I honestly don't see domain investors jumping into tlds like .cash, .link etc...look at what happened with .name. Also they have high reg fees. Personally I will never touch them.
I'm not talking about investors - I am talking about market manipulations.
Lets say I contact a registrar and strike a deal for a discount on 10,000 registrations. People know that there are some that will do that for the big players. So I buy up 10k variations of a possible 26k combos of NNNL at $4 per and a total cost of 40K - I just effectively cornered a market by holding almost 40% of the resource.
Some domainers read on some blog that suddenly there was a buyout of NNNL.example and they all resolve to bogus chinese looking sources. The wave comes and the remaining combos are bought up within the week. Dropcatchers are working overtime grabbing deletes, prices are increasing as demand grows...etc, but these are not getting developed - just vault stored.
Next I sell some to my cousins Ernie Vito and Joey the Thumb for splashy bucks - lets say 15k - and the sales are reported. I just influenced the market with my transaction that stays in the family money, and maybe I am out 45k total by now with various fees.
Now here is where the beauty of this comes together, Tony.....you're gonna love this.....there are thousands of domainers eating these things up like crack cuz they wanna get rich, and they drive the market even more, so now all we gotta do is sit back, sell off our stock in small increments so as not to disrupt the market too much, and in no time we turned 45k into 450k if we can leverage off 450 of our 10, 000 domains at a geezer apiece when the price point hits. We created the market out of thin air on worthless goods - we can dictate pricing.
Somehow, in a very short period of time, absolutely worthless domains skyrocketed in value. If you owned bananabasketpads.com and Apple suddenly decided they wanted to launch a new product called Banana Pads In A Basket- you have something of real value. Apple comes knocking and you walk with 1.5 mil. But these liquids are volatile and can be manipulated greatly by powers with wealth and/or influence and control.
There is a reason that market trading is so heavily monitored and regulated, and even then it still gets exploited at times by the right con men. It's tightly controlled because of the manipulations of worthless investments made to appear valuable at times to investors, who then later find out they're not worth shit after the money left town.
The government never cared if businesses bought bananabasketpads.com from some domainer and made him wealthy for a year - but the market has changed and gone almost purely lliquid and volatile, and easy to manipulate if the players play well together. Eventually DoJ is showing up to this party.