Why I joined the online army taking on the hedge funds

I spent most of last week drenched in sweat, launching a vicious assault on Wall Street hedge funds which cost them $20 billion. Along with thousands of other ‘degenerates’, I bought shares in GameStop, a struggling videogame shop whose value has recently soared by 2,000 per cent. Behind the surge is an online community called WallStreetBets, where bored young men gamble on barely researched stock tips and crack tasteless jokes. The community, which lives on the social media website Reddit, has a history of hilariously aggressive stock-market bets. In 2019, for example, a 19-year-old member made $700,000 and then lost it all again within two weeks.

Last week WallStreetBets became global news. You’ve probably read about it by now: the forum’s members have driven GameStop’s price up by buying masses of shares, inflicting huge damage on the hedge funds who were betting against — or ‘shorting’ — the company’s prospects. The WallStreetBets board is now deluged with ‘gain porn’ —  screenshots of trading accounts showing enormous returns, though real WallStreetBets addicts seem just as happy posting ‘loss porn’ when things go wrong.

The most famous winner is a man named Keith Gill, who goes by an obscene moniker on WallStreetBets and is known as ‘Roaring Kitty’ on YouTube. At last count, his initial $50,000 investment had returned $36 million. He’s cashed out a third of it, but the rest is still in play. Gill is a 34-year-old father who works in insurance and dresses like a teenager: aviator sunglasses, sweat bands on his wrists and a bandana. As he passed the $10 million mark, he celebrated by dipping some fried chicken in a glass of prosecco.

Smaller wins have been life-changing, too. A member called llweasel told me he made $35,000 which he will spend on a custody battle for his daughter: ‘I started stock trading to be able to afford a lawyer as my ex has an expensive lawyer.’