Wall Street Influencers Are Making $500,000, Topping Even Bankers | Hacker News Reader

Wall Street Influencers Are Making $500,000, Topping Even Bankers

bloomberg.com

32 pointskjhughes20 comments

We live in such a chaotic time. How do you even give someone useful career advice these days? Algorithms pump random things and accounts from 0 to millions in revenue overnight. You have no idea what advice is good, bad or paid for. Your financial advice might be sandwiched between a video of a punchup in a carpark and a lip sync with millions of inexplicable views. Even companies clearly have no idea who is promoting their stuff cause everyone's a freelance advertiser now.

Does anyone else find it paralyzing just trying to decide what to invest time in each day/ week/ year when you see stuff like this? Which lottery do you buy tickets in? (metaphorically speaking)

Career advice hasn't changed much. Becoming a Wall Street influencer isn't a viable career plan for the vast majority of people, just like being a pro athlete or rock star.

Easy: do only what you want — what you're passionate about — so you always have a competitive advantage making you above average in your field.

But, only easy if you're truly okay with the consequences of chasing happiness first.

Great advice. But I’m not gonna tell my 7 year old he’ll have a career in Minecraft or Roblox in the future!

Becoming an influencer that grade is like wining a lottery, so unless you encourage people to play lottery nothing when it comes to advice has changed really.

In the same way that landing a $500k/yr tech job is like winning a lottery :)

There's a much clearer path to a 500k/year tech job, and even if you fail, you'll have a 250k/year tech job instead

I feel like the path to being a successful influencer is fairly clear too, since you get almost instant feedback it’s not too hard to figure out what works.

It’s really not as difficult and risky as people outside the field like to make it sound.

From the perspective of the financial institutions writing the paychecks, this feels like a pretty transparent regulatory arbitrage - it turns out it's lucrative to find legal ways to say "invest your money with me and you'll get rich." As Matt Levine put it the other day [0]:

> I … okay … so … some guy on TikTok is like “you’ll be a millionaire if you use Betterment” and Betterment was like “oh thanks, nice of you to say, here’s some money, keep saying that,” and he did, and … Mass Mutual gets in trouble for Keith Gill using Reddit under a pseudonym?

For reference, Keith Gill aka /u/DeepFuckingValue was arguably the main player in turning GameStop into a meme stock, and he was a broker at a subsidiary of Mass Mutual at the time.

Of course, as other commenters have pointed out, influencer is just a new class of celebrity. Arguably these folks are more productive than the likes of Paris Hilton or the Kardashians at the peak of their relevance, but the glorification of marketing is pretty concerning - I might prefer celebrities who are rich and famous for "no reason."

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-09-17/be-car...

They are actors / celebrities, not bankers. Actors / celebrities have always done well. same with too athletes, they are celebrities.

I'm not handsome enough to be an actor, but I know more about finance than most of these influencers, and most HN'ers could also acquire such knowledge. So what is the barrier to entry?

IIRC TikTok's algorithm penalizes potential influencers that aren't in the top x percentile of physical attractiveness. If you're below that threshold you're at a disadvantage.

Is that true? Is there a source to back this claim up?

Guidelines for how human raters manually deranked people that looked old, overweight, facially asymmetric, scarred, physically disabled, impoverished, etc: https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...

For automatic promoting/demoting of users based on their attractiveness, Tiktok probably uses something like SCUT-FBP5500 but because it's part of their proprietary secret sauce this hasn't been confirmed.

It is true and it was admitted by them, according to the TikTok leaks [0] and insiders. [1].

[0] https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/25/tiktok-insiders-say-chinese-...

Team up with one who is.

Am I the only one that doubts they didn’t pay him to do this? Seems strange he just organically promotes them

Gen Z: Aspire to be a bser

The lesson here: fake it until, during, and after you make it.

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