I kept the news in all the way out of the terminal until halfway through the airport parking garage, which was as far as I could hold it. It was the kind of announcement that was too voluminous for the inside of a car, so I blurted it out to my parents in the open air in a half-mumble, half-laugh.
“So, umm, I turned $15,000 into $1.2m in the past year.”
They both stopped and looked at me, silent.
“Are you on drugs?” my mom finally asked, anxiety flashing across her face. My dad said nothing. I dispelled her accusation by opening up my investment account on my iPhone and turning the screen towards her to show her the balance.
“Oh my God, are you one of those … GameStop people?” she said, referring to the brief and spectacular rise in stock price of the video game retailer after amateur investors rallied around it in early 2021.
My dad remained silent, in a way that felt more accusing and harder to confront – as if I had suddenly upended his conception of the world. Both of my parents had taken vows of poverty to each other as part of their wedding vows; their guiding philosophy was to “live simply so that others may simply live”. They owned no property because of their choice to be “war tax resisters”, and both had consciously dedicated their careers as a legal aid attorney and a Presbyterian minister to low-paying social justice work at the detriment of material possessions and substantial retirement accounts.
But if his worry was that he didn’t know how to relate to a son who was now rich, then he needn’t have. Not about the money anyway, because within four weeks, the bulk of it was gone. In the span of a year, the numbers came, danced, disappeared.
What took longer was un-becoming the asshole they almost made me.
Millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, have spent their entire adult lives in a financial paradox. Despite cascading crises, right now is the most materially comfortable moment in human history. Climate change threatens to render all of this moot, but on a pure quality of life measure, we collectively enjoy better health outcomes, longer lives, more education, more individual freedoms and more geographic mobility than anyone before us.
Though there is inequality shot through this, it does not merely describe the rich world experience: the percentage of people living in extreme poverty has plummeted as developing countries have converged on their wealthy neighbors. For the average person in the world, there has never been a preceding era when it has been better to be alive.
And yet, relative to our boomer parents, the millennial financial reality and future is objectively more precarious and less optimistic. The most educated and diverse generation in the US also has the highest debt-to-income ratio and has earned on average 20% less than boomers had at the same age. At the same time, the cost of housing has far outpaced both inflation and incomes. Nearly half of millennials and Gen Z report that they live paycheck to paycheck and worry about covering their expenses, and 30% of millennials are worried they won’t ever be able to retire.
When Robinhood launched its gamified stock and options trading app in 2015, and rose to popular prominence over the next few years, this is who it targeted: a generation financially on the fritz, with enough disposable cash for avocado toast but not enough for mortgages. Of its 21 million users, the average age is 31, and half are first-time investors. And by March 2020, the financial world was threatening to collapse on them for the second time in a decade. If there was ever a time to yolo, wouldn’t this be it?
In the stock market, it takes money to make money. So what do you do when you don’t have very much to begin with? You pour what little you have into overly leveraged, rarely brilliant, sometimes inane trades that lie somewhere in between gambling and investing.
Call it the millennial desperation capitalism of r/wallstreetbets, where I ended in February 2020, just before Covid crashed the world.
As country after country naively clung to the idea that borders meant something to a virus, my first move was to take out a loan. My social justice oriented, middle-class parents may have eschewed material wealth, but they gave me one significant privilege: dedicated contributions to a college savings plan throughout my entire childhood, which meant that I finished both undergrad in the US and graduate school in London and Paris, where I still live, completely debt-free.
This meant my pandemic loan – for €12,500, or roughly $15,000 at the time – was my first experience with debt.
I remembered the 2008-09 financial crisis, and thought about the surging wave of sheer unknown that was about to crest and pull us all into its swell. Money could only be a buoy in the ocean, an inflatable vest, soft sand to stumble on to.
I decided to bet on cruise ships – after all, what could be more exposed to travel shutdowns and fears about a global virus? Making money on the way down seemed morally dubious, but on the other hand, making money on the sinking of the cruise industry – environmentally noxious, labor exploitative, tax evading and generally tacky – seemed to reset the moral balance to neutral. So I took the newly acquired loan, which roughly doubled the size of my meager life savings, and started buying “puts” – that is, purchasing the option to buy or sell shares of a stock at a predetermined price – on cruise lines.
During lockdown, the Reddit forum WallStreetBets became my personal finance journal, catharsis and source of entertainment. It was a digital hootenanny of memes, jokes, outrageous “all in” moves, stunning “gains porn”, scary “loss porn”, promises to quit jobs and stick it to the boss if things went well, and yes, even a re-worded sea shanty, fine-tuned to the forum’s specific lingo. Like any subculture, it came with its own linguistics (some of it, yes, sexist and homophobic, even if it claimed the cover of irony), mythology and reference points. “This is the way,” someone would post in approval of an obviously good, or outrageously irresponsible idea, prompting a nested series of
This is the way
This is the way
This is the way
This is the way
This is the way
from other posters.
Sir, this is a Wendy’s, someone else might write when an idea for a trade was too mundane or too mainstream. Fuck it, I’m in, exuded the desperation capitalism sentiment that ruled over the board; “tendies” were gains (referencing both chicken tenders and $10 bills – testament to the fact that so many on the board were playing with such small pots of money); literally can’t go tits up was the sarcasm-infused reply to ideas that were a priori quite stupid, but contained big potential.
Among the now millions of members – mostly male, educated and between 18 and 35 according to Jaime Rogozinski, who founded WallStreetBets in 2012 – some have become legend and lore in their own right: in 2019 the user u/ControlTheNarrative discovered a glitch in Robinhood’s margin loan functionality dubbed the “infinite money cheat code” that u/MoonYachts later says they used to leverage $4,000 into $1m worth of stock and options positions; u/TheEmperorOfJenks confused everyone about whether he was serious, or simply gaslighting, when he detailed his intention to buy “ornamental gourd futures” (tl;dr he allegedly lost everything and then some); and of course the most infamous of all, u/DeepFuckingValue, who set the market aflame when he pointed out that GameStop stock was so over-shorted that it would result in the mother of all short squeezes.
In between the memes and nodes of internet culture, there was an illusion of control. The global situation was overwhelming, and the market might have been full of day-to-day movements that I could not influence, but I had grabbed my money with both hands and was making choices with it. Choices that had clear and immediate results – just like the impact of Covid on Paris.
In the spring, the city opened up in stages. The sometimes seductive, sometimes awkward bise had disappeared, along with the tourists. Paris had lost one intimacy, but gained another: in the sudden emptiness of one of the world’s most visited cities, people seemed to smile more, chat more and American-accented French mattered less. You were there, you had been locked down too, there was no need to prove that you were no visitor in the churn of millions, you simply belonged.
The cruise industry was devastated; my portfolio was rejoicing.
The balance at the end of May 2020: $101,075.61
During the summer, my portfolio plateaued. I had missed the rebound, and was filled with uncertainty about whether it would continue, or reverse. Uncertainty meant fear, and fear meant that I froze.
What brought me back to trading was a large dose of jealousy. A good friend’s ex had stock options from his former startup and an atypical Parisian apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows and a rooftop terrace. He threw giant, wacky parties to which he would continue to extend invitations to all my friend’s closest friends after their breakup – even though she was clearly unwelcome.
On the Fourth of July, I stood on his terrace, where a pig was roasting on a spit, and had the most American reaction to the jealousy I was experiencing. Why shouldn’t I have the same things he does? And the way there seemed clear: back to options trading, only calls this time around. Bigger, better and bolder even than the cruise puts. A few weeks later, I channeled the inner voice of the millions of “degenerates” on Reddit. This literally can’t go tits up. I grabbed my phone, opened my brokerage account and spread a third of my net worth into something I could feel intensely good about rooting for – calls on alternative energy stocks.
At a certain income level, there are diminishing returns to happiness for each extra dollar (it’s estimated the change point…
Read More: How I turned $15,000 into $1.2m during the pandemic – then lost it all