8 ms·

The GameStop stock is part of our national pandemic gambling binge

59 points by prostoalex 6y ago

postalrat 6y ago
Articles such as this are a product of the never-ending "never waste a good crisis" crowd.
- cat199 6y ago
  all the better to frame WSB and the proles as the culprit, rather than information assymetry / under-regulation of short selling (why for example, is short interest data not available at higher frequency)
imbnwa 6y ago
- "You hear that line? Line's for you. Don't make me laugh. We're one people. It's a myth created by Thomas Jefferson." - "Oh, now you're gonna have a go at Jefferson?" - "My friend. Jefferson's an American saint... because he wrote the words, "All men are created equal"... words he clearly didn't believe, since he allowed his own children to live in slavery. He was a rich wine snob who was sick of paying taxes to the Brits...so yeah, he wrote some lovely words and aroused the rabble... and they went out and died for those words... while he sat back and drank his wine and fucked his slave girl. This guy wants to tell me we're living in a community. Don't make me laugh. I'm living in America, and in America, you're on your own. America's not a country. It's just a business. Now fucking pay me."
- rafiki6 6y ago
  This applies to literally every country in existence. How many times have socialist revolutions simply descended into fascist feudalist states? Since the dawn of agriculture, there has been no egalitarianism. Our social groups have become too large for that to be practical. We can only really know about 150 people personally. Beyond that it's a whole different level of social dynamics, and a hierarchy naturally takes order. That's why you should never feel ashamed trying to get to the top of the hierarchy. If you don't someone else will, that's game theory for you. You're better off watching a revolution unfold rather than picking sides.
  - ihm 6y ago
    This is such a cynical view of humanity. Personally I believe it is worth striving to create a society that encourages and cultivates our best qualities rooted in love, rather than resigning ourselves to a social structure and way of thinking that encourages our most selfish and destructive ones.
    - rafiki6 6y ago
      You're never going to do that by taking down the current order of the day violently. Violent revolutions lead (whether social or financial) lead to violent societies. That's my main point. Don't assume that a violent revolutions wrapped in idealism is any less violent.
  - FlownScepter 6y ago
    > This applies to literally every country in existence. How many times have socialist revolutions simply descended into fascist feudalist states? This is an incredibly disingenuous view, as though Socialist/Communist states were simply allowed to exist and failed, and weren't targeted very explicitly by every Capitalist state on the planet with everything ranging from economic sanctions to intelligence manipulation and assassinations to actual boots-on-the-ground war, and that doesn't even take into account Capitalism's toll on the global south in general, which is bad enough to cause huge problems by itself. All those states that failed had problems and many did terrible things too, but to say that Capitalism is required because everything else failed as though Capitalism in many cases wasn't there making sure they failed is intellectually dishonest.
    - rafiki6 6y ago
      I never said capitalism is required. You're arguing the wrong point. The point is about idealism based revolutions. They never workout the way they followers want them to. Never.
      - FlownScepter 6y ago
        Well incremental reform is on track to kill the planet, so I wouldn't say that's a good way to go about it either.
- icu 6y ago
  The hope for humanity is that we're irrational. Yes, it comes with downsides... but it is our irrational nature that compels us to help a stranger even when it comes at our own expense. This is why I can't give up hope.
  - A12-B 6y ago
    No, you only think that's irrational because you can only see so far. In reality we help people because in the long run it benefits us more than not. A rising tide lifts all boats etc. You don't actually get as much out of being selfish as you think you do.
    - defterGoose 6y ago
      And thats the problem with American society. Its always easier to understand the (short-term) gains from being selfish, and difficult to understand the (long-term) edifying effects of being magnanimous.
      - imbnwa 6y ago
        This is pretty spot on
  - wruza 6y ago
