But on Wednesday, he found himself a paper millionaire. “It’s a means to an end,” explained one of them, AJ Vanover.Īt his retail job in a battery store in Missouri, Vanover makes around $35,000 a year. But unlike many other similar online communities, there is also a clear financial goal for the people in it. Many celebrated WallStreetBets’ war on GameStop short-sellers as a populist campaign against hedge-fund raiders looking to profit off the destruction of a well-known retail brand like GameStop.
#Wallstreetbets lingo bloomberg free#
One can trace its epic rise to a perfect storm of favorable conditions: the exponential growth of the app Robinhood and its no-fee options trading, the extreme volatility Covid-19 brought to the markets, the stimulus checks mailed to millions of Americans, the lack of televised sports for much of the year, and the unwanted free time stuck at home the pandemic has forced on many people.ĭescribing itself as if “4chan found a Bloomberg terminal,” the forum’s giddy nihilism, inscrutable language and memes fueled a war on a perceived corrupted mainstream.Īnd it’s led WallStreetBets’ evolution into an unprecedented force of retail-investing financial radicalism, offering the allure of get-rich-quick gains to a rapidly expanding audience of millions. The subreddit’s short-squeeze of GameStop helped shoot up the price of the video game retailer’s stock a mind-boggling 1,700% from the beginning of January to Wednesday (before it fell again Thursday), captivating the minds and wallets of investors - both casual and institutional - and financial regulators.īut while millions are now discovering WallStreetBets for the first time, it has been building momentum throughout the pandemic. WallStreetBets exploded into the mainstream, moving from the front page of Reddit to the front page of the New York Times and nearly every other major news site. This past week has been a banner one for Reddit’s island of misfit investors. Stock market meets internet fringe culture This January, with WallStreetBets now an inescapable presence, Omar was back on the board. “I would not have traded options,” Omar admitted, “if I had not found WallStreetBets.” Omar, who spoke on the condition that he be referred to using a pseudonym out of concern over the legality of trading with money from his student loans, said that he blames himself for his losses but regrets ever stumbling upon one of Reddit’s most active communities. By the end of the week, he had lost it all again.
0 kommentar(er)
