This is not how WallStreetBets started. I joined the community in 2017 and I can tell you, there was high-level due diligence going on that made me wonder if some of the people posting might also be working at large investment banks, but couldn't get these certain trades they were advocating past their compliance guys (at some point, "too risky" starts to overlap in the Venn diagram with "too dumb").
Like every thing in the world that gains massive popularity, it attracts the normies who want in on the action, but aren't willing to do the, quite literally months or years (depending on how deeply you throw yourself into it) of learning required to even understand most of the DD posts there.
Yes, there was the occasional ridiculous trolling, like convincing posters on /r/investing that /r/wallstreetbets had a Lean Hogs Insider Trading Ring (which still makes me laugh out loud to this day), but it was far more rare.
Yes, the meme posts have risen dramatically, but there's still occasional good due diligence there, its just now you have to sift through a mountain of shit instead of small hill of it.
The same Chamath Palihapitiya said in his CNBC interview that he read posts in WSB and saw better analysis than the ones coming from real wall street analysts he has worked with.
You want to know what it looks like is happening now though? It looks like these peeps are weaponizing the sub to their own benefit in the name of "sticking it to the man". Everything about this smacks of a massive, crowd sourced "market manipulation" under the guise of righteousness.
All the people screaming "YOLO I can't care if I lose X" seem to be missing the fact that their money isn't "lost"; it is ending up in the pockets of a few at their expense.
From what I gather in WSB (I lurk there a lot) it seems more that a lot of people are very aware that money will change hands, might go into other rich people's pockets but they simply don't care, if they fuck up one or more rich folks while enriching others, they don't care. If some normal people make a lot of money out of this they are happy enough.
It's fascinating to see how many people really just want to fuck with the rich and how many care about normal people getting life-changing money. It's much more altruistic than I imagined.
Absolutely. I think generationally we're sick of old rich people owning everything and dictating how things should work, electing backwards idiots, doing things like brexit, and forcing us to rent every god damn part of our lives from them. Democracy is at present failing us hugely, and if something like this can start to hit the ownership class where it hurts, I'm all for it.
I chucked in £30 on Free Trade.
I don't care if I get that money back. I just want to see the rich people suffer a bit, know that they don't have all the power.
>it is ending up in the pockets of a few at their expense.
Everyone is aware of that. The group of people that will get rich are those who bought the stock 2 weeks ago or earlier.
Heck, when someone put their entire life savings in ornamental gourd futures WSB crapped about that person saying how stupid that was. They aren't stupid. They are fully aware of what they are doing.
WSB went through many different phases. I remember when gold was getting meme'd super hard ($JUNG, $DUST). Then "pharma bro" (Martin Shrekli) was popular and it was all about small cap bio stocks.
Then FD's (weekly OTM options, what it stands for is offensive) became super popular.
But I agree, it was always a good mix of memes and DD. I remember some activision DD which was along the lines of: "look at the name, act and vision! Two things a company needs to succeed".
Like every thing in the world that gains massive popularity, it attracts the normies who want in on the action, but aren't willing to do the, quite literally months or years (depending on how deeply you throw yourself into it) of learning required to even understand most of the DD posts there.
Yes, there was the occasional ridiculous trolling, like convincing posters on /r/investing that /r/wallstreetbets had a Lean Hogs Insider Trading Ring (which still makes me laugh out loud to this day), but it was far more rare.
Yes, the meme posts have risen dramatically, but there's still occasional good due diligence there, its just now you have to sift through a mountain of shit instead of small hill of it.