    "You're looking at it rationally - there are people who are useful to you, and people who ain't, and the people who ain't got to go. Me. I'm not rational. I don't care if you're useful or not. I feel like taking you out, Devo, so that's what I'm doing." - Trevor Philips (No insights here, I just feel like quoting Trevor, cause he’s loyal one)
- tengbretson 6y ago
  I've always found it kind of lazy to criticize someone's ideals on the basis that they themselves fell short of those ideals. Isn't setting your sights on what is today out of reach a critical element of progress?
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    In some situations, sure. In Jeffersons? He didn't just fall a little short. He fell way short in ways that both he and his contemporaries knew were monstrous. Jefferson himself wrote that it was too dangerous to support abolition, even if slavery was a moral evil. In comparison, Lincoln wrote that ending slavery was worth the total destruction of the entire wealth of the nation. Jefferson wasn't even willing to personally sacrifice. Ending slavery was absolutely within reach during Jefferson's lifetime. And he personally had the ability to free his own slaves even if broader abolition didn't come quickly. Jefferson also betrayed his own ideals by failing to support the french revolution (a revolution that was actually about granting power to the people, though it had its own problems).
    - positr0n 6y ago
      When did Jefferson sour on the French Revolution? I know he helped the Marquis de Lafayette write The Declaration of the Rights of Man. Granted that was very early in the revolution, before it turned on the liberal nobles like Lafayette. Fun fact I learned from the Revolutions podcast. Lafayette was imprisoned by the Austrians after trying to escape France through enemy lines. The US learned of his situation (this was during George Washington's presidency) and granted him back pay for his service during the revolutionary war. And that is how he survived those ~5 years in an Austrian prison.
  - Layke1123 6y ago
    But his point is exactly that those were not his ideals, but just pleasant rhetoric to invoke the action of those beneath his position to benefit him. It's not a criticism of the idea that "all men are created equal". It's a criticism of Jefferson's actual belief in said ideals.
- jbonniwell 6y ago
  I didn’t know what this was from so I looked it up, in case anybody else is curious, from the movie Killing Them Softly: https://youtu.be/Zi9iCOsD8Sg https://youtu.be/Zi9iCOsD8Sg
stefan_ 6y ago
Gambling or trying to participate in what is increasingly "the economy", because work sure as hell ain't the way to make any money. Unprecedented bull run during a pandemic with record high unemployment.
- WJW 6y ago
  Observing that "X doesn't lead to the desired outcome" and "Y is not X" does not imply that "Y will lead to the desired outcome". If you want to accumulate money, gambling on games with negative expected value is not the way to do it.
  - klmadfejno 6y ago
    To be pedantic though, it's also possible for the EV of Y to be worse than X, yet for the probability of a good outcome to be higher with Y.
  - ironmagma 6y ago
    Observing that people are turning to Y is not the same as saying Y is better than X, it’s just saying that X appears to be relatively worthless.
  - cactus2093 6y ago
    > gambling on games with negative expected value There are different ways to treat "expected" - in one sense, by definition every stock has neutral expected value in the short term, that's what the market price is. And in the longer term, it has the expected value of the rate of increase of the overall market. Given what we've seen the overall market do in the past year, and the unprecedented combination of massive government relief spending and low interest rates, owning stocks at all right now seems to be a great idea. If you use a different way of calculating "expected", then everyone expected Gamestop to be worth very little based on all the traditional markers of a stock, future cash flows, etc. But those people were wrong for quite a while and many of them lost a lot of money, and many people who bet against the common wisdom made a lot of money. Even today the price is still a factor of 10 higher than what most analysts recently had it at. Basically, if you're so sure that this was a "negative expected value" bet for everyone who went long on gamestop, why wouldn't you short it today and make a ton of money? I agree that this stock run-up was a form of gambling, but it's dishonest to write all these people off as making bad decisions because it's not like there is a true expected value that anyone can calculate with certainty ahead of time.
fullshark 6y ago
