Welcome to Wednesday, my friends. Today, I have four different stories for you and I like each of them a lot. Seriously. They’re each worth reading all the way through. And I’ve tried to arrange them in an order that leads you on a sort of logical thought progression. I’m not kidding! 🙂
Let’s start with those silly kids over at Reddit’s /r/WallStreetBets:
How WallStreetBets pushed GameStop shares to the moon. [Bloomberg Wealth] — I don’t even know how to set this up. So, hedge fund managers are betting that GameStop stock is crashing and that the company is in trouble. But the folks on Reddit’s /r/WallStreetBets are fighting back. They’re buying the stock en masse, which forces the price up, thus hurting the hedge fund managers. In fact, the pros lost $1.6 billion in a single day last week because of this. It’s crazy. This is one of my favorite stories in recent years. It’s just so bizarre. (And a little bit scary.)
Now, as a counterpoint, here’s another story about the wisdom (or folly, actually) of taking financial advice from Reddit:
Just take the money. [Of Dollars and Data] — “Since the date of this post (9/30/17), GE stock has declined by 51%! Had the father followed the top commenter’s advice, his $1.8M would now be worth less than $900k. If he had instead put that money into the S&P 500, it would have grown to $2.9M today (assuming no taxes/fees). This is why you don’t take financial advice from Reddit.”
Living your values. [The Three-Year Experiment] — “One thing I’ve had to learn, over and over again, is that I must make choices that make me happy. I have spent large amounts of time worried over the choices we’ve made in our lives, especially when others’ values are different from mine…I have to remember to say ‘no’ when I want to say no. I have to remember that the only decisions that really matter are the ones that I make for my family, because we are the ones affected.”
Perspective affects everything. [Slowly Sipping Coffee] — “In the end, be nice. Be caring and be open to other views than your own. Just because you also existed in the same time and space as someone else DOES NOT mean you experienced the same thing.”
Finally, here’s the video for David Gray’s “Disappearing World” from 2013. I’d never heard this song before, but my college roommate recently recommended I give it a try. I think it’s great. It kind of captures the mood for January 2021. And it kind of matches our stories today.
That’s all I have for today, folks. See you again tomorrow!