Hot Girls’ Guide to the Stock Market

Back in January, the world was watching as people came together to drive up the stock of GameStop (GME).

This is a complex situation. To begin, Reddit is a social media app where users can join and post in niche communities of users with a similar interest. If you were watching the Super Bowl, you may have noticed the ominous five second advertisement that Reddit took out. These communities, known as subreddits, always start with “r/” (i.e. r/RelationshipAdvice, r/MaleFashion, etc.) and users can upvote or downvote posts and start comment threads.

There is a subreddit called r/WallStreetBets that describes itself as “a community for making money and being amused while doing it. Or, realistically, a place to come and upvote memes when your portfolio is down.” To sum it up, a group of Wall Street hedge fund investors had put a lot of money on GameStop losing money. In retaliation, a community of day traders on r/WallStreetBets planned to drive up the stock so that the hedge fund investors would lose money.

So why make these investors lose money? Well, the answer is complicated. The subreddit has people from all walks of life looking for the same thing—money. Some people enjoy taking from the Wall Street elites, and some just enjoy the trolling aspect of it all. The movement may have began on Reddit, but it soon spread to the mainstream. Suddenly, everyone was talking about not only buying up GME, but AMC (the theater company heavily affected by COVID), and holding it.

People were urging everyone not to sell and anyone who sold would be “crossing the picket line.” #AMCToTheMoon was trending on Twitter and someone on Reddit even posted that they were able to pay off their student loans thanks to the increase. GME ended up peaking at a whopping $347.51 a share on January 27th.

This whole situation opened up a can of worms about investing. When GME and AMC started booming, trading platforms such as TD Ameritrade and Robinhood restricted trading for these companies. Twitter users began to question the ethicality of this. How is it okay for them to restrict trading these companies? People were speculating that manipulating stocks is only okay when rich people do it.

Nonetheless, this has opened up a door for investing. Plenty of young people who have never invested much before are now involved, or at the very least, curious. Myself included. I had a Robinhood account for a little over a year, but only because my friend told me that if I downloaded the app with his link, we would both get a free share of a random company. When I got my free share of PLUG, it was worth roughly $6. Shortly after the GameStop situation, I had noticed it shot up and I ended up selling at a little over $70. I have now opened a TD Ameritrade account and used Reddit to figure out which penny stocks I should invest in.

We are currently living through the sharing economy. Apps like Uber and AirBnB are thriving, and people are constantly thinking of new ways to “share.” So why not share information? Why would anyone pay a financial analyst when the information is at our fingertips? People are finding out just how much money they can make and how easy it can be. Our generation is making investing accessible.