I don't know if it's a gambling binge, but I'll tell you the returns from capital seem to far outstrip the returns to labor in our modern society. Seems like you are either part of the investor class or the lower class in America and I think people have caught on, willing to take chances to get into said investor class.
- nerdponx 6y ago
  I made more money on some savingss in 2020, by literally doing nothing and just watching it grow, than a lot of people earn in 9-5 jobs. I'm happy about it of course, but it seems wildly unfair. I'm not what you'd call a Marxist, but it's pretty obvious that there is a serious socioeconomic imbalance here and something needs to be different.
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    Savings or investments? As for the bull market, it won't past forever. Can you also make that work in a bear market? At any rate a great number of people benefit from the markets via 401Ks and stock comp.
    - nerdponx 6y ago
      Of course it won't work in a bear market, but neither will working 9-5 if you get laid off.
  - HNfriend234 6y ago
    It is easy to see it as "doing nothing" but the reality is your risked your money during a period of time which was very uncertain. Uncertainty = higher risk in terms of stocks. The reality is you took a big risk and you got a big return because you kept your money in the market. Eventually the stock market will crash and the imbalance will be corrected. People who are invested in risky stocks will likely be bankrupted as those companies fail. Likewise for people who used lots of leverage. Then the working class will be seen as smart because they made 50-100k from working while joe investor lost 500k in the market. see dot com crash for an example
raidicy 6y ago
At the risk of sounding dumb; why not? As long as you put money in you're willing to lose it seems it's better to take a calculated risk on a stock or cryptocurrency in hopes for a return. When you're poor and can make as much as a paycheck in a single lucky trade it almost doesn't make sense not to try.
- sct202 6y ago
  When you're poor and inexperienced, you probably don't have much of a basis of estimating the risk versus reward of all the potential options you could put that money into. There are a lot of influencers selling courses saying that trading forex, crypto, and meme stocks will make you rich in 10 easy steps, and it's very easy to get mixed up in an echo chamber that's trying to extract money from you instead of helping you grow your money.
- notahacker 6y ago
  It's not calculated risks for the poor though. It's putting their paycheck on hot tips from Wall Street and tech bros who think losing large multiples of a poor person's paycheck is hilarious and ending up struggling to pay rent because it turns out their advice wasn't so good. When you haven't got much capital, the amount of good luck you need in investment to not be poor is enormous, and losing more than you can afford by trying is near certain. When you're poor, a share in GME is not the sort of money you're willing to lose, and it makes no sense at all to participate in a rich person's subculture that sees losing several times your income as a cause for boasting.
Shivetya 6y ago
The Stock market, even the gamestop event, is far better use of money than the various government powered lotteries. it is very difficult to tell people gambling is bad when you see the amount of advertisement that state lotteries are permitted to spend on let alone the national cooperative versions. at least with the stock market your bets are pretty much not going to leave you broke if you choose wrong but 99.9% of the time a state lottery is a losing bet.
- asdff 6y ago
  Government powered lotteries are designed to raise funds for things like schools, not as an investment vehicle.
sky_rw 6y ago
Friend of mine does data analytics for off track betting. The spike in wagers from the stimulus checks was staggering.
- asdff 6y ago
  So many people I know immediately took their stimulus check, dumped it into some dumb crypto meme, and lost all their money. There is something to be said about money allocated for low level economic activity is instead obliterated into the worldwide ether, sometimes at massive electricity costs just to rub salt into the wound of our warming world. I wonder if in the future we will see national economies shrink as people dump more local fiat into economically useless, speculative crypto that is distributed globally.
UncleOxidant 6y ago
International.
andreygrehov 6y ago
> The GameStop surge was just one of the ways Americans have renewed their love of gamblng. There is nothing about Americans specifically. Check out Telegram/Discord channels, there are more non-Americans shilling GME than the total number of American users in those groups.
