Thread by @AnthonyLeeZhang

I am still following r/wsb relatively closely, as this is a pretty incredible cultural phenomenon. WSB seems to view itself not only as a money machine, but also as a kind of righteous rebellion against the corrupt finance establishment (31.7k likes is huge)

All manner of guesswork/conspiracy about institutional collusion starting to get posted. The brokers are in on it, etc., not just the obvious explanation of jacking up margins in response to increased vol (I believe this is more likely?)

See for example this ongoing 3-part essay: quality of the narrative is really something

reddit.com/r/wallstreetbe…

There is a strange combination of, a rough count, ppl in it for:

- $$$
- drama
- memes
- fame of some sort
- #&@# the establishment
- fomo, driven by ppl posting 8-figure gains. literally 8 figure

OK, the discord is a whole different level

discord.com/invite/wallstr…

Screenshot of the discord. imagine twitch chat where the livestream is just... the market. and it's not even open. I've hung around a couple trading discords before, but... wow

There are like 26,000 people on this discord looking at this live

I'm not teched up enough that I know how to record a chunk of the discord chat but I'd encourage ppl to just tune in for 5 mins or so, the atmosphere is... really something

28,000 now. gonna check it out tmr during trading hours

Cynically, you could try to scrape all of this and correlate intraday returns with it. Data density isn't a problem: I am seeing like around 20-30 posts per second. Extracting some meaningful variables from this might be the hard part

For comparison just imagine you had access to the entire timestamped chat logs in every bloomberg chat in history... and this stuff is literally almost 100% public. I am listening to a crypto millionaire discussing Roth IRA optimization atm

I am out for today, but... oh man

36,000 now. Voice chat is a totally illegible cacophony of computer-distorted lagged voices. Continuous laughter. I heard "fuck the SEC" a couple times and then "GME 192"

(rmb tweets not investing advice etc)

It is a quasi-religious experience. It is like I am listening to some kind of church hymn, or battle song to the tendie gods

There is a baby crying in the background somewhere. Someone has repeated 6-7 times "I MADE A MILLION DOLLARS"

There are virtual casino, roulette, etc. channels within the discord, where there's bot-run casino games where you can bet wsbcoins. so you can lose fake money if you want to take a break from losing real money

I think somebody figured out "BB" sounds like "baby" and the baby is still here, and this is funny

Gotta prep class so I'm out for now. Teaching my undergrads about short squeezes