Average Millennial Investors Are Rebelling Against Wall Street and Winning

Social media is being used to shake up old school finance (these examples provide proof)

Photo by David Veksler on Unsplash

There is a civil war happening in finance.

Normal people are sick of hedge funds and Wall Street taking money from them, as though they are stealing candy from a baby.

The rebellion started with Bitcoin in 2008. A few cryptographers were upset with the bailout of banks that led to the Occupy Wall Street Movement. In the first block of Bitcoin transactions was a hidden message, giving away the genius of his/her/their grand plan.

“The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” This message created a Bitcoin movement. That movement is now worth $580 billion. There are several other examples of the internet becoming a platform to peacefully protest against the conventional way investing works.

The rebellion against Wall Street has been ignited further by a group of Reddit investors known as “Wall Street Bets.”

One user bought a stock called GameStop. They’re an old fashion bricks and mortar shop that sells computer games. With digital downloads being the rage, their future prospects seemed grim. One Reddit user bought $50,000 worth.

Then other users followed along. Everything was fine until hedge funds decided to short the stock. Instead of betting the share price would go up like Reddit users had bet, they placed bets against them, betting the price would go down.

This upset the Reddit users, so they began buying more GameStop stocks. Without getting into the technical side — a short squeeze was created. This meant the hedge funds started losing money quickly. They were forced to buy the stock to escape losing lots of money, which made the price go even higher. Now GameStop is up more than 1700%.

Twitter lit up when Wall Street started to complain. Hashtags like #Stonks, #TheBigShort (classic investing movie), and #HedgeFund continue to trend.

It doesn’t end there, either.

Reddit users have started using social media to pump up unsexy stocks like Blackberry and Nokia. They are…