- asdff 6y ago
  Cheaper to host your bot ring in eastern europe I imagine
asdff 6y ago
In my opinion, it really is gambling for the vast majority of participants. The same millenial peers of mine who talk about sports betting endlessly seamlessly talk about crypto and stock options within the same sentence. They are all just more things to bet on when there isn't a game on TV. It's the same crowd of people who wouldn't hesitate paying for UFC pay per view to live bet, or ending the night at the nearest casino in any city they are currently binge drinking in. There is a whole subset of millennials who follow the words of David Portnoy and/or Joe Rogan and others like some sage prophets, echoing their rhetoric and chasing their bets. These people aren't sticking it to the man. They are looking for their next bet to hit, and taking fools and the resulting media circus with them. The celebration of hedge fund losses is rooted mainly in memes rather than an actual coherent class struggle, since if you have enough money to blow on dumb bets constantly without going broke, chances are you are living somewhat comfortably to begin with.
gordon_freeman 6y ago
I would just like to remind here that if your goal is to create the wealth for the long term then being lazy and investing in good-old (boring) index funds is a better way. NYT has a nice article published recently on this: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/upshot/stock-market-winning-strategy.html?smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/upshot/stock-market-winni...
- mettamage 6y ago
  I'm doing both until I see a clear winner. It's year 3 so far, there's no clear winner yet. My win condition: 10 years for my own stock picking. My lose condition: if I'm getting abysmal lower returns on my stock picking (e.g. 20% of index funds).
  - tyrust 6y ago
    You don't need to wait, there are many historical examples of indexing beating stock picking. Also, 10 years is a pretty short time horizon considering this recent bull market is approaching that age. Good luck, though.
- t0mbstone 6y ago
  Or maybe, just maybe... you could do a "hybrid" approach? I have my 401K and Roth IRA maxed, an emergency fund set aside, all my debts paid off, and the vast majority of my income being set aside in safe index funds and bonds. As such, I feel like it's completely responsible for me to take a small percentage of my annual income and devote it towards "high risk investments". I call it my "gambling money". In the past 6 months, by trading and holding various cryptocurrencies, I managed to turn $100 into $1000, then $1000 into $5000. This is essentially just "play money" for me, and I don't feel guilty about throwing some of it at online sports betting or online poker or GME/AMC/BB or Dogecoin or whatever. It's money I can afford to lose, but it also has the potential to give me 100x gains while my index funds never will (at least not within my lifetime). I think it's important to maintain a balanced portfolio, and having some "gambling money" set aside for high risk investing is an important part of that.
zby 6y ago
I might be many things to different people. I hear your gambling and rise my performance: https://zby.medium.com/gamestop-capitol-hill-riots-flashmobs-everywhere-3c1df6333328 https://zby.medium.com/gamestop-capitol-hill-riots-flashmobs...
yongjik 6y ago
The saga reminds me of Korean cryptocurrency craze of 2017[1], when the government decided to crack down on the exchanges and people were decrying that they were being robbed of their only viable way to middle-class life. Well, the following price dip proved the government's point. If the government had looked the other way, there could have been millions who would've watched their life savings evaporate. (Also, if you really wanted, there was nothing seriously stopping you from pouring your money to BTC or ETH or whatever. The government's action mostly worked on those angry horde who couldn't tell Satoshi from Nvidia.) There's a lot of inequality. That doesn't mean the government should encourage (or even tolerate) get-rich-quick schemes that prey upon desperate, financially illiterate people. Because when a few of them become millionaires and one third of them just lost their next month's rent, you made inequality worse, not better. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16121434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16121434
isoskeles 6y ago
This seems like it would partly be a result of near zero interest rates. Don't have anywhere to park your cash and get a modest return? Of course people are going to start speculating their money on crazy, stupid shit.

