Not everyone sees it that way.
“I had at least three, four guys who told me they lost money and will never invest again,” said Tobi Alli, an amateur broker from Bowie, Maryland, who last week bought 80 AMC shares and 50 Nokia shares, two others previously unremarkable stocks that recovered as part of a rebellion against hedge funds.
Alli said he would have come out with a considerable gain if he had sold before, and now he has lost $ 800 in his initial investment. But he said he didn’t even think about earnings anymore. Instead, holding your shares is a protest against the brokers who have instituted certain limits or restrictions on volatile stock trading.
Alli, who owns a small multimedia company, is among those who believe that brokers – like the one he uses, TD Ameritrade – have imposed certain limits under pressure from hedge funds that he and his fellow retailers have been trying to squeeze out.
“You know you can get in there and lose, and I was ready for it,” said Alli, who follows Twitter accounts that post content from WallStreetBets. “But what I wasn’t ready to do was lose based on the manipulation of billionaire guys who are preventing people from doing what is their legal right.”
For investors who are not interested in a crusade, the big swings and high stakes are desperate.
Ian Poppel, 23, a wild firefighter in Winnipeg, Manitoba, invested $ 18,000 – equivalent to the salary of an entire fire season – in GameStop in three days, just before the actions took off. He cashed out last Wednesday, the day before the peak of the rally.
“I didn’t sleep,” said Poppel, who started trading stocks as a hobby during the off-season. “I really haven’t eaten these days. I was so stressed out about how this trade would go. “
He raised about $ 40,000, an amount he called “money to change lives”. But he knows that it has nothing to do with investment skill.
“I was lucky,” he said, “and I see people online who say they have lost their life savings.”
Tara Siegel Bernard contributed reports.