Dread, Despair, and Market Mania
What the current stock and crypto investment frenzies tell us about our societies and their inequalities.
Gamestop, weed stocks, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies: a trading frenzy driven by small retail investors has taken hold of the world in early 2021. People who had never bought stock see their friends and acquaintances become overnight millionaires and want to join in on the action. Some will become rich; many will make a decent profit; more will lose all their savings.
Reading the discussions on online forums like r/WallStreetBets or r/Cryptocurrency paints a frightening picture. People are flocking to highly volatile assets in the hopes that it will make them rich fast and easy. Some complain that their investments don’t grow fast enough when they’ve done 5x in the past month alone. Others look at meme coins like Doge, an obscure humoristic cryptocurrency that Elon Musk gleefully pumped and dumped, and predict it will be worth as much as Bitcoin someday.
These people have no idea what they are talking about. Fundamentally, there isn’t that much to talk about at all. One should trade cryptocurrencies and stocks like Gamestop as momentum assets: you buy in the hype, sell the fear, rinse and repeat. If you’re catching the train early, you can make extraordinary…
