GME is the only time where investment is fine and dandy - you're not reaming over any workers, we're just getting scraps from a fight between some hedge-funds. And that's great, I'm in on it too. I love the memes, it makes me happy to see people share posts about being debt-free (hopefully I will be too when this is all over), being able to afford medical expenses, or just finally catching a break in this hell-year. This is the one time it's ok to invest in a stock.
Suddenly turning around and wanting to "invest" is not great, and does not bring me joy. The gains you make trading stocks, are taken directly out of a workers pocket. It's not an honest dollar.
Shareholders and wall-street guys aren't hated because they're rich (exclusively). They're hated because they're parasites. They add no value, they do nothing.
If you are a stocktrader, or dependent on it for your life, I'm not trying to hit you with lifestyleism.
You do you. But don't start asking for an investment community on a leftist forum - like we're not struggling enough with chuds. What are you gonna do; hit us with a quote from Marx, whilst putting out some info on why Target is the next big thing?
To make it big as a stock trader, you have to have a shitton of money already. Whatever it is you're working with, it's pennies compared to even the tiniest hedgefund (and if it's not :stalin-shining: wtf you doing here?)
If you make it big trading stocks, your material interests are directly opposed to that of the working class.
If you donate all your gains, you will not be able to effectively trade.
If you don't donate your gains, why are you doing this?
No matter what you do, you're expropriating wealth from workers. Who are you to decide where their money goes?
"They will sell us the rope..." "Marx was a day-trader..." yadayadayada
TRUE
Marx was a daytrader way back before high-frequency-trading. Stalin was a bankrobber, Lenin probably did some spooky shit too. A lot of those guys did a whole bunch of crimes.
STEAL THE ROPE.
Sorry for the rant.
I'm deeply uncomfortable with the implication that robbing banks is bad
Yeah, robbing banks is cool and good. Definitely more likeable than daytrading.
Instead of a trading community, we should have one that shares info on scamming banks out of money.
no. no day trading is fighting in their rules on their terms.
which im pretty sure sun tzu said to not.
...
we need need to outnumber the banks 10-1, and our victory will be assured. how many banks can there be?
A. People fetishizing or at least romanticizing their own poverty, which I totally get the impulse to do but should not be done, being poor fucking sucks and the endgame here is nobody being poor, and B. Petty Bouge fail kids/ upwardly mobile middle class folks making money that is objectively 2x what the rest of us make but pretending like they’re poor.
fucking preach brother. Like, yes, the market is evil, but criticising people for trying to not be poor because you are so fucking comfortable in your own material conditions is just punching down and describes the complete impotency of the western left. Increasingly, it feels like the left in this country is not about improving the lives of other people and having empathy, but about fostering camaraderie around being smug and morally superior to other people. I've met these people irl and they're all fucking aesthetic chasers living the poor life while they wait to inherit their suburban mansion from mommy and daddy.
REGARDLESS, it would be great to have a comm where we could debate this because I'm still personally very conflicted about this. This is uncharted territory and I would love to hear what Marxist scholars have to say about it.
I hear you, but I mean we all operate under this system. More wealth was redistributed today than any US politician has done in their lifetime. The problem is the redistribution isn’t wide enough, you need some market knowledge, technology and initial capital to the even attempt this. But I won’t lie and say I’m not enjoying seeing this play out, heck one of the White House reporters said the administration is “monitoring the situation”. If this causes fear and panic in the market that’s fucking hilarious
make something. provide a service.
OR FUCKING STEAL HONESTLY!
real praxis is crime. it's always crime.
Is isn’t even stealing, it’s just collectively playing their own game better then they are
no, I mean do something respectable like honest crime. which is good.
and wha tyou're doing is stealing. someone always loses, and you're not making or doing anything for anyone. as good as it feels to have that brief rush of capitalist bliss.
and you're not playing their game. this isn't the real rules. this is the fake rules they tell us so we think its fair. if you count cards at the casino, they throw your ass out.
Sure but there isn’t anything against counting cards like a law or whatever. If you can count cards and get away with it good on you. In fact as we work to change the ownership of the casino more people should learn to count cards in the meantime
k but what im saying is; once you get banned for that, you can't go back.
without a gun and a cool mask and a getaway driver and a team member who you're sure will betray you and another guy who actually betrays you.
also: FUCK laws. you'll never have a revolution "following the laws". even the centralized folks are examples of that. :stalin:
What if we made c/strugglesessionbets where we bet on