Inside the Reddit army that’s crushing Wall Street
Omar couldn’t believe what was happening.
He should have been concentrating on the student he was tutoring in physics — a job he did during his free time while enrolled in a post-baccalaureate pre-med program — but Omar’s eyes kept darting back to the Robinhood app open on his phone.
Omar had invested $6,000 in Beyond Meat options; in the days before that tutoring session he’d seen the value of that investment rocket up to almost $15,000. What he was witnessing now, though, felt like torture.
Down $2,000.
Down $3,000.
By lunchtime, the stock options Omar had bought were down around $7,000 from their peak.
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Omar knew he should probably sell the options before they became worthless. But he followed the mantra of the place where he’d first learned about options trading, the subreddit r/wallstreetbets, and held on.
“It was diamond hands,” said Omar, using the site’s term for holding an option even after incurring extreme losses or gains. “It was like, all or nothing.”
Within two days Omar had lost not only his gains but his entire initial investment.
Desperate to earn it back, Omar, 23 years old and the child of working-class immigrant parents, took the rest of the money he could scrounge up — cash from his tutoring gig, his stimulus check, a chunk of his freshly-deposited student loans that was supposed to pay for his living expenses (which were basically non-existent after he had moved home during the Covid-19 outbreak) — and poured all of it, $22,000, into his Robinhood account. Then he opened up WallStreetBets.
I would not have traded options if I had not found WallStreetBets.”
“OMAR,” WALLSTREETBETS USER
“I was really scared,” Omar told CNN Business in an interview in August. “All I wanted to do was just make my initial money back and pay it off.”
By the end of the week, he had lost it all again.
Omar, who spoke on the condition that he be referred to using a pseudonym out of concern over the legality of trading with money from his student loans, said that he blames himself for his losses but regrets ever stumbling upon one of Reddit’s most active communities.
“I would not have traded options,” Omar admitted, “if I had not found WallStreetBets.”
This January, with WallStreetBets now an inescapable presence, Omar was back on the board. Back to trading.
Stock market meets internet fringe culture
This past week has been a banner one for Reddit’s island of misfit investors.
WallStreetBets exploded into the mainstream, moving from the front page of Reddit to the front page of the New York Times and nearly every other major news site. The subreddit’s short-squeeze of GameStop helped shoot up the price of the video game retailer’s stock a mind-boggling 1,700% from the beginning of January to Wednesday (before it fell again Thursday), captivating the minds and wallets of investors — both casual and institutional — and financial regulators.
But while millions are now discovering WallStreetBets for the first time, it has been building momentum throughout the pandemic. One can trace its epic rise to a perfect storm of favorable conditions: the exponential growth of the app Robinhood and its no-fee options trading, the extreme volatility Covid-19 brought to the markets, the stimulus checks mailed to millions of Americans, the lack of televised sports for much of the year, and the unwanted free time stuck at home the pandemic has forced on many people.
Describing itself as if “4chan found a Bloomberg terminal,” the forum’s giddy nihilism, inscrutable language and memes fueled a war on a perceived corrupted mainstream.
And it’s led WallStreetBets’ evolution into an unprecedented force of retail-investing financial radicalism, offering the allure of get-rich-quick gains to a rapidly expanding audience of millions. (5, at last count).
Many celebrated WallStreetBets’ war on GameStop short-sellers as a populist campaign against hedge-fund raiders looking to profit off the destruction of a well-known retail brand like GameStop. But unlike many other similar online communities, there is also a clear financial goal for the people in it.
“It’s a means to an end,” explained one of them, AJ Vanover.
At his retail job in an auto-parts store in Missouri, Vanover makes around $35,000 a year. But on Wednesday, he found himself a paper millionaire. (His Robinhood account exceeded $1 million, according to screenshots he provided, but he hadn’t cashed out yet). For months, Vanover had been following GameStop as a “value play,” posting his thoughts on WallStreetBets along the way. This week, Vanover was off from work, quarantining after a coworker contracted Covid-19, but now thinks he won’t return to his old job. “I know I’m going to do two-weeks’ notice,” he said with a nervous laugh. “So, I’ll be nice about it.’ Vanover said he plans help his parents with their mortgage, and he intends to keep investing in options.