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AMC Empire 25 off Times Square in New York Angela Weiss / AFP via Getty Images
Karl Marx would have loved Reddit. If the German philosopher was alive today, he would post that everyone should get into meme stock and cryptocurrency trading. Not to get rich although that is an interesting side benefit, but to strike back against the investor class. It is worth taking a certain risk to relieve the enemy of his money, writes Marx. I’m here with you, Karl.
Working class millennials have been denied the opportunity to build generational wealth during our professional careers. Many of us risk what little we have left to rage against a machine we believe is rigged against us. And followed in Marx’s footsteps.
After the death of a friend in 1864, Marx received 820 as a bequest, says his biographer. This comes down to around $ 151,500 today after adjusting for inflation and applying current conversion rates. Marx used part of his legacy to become a financial speculator, often engaging in the same sort of penny-stock bubble schemes that the notorious WallStreetBets sub-Reddit has been accused of engaging in this year. [Stocks] are springing up like mushrooms this year, Marx wrote in a letter to his uncle, bragging about having already made 400 thanks to speculation. He added that many of his investments were usually pushed to a completely unreasonable level and then, for the most part, collapsed.
Marx’s trading stories are hard to substantiate, but Millennials’ love of memes stocks is very real. I’ve already earned more this year trading memes stocks and cryptocurrencies than I have as a professional writer. I’ve come to see the stock boom itself as a chance for millennials to finally build wealth. But otherwise, we have been content to make the investors who are largely responsible for our financial woes feel the pain they have inflicted on us. So far, short sellers are losing their shirts to the tune of $ 4.5 billion on memes stocks.
As a 34 year old American, almost all generational stereotypes apply to me. HuffPosts Michael Hobbes best summed up Millennials’ financial situation in 2017: My rent consumes almost half of my income, I haven’t had a stable job since Pluto was a planet, and my savings are dwindling faster. that the baby boomer ice caps have melted.
Perhaps because we were the only American generation to have gone through two major recessions and two wars in our coming years, was the first generation to be financially worse off than our parents, despite a better level of education in average. We paid for it too. According to Bloomberg, a year of college that cost baby boomers $ 10,000 cost millennials more than $ 15,000 on average in inflation-adjusted dollars. Millennials of color, especially black millennials, have the worst situation. They graduated with even more student debt than their white classmates, are much less likely to be hired into white-collar occupations, and their households earn only 60% of what their white colleagues earn.
The expensive education of millennials has not given us much job security. A 2018 Gallup study called millennials a generation looking for work. Maybe, but not by choice. A 2019 University of Chicago study found that millennials actually aspire to a stable career. It should therefore come as no surprise that a generation plagued by job insecurity and growing debt is at the head of the baby-bust. The birth rate is at its lowest for three decades. There may not be enough working-age Americans to care for the country’s growing senior population. Baby Boomers did move up the ranks of the class, then took a saw and cut the ranks below them. (And they still ask us when to give them grandchildren!)
If all of this doesn’t make memes stocks and cryptocurrency more appealing, it could at least help explain why some of us don’t care about playing it safe anymore. I’ll be the first to admit that investing in memes stocks isn’t a sustainable way to build wealth. Many of us will be hurt rather than rich. But I don’t invest primarily to make money: I want investors who collapsed the economy and got bailed out in my last year of college, thus torpedoing my career earning potential, to feel at least some of the hardships they endured my generation. And given the mostly millennial makeup of / r / WallStreetBets, I know I’m not the only rage-driven investor.
There is something to be crazy about. As we’ve seen with GameStop, the workers who organize to make the stock market pay in our favor are causing a strict backlash. After Redditors speculated on GameStop shares through the roof in late January, the Robinhood mobile trading app not only restricted trading, but reportedly even sold GameStop shares to investors without their consent. (Robinhood denies there was a hard sell.) When it turned out that Robinhood had a financial relationship with a subsidiary of Citadel Securities, which had a huge short position on GameStop, it made a lot of newbie investors like me even more jaded by the markets.
In March, when New York City opened theaters, I decided to buy AMC stock on a lark for $ 7 apiece. At the beginning of June, my investment appreciated by more than 550%. It might evaporate, but I’m taking a lesson from GameStop. Its stock is still trading at over $ 250 per share despite starting the year at less than $ 20. I plan to continue to hold my AMC shares in the hope that the value will increase even more. When it’s finally time, I’ll sell half and reinvest my profits in cryptocurrency.
When that happens, I will be far from the only Millennial to bet big on crypto. My generation is primarily responsible for the sudden rise in cryptocurrency in 2021, in which both blue chip digital currencies like Ethereum, as well as fun cryptocurrencies like Dogecoin, thrive, according to Business Insider. Ethereum’s price rose from $ 730.97 per coin on January 1 to a high of over $ 4,000 in May. Dogecoin has appreciated over 21,000% since its inception as a meme in 2013. (I still blame myself for selling my Dogecoin when it was trading below 10 cents, although I still have made thousands of profits). Millennials’ commitment to crypto is now forcing the giants to play the game: In March, Morgan Stanley became the first bank to offer Bitcoin funds to its high net worth clients. And just like at the right time, now that the workers have made some money in the rigged casino, US regulators are reportedly planning a crackdown on the cryptocurrency.
Millennials went through their childhood being told that we had to work hard to be financially secure. Then we were told we had to go into debt to get a college degree that would give us a good job. Then we were told that only the lucky few create wealth from their work and that in order to be truly financially successful we need to invest. And then when we invested, we were told we were doing it wrong. I get the message. Millennials are not meant to win. Financial security is not for us. So, if we can make a few thousand dollars speculating in moon penny stocks and hurt a few enough hedge fund vultures in the process, then just settle for that.
Carl Gibson is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in CNN, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Business Insider, The Independent, and NPR, among others. Follow him on Twitter @crgibs.
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