You’ve probably been hearing a lot about a place on the internet called WallStreetBets. Depending on who you ask it’s the epicenter of a revolution, the biggest threat to financial stability since COVID, or a fun place to post memes.
We were tired of baseless hot takes about this, so we decided to call my friend Liz Zhang for an insider view. She has been active on the forum for three years or so, and has been trading options for fun for about that long. She’s a software engineer by day and a part of my “bubble,” which means we were able to deliver something unprecedented on this episode of Free Money: an in-person interview.
Liz experienced the growth of interest in GameStop stock firsthand, and she tells the story of how one disciplined poster managed to gather unheard of interest in a stock that most investors had left for dead. And now, “his position is worth tens of millions, and he’s treated in some ways literally like a god.”
She also shared some of the biggest legends of WallStreetBets with us, like the time a user exploited a glitch in their Robinhood account to gain something close to unlimited leverage.
And of course, we talked about what comes next for this group of redditors. She shared that recently “they have become an almost socialist ‘let’s take down the hedge funds’ group. But that’s more recent and honestly I don’t see it lasting.”
This is one of the few opportunities to hear someone talk about the ongoing short squeeze from a place of experience. Don’t miss out.
The Wall Street Bets Episode