59 points by prostoalex 6y ago

postalrat 6y ago

Articles such as this are a product of the never-ending "never waste a good crisis" crowd.

cat199 6y ago
all the better to frame WSB and the proles as the culprit, rather than information assymetry / under-regulation of short selling (why for example, is short interest data not available at higher frequency)

imbnwa 6y ago

- "You hear that line? Line's for you. Don't make me laugh. We're one people. It's a myth created by Thomas Jefferson." - "Oh, now you're gonna have a go at Jefferson?" - "My friend. Jefferson's an American saint... because he wrote the words, "All men are created equal"... words he clearly didn't believe, since he allowed his own children to live in slavery. He was a rich wine snob who was sick of paying taxes to the Brits...so yeah, he wrote some lovely words and aroused the rabble... and they went out and died for those words... while he sat back and drank his wine and fucked his slave girl. This guy wants to tell me we're living in a community. Don't make me laugh. I'm living in America, and in America, you're on your own. America's not a country. It's just a business. Now fucking pay me."

rafiki6 6y ago
This applies to literally every country in existence. How many times have socialist revolutions simply descended into fascist feudalist states? Since the dawn of agriculture, there has been no egalitarianism. Our social groups have become too large for that to be practical. We can only really know about 150 people personally. Beyond that it's a whole different level of social dynamics, and a hierarchy naturally takes order. That's why you should never feel ashamed trying to get to the top of the hierarchy. If you don't someone else will, that's game theory for you. You're better off watching a revolution unfold rather than picking sides.
- ihm 6y ago
  This is such a cynical view of humanity. Personally I believe it is worth striving to create a society that encourages and cultivates our best qualities rooted in love, rather than resigning ourselves to a social structure and way of thinking that encourages our most selfish and destructive ones.
  - rafiki6 6y ago
    You're never going to do that by taking down the current order of the day violently. Violent revolutions lead (whether social or financial) lead to violent societies. That's my main point. Don't assume that a violent revolutions wrapped in idealism is any less violent.
- FlownScepter 6y ago
  > This applies to literally every country in existence. How many times have socialist revolutions simply descended into fascist feudalist states? This is an incredibly disingenuous view, as though Socialist/Communist states were simply allowed to exist and failed, and weren't targeted very explicitly by every Capitalist state on the planet with everything ranging from economic sanctions to intelligence manipulation and assassinations to actual boots-on-the-ground war, and that doesn't even take into account Capitalism's toll on the global south in general, which is bad enough to cause huge problems by itself. All those states that failed had problems and many did terrible things too, but to say that Capitalism is required because everything else failed as though Capitalism in many cases wasn't there making sure they failed is intellectually dishonest.
  - rafiki6 6y ago
    I never said capitalism is required. You're arguing the wrong point. The point is about idealism based revolutions. They never workout the way they followers want them to. Never.
    - FlownScepter 6y ago
      Well incremental reform is on track to kill the planet, so I wouldn't say that's a good way to go about it either.
icu 6y ago
The hope for humanity is that we're irrational. Yes, it comes with downsides... but it is our irrational nature that compels us to help a stranger even when it comes at our own expense. This is why I can't give up hope.
- A12-B 6y ago
  No, you only think that's irrational because you can only see so far. In reality we help people because in the long run it benefits us more than not. A rising tide lifts all boats etc. You don't actually get as much out of being selfish as you think you do.
  - defterGoose 6y ago
    And thats the problem with American society. Its always easier to understand the (short-term) gains from being selfish, and difficult to understand the (long-term) edifying effects of being magnanimous.
    - imbnwa 6y ago
      This is pretty spot on
- wruza 6y ago
  "You're looking at it rationally - there are people who are useful to you, and people who ain't, and the people who ain't got to go. Me. I'm not rational. I don't care if you're useful or not. I feel like taking you out, Devo, so that's what I'm doing." - Trevor Philips (No insights here, I just feel like quoting Trevor, cause he’s loyal one)
tengbretson 6y ago
I've always found it kind of lazy to criticize someone's ideals on the basis that they themselves fell short of those ideals. Isn't setting your sights on what is today out of reach a critical element of progress?
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  In some situations, sure. In Jeffersons? He didn't just fall a little short. He fell way short in ways that both he and his contemporaries knew were monstrous. Jefferson himself wrote that it was too dangerous to support abolition, even if slavery was a moral evil. In comparison, Lincoln wrote that ending slavery was worth the total destruction of the entire wealth of the nation. Jefferson wasn't even willing to personally sacrifice. Ending slavery was absolutely within reach during Jefferson's lifetime. And he personally had the ability to free his own slaves even if broader abolition didn't come quickly. Jefferson also betrayed his own ideals by failing to support the french revolution (a revolution that was actually about granting power to the people, though it had its own problems).
  - positr0n 6y ago
    When did Jefferson sour on the French Revolution? I know he helped the Marquis de Lafayette write The Declaration of the Rights of Man. Granted that was very early in the revolution, before it turned on the liberal nobles like Lafayette. Fun fact I learned from the Revolutions podcast. Lafayette was imprisoned by the Austrians after trying to escape France through enemy lines. The US learned of his situation (this was during George Washington's presidency) and granted him back pay for his service during the revolutionary war. And that is how he survived those ~5 years in an Austrian prison.
- Layke1123 6y ago
  But his point is exactly that those were not his ideals, but just pleasant rhetoric to invoke the action of those beneath his position to benefit him. It's not a criticism of the idea that "all men are created equal". It's a criticism of Jefferson's actual belief in said ideals.
jbonniwell 6y ago
I didn’t know what this was from so I looked it up, in case anybody else is curious, from the movie Killing Them Softly: https://youtu.be/Zi9iCOsD8Sg https://youtu.be/Zi9iCOsD8Sg

stefan_ 6y ago

Gambling or trying to participate in what is increasingly "the economy", because work sure as hell ain't the way to make any money. Unprecedented bull run during a pandemic with record high unemployment.

