The creator of the Reddit forum at the center of the continuing stock market frenzy called the recent coordinated strategy for pumping struggling stocks like GameStop and AMC a “train disaster”.
Jaime Rogozinski, 39, who established Reddit’s / WallStreetBets in 2012 as a platform for discussing unconventional investment strategies, expressed his concern about the astronomical increase in forum influence in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
“It’s a bit like watching one of those horror movies where you can watch the thug walking up the stairs slowly,” Rogozinski told the newspaper.
“You see this train crash happening in real time.”
WallStreetBets played a prominent role in driving GameStop and other similar companies in decline, hosting many of the amateur investors who drive stock prices.
The move resulted in billions of dollars in losses for hedge fund companies that were short selling those same businesses.
Rogozinski, a married father of 3-year-old twins who lives in Mexico City, started WallStreetBets while working as an information technology consultant in Washington, DC, the report said.
In the early stages, only a few thousand users subscribed to the channel. Now, after gaining prominence in the GameStop boom, the number of subscribers has skyrocketed to 2 million.
“A large group of people organized themselves where they collectively sit at the poker table, which was previously just for guests,” Rogozinski told the Journal.
“You can no longer ignore them.”
Despite being its founder, Rogozinski was expelled from the forum in April for trying to eliminate the hate speech that plagues the community.
“There were a handful of mods that were adept at white supremacy,” he said.
“I have very tough skin and people can say what they want to me, but at some point there is a moral point of view – like with my kids, I don’t want them to think, ‘Well, they can say what they want about you. , ‘”He told the newspaper.
To make matters worse, Rogozinski said he received a call last week from Andrew Left, the founder of Citron Research – one of the companies that lost a lot by selling GameStop – who said that users of WallStreetBets were threatening his family.
Rogozinski was disturbed and condemned the threats, but he was unable to do much about it.
“It’s not what it used to be,” he said of the forum.