![]() I didn’t know an Iron Condor from a margin call, and “the Greeks”-the symbols used to denote a stock’s risk-were Greek to me (still are, to be honest). I began spending more nights scrolling through r/WallStreetBets. I started looking for new ways to make money. My business took a hit, but my wife was able to keep her job. Many of my close friends went on unemployment, bootstrapping Republicans among them. Family members were furloughed, fired, or pushed into telecommuting. When the pandemic hit last year, I felt the collective Spidey-sense of a generation perk up-this was going to be another 2008. To this day, those two stocks make up the bulk of my portfolio. Eventually, our 401(k) climbed out of its hole, and I rode Amazon and Netflix to the moon. ![]() But the other $8,000 I invested in companies like Amazon, Netflix, and Ford did not. In comic, amateurish fashion, I immediately spent a month researching thousands of penny stocks, my thinking being, if I can buy tens of thousands of these small stocks, and one goes up to $1, I’ll be rich! Within the year, the $2,000 I spent on penny stocks plummeted to less than 50 bucks. I began reading up about stocks, tuned in to Jim Cramer on Mad Money, and plotted my entry point into the market. I grew up under the care of a single mother living off food stamps, so I knew I could live in poverty, but dreamed of something more. I’d just started my own business and worked through the night in nearby coffee shops, hoping to make ends meet. I had two additional roommates, a living room the size of a bathroom, and student loans the size of a small mortgage. In 2008, I was recently married and renting a room in a cramped apartment in New York. These were not wannabe day traders but reasoned, seasoned investors.Īnd for a long time, I shared that dream of the long game, the Boomer Boomerang, where you get back what you put in, plus adventure and gains, because in the back of my mind, always, was the financial meltdown that led to the Great Recession. They certainly weren’t fanboys of Martin Shkreli, a moderator of WSB and pharma bro who infamously raised the price of an anti-parasitic drug by more than 5,000 percent and later went to prison for securities fraud. These people weren’t degenerate gamblers, not like those people over on r/WallStreetBets. ![]() It was a dry, effective way to hunt growth stocks. Make no mistake, r/WallStreetBets is a sewer. Boring old investment data with a proven track record of slight upward trajectory-if you listened close, you could almost hear the scraggly old Mary Poppins banker singing about compounding tuppence. They were interested in fundamentals: quarterly earnings, price-earnings ratios, dividends, market share. These types would never shell out money based on a mad president’s tweet or the offbeat musings of a CEO smoking weed on Joe Rogan’s show. I’d spend hours reading ample research provided by these amateur sleuths rummaging through 10-K financials with the hope of stumbling across the next Shopify. Warren Buffett was their cosmic dignitary, and a 4 percent yearly gain on their investments a prudent retirement plan. These sleepy little subreddits-r/Stocks, r/StockMarket, r/Investing-were havens of level-headedness, frugality, and caution, where everyday investors plotted investments according to some shared sense of how the market actually worked. I stumbled upon r/WallStreetBets after years of poking around the more conservative stock forums on Reddit. ![]()
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