WJW 6y ago
Observing that "X doesn't lead to the desired outcome" and "Y is not X" does not imply that "Y will lead to the desired outcome". If you want to accumulate money, gambling on games with negative expected value is not the way to do it.
- klmadfejno 6y ago
  To be pedantic though, it's also possible for the EV of Y to be worse than X, yet for the probability of a good outcome to be higher with Y.
- ironmagma 6y ago
  Observing that people are turning to Y is not the same as saying Y is better than X, it’s just saying that X appears to be relatively worthless.
- cactus2093 6y ago
  > gambling on games with negative expected value There are different ways to treat "expected" - in one sense, by definition every stock has neutral expected value in the short term, that's what the market price is. And in the longer term, it has the expected value of the rate of increase of the overall market. Given what we've seen the overall market do in the past year, and the unprecedented combination of massive government relief spending and low interest rates, owning stocks at all right now seems to be a great idea. If you use a different way of calculating "expected", then everyone expected Gamestop to be worth very little based on all the traditional markers of a stock, future cash flows, etc. But those people were wrong for quite a while and many of them lost a lot of money, and many people who bet against the common wisdom made a lot of money. Even today the price is still a factor of 10 higher than what most analysts recently had it at. Basically, if you're so sure that this was a "negative expected value" bet for everyone who went long on gamestop, why wouldn't you short it today and make a ton of money? I agree that this stock run-up was a form of gambling, but it's dishonest to write all these people off as making bad decisions because it's not like there is a true expected value that anyone can calculate with certainty ahead of time.

fullshark 6y ago

I don't know if it's a gambling binge, but I'll tell you the returns from capital seem to far outstrip the returns to labor in our modern society. Seems like you are either part of the investor class or the lower class in America and I think people have caught on, willing to take chances to get into said investor class.

nerdponx 6y ago
I made more money on some savingss in 2020, by literally doing nothing and just watching it grow, than a lot of people earn in 9-5 jobs. I'm happy about it of course, but it seems wildly unfair. I'm not what you'd call a Marxist, but it's pretty obvious that there is a serious socioeconomic imbalance here and something needs to be different.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  Savings or investments? As for the bull market, it won't past forever. Can you also make that work in a bear market? At any rate a great number of people benefit from the markets via 401Ks and stock comp.
  - nerdponx 6y ago
    Of course it won't work in a bear market, but neither will working 9-5 if you get laid off.
- HNfriend234 6y ago
  It is easy to see it as "doing nothing" but the reality is your risked your money during a period of time which was very uncertain. Uncertainty = higher risk in terms of stocks. The reality is you took a big risk and you got a big return because you kept your money in the market. Eventually the stock market will crash and the imbalance will be corrected. People who are invested in risky stocks will likely be bankrupted as those companies fail. Likewise for people who used lots of leverage. Then the working class will be seen as smart because they made 50-100k from working while joe investor lost 500k in the market. see dot com crash for an example

raidicy 6y ago

At the risk of sounding dumb; why not? As long as you put money in you're willing to lose it seems it's better to take a calculated risk on a stock or cryptocurrency in hopes for a return. When you're poor and can make as much as a paycheck in a single lucky trade it almost doesn't make sense not to try.

sct202 6y ago
When you're poor and inexperienced, you probably don't have much of a basis of estimating the risk versus reward of all the potential options you could put that money into. There are a lot of influencers selling courses saying that trading forex, crypto, and meme stocks will make you rich in 10 easy steps, and it's very easy to get mixed up in an echo chamber that's trying to extract money from you instead of helping you grow your money.
notahacker 6y ago
It's not calculated risks for the poor though. It's putting their paycheck on hot tips from Wall Street and tech bros who think losing large multiples of a poor person's paycheck is hilarious and ending up struggling to pay rent because it turns out their advice wasn't so good. When you haven't got much capital, the amount of good luck you need in investment to not be poor is enormous, and losing more than you can afford by trying is near certain. When you're poor, a share in GME is not the sort of money you're willing to lose, and it makes no sense at all to participate in a rich person's subculture that sees losing several times your income as a cause for boasting.

Shivetya 6y ago

The Stock market, even the gamestop event, is far better use of money than the various government powered lotteries. it is very difficult to tell people gambling is bad when you see the amount of advertisement that state lotteries are permitted to spend on let alone the national cooperative versions. at least with the stock market your bets are pretty much not going to leave you broke if you choose wrong but 99.9% of the time a state lottery is a losing bet.

asdff 6y ago
Government powered lotteries are designed to raise funds for things like schools, not as an investment vehicle.

sky_rw 6y ago

Friend of mine does data analytics for off track betting. The spike in wagers from the stimulus checks was staggering.

asdff 6y ago
So many people I know immediately took their stimulus check, dumped it into some dumb crypto meme, and lost all their money. There is something to be said about money allocated for low level economic activity is instead obliterated into the worldwide ether, sometimes at massive electricity costs just to rub salt into the wound of our warming world. I wonder if in the future we will see national economies shrink as people dump more local fiat into economically useless, speculative crypto that is distributed globally.

