The term was coined in the dystopian novel Snow Crash three decades ago. Write to Jack Hough at Follow him on Twitter and subscribe to his Barron’s Streetwise podcast.Some tech CEOs are betting it will be the successor to the mobile Internet. If you need me, I’ll be scanning the internet for insights in feline sarcasm. I’ve been thinking of investments like Bitcoin and Tesla stock as having risen in price to baffling levels, but I haven’t yet calculated the present value of their future memes. For now, I need to adjust my valuation framework for sizing up stocks-sorry, stonks. That’s a tricky argument, because price discovery depends on trading, and trading affects prices, which makes all buying and selling a form of manipulation-a meme-trading conundrum I’ll call Schrödinger’s Grumpy Cat. Meme trading amounts to price manipulation, critics say. That used the meme of ironically misstating “stock” as “stonk,” while cheering a meme trade-a meme within a meme as impressive as a two-stage Space-X rocket. ![]() (TSLA) founder Elon Musk late on Tuesday tweeting “Gamestonk!!” with a link to WallStreetBets. Bigger picture, some blame zero-commission trading for a rise in speculation, the pandemic for leaving the young and homebound looking for online adventure, and years of near-zero interest rates for creating buoyant conditions for risky assets. The rest of GameStop’s rise has been attributed to a short squeeze, and to the tendency of heavy call-option buying to push share prices higher, as options market makers hedge their exposure with stock purchases. (CHWY), who had taken a big stake in GameStop and agitated to shift the business online-never mind that in-store trade-ins and resales of used games are the most lucrative part-won board seats for himself and associates. Earlier this month, Ryan Cohen, co-founder of online pet shop Most of GameStop’s shares, he pointed out, had been sold short, a precondition for panic buying if the stock price jumps. Last year, Senior_Hedgehog laid out the case for “THE BIGGEST SHORT SQUEEZE OF YOUR ENTIRE LIFE.” What he lacked in dirty user-name action words he made up for in specifics. In 2019, one post showed just over $50,000 worth of GameStop call purchases by a member with a three-word username that starts with “Deep,” ends in “Value,” and in the middle employs a profane gerund that, best-case scenario, modifies “Value.” At one point this week, he was reportedly up $22 million. Members post trade rationales, promissory tendies language, and account snapshots verifying personal buying. Before a trade can achieve meme status, it seems, it starts quietly on WallStreetBets as DD, short for due diligence, but more closely resembling dude belligerence. (HTZGQ), whose shares spiked this past summer even though the car-rental chain had filed for bankruptcy.ĭo you see what I’m getting at? If so, can you give me a hint? Oh, right: I’m pretty sure the young, capital-light, and risk-hungry have figured out how to monetize a hidden asset-their ability to recognize memes faster than the rest of us. The others are variations on the theme of written-off and shorted companies soaring-another meme. The AMC name mix-up looks a lot like an iteration of the Zoom trade-a meme, in other words. ![]() (AMC) exploded higher this week before reversing, and so did those of a separate television company with a similar name, “My response to that is, who’s the fool? They made more money than had they invested in the actual Zoom company.” He was referring to multiple episodes where shares of a tiny Chinese phone-parts maker with the ticker ZOOM soared, seemingly because ill-informed traders mistook it for ![]() “People say, ‘These fools don’t know what they’re doing-they’ve invested in the wrong company,’” he says. ![]() Rogozinski says he started WallStreetBets in 2012 because he wanted to learn about “high-risk, high-return-type trades,” but online communities were then focused on “diversifying and controlling your risk.” He says investors who mock the Robinhood set for not making sense miss the point. “The boomer says to the millennial, ‘What are you, growth or value?’ And he goes, ‘I’m a meme investor, and I’m kicking your ass.’ ” “Nowadays you have value and growth on one side and you have memes on the other side,” Jaime Rogozinski, creator of the WallStreetBets forum, told me this week. I need to learn more about meme-based investing, pronto. They’d downvote my post and call me a boomer, which is technically wrong but meme-logically on point, and would hurt like a spiritual kick in the tendies (am I using that right)? I’d probably add the wrong number of rocket-ship emojis, or misuse “tendies,” which we all learned this week is short for chicken tenders-WallStreetBets slang for money. On second thought, if I post my Wonka on WallStreetBets, those Robinhood young guns will sense right away that I’m barely meme-literate and nearly as old as the film.
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