What Is WSB? Understanding WallStreetBets

I’m not here to tell you why the stock price of GameStop has skyrocketed. You can get that information in literally any media publication, all of which have been in a frenzy over the last 48 hours as why certain parts of the financial markets are seemingly divorced from reality.

But I do want to take a step back and look at WallStreetBets, the Reddit forum that has propelled young retail investors to new heights. Luckily, the founder of WallStreetBets, Jaime Rogozinski, came out with a book on the topic just last year:

WallStreetBets: How Boomers Made the World’s Biggest Casino for Millennials — $13.99

If the Amazon reviews of Rogozinski’s book aren’t particularly good, it is mostly because what he was saying was not all that interesting in January 2020. The idea of day trading is hardly novel, and anyone who knew enough about WallStreetBets to consider reading the book did not need a primer on Robinhood.

Now, things are different. Government-mandated lockdowns have severely limited the number of things young people can do for fun, and that same U.S. government is handing out hundreds of dollars in relief money to people who, with nowhere to go, suddenly have very few expenses. What is the natural thing to do with surplus money? Gamble, of course. Since there are no casinos to go to right now, online trading has become the surest way to take a risk with whatever cash is burning a hole in your pocket.

Enter WSB. This subreddit provides a community for those to discuss stock picks. If the 2008 financial crisis taught us anything, it is that the market is already set up to bear little relationship to reality. Win or lose, the people controlling the portfolios always win. If this can be true for money managers, what was preventing millennials from getting in on the action? As it turned out, nothing.

For people in their 20s, this is obvious. For others, who adamantly believe whatever the talking heads are selling them on CNBC, the desire to throw money at the stock market seemingly at random may still not sit right. Those are the people who should read Jaime Rogozinski’s “WallStreetBets: How Boomers Made the World’s Biggest Casino for Millennials.” Everyone else should just go out and live it.