UncleOxidant 6y ago

International.

andreygrehov 6y ago

> The GameStop surge was just one of the ways Americans have renewed their love of gamblng. There is nothing about Americans specifically. Check out Telegram/Discord channels, there are more non-Americans shilling GME than the total number of American users in those groups.

asdff 6y ago
Cheaper to host your bot ring in eastern europe I imagine

asdff 6y ago

In my opinion, it really is gambling for the vast majority of participants. The same millenial peers of mine who talk about sports betting endlessly seamlessly talk about crypto and stock options within the same sentence. They are all just more things to bet on when there isn't a game on TV. It's the same crowd of people who wouldn't hesitate paying for UFC pay per view to live bet, or ending the night at the nearest casino in any city they are currently binge drinking in. There is a whole subset of millennials who follow the words of David Portnoy and/or Joe Rogan and others like some sage prophets, echoing their rhetoric and chasing their bets. These people aren't sticking it to the man. They are looking for their next bet to hit, and taking fools and the resulting media circus with them. The celebration of hedge fund losses is rooted mainly in memes rather than an actual coherent class struggle, since if you have enough money to blow on dumb bets constantly without going broke, chances are you are living somewhat comfortably to begin with.

gordon_freeman 6y ago

I would just like to remind here that if your goal is to create the wealth for the long term then being lazy and investing in good-old (boring) index funds is a better way. NYT has a nice article published recently on this: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/upshot/stock-market-winning-strategy.html?smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/upshot/stock-market-winni...

mettamage 6y ago
I'm doing both until I see a clear winner. It's year 3 so far, there's no clear winner yet. My win condition: 10 years for my own stock picking. My lose condition: if I'm getting abysmal lower returns on my stock picking (e.g. 20% of index funds).
- tyrust 6y ago
  You don't need to wait, there are many historical examples of indexing beating stock picking. Also, 10 years is a pretty short time horizon considering this recent bull market is approaching that age. Good luck, though.
t0mbstone 6y ago
Or maybe, just maybe... you could do a "hybrid" approach? I have my 401K and Roth IRA maxed, an emergency fund set aside, all my debts paid off, and the vast majority of my income being set aside in safe index funds and bonds. As such, I feel like it's completely responsible for me to take a small percentage of my annual income and devote it towards "high risk investments". I call it my "gambling money". In the past 6 months, by trading and holding various cryptocurrencies, I managed to turn $100 into $1000, then $1000 into $5000. This is essentially just "play money" for me, and I don't feel guilty about throwing some of it at online sports betting or online poker or GME/AMC/BB or Dogecoin or whatever. It's money I can afford to lose, but it also has the potential to give me 100x gains while my index funds never will (at least not within my lifetime). I think it's important to maintain a balanced portfolio, and having some "gambling money" set aside for high risk investing is an important part of that.

zby 6y ago

I might be many things to different people. I hear your gambling and rise my performance: https://zby.medium.com/gamestop-capitol-hill-riots-flashmobs-everywhere-3c1df6333328 https://zby.medium.com/gamestop-capitol-hill-riots-flashmobs...

yongjik 6y ago

The saga reminds me of Korean cryptocurrency craze of 2017[1], when the government decided to crack down on the exchanges and people were decrying that they were being robbed of their only viable way to middle-class life. Well, the following price dip proved the government's point. If the government had looked the other way, there could have been millions who would've watched their life savings evaporate. (Also, if you really wanted, there was nothing seriously stopping you from pouring your money to BTC or ETH or whatever. The government's action mostly worked on those angry horde who couldn't tell Satoshi from Nvidia.) There's a lot of inequality. That doesn't mean the government should encourage (or even tolerate) get-rich-quick schemes that prey upon desperate, financially illiterate people. Because when a few of them become millionaires and one third of them just lost their next month's rent, you made inequality worse, not better. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16121434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16121434

isoskeles 6y ago

This seems like it would partly be a result of near zero interest rates. Don't have anywhere to park your cash and get a modest return? Of course people are going to start speculating their money on crazy, stupid shit.