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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

Wait, people actually go to /r/wsb for investment advice? The entire time I thought it was a mix of posting wins/losses along with some memes/humor.

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While it's mostly for jokes, it's also hit r/all enough times and has enough subs that if the sub jumps on a particular meme stock, they are enough to actually make it move.

So, it's somewhat ironically become a way to coordinate purchase/selling of a stock by getting enough of the hivemind to go along with a particular stock.

It's still a terrible place for general advice though.

So...a pump and dump then.

Is a pump and dump illegal if everyone's in on the joke though?

I don't think the SEC would buy that excuse. Even on thinly traded stocks there's going to be volume from non /r/wsb participants.

Only way to find that out is through precedent.

I mean, there are definitely those who are trying to exploit r/WSB to do that I'm sure.

But at the same time, it's not like there's defacto leaders. It's more once the zeitgeist takes hold mobs of people will, for whatever reason, follow along.

I'm sure there are a lot of very smart people trying to figure out how to weaponize this and have their positions locked in before the mobs move the market and time their exits.

It's mostly what you said but as the sub got more popular, a lot of people started treating it as sage advice to get rich quickly without understanding what they were doing.

There were a few posts by people pumping their stocks and the like but I think the current market correcrion/recession bell tolling will scare most people off

It definitely is mostly memes, but if you're a momentum trader...it's probably not a bad sub to follow for ideas. It can also act as an inverse indicator when everyone starts showing massive gains. I wouldn't be surprised if some hedge funds or algos monitor the sub.

Even if they don't take it too seriously, I'm sure people pick up ideas there. If you see people talking about buying Tesla options every day, you'll probably consider it far more than you would otherwise.

You'd think that the screenshots of horrific losses on robinhood, interspersed throughout would have a moderating effect. That, along with the obviously sarcastic investment advice and general crude language makes anything coming out of there less trustworthy than something like Mad Money on CNBC.

Posting losses gets other people more comfortable with losing, keeping folks interacting with the market longer. If you're Robinhood, you'll benefit either way.

It is exactly that. Sometimes there's actual, solid, investment advice hidden in posts. Sometimes.

Wsb is in the honey moon stage of a subreddit where you find a ton of amazing humor and and an occasional deeply insightful comment.

unless you already know what you're doing (ie, not me), it's hard to tell the solid investment advice from intelligent-sounding bs. in general, it serves as a good example of what not to do.

I follow other subreddits like /r/investing /r/personalfinance /r/financialindependence that basically send people like this to /r/wsb.

Yes, that's why you can be sure that data is vacuumed up, and fed into a model which can exploit that behavior.

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