The nihilism of r/wallstreetbets

Well, they apparently do move markets. Whether that's good or bad remains to be seen and there's no telling what sort of action the SEC will take to curtail this. IMO all it will take is one bad day to have something happen. But wsb does understand one thing: the barriers to entry are artificially there - it doesn't take a quant with an MIT education to make and lose money.

In 1999, people under 40 were gambling large sums that, if lost, could be made back through x months of work.

In 2021, people under 40 are gambling any random ad hoc payment they receive in the attempt of calling it a career.

The reason? 10% of our country have great jobs, and the rest have none. That is a result of policy.

Yeah, I wonder if ML-driven investing is being tricked by reddit into buying stock in failing companies and causing a runaway effect. If so, it makes me nervous that lots of stocks might be massively over-inflated right now.

WSB (r/Wallstreetbets) is basically just an ultra-popular subreddit for gambling via buying options on stocks, which allow you to significantly increase your risk for potentially insane returns (feasible chances at 100-500%+ returns, but also a great chance you will literally go broke). This style of gambling is very easy to do and requires nothing more than a phone app for a brokerage (most commonly Robinhood) and a little cash (a few hundred dollars is definitely enough for some fun), with many users having little prior investing experience or knowledge. It's also much more fun to do in groups and to brag about on the Internet, as most things are.

Although many of the users have a lot of fun doing this, I'd personally estimate it has so far caused more than ten suicides, perhaps significantly more. I don't have a source for this aside from the number of subscribers (2,000,000) multiplied by an approximate amount of how many experience gambler's ruin at some point (..a lot, even many lucky ones), multiplied by a very low suicide success rate for some people who are hit particularly hard by losing money they've worked and saved for for years or decades. Having been near people gambling in one way or another for many years, it's difficult to state the amount of pain that someone can experience from abrupt financial losses, but we have had confirmed suicides from something as 'minor' as a glitch showing a user they had lost much more than they actually had (QA literally saves lives!): https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/06/17/20-y...

Coupling this with the current scenario of our market (very high volatility and strong upwards momentum in sectors anywhere from tech to IPOs to SPACs to cryptocurrencies) we are living in some interesting times. Investing has felt increasingly more like a casino to me over the last few years, and it seems to be entering its final phase at this point: you may want to avoid the casino, but the casino has become quite efficient at making this very hard to do, expanding its reach until you somehow find yourself surrounded by slot machines and lottery ticket winners. With popular stocks from FANG to Tesla having doubled or even 10-20X'd investors' money within months, you will be hard-pressed to keep yourself on the safe side of the gamblinginvesting dichotomy.

I'm not sure exactly where this ends up, besides, well, exactly where we are right now: more and more speculation, gambling, and volatility. Whether we will enter a 'single' bubble and eventually crash or just maintain this higher-risk chaotic state is of course, not predictable by me (and even if I could could predict bubbles, it is useless without precise and accurate timing predictions), but I must admit I've found myself falling into higher and higher risk 'investing' as well, especially as I found myself growing bored during covid lockdowns. I do think we will see some changes from the SEC at some point to try to curb this as well (also very interested in what they will do with WSB at some point, if anything), but those that want to gamble will always find ways to do so, so it may be futile. All I can say for certain is that you should be careful and to repeat the old adage of never investing what you cannot afford to lose, but both financially and emotionally.