wallstreetbets

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors
by Spencer Jakab
Published 1 Feb 2022

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6 Chapter 13: Rise of the Apes That_Guy_KC, “Stop with the ape crap,” Reddit, February 6, 2021 (post deleted), archived at https://js4.red/r/wallstreetbets/comments/ldrwvl/stop_with_the_ape_crap [inactive]. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1 Page statistics for r/wallstreetbets, Subreddit Stats, accessed March 2021, https://subredditstats.com/r/wallstreetbets. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2 Jack Morse, “Reddit Swoops In to Resolve WallStreetBets Moderator Drama,” Mashable, February 5, 2021. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3 Maggie Fitzgerald, “GameStop Mania May Not Have Been the Retail Trader Rebellion It Was Perceived to Be, Data Shows,” CNBC, February 5, 2021.

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For example, there are several large groups devoted to investing, ranging from r/bogleheads, who are devotees of the late index-fund pioneer Jack Bogle, to r/personalfinance, the early retirement forum r/financialindependence, r/FinancialPlanning, and two very different ones devoted to the stock market, r/investing and, of course, r/wallstreetbets. Of the roughly one hundred thousand active subreddits, Chief Executive Officer Steve Huffman was interested enough in the now-famous forum to personally become an observer, according to company spokeswoman Sandra Chu.[24] “He does bristle at the suggestion that WallStreetBets users are wild and ignorant.” As a businessman, he has to be pleased with how Reddit has become more valuable since it became the center of the universe for many young investors. Days after the meme-stock squeeze, Reddit ran its first Super Bowl ad featuring WallStreetBets. Days later, the company raised money, doubling its value from a year earlier to a record $6 billion.

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BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6 NFTOxaile, “Response to ‘Shitron Attacking Begins,’” Reddit, January 19, 2021, www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l0lg6r/shitron_attacking_begins/gjv3z3x. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7 Truthposter 100, “Response to ‘Shitron Attacking Begins,’” January 19, 2021, www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l0lg6r/shitron_attacking_begins/gjutdfu. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8 Self-AwareMeat, “yeah, Melvin is small fodder. Citron is the one we want to fuck badly,” Reddit, January 19, 2021. Response to “Shitron Attacking Begins,” www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l0lg6r/shitron_attacking_begins/gju7o8e. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9 Citron Research, “Citron Research discontinues short selling research to focus on long opportunities,” YouTube video, January 29, 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?

The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees
by Ben Mezrich
Published 6 Sep 2021

Chinwe asked, running his finger along the top of the screen, reading the small print an inch beneath the WallStreetBets logo/mascot, the image of a blond-haired trader in sunglasses and a suit and tie, like something out of an eighties video game—“‘Like 4chan found a Bloomberg terminal.’” Kim grinned. 4chan was one of the most notoriously dirty sites—a bulletin board, really—that bridged the gap between the dark web and more popular social media. And a Bloomberg terminal was what real Wall Street traders used to take money from regular people like her. “It’s kind of a motto. WallStreetBets is a place to talk about stocks, buying and selling.” “You mean investing.”

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And she’d scrolled through many of the comments about what he’d been saying, both on YouTube and WallStreetBets. It was obvious, a lot of people were buying in, and the stock had risen to close to $20 a share. Which, she gathered, had been DFV’s original price target when he’d first started posting about the company being undervalued. But Sara didn’t believe that stock rise had much to do with the bits of news he’d gone on about, the interest of that strange guy from The Big Short, or even the meme-friendly pet food entrepreneur. She believed something deeper was happening. Alone in the examining room, waiting for the doctor to return, she scrolled through WallStreetBets to a post she had bookmarked, which she’d first found when she’d been reading backward through different comment streams to try and understand more about what was going on.

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Jeremy wasn’t sure which of them won the race to the Leave Meeting button, but in the frozen image of her face that remained on his screen just a moment too long, he could see that she shared his sense of relief. Before the news had hit the market, WallStreetBets came up and bought it, With diamond hands they knew they’d profit, If they could only hold. Soon may the Tendieman come, To send our rocket into the sun, One day when the trading is done, We’ll take our gains and go… He was already banishing Zoom back to his app folder when a new chime told him that he wasn’t yet going to be allowed back to WallStreetBets, to the sea shanties and anti-Citron rants. A quick glance at his phone told him that his brother was FaceTiming—an accurate bit of timing that only a younger brother could pull off.

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All
by Adrian Hon
Published 14 Sep 2022

“Interactive Brokers chairman: Worried about integrity of the market,” CNBC Television, YouTube, video, 4:17, January 28, 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RH4XKP55fM. 70. u/sentientpork, “#1 mobile gaming app for 2020 crushes the competition and it’s players,” r/wallstreetbets, Reddit, June 24, 2020, www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/hf5ndx/1_mobile_gaming_app_for_2020_crushes_the. 71. u/josephd6, “Here it is in all its glory,” r/wallstreetbets, Reddit, January 30, 2021, www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l8hfhy/here_it_is_in_all_its_glory. 72. “SEC Requests Information and Comment on Broker-Dealer and Investment Adviser Digital Engagement Practices, Related Tools and Methods, and Regulatory Considerations and Potential Approaches; Information and Comments on Investment Adviser Use of Technology,” US Securities and Exchange Commission, August 27, 2021, www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2021-167. 73.

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“Virtual Hearing—Game Stopped? Who Wins and Loses When Short Sellers, Social Media, and Retail Investors Collide,” Hearing, US House Committee on Financial Services, February 18, 2021, https://financialservices.house.gov/calendar/eventsingle.aspx?EventID=407107. 62. “wallstreetbets,” r/wallstreetbets, Reddit, accessed November 28, 2021, www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets. 63. James Chen, “2020 Was a Big Year for Individual Investors,” Investopedia, December 31, 2020, www.investopedia.com/2020-was-a-big-year-for-individual-investors-5094063; Matt Levine, “Is the Twitter Ban Securities Fraud?” Bloomberg, January 11, 2021, www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-11/is-the-twitter-ban-securities-fraud. 64.

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The stunning gyrations of the share price of a company called GameStop. THE BOREDOM MARKET HYPOTHESIS We need to visit r/wallstreetbets to understand why Robinhood and GameStop captured the attention of the world’s financial markets and US legislators.62 This immensely popular Reddit forum describes itself as “like 4chan found a Bloomberg terminal” where users compete to make the most attention-grabbing posts about how to get rich through trading. I first came across r/wallstreetbets at the beginning of 2020, just as COVID-19 was making its effects felt in Asia and then in Europe. The community had just shy of one million members, many of whom were fixated on shorting shares they correctly predicted were about to plunge off a cliff.

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam
by Vivek Ramaswamy
Published 16 Aug 2021

Of course, Reddit traders were still free to use brokerages other than Robinhood to buy stocks if they wanted to—including in a coordinated fashion. But this is where wokeness comes in. Just hours before the Thursday short-selling onslaught, the online chat company Discord shut down a WallStreetBets discussion server with 250,000 members over allegations of “hate speech”—WallStreetBets moderators claimed the entire Discord server was banned because one user had managed to bypass a filter for vulgarity.29 Simultaneously, Facebook shut down a 150,000-strong discussion page for Robinhood traders over allegations of “adult sexual exploitation,” which it refused to substantiate.30 It was a ridiculous claim even on its face.

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BBC News, BBC, 22 Oct. 2020, www.bbc.com/news/business-54597256. 3. Hope, Bradley, et al. “The Secret Money Behind ‘The Wolf of Wall Street.’” The Wall Street Journal, 1 Apr. 2016, www.wsj.com/articles/malaysias-1mdb-the-secret-money-behind-the-wolf-of-wall-street-1459531987. 4. “r/Wallstreetbets—Goldman Sachs Alludes to GME & WSB.” Reddit, www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l3ucyv/goldman_sachs_alludes_to_gme_wsb/. 5. Chappell, Bill. “Malaysia’s Former PM Najib Razak Begins Trial on 1MDB Slush-Fund Charges.” NPR, 3 Apr. 2019, www.npr.org/2019/04/03/709388200/malaysias-former-pm-najib-razak-begins-trial-on-1mdb-slush-fund-charges. 6.

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“Today I Learned about Intel’s AI Sliders That Filter Online Gaming Abuse.” The Verge, 8 Apr. 2021, www.theverge.com/2021/4/8/22373290/intel-bleep-ai-powered-abuse-toxicity-gaming-filters. 29. Peters, Jay. “Discord Bans the r/WallStreetBets Server, but New Ones Have Sprung to Life.” The Verge, 27 Jan. 2021, www.theverge.com/2021/1/27/22253251/discord-bans-the-r-wallstreetbets-server. 30. Stanley, Alyse. “Facebook Bans Popular Stock Trading Group amid GameStop Stock Price Chaos.” Gizmodo, 29 Jan. 2021, gizmodo.com/facebook-bans-popular-stock-trading-group-amid-gamestop-1846156731. 31. “Psaki: Treasury Secretary Yellen ‘Monitoring’ GameStop Stock Situation.”

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
by Nate Silver
Published 12 Aug 2024

Skilled Gambling Is Still Gambling: The Runbo Li Story Runbo Li won big on his first major options trade. He’d seen a tip on r/wallstreetbets that Nvidia, the semiconductor manufacturer, was about to announce a new GPU.[*8] A year or so earlier, Li had bought some stocks on the trading platform Robinhood with money he’d saved up from his first job—big consumer stocks he knew like Nike and JetBlue. The stocks had made a modest return. But what was happening at r/wallstreetbets was much more exciting. “I saw that some people were making just insane amounts of money trading stock options,” he said.

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But in January 2021, its market capitalization suddenly shot up to $22.6 billion after having been under $1 billion in mid-December. Absolutely nothing had changed to justify that—GameStop is an old-fashioned retail business in an industry where most video game sales have moved online, and the company has suffered a net loss every year since 2018. But the stock had become popular on the Reddit r/wallstreetbets, a forum for day traders and options traders. Why GameStop in particular became popular is hard to say. It was partly because it was being shorted by a lot of hedge funds and the day traders wanted to fight back, and partly because it was perceived as an archaic, Blockbuster Video dinosaur of a company.

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Markus said that it would have taken him only ten minutes to complete the programming for Dogecoin—but he spent a couple hours to customize the images (“doge” is a deliberate misspelling of “dog,” sometimes associated with pictures of a cute Japanese dog named Kabosu) and fonts (Comic Sans). And yet, Dogecoin went viral, gaining acclaim with r/wallstreetbets traders and Elon Musk. Valued at $0.00026 shortly after its creation in 2013, it eventually reached a peak of $0.74 in May 2021—a roughly 3,000x increase. In theory, companies like Apple and Google are occasionally supposed to produce a 3,000x return based on creating revolutionary consumer technologies that are adopted all around the world.

Just Keep Buying: Proven Ways to Save Money and Build Your Wealth
by Nick Maggiulli
Published 15 May 2022

I jokingly replied, “Darren, it could turn into the best thing that’s ever happened to you.” That was all it took. Over the course of the next hour the conversation in our group chat descended into the merits of GME and whether the wallstreetbets Reddit forum was right about its imminent price increase. As soon as the market opened, it was clear that wallstreetbets had called it perfectly. GME started the day at $96, up from its previous close of $65, and didn’t stop there. By 10:22 AM, Darren couldn’t stand to be on the sidelines any longer. He texted the group, “I’m in” after buying GME at $111 a share.

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest
by Edward Chancellor
Published 15 Aug 2022

The app-based broker offered zero-commission trading, margin loans at 2 per cent and options trading for the masses, and blended techniques developed in Silicon Valley to attract users to its app with those developed in Las Vegas to keep gamers hooked. Neophyte speculators gathered on WallStreetBets, a subreddit forum, where they styled themselves ‘retards’, ‘autists’ and ‘degens’. The WallStreetBets crowd mocked investment norms. Instead, they sought out the next ‘meme’ stock, or ‘stonk’ in their parlance. Their trading mantra was YOLO – You Only Live Once. They were driven by fear as much as greed – Fear of Missing Out. A bet that went stratospheric was called a ‘mooner’.

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In Sylvie and Bruno, a bond must be repaid before the money is lent. The Outland Professor owns a watch with a Reversal Peg, which causes events to happen in reverse order. Carroll would have understood that when the price of time is set at nothing or turns negative, and central banks print money without limit, finance becomes absurd. The autists on WallStreetBets found the situation intensely amusing. Serious investors, such as Klarman, found it deeply worrying. THE COVID TRANSITION The novelist Michel Houellebecq claimed that the ‘banal virus’ would change nothing. ‘We will not wake up after the lockdown in a new world. It will be the same, just a bit worse,’ a pessimistic Houellebecq announced on French radio.

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D., 163–4 Röpke, Wilhelm, 97, 100, 299 Rothbard, Murray, 30 Rothermere, Lord, 93 Roubini, Nouriel, 207, 254 Rousseff, Dilma, 258 Rucellai, Giovanni, 21 Rueff, Jacques, 85, 91, 115‡, 251 Ruskin, John, 180–81 Sainsbury’s (British grocery chain), 160 Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy, Duke of, 50–51, 52, 57 Samuelson, Paul, 246–7 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 292 Savills (property consultants), 174 saving: bonus of compound interest, 190; China’s savings glut, 268–9; as deferred gratification, 29, 188–90; and interest, xxiv, 44, 77, 188–93, 194–9, 205–6; interest as ‘wages of abstinence’, xxiv, xxv, 188–91; savings glut hypothesis, 115–16, 117, 126, 128–9, 132, 191, 252; Terborgh on, 125* savings & loan crisis, US, 111, 145 Say, Jean-Baptiste, 99 Sbrancia, Maria Belen, 290 Scandinavian banking crisis (early 1990s), 136 Schacht, Hjalmar, 82, 92, 312 Schäuble, Wolfgang, 299 Scheidel, Walter, 204 Schumpeter, Joseph, 16, 32, 46, 95, 218; Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), 126, 140, 296–7; ‘creative destruction’ idea, xx, 140–43, 153, 296–7; on deflation, 100; History of Economic Analysis, xviii; view of intellectuals, 297 Schwartz, Anna, 98, 99, 105, 116 Schwarzman, Steven, 207 Sears (department store), 169–70 secular stagnation, 77, 124–8, 131, 132–9, 151, 205–6 Sée, Henri Eugene, Modern Capitalism (1928), 28* Seneca the Younger, 20–21 Senior, Nassau, 188, 191 Senn, Martin, 193 shadow banks: in Canada, 174–5; in China, 266, 270, 282*, 283–5, 286; collapse in subprime crisis, 221, 283; illiquid products, 226–7; re-emergence after 2008 crisis, 221, 227, 231, 233; structured finance products, 116, 227, 283–5; Trust companies as precursors of, 84*; types of, 221; ‘Ultra-short’ bond exchange-traded funds (ETFs), 227 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of, 27 ‘shareholder value’ philosophy, 163–6, 167, 170–71 Shaw, Edward, 286 Shaw, Leslie, 83, 83* Shiba Inu (cryptocurrency), 308 Shin, Hyun Song, 254, 263 Shiyan, Hubei province, 275 Silicon Valley, 148, 151, 173, 176, 204 Silver, Morris, 7, 11 Singer, Paul, 185, 246 Smith, Adam, 14, 174; on monopolies, 162, 298; view of interest, 27, 27*, 31, 183; on wealth, 181; The Wealth of Nations (1776), xxii, 27–8, 27*, 31 Smithers, Andrew, Productivity and the Bonus Culture (2019), 152* Smoot–Hawley Act (1930), 261 socialism, 188, 297, 298 Soddy, Frederick, 181, 242 Solon the ‘Lawgiver’, 9, 18 Solow, Bob, 128 Somary, Felix, 94–5, 308 Sombart, Werner, Modern Capitalism, 22* Soros, George, 148*, 273, 283 South Africa, 258 South America: loans/securities from, 77, 79–80; precious metals from, 49, 168; speculation in bonds from, 64, 65–6, 91; trade during Napoleonic Wars, 70 South Korea, 267 South Sea Bubble (1720), 62, 65*, 68, 69, 307 Soviet Union, 278 Spain, 144–5, 147, 168, 213, 253, 279; mortgage bonds (cédulas), 117 Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs), 307 speculative manias, xxiii; Borio on, 135; and cryptocurrencies, 177–9; ‘hyperbolic discounting’ during, 176–7; in period from 1630s to 1840s, 64–6, 67–72, 73, 74, 75–6, 77–8, 79–80; technology companies in post-crisis years, 176–9; before Wall Street Crash (1929), 91 see also Mississippi bubble Spencer, Grant, 177 Sraffa, Piero, 42 St Ambrose, 18 St Augustine, 18–19, 202 St Bonaventure, 19 Stable Money League/Association, 87, 96 Standard Oil, 157 state capitalism, 280, 284, 292–5, 297, 298 Stefanel (Italian clothing company), 147 Stein, Jeremy, 231, 233 Steuart, Sir James, 53, 273 ‘sticky prices’ theory, 87* Strong, Benjamin, 82–3, 86–8, 90*, 92, 93, 98, 112 Stuckey’s Bank, 63, 66–7 subprime mortgage crisis, xxii, 114, 116, 117–18, 131, 211, 292; produces ‘dash for cash’, 227; unwinding of carry trades during, 221, 227 Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, 12 Suez Canal, 78 Sumerian civilization, 4, 6, 8, 15 Summers, Larry, 124–5, 127, 129, 185, 230, 230*, 235, 302 Sumner, William Graham, ‘Forgotten Man’, xx, xxii, 198 Susa, Henry of, 25 Svensson, Lars, 247 Sweden, 174, 241, 242, 244, 245, 247, 294 Sweezy, Paul, 156 Swiss National Bank, 172–3, 293–4 Switzerland, 172, 174, 226, 233, 241, 244, 245 Sydney (Australia), 175 Sylla, Richard, 4, 11, 68, 109 Tacitus, 20–21 Tasker, Peter, 271 Tawney, R.H., 201 tax structures, 164; offshore tax havens, 210 Taylor, John, 116–17, 129, 252 Tencent, 283 Tencin, Claudine Alexandrine Guérin, Madame de, 51 Terborgh, George, 125–6, 127 Tesla, 176–7 Theranos, 149 Thiel, Peter, 263 Third Avenue (investment company), 227–8 Thornton, Daniel, 192 Thornton, Henry, 41–2, 66*, 70, 75 Thornton, Henry Sykes, 66* Tiberius, Roman Emperor, 12 time, concept of, xviii; and act of saving, 188–90; canonical ‘hours’, 21; and Lewis Carroll, 309; in era of ultra-low interest rates, 59, 177; Franklin on, xviii, 22, 28; and Hayek, 32; interest as ‘time value of money’, xxiv, xxv–xxvi, 10, 14–15, 16, 20, 22, 26–7, 28–32; Lord King’s ‘paradox of policy’, 194, 230*; the Marshmallow Test, 29, 189; and medieval scholars, 19–20; Renaissance writings on, 21; secularization of, 21–2; speculators’ misunderstanding of, 59; and thought in ancient world, 20–21; time as individual’s possession, 20, 21, 25; ‘time in production’, xxiv, 14–15, 16, 22, 95, 95†, 141; ‘time preference’ theory, xxiv*, 28–32, 42, 95, 188–9; Thomas Wilson’s ideas, 26–7, 28, 30 Time-Warner, 167 Tooke, Thomas, 69 Toporowski, Jan, 167 Torrens, Robert, 66 Toys ‘R’ Us, 169 trade and commerce: in ancient world, 6, 7–8, 12, 14, 15; Atlantic trade, 59; business partnerships (commenda, societas), 26; commercial classes/interests, 35, 36–7, 38–40, 41, 43, 44, 66–7; commercial importance of time, xviii, 15–16, 21, 22; emergence of modern trade cycle, 62–4; expansion of in Middle Ages, 19, 21–3, 25–6; international trade, 6, 15, 23, 24, 59, 252–3, 261–2; and Italian Renaissance, 21; in medieval Italy, 21–3; mercantile/shipping loans, 6, 12, 14, 22–3, 26, 219 TransAmerica Life Insurance, 199* Trichet, Jean-Claude, 239 Trollope, Anthony, The Way We Live Now, 73 Truman, Harry, 84 The Truman Show (Peter Weir film, 1998), 185–7 Trump, Donald, 185, 261, 262, 291–2, 299, 304, 310 trusts/monopolies: in early twentieth century Europe, 159; Lenin on, 159–60; merger ‘tsunami’ after 2008 crisis, 160–63, 161*, 168–70, 182–3, 237, 298; ‘platform companies’, 161; Adam Smith on, 162, 298; in US robber baron era, 156, 157–9, 203 tulip mania (1630s), 68 Tunisia, 255 Turgot, Anne-Robert Jacques, 15, 28–9, 30, 218 Turkey, xxiii, 252, 258–60, 263 Turkmenistan, 262 Turner, Adair, 292 TXU (energy company), 162 Uber, 149, 150 ‘unicorn’ start-up companies, 148–50, 153, 155, 173, 176–7 Union Pacific Railroad, 157, 158 United States: as bubble economy, 184–7; credit expansion of 1920s, 87–91, 92–4, 96–8, 112, 203; Democrats’ Green New Deal policy, 302; economic expansion (1929–41), 143; economy in Bretton Woods era, 291, 302; financial crisis (1873), 157; foreign securities/loans in 1920s, 91; inflation in 1970s, 108–9; Knickerbocker Panic (1907), 83–4; large-scale immigration into, 78; loan of farm animals in, 4; long-term interest rates (1945–2021), 134; loss of manufacturing jobs to China, 261*, 261; low economic vitality in post-crisis decade, 124, 150–53, 191; monetary policy in 1900s, 83–4, 83*; post-Second World War recovery, 126; public debt today, 291–2, 291*; recessions of early 1980s, 109–10, 151; reversal of global capital flows (late-1920s), 93; robber baron era, 156–9, 203; shift from manufacturing towards services, 167–8, 182; and zombification, 146, 152–3, 155 see also Federal Reserve, US United States Steel Corporation, 157–8 Universities Superannuation Scheme, UK, 196 Useless Ethereum Token, 178 usury: attacked from left and right, 17; attitudes to in ancient world, 17–18, 19, 20–21, 219; in Britain, 24, 26–7, 34, 40, 42, 65‡, 65; Church law forbids, 18–19, 23–4; definitions in Elizabethan era, 26–7; etymology of word, 5; Galiani on, 218–19, 220, 221; and Jews, 18; Marx on, 16, 200–201; medieval Church acknowledges risk, 25–6; Old Testament restrictions on, 17; Proudhon-Bastiat debate on, xvii–xix, xxi, xxii, xxv, 9; in Renaissance world, 22–3; scholastic attack on, 18–20, 23–4, 25 Valeant Pharmaceuticals, 161, 168–9 Vancouver, 175 Veblen, Thorstein, Theory of Business Enterprise (1904), 158, 159, 166 Velde, François, 58*, 59 Venice, 22, 23 Vinci, Leonardo da, Salvator Mundi, 208–9 VIX index, 228–9, 254 La Voix du Peuple, xvii–xix volatility, 153, 228–30, 233, 234, 254, 304, 305 Volcker, Paul, 108–9, 121, 145, 184, 240 Voltaire, 57 Wainwright, Oliver, 209 Waldman, Steve, 206 Waldorf Astoria, New York, 285–6 Wall Street Crash (October 1929): Fed’s response to, 98, 100, 101, 108; Fisher and Keynes fail to foresee, 94–5; Hayek’s interpretation of, 101, 105; low real rates in 1920s USA, 87–91, 89, 92–4, 96–8, 203; low/stable inflation at time of, 134; monetarist view of, 98–9, 101, 105, 108; predictions/warnings of, 93–5, 96, 101, 105, 308; reversal of international capital flows (late-1920s), 93, 93*, 261 WallStreetBets, 307, 309 Walpole, Horace, 62–3 Warburg, Paul, 94 Warsh, Kevin, 228 wealth: ‘Buddenbrooks effect’, 216; conspicuous consumption by mega-rich, 54–5, 208–10, 212; definitions of, 179–82, 216; elite displays as signs of inequality, 209–10, 212; virtual wealth bubbles, 179, 180, 181–2, 185, 193–5, 206, 215, 216–17, 217†, 229–30, 237; wealth illusion, 193–5, 198 Welch, Jack, 170, 171 Wells, H.

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back
by Bruce Schneier
Published 7 Feb 2023

If others fall for the scam and purchase the stock, it inflates the price and the perpetrators sell. Traditionally, this scheme involved calling potential investors on the telephone. Today, it more often involves online trading message boards, social media groups, and spam emails. Whether it’s ringleaders on the Reddit finance forum r/WallStreetBets pushing retail investors to send GameStop’s price “to the moon” or Elon Musk tweeting about his bitcoin buys to millions of online followers, investors can use online communications to manipulate investor expectations and produce asset bubbles for their own profit (and others’ loss) with unprecedented speed and scale.

Nothing but Net: 10 Timeless Stock-Picking Lessons From One of Wall Street’s Top Tech Analysts
by Mark Mahaney
Published 9 Nov 2021

This was one of the biggest roller-coaster rides I have ever seen, and I have been to more than my share of amusement parks. The GME rally was a dramatic short squeeze featuring Bullish options bets that helped popularize the concept of meme stocks—stocks that are popular with millennial-aged retail traders and move more on hype than on underlying fundamentals. Comments on Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum suggested a lot of momentum day-trading activity with one popular goal being to go Long the most heavily shorted stocks in the market, of which GME was certainly one. Some of the comments also suggested thoughtful investment themes, with a focus on GME’s growing TAM, a potentially changing business model, new management, and the active involvement of Ryan Cohen, the highly successful founder of Chewy, the online pet supplies retailer.

Buy Now, Pay Later: The Extraordinary Story of Afterpay
by Jonathan Shapiro and James Eyers
Published 2 Aug 2021

The trade went to plan, until the unpredictable virality of the digital age made GameStop shares the currency of a social uprising. Melvin’s bet had become an obsession for Keith Gill, a 34-year-old out-of-work financial planner from Massachusetts. From his home, he wrote about GameStop on social-media platform Reddit’s sub-group Wallstreetbets, under the pseudonym ‘Deep Fucking Value’, a homage to stock pickers who searched for undervalued companies. On YouTube he used another alias, Roaring Kitty, to urge his followers to get behind his trade. The crux of his thesis was that short-selling hedge funds—and in particular Melvin—were destroying the company that had sold people like Gill video games in their youth.

Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis
by Jeanna Smialek
Published 27 Feb 2023

the committee argued that the episode was raising “important questions” about “whether technology and social media have outpaced regulation in a manner that leaves investors and the markets exposed to unnecessary risks.”[11] Meme stocks making national headlines in 2021 did, at some level, trace back to the Fed, as participants in the phenomenon would tell you. “Ty Jpow” (translated: Thank you, Jay Powell) posts were frequent on WallStreetBets, the Reddit discussion board at the center of the phenomenon. Memes abounded in which people took real CNBC footage of Fed press conferences and superimposed, in place of what Powell had said, the chyron “Powell: F*** Your Puts.” (Translated from Wall Street–ese: Powell’s policies were making it a bad idea to take out put options, which give investors protection if a stock they hold goes down.