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Comment by throwaway9980 | Hacker News Reader

It’s not all Gen Z. I have heard from several friends who are older Gen X guys that they’ve done cash out refinancing to dump money into the stock market. The reasoning is that they’d be idiots not to borrow at 2.5% and put it into stocks. Hard to argue with when the US stock market has a 100 year track record of producing 7% on average.

A couple weeks after hearing about this from one guy, his wife tells me that he made $80k on AMC today. It’s gone up another 3-4x from that day. No idea if he’s still in or not, but this kind of thing feels like the end of days of bubbles. It won’t end well.

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> A couple weeks after hearing about this from one guy, his wife tells me that he made $80k on AMC today.

Speculative traders like to talk about their biggest wins, but they're generally quiet about losses.

Sure, it's possible that one guy YOLOed everything into a single stock at just the right time, cashed out, and walked away. It's more common for these traders to make a lot of bad bets, then get excited when one of them pays off. The problem gets worse when these payoffs come in the form of black swan market events that the trader just happened to be on the right side of.

Or maybe I'm wrong and the meme stonk trend will continue forever, making the gamblers wealthy while the rest of us lose out.

Speculative traders like to talk about their biggest wins, but they're generally quiet about losses.

Um, yes. This is zero-sum. There have to be a lot of losers out there.

Stock markets are not zero-sum. Derivatives markets would be, though

Derivatives markets are zero-sum measured in currency, but few people/organizations have perfectly linear utility functions. Transferring risk from more risk averse people to less risk averse people is not necessarily zero-sum if the accounting is done in utility instead of currency.

I buy Microsoft at 10 and sell to you at 20. You then sell at 30.

We have both won and clearly no one has lost. Cash equity Markets are not zero sum.

Who did j sell to and who did You buy from?

Follow the trail all the way down to QE by the federal reserve. Everyone wins! There are no losers!

Follow this chain and ultimately you'll discover the concept of credit creation, where banks lend the same money to multiple people.

It really is not a zero-sum game.

You have not factored in the person that I sold it to for 30.

It depends on your perspective. The act of speculation is zero sum, but holding onto the stock and letting it appreciate isn't zero sum. Seeing how "speculative traders" are in it to make more than the 8% average (or whatever), we're probably talking about the former and not the latter.

I’ve been on wsb for years and Ive seen more loss porn than gains up until relatively recently.

I think the current stonks situation and folks involved are a bit more nuanced than you’re implying here, but I can certainly see how you might come to such a conclusion from the outside looking in.

The cultural shift of not posting “loss porn” on WSB is going to be the undoing. Well, the eternal September it’s been going through since this time last year has been a big contributor too.

I'd guess that a lot of the WSB crowd has some exposure to crypto, which isn't doing so hot recently.

I don't see how gamblers make you lose out.

There's no way to tell if stocks going up is a bubble or not. But if you never invest when stocks are going up, you'll never make money.

Most of the money a retail trader is making comes from another retail trader.

Is a poker table a bubble? Another way to interpret the price is, “the most recent payout at the poker table.”

The meme stock thing is very different than the S&P in terms of state of the market.

When denominator is M2 money supply, the stock market doesn't look bubbly at all..

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