He should have been concentrating on the student he was tutoring in physics — a job he did during his free time while enrolled in a post-baccalaureate pre-med program — but Omar’s eyes kept darting back to the Robinhood app open on his phone.
 Omar had invested $6,000 in Beyond Meat options; in the days before that tutoring session he’d seen the value of that investment rocket up to almost $15,000. What he was witnessing now, though, felt like torture.

By lunchtime, the stock options Omar had bought were down around $7,000 from their peak.

Omar knew he should probably sell the options before they became worthless. But he followed the mantra of the place where he’d first learned about options trading, the subreddit r/wallstreetbets, and held on.
“It was diamond hands,” said Omar, using the site’s term for holding an option even after incurring extreme losses or gains. “It was like, all or nothing.”
 Within two days Omar had lost not only his gains but his entire initial investment. 
 Desperate to earn it back, Omar, 23 years old and the child of working-class immigrant parents, took the rest of the money he could scrounge up — cash from his tutoring gig, his stimulus check, a chunk of his freshly-deposited student loans that was supposed to pay for his living expenses (which were basically non-existent after he had moved home during the Covid-19 outbreak) — and poured all of it, $22,000, into his Robinhood account. Then he opened up WallStreetBets.
 I would not have traded options if I had not found WallStreetBets.”

“OMAR,” WALLSTREETBETS USER

”I was really scared,” Omar told CNN Business in an interview in August. “All I wanted to do was just make my initial money back and pay it off.”
 By the end of the week, he had lost it all again.
 Omar, who spoke on the condition that he be referred to using a pseudonym out of concern over the legality of trading with money from his student loans, said that he blames himself for his losses but regrets ever stumbling upon one of Reddit’s most active communities.
 ”I would not have traded options,” Omar admitted, “if I had not found WallStreetBets.”
This January, with WallStreetBets now an inescapable presence, Omar was back on the board. Back to trading.

Stock market meets internet fringe culture
This past week has been a banner one for Reddit’s island of misfit investors.
WallStreetBets exploded into the mainstream, moving from the front page of Reddit to the front page of the New York Times and nearly every other major news site. The subreddit’s short-squeeze of GameStop helped shoot up the price of the video game retailer’s stock a mind-boggling 1,700% from the beginning of January to Wednesday (before it fell again Thursday), captivating the minds and wallets of investors — both casual and institutional — and financial regulators.

But while millions are now discovering WallStreetBets for the first time, it has been building momentum throughout the pandemic. One can trace its epic rise to a perfect storm of favorable conditions: the exponential growth of the app Robinhood and its no-fee options trading, the extreme volatility Covid-19 brought to the markets, the stimulus checks mailed to millions of Americans, the lack of televised sports for much of the year, and the unwanted free time stuck at home the pandemic has forced on many people.

Describing itself as if “4chan found a Bloomberg terminal,” the forum’s giddy nihilism, inscrutable language and memes fueled a war on a perceived corrupted mainstream.

And it’s led WallStreetBets’ evolution into an unprecedented force of retail-investing financial radicalism, offering the allure of get-rich-quick gains to a rapidly expanding audience of millions. (5, at last count).

Many celebrated WallStreetBets’ war on GameStop short-sellers as a populist campaign against hedge-fund raiders looking to profit off the destruction of a well-known retail brand like GameStop. But unlike many other similar online communities, there is also a clear financial goal for the people in it.

“It’s a means to an end,” explained one of them, AJ Vanover.

At his retail job in an auto-parts store in Missouri, Vanover makes around $35,000 a year. But on Wednesday, he found himself a paper millionaire. (His Robinhood account exceeded $1 million, according to screenshots he provided, but he hadn’t cashed out yet). For months, Vanover had been following GameStop as a “value play,” posting his thoughts on WallStreetBets along the way. This week, Vanover was off from work, quarantining after a coworker contracted Covid-19, but now thinks he won’t return to his old job. “I know I’m going to do two-weeks’ notice,” he said with a nervous laugh. “So, I’ll be nice about it.’ Vanover said he plans help his parents with their mortgage, and he intends to keep investing in options.

’These guys can move markets’
Enter WallStreetBets for the first time and you’ll almost certainly be a bit lost.
The forum’s language can be difficult to understand, even for someone who knows typical Wall Street jargon. The vocabulary specific to the subreddit is extensive, and it will almost never be explained to a newbie earnestly asking for a term’s definition. Posters revel in their crudeness; homophobic epithets are tossed around as terms of affection.

The site is a chaotic mix of memes, screengrabs of wild losses and gains, the occasional “deep dive” into a stock, all unified under the guiding principle of betting as much money as you possibly can on the highest possible risks, generally short-term options trading. Trading individual stocks, as opposed to options, is generally taboo. There’s r/investing for you right down the corner, thank you very much.
But fringe online movements have shown that internet culture can lead to extreme behaviors, making radical ideas palatable for people raised on memes and 4chan in a way that they likely wouldn’t be, at least at first, if presented in a straightforward manner. In the case of WallStreetBets that extremism has a real financial impact.
“These guys can move markets,” said Jeremy Blackburn, an assistant professor of computer science at Binghamton University who studies extremist communities on the web.
“That’s a huge deal.”
Lana Swartz, assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, describes the subreddit’s financial spin on the kind of nihilism seen on 4chan as the idea that its users should have a “relaxed” relationship with their money. She characterized the spirit this way: “Let it come. Let it go. Because the kind of secret that the elites know is that money is. B.S., and only by knowing that money is B.S. can you accumulate a lot of it, which should be your goal.”
It’s not even the ends that matter. It’s the means. It’s the fact that you’re placing this bet, that’s where the value in all this is. Sure, you may get money, or you may end up broke, but you played the game, and you did it in some crazy way.”

JEREMY BLACKBURN, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF COMPUTER SCIENCE, BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY

That ethos on WallStreetBets not only encourages risky trades, but also trading the entirety of your net worth or portfolio in a single risky trade — a financial move that would be sure to make any certified financial advisor bleed from their ears.  
“It’s not even the ends that matter. It’s the means. It’s the fact that you’re placing this bet, that’s where the value in all this is. Sure, you may get money, or you may end up broke, but you played the game, and you did it in some crazy way,” Blackburn said.
“It is a little bit scary, though, right? Because this is real money. And any time you are more interested in the game than the outcome, that can be incredibly dangerous.”

4Chan meets a Bloomberg terminal
WallStreetBets has long described itself as “4chan with a Bloomberg terminal.”
Look closer at communities like 4chan or 8kun, and WallStreetBets, and it’s not just a shared use of memes that link them.
One key element to 4chan is its opposition to mainstream “normie” culture, an idea that has broad applicability. For many on 4chan, normie culture is the popular kids in your high school. For WallStreetBets, the normie culture it stands in opposition to is one of “safe” mainstream investing: focusing on long-term gains, maxing out your 401(k)s, buying index funds; Suze Orman 101. “Boomer” advice, as users say.

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