> The same emotion that caused us to root for the thieves in Ocean’s 11 is what makes Wall Street Bets so enticing. Put frankly, Millennials are tired of getting fucked by the man. When you’re underemployed with $100,000 in student loan debt, your financial situation feels overwhelming. You really don’t want to take the advice of your parents or CNBC talking heads [5] to invest 10% of your salary for a 4% annual return. At that point, what’s another $5,000? Might as well buy some short-dated GME calls.<p>Well put. I was explaining to a friend of mine a few weeks ago why cynicism is so prevalent in our generation: we graduated in 2008 where banks, not our parents, got the bailouts; we got stuck with thousands in student debt; the dream of marrying a pretty wife and having a few kids, working for a company for 40 years, and retiring in Cabo is a relic of the 1950s; we lived with our parents until our 30s, and in spite of being so "connected," we are more lonely, have less friends, and are having less sex than previous generations; unless, I guess, you count the COVID shutdowns screwing young people yet again.<p>It's a never-ending shit-show. At least <i>some of us</i> are getting rich in /r/wallstreetbets.
I've wrote this elsewhere. The thing that's clicked for me after reading the comments on wsb is that populism, amplified by the modern internet, is going to radically change the finance world in a similar way to how it radically changed our political landscape. These people aren't just investing in GME to enrich themselves. They are doing it to spite the people who they percieve as rigging the game. They are doing it to poke in the eye of "mainstream media talking heads" whom they view as part of the controlled narrative of oligarchs. Does any of this sound familiar?<p>This is a once in a life time black swan. No one is factoring in populism in their investment thesis yet. Whoever can figure out populism well enough to predict it first stands to gain a lot of money.
I’ve made millions on WSB options plays. I can finally quit my job and stop being a cubicle slave. The visceral reaction from the media on this is disgusting. Major hedge funds got caught on the wrong side of this, and have been making a huge stink about it. CNBC to the rescue, demonizing young middle class Reddit investors. This whole thing has opened my eyes to how even my FAANG compensation is peasant money, it’s too little even as someone in the top few percent of incomes. Capital > labor
They're not winning. They're just minting a different set of losers and pushing the drawing out by a couple weeks.<p>And Reddit being Reddit you can never really be sure whether organic interest is pumping the stock or if they are being manipulated by an astroturfing campaign. If day trading weren't a conflict of interest for me I'd be looking into doing something like that (and consequently not blabbing about it on HN).
I feel like a lot of the commenters here either never actually went on /r/wsb or are trying to glorify it with a narrative that is absolutely disconnected from the real thing.<p>They are not somekind of community trying to "stick it to wall street", they are mostly just random people shitposting all the time, posting their gains and losses. Right now it's GME, before it was SPY/TSLA/NIO. No need to overthink it.<p>Sure the GME thing has an actual borderline smart twist to it which gives the entire community a different spin, but it's still just an outlier in the wsb timeline.
A couple of hedge fund managers shorting GME may have gotten kicked in the nuts, but Wall Street as a whole is laughing all the way to the bank. A friend of mine working at a high-frequency trading co says 2020 was their best year ever and by a long shot, because volatility plus clueless retail investors (yes, that means you, /r/wsb'ers YOLOing on Robinhood) means arbitrage and frontrunning rakes in money.
Retail investors are supposed to buy and hold all of the stocks, because they couldn't possibly be smart enough to pick the good ones.<p>Hedge funds are supposed to be allowed to naked short the stocks they don't like into oblivion, transferring wealth from retail investors to hedge funds.<p>The hysteria and pearl clutching at this wealth transfer being reversed is hilarious.
Citadel can see 80% of retail orderflow such as Robinhood and is massively long since last Friday as can be seen from the calls they are selling.<p>Now it is likely the steam has run out(gamma cascade) so they are placing their bets on the opposite side by taking over Melvin which is massively short without causing too much market impact.
Isn’t the underlying problem here that hedge funds have shorted more stock than the float?<p>They got themselves in this mess. Don’t be so greedy, you short more than shares that trade.
The jury is still deliberating whether WSB is an effective cartel or not. At the end of the day, the members total investment is so small that it doubtfully makes any difference. It is probably more analogous to Ed Thorp's Beat the Dealer. He devised an algorithm to count cards. Ran a simulation on a computer at MIT, got bankrolled, and went to Reno to test it in person. Why didn't he continue counting cards in Nevada? Because hedge funds are more lucrative per effort.<p>Nonetheless, after he published Beat the Dealer casinos greatly benefitted rather than a situation where they lost revenue from Blackjack card counters. Thousands of people believing that they could make a fortune using his system went to the casinos. Between the free drinks and the inability to focus, people lost fortunes instead. Moreover, Blackjack remained hugely popular.<p>You never hear about people losing money in Vegas, only about that one time someone won big. It's the same with WSB, sort of. They do lose money and lots of it. Moreover, they post the losses. It is only during squeezes like with Tesla do we hear about it in the media.<p>Still, at the end of the day, they invest a very, very small sum of money and can't have much influence. I thought for a while that maybe there were outside influences driving memes to get the cartel to behave a certain way, but decided they are not much of a force.
It's like everyone has forgotten the past meme stocks of /r/wsb. GME is not something out of the ordinary. They do this all the time. First someone will pick a stock to pump and if it rises some people win and some will be left holding the bag. Remember the SPY puts at the beginning of 2020? The Chinese coffee startup that got delisted? NKLA? How PLTR pump lost the energy?
WSB isn’t doing anything that isn’t typical on actual Wall St.<p>The market is, and always has been, a ridiculous game. WSB is just showing the world. But the folks on actual Wall St would prefer no one else can see how the sausage is made.
People and the media is not stating the simple fact that they short interest has been over 100% since June. I bought a bunch and told all my friends/family about it and everything laughed at me. Now those people asking me what they think about it.<p>Likely they started short positions around $10 in 2019, had a nice profitable trade, started to bleed out then doubled down and increased position as it picked up momentum. Now they are far over their head and from the looks of things, stock is going to $200.<p>Lots of people made tons of money shorting tesla. Until they didnt and stock kept doubling.
I cover this chatter as a sideproject. Wallstreetbets is seeing higher levels of chatter than when the coronavirus broke out. I think it may be the highest level this year.<p><a href="https://topstonks.com/stocks/gme" rel="nofollow">https://topstonks.com/stocks/gme</a>
Can someone extrapolate what happens (hopefully) in a half a year when we get to herd immunity and the economy opens fully when a lot of these people (I'm guessing) will decide to cash-in in their stocks in order to go to a nice vacation, get a new car ect.
Can we expect some sort of economic recovery followed by hyperinflation?
They might be being rude... But are they winning?<p>Probably.<p>The banks and hedge funds are playing the same games they've been playing for years and years.<p>Someone new has entered the picture and changed the game.
>We can remain retarded longer than they can remain solvent.<p>There is a <i>tremendous</i> amount of spite involved here. They <i>hate</i> the boomers, and they <i>hate</i> the institutional wallstreet investors and hedgies. And why shouldn't they? These people play with our lives and get fantastically wealthy by gambling with our retirement accounts.<p>I saw that some hedge fund got wiped out today by this. Sorry I won't be shedding any tears over that. Maybe the hedgies should have to learn to code.
I can make $200k selling covered calls every month with a few million in capital. Options prices are crazy right now. It makes you think about how silly money is.
Today I noticed that Bad Bath and Beyond rallied 40% in the morning with no major news. It closed only +1.5%. I was wondering what's going on. I think that's one warning sign not to invest in companies that often flactuate greatly with no major news. It often happens with small companies so it's good to stay away from such companies. But BB&B seem to have a market cap of a few billions so it's not expected.
This is essentially a crowd-sourced Ponzi scheme. But is it really so different from the market at large right now? It's more clearly identifiable in that there are explicit signals in the message board. But the primary signal is probably the stock trajectory itself, just as it is with the broader market. People are buying mostly because people are buying, and the higher the price goes, the more sensitive it will become to perturbations, until something---maybe a tiny fluctuation in some obscure part of the market---causes it to collapse.
It's market hot potato/ponzi scheme. You buy in to capitalize on growth, funded by increased interest in the meme, and try to cash out before the meme isn't funny anymore.
Where is the evidence that most of the volume came from wsb users? Genuinely curious because I don't know the details. Is it possible that a third party saw the situation and joined in?