Your Misery, Our Dividends

There's an uncomfortable truth embedded in modern capitalism: human suffering is extraordinarily profitable. When civil unrest erupts, surveillance companies see their stock prices surge. When immigration becomes a crisis, private detention centers expand their contracts. When economic anxiety spreads, predatory lenders multiply their revenues. The very social ills that degrade our collective wellbeing create asymmetric returns for a specific class of corporations—those that monetize instability, extract value from vulnerability, and build moats around misery. This creates a perverse incentive structure where the deterioration of social conditions becomes a tailwind for certain business models. Palantir doesn't profit when communities build trust; it profits when governments need to track everyone. Axon doesn't win when police reform succeeds; it wins when departments militarize. CoreCivic doesn't grow when criminal justice becomes rehabilitative; it grows when incarceration becomes industrial. The Dystopia Fund exists as both commentary and experiment: if these patterns are real, they should produce measurable alpha. If profiting from social dysfunction is genuinely lucrative, then a portfolio explicitly designed around that thesis should outperform—and that outperformance itself becomes evidence of how deeply inverted our incentive structures have become. ## Performance: The Thesis Validates Itself 5-Year Backtest (October 2020 - September 2025): - Dystopia 50 Portfolio: +227.2% - S&P 500 Benchmark: ~89% - Outperformance: +138.2 percentage points The portfolio didn't just beat the market—it more than doubled the market's returns. This wasn't achieved through conventional growth investing or value plays. It was achieved by identifying companies whose business models explicitly benefit from societal breakdown. Top Individual Performers: - Palantir (PLTR): +1,701% — Surveillance state infrastructure - NVIDIA (NVDA): +1,393% — AI chips powering autonomous weapons - Enova (ENVA): +650% — Predatory lending to the financially desperate - Axon (AXON): +626% — Militarized policing equipment The data suggests a hierarchy of dystopian profitability: permanent surveillance infrastructure outperforms episodic crisis response. Palantir's digital panopticon generated 17x returns; GEO Group's physical cages went nowhere. ## Methodology The portfolio was constructed by identifying companies whose revenue models explicitly benefit from: surveillance expansion, militarization, incarceration, border enforcement, financial desperation, and addiction. Gambling and landlord stocks were initially included but removed after backtesting showed they underperformed—apparently, societal dysfunction must be systematic rather than chaotic to generate alpha. All 50 stocks are US-tradeable and currently deployed in paper trading via Alpaca's API. Automated monitoring posts daily performance updates with appropriate commentary on the correlation between your suffering and our returns. ## Contact Email: dystopiafund@gmail.com Twitter: @DystopiaFund Philosophy: If capitalism makes misery profitable, we might as well be honest about it.