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What I find more fascinating since the beginning of this year is the rise "meme investing" a la r/wallstreetbets. Huge speculative option plays among a huge swa

What I find more fascinating since the beginning of this year is the rise "meme investing" a la r/wallstreetbets. Huge speculative option plays among a huge swath of retailers on meme stocks. Self-proclaimed value investors like to call them "Robinhooders".

repsilat 6y ago
A few days ago there was a "passive income" AskHn[1], with links to similar threads from previous years, and this year there were a lot of "stock market" answers. My scientific ctrl-f survey has the string "stock" appearing 48 times in 166 comments this year, three times in 84 comments last year, once in 163 comments in 2018, and 6 times in 90 comments in 2017. And this year they were talking about leverage. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25316912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25316912
vmception 6y ago
As someone that's been in wallstreetbets for 7 years. The memes were always there, and that community has been glorifying losses for a long time. Mostly around options bets during earnings season. The only thing that has changed lately is that trading options become free. Options used to be prohibitively expensive. Oh yeah and a couple people killed themselves, the irony here being that people stop blaming the trader and blame the broker after the trader self harms? Convincing. But it definitely helped bring the attention from everyone that figured they had slightly better self preservation skills and could understand how settlement works. I'm glad undercapitalized people stopped gravitating towards penny stocks.
- cstejerean 6y ago
  What also changed this year is that a lot of other things to do for fun became unavailable due to Covid. Betting on stocks is something you can do from the comfort of your own home.
  - vmception 6y ago
    That didn't hurt for sure, but everyone wanting to be a day trader always happens during asset bubbles.

repsilat 6y ago

A few days ago there was a "passive income" AskHn[1], with links to similar threads from previous years, and this year there were a lot of "stock market" answers. My scientific ctrl-f survey has the string "stock" appearing 48 times in 166 comments this year, three times in 84 comments last year, once in 163 comments in 2018, and 6 times in 90 comments in 2017. And this year they were talking about leverage. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25316912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25316912

vmception 6y ago

As someone that's been in wallstreetbets for 7 years. The memes were always there, and that community has been glorifying losses for a long time. Mostly around options bets during earnings season. The only thing that has changed lately is that trading options become free. Options used to be prohibitively expensive. Oh yeah and a couple people killed themselves, the irony here being that people stop blaming the trader and blame the broker after the trader self harms? Convincing. But it definitely helped bring the attention from everyone that figured they had slightly better self preservation skills and could understand how settlement works. I'm glad undercapitalized people stopped gravitating towards penny stocks.

cstejerean 6y ago
What also changed this year is that a lot of other things to do for fun became unavailable due to Covid. Betting on stocks is something you can do from the comfort of your own home.
- vmception 6y ago
  That didn't hurt for sure, but everyone wanting to be a day trader always happens during asset bubbles.