A lot of Redditors hate the Reddit IPO | Reddit warned us that its users were a risk factor, and boy do they sound excited about shorting its stock.::Reddit seems like a likely candidate for a meme stock. But the actual reaction suggests that r/WallStreetBets isn’t going to send the stock to the moon.
Reminder that shorting is a high risk play and you should never make investment decisions out of spite.
Instructions unclear, purchased Lemmy stock using Amazon gift cards
Kitboga, this you?
To quote XKCD’s “Engineer Syllogism”:
I am good with numbers and math.
The stock market is mostly numbers and math.
Therefore, I would be – wait, where did all my money go?
Second premise is false
No shit Sherlock
I think this company is deeply and uniquely incompetent and will never deliver on its objectives.
100%, this is a trap being set for retail investors… not touching this even if I had a 1000ft pole.
Playing the stock market at all is a form of gambling. You should never gamble money you aren’t completely willing to lose.
And with shorting there’s no upper limit to what you can lose.
Not true
It is true.
You buy a stock for $30. At worst it gets to $1 and you lose $29.
You short a stock for $30. There is no upper limit to how high it can go.
In theory that’s true but you’ll get liquidated at some point.
No. There are lots of ways to short a stock which just means betting that a stock will fall. If you buy Puts you go short, you can only lose the money you spent on the Puts. What you are talking about is unhedged short selling but that is far from the only method to short a stock.
Yeah, if there’s a “Superstonk” style event, the shares might jump to $1000 per share.
Say you shorted 100 shares. If you shorted it at $30, the absolute maximum you could make is just under $30 per share, or $3000. But, if it jumps to $1000 per share, you would lose $970 per share, and owe $97,000.
Maybe it’s not technically possible for there to be “no upper limit” to what you could lose, but you could easily lose many multiples of the maximum possible gain.
A reminder that the stock market and any kind of high level money market of any kind including digital money … is a rich man’s game where poor are by design destined to lose.
This is a gross over simplification. Yes, rich people can have higher risk tolerance, but that doesn’t mean people shouldn’t be going long on index funds and otherwise safe, low risk investments for retirement with what they can afford to.
It’s not just risk tolerance. The very rich can manipulate the market in ways that the poor can’t.
You don’t need to manipulate markets to dollar cost average the S&P500 for 40 years and retire. This is a get rich slow scheme that’s worked since the inception of index funds.
Yeah, and some rich people may do that. But, other rich people aren’t satisfied with the returns of an index fund, so they’ll manipulate the markets to get higher returns.
No you should make investment decisioms purely for the fun of it.
Also, WSB has been wanting to short reddit for literally years, so this is barely news.