I’ll be the first to admit that I am far from an expert when it comes to investing in the stock market. While I’ve invested on and off in the stock market for over two decades, domains have been my core focus when it comes to investing. On top of that, I’ve never studied the inner-workings of the stock market so I’ve stayed away from things like call options that seem to be all the rage these days.
All that being said, I do enjoy following the stock market and I did pretty darn well with Peloton last year, and like most people, the latest buzz around GameStop has been fascinating to follow.
When it comes to people who do actually know about how the stock market works I usually turn to some of my college buddies in NYC who work in finance or Shane who also used to work in finance and definitely knows his stuff.
While I do spend quite a bit of time on Reddit, I spend most of my time in /r/WildernessBackpacking and /r/hiking than anywhere else. For those who didn’t know, I love hiking and backpacking and can’t get enough of hearing about other people’s adventures.
Okay, back to the topic of this post – GameStop. Well as you might have guessed from what I wrote above, I have not been an avid reader of /r/wallstreetbets so I missed all the action leading up to last week. Now I’ve had the chance to read a bunch of articles about what went down as well as hop on /r/wallstreetbets to see what everyone is talking about. This article in Barrons was a really good read for anyone that wants to do a deeper dive into everything that happened and is happening right now.
All that being said, to me, it feels like what is happening now, or at least what will happen next week has a lot more to do with human psychology than it does investing. If people who have made a small fortune on paper can resist the urge to sell, and more people jump in to buy more GameStop stock (or options), then it sounds like the stock is going to have a pretty exciting week ahead.
IMHO, to understand what will happen next week you really need to do your best to guess how humans will behave in this rather unique situation more than anything else. Nobody is investing in GameStop because they think the company is poised for success, this is a a group of people that are making a stand against hedge funds and market makers that have been printing money for a long time.
I think I’m going to throw some money into GameStop next week, I want to support the movement and I’m interested to see what happens next and have a little skin in the game. That being said, I don’t consider this investing, this is gambling, plain and simple. By now I would have gone to Vegas two or three times and had some fun gambling while I was there so I guess this can make up for lost time.
Still, I do think this is the beginning of a new movement and a time where individual investors can change the rules of the game, and I think that’s pretty awesome. Mark Cuban has been pretty vocal about what’s been happening and I think he said it best in this tweet last week:
So now I’ll ask you – are you buying any GameStop stock next week?
