(All of the top 20 subreddits with which WallStreetBets shares subscribers concern stocks, finance, betting or cryptocurrency. But it’s also very much a financial forum, and one that shares subscribers with other, more straightforward financial forums. WallStreetBets may look like a wall of slang, memes, jargon and inside jokes, largely populated by men, and it is. Some commentators have suggested that the activity represented by WallStreetBets and Trumpism are part of the same populist, anti-elite phenomenon, but if Trumpism in general is instructive at all here, it’s as a reminder that self-described anti-elite movements can, in fact, turn out to be much more complicated than that. To be clear, these precedents aren’t necessarily about ideology or broad style. Like other social platforms, Reddit has struggled with harassment, hate speech and abuse, and sometimes banned communities whose influence concerned them.įor people who study social platforms like Reddit, WallStreetBets - a clear example of an insular Reddit community breaking through to the larger site, and then beyond - called to mind a specific recent precedent: The_Donald, the subreddit that was, for a few years, the staging ground and the central organizing platform for supporters of Donald J. More likely, it’s a place you’ve heard of and perhaps visited before, where you know people are up to lots of things, most of which don’t concern you, until they do. Perhaps it’s a place where you hang out with a small group of friends, or post to a community of millions. Maybe Reddit is where you find interesting links and watch funny videos. Its business is to let people gather for free, generating communities and content, and then assigning value to that content so that it can be sorted and shown to millions more people, some of whom see ads. It inhabits a gray zone between small, intimate communities with shared expectations and norms and the mega-platforms that tend to obliterate such things. On its face, Reddit is a huge collection of forums overseen by a single private company. This doubles as a challenge to the finance world: Tell us how this is different. The precedent offered most enthusiastically by WallStreetBets is the one provided by finance itself: Professionals have been manipulating markets for years. Likewise if you’ve kept up with the (market) story of Tesla, whose founder, Elon Musk, who has gone to war with short sellers, got in on the GameStop action this week. If you absorbed the rise of cryptocurrencies, this all may feel a bit less foreign. But a few rules of thumb can stave off some nasty surprises. Tips for Investors: When you invest and where matters for taxes.May I Speak to a Human?: Younger investors who are navigating market volatility and trying to save for retirement are finding that digital investment platforms lack the personal touch.2023 Predictions: There are plenty of forecasts coming for where the S&P 500 will be at the end of the year.Value and Growth Stocks: Eight tech giants are no longer “pure growth” stocks, while Exxon and Chevron are, according to a new study.Our Coverage of the Investment World The decline of the stock and bond markets this year has been painful, and it remains difficult to predict what is in store for the future. Hedge funds that had bet against GameStop lost billions. Thousands of traders, amateurish and sophisticated alike, made money, fast. 28, 2020, it was treading at under $4 this year, on the same date, that number briefly exceeded $480. Individual investors, many of them moved by calls to action on Reddit and other social platforms, have spent recent weeks aggressively buying up stock in GameStop, the struggling video game retailer, driving the price to extraordinary highs. You may have guessed that, right now, we’re talking about stocks. Perhaps then the voice in your head really wants to say: Why not? Let’s see where this goes. Maybe it’s something sillier - a whole new digital currency named after a meme. A conspiracy theory that was treated as a punchline, then a nuisance, then a crisis.
What comes to mind? Maybe a recent event in politics, or perhaps a particular politician. Read this in the little voice in your head, and tell me it doesn’t sound familiar: Is this for real? It’s got to run out of steam.
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