![]() This might go without saying, but Money doesn’t often recommend picking stocks, let alone participating in the risky investment moves discussed on WallStreetBets. (“Idiot” is one of nicer names tossed around). And the language used in the posts and comments is frequently not suitable for a publication like Money. Last year a user said they turned $35,000 into $1.25 million in four months (again, not verified.) On the other hand, Dennis Cao, a software engineer Money interviewed in 2018 when he was 24, said he lost more than $180,000 in a day after boasting on the forum just a few days before that his bet on tech companies like Facebook and Amazon had made him “mega rich.”Īside from controversy around risky investment moves, there’s also the fact that Martin Shkreli, the “pharma bro” known for jacking up the price of a life-saving drug by 5,000%, seems an idol in the forum. The result of YOLO investing can be huge bragging rights, or a tough admission of loss. Just this week a post now deleted by the original poster says, “Took my dads life savings and Yolo’d into BB, told him It’s either retirement on a yacht or foodstamps for him.” ![]() Last year, one user wrote “Yolo’d 10k (life savings) into Tesla.”Īpparently it can also mean gambling. It’s common to see “YOLO” next to a post about a user’s latest trade. For these traders, it's throwing their savings into a risky investment. You only live once, right? For most people that might mean it’s time to skydive or travel the world. The moderators suspect that a lot of the huge wins posted on the channel are photoshopped, and that most of the members really only make a few risky trades per year, Vice reported. During the pandemic, day trading has become even more popular.īut it’s hard to tell if any particular post on the subreddit is real. The risky and speculative options trading WallStreetBets members claim to participate in has become much easier to do recently thanks to apps like Robinhood. And if they’re trading what they say they are, they’re gambling thousands of dollars. If you’re a long-term investor who buys stocks and holds on to them for years, these Redditors may seem closer to gamblers. The demographics of subscribers is hard to know, but it appears to be a predominantly young, male crowd. Nearly a decade after Rogozinski founded the subreddit, it has amassed more than 3 million subscribers, or “degenerates,” as they call themselves. Hawaii Alaska Florida South Carolina Georgia Alabama North Carolina Tennessee RI Rhode Island CT Connecticut MA Massachusetts Maine NH New Hampshire VT Vermont New York NJ New Jersey DE Delaware MD Maryland West Virginia Ohio Michigan Arizona Nevada Utah Colorado New Mexico South Dakota Iowa Indiana Illinois Minnesota Wisconsin Missouri Louisiana Virginia DC Washington DC Idaho California North Dakota Washington Oregon Montana Wyoming Nebraska Kansas Oklahoma Pennsylvania Kentucky Mississippi Arkansas Texas Get Started Who are the WallStreetBets members? In their own words, it’s “like 4chan found a Bloomberg Terminal.” While the forum has its fair share of investing “tips,” there are also plenty of brags, memes and trolling. “Whenever I would go on Reddit and post a comment or question, I would get berated for not being a good investor.” “All the talk was about long-term investing and index funds,” Rogozinski told Money at the time. So who are these individual investors that managed to turn a “meme stock” into a nightmare for hedge funds? What is WallStreetBets?Įntrepreneur Jaime Rogozinski, founded the forum in 2012 in hopes of building a place where sophisticated investors could discuss high-risk, high-reward short-term trading strategies, Money reported in 2018. Just four months later, GameStop’s stock has seen a 700% year-to-date rally, and short sellers - nicknamed " fat cats" by one of the subreddit’s moderators - are paying the price. A case for why the share price was about to soar came later in the form of a post aptly titled “Bankrupting Institutional Investors for Dummies, ft GameStop.” Members of the subreddit r/WallStreetBets, known for pumping stock prices of cult names like Tesla, started a bull case for GameStop about twenty-one months ago when one member included in a post that the company's valuation “does not reflect the current earnings power,” Bloomberg News reported. ![]() But these institutional investors seemed to ignore a threat bubbling up from a very specific corner of the Internet. ![]() The video game retailer recently attracted the attention of short sellers - hedge funds and investors that bet on a company’s share price dropping - thanks to layoffs and dwindling sales. Can an army of everyday traders on Reddit win a war against Wall Street? Yes, if you look at GameStop’s soaring stock. ![]()
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