America’s Investing Boom Goes Far Beyond Reddit Bros
On a Wednesday in June, deep in a corner of the Reddit message board r/WallstreetBets, a user going by Your_Boy_Roy_ published a lengthy post. The subreddit, which now has almost 11 million members (or “Degenerates,” as the page officially lists them), has become an epicenter for crowdsourced, short-term, high-risk stock speculation and analysis. Roy had been a member of the group since “its prime,” and had to get something off his chest.
“You are all being ridiculous with these endless posts,” he titled his spiel. The subreddit, he wrote, was facing an epidemic of “I made $368 on my BIG DICK YOLO PLAY” entries: overeager, ill-informed, low-stakes-masquerading-as-high-stakes material that he deemed in violation of the forum’s typically brash-yet-chipper atmosphere.
For those who may have forgotten—or somehow not heard—in January, thousands of r/WallStreetBets members made major news, and major amounts of money, by half-ironically rescuing the stock of GameStop, a nearly bankrupt gaming retailer. They shared rocket emojis, then together bought up enormous sums of GameStop shares, causing its share price to briefly surge by 2,265 percent (from $20.42 to $483) and threatening to liquidate a hedge fund that had bet heavily against the company. This nifty gambit of taking GameStop “to the moon,” and fracas surrounding it, made Robinhood—the controversial brokerage startup that many Redditors used for the plot—a household name. The billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Cuban the cheerleading section (Cuban thanked the Redditors for “”). And in spite of the scrutiny that Robinhood received for hastily halting GameStop trading in order to ensure it had enough collateral to backstop trades, the whole cause célèbre birthed the mainstreaming of “”: public companies that benefit from their market value surging, not mainly because of business fundamentals but because of their popularity among the masses, driven by social media.
