This week has made a lot of WSBers rich, but the site didn’t start this week, and many people have gotten wrecked trying to chase the crazy gains that make it to r/all
Omar is a young guy, who’s the children of immigrant working class parents. He stumbled onto WSB after seeing it on Reddit, and got into a early whole selling options. Then he bet his student loans.
AJ Vanover makes around 35k a year as a retail worked in Missouri. After getting in on $GME, he (and a friend he convinced to invest) are now millionaires.
My favorite was Min, 22 y/o born in Bangladesh and training to become a pharmacist in NYC.
In July, he flipped just his stimulus check into $280k within 2 weeks. He couldn’t sleep thinking about cars he wanted to buy, and passed out midday.
When he woke up, it was down to 8k
YOLOing (putting everything into a trade) is a key part of WSB.
If you YOLO and hit a hot streak (see #GME), it can make you rich. But if you keep doubling down and never cash out...eventually the house wins
There are undeniable signs of gambling addiction all over WSB.
Looking at post histories, you can see people losing their life savings, walking away from WSB, and then months later returning talking about new positions.
One thing that struck me talking with WSBers who won and lost was the FOMO.
With each crazy bull run, there’s a sense that there’s life changing money out there and you just missed it. Even if you won, it wasn’t just enough.
Walking away from that is very, very hard.
One thing we didn't mention in the piece was the obvious potential for market manipulation.
WSB says that it bans mentioning small cap stocks, which can be pumped and dumped easily, but they do a very, very bad job of stopping it.
A close friend of mine got into options trading in his early 20s.
He lost all the money that he had, got into debt via margin trades. It wrecked his credit and has followed him for literally years. He still hasn't paid it all off.
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Reporting on this story, it is clear that the 2008 financial crisis — no one going to jail for breaking the global economy, the rich getting richer — has been the defining event in shaping young people's cynicism about the financial world
The tone on WSB has dramatically evolved over the last week.
It was always about making money (which is still true) but now there is this sense of moral righteousness, that holding on to GME is revenge for 2008
We don’t know who the posters on WSB making Braveheart memes about holding $GME are, and we definitely do not know what their actual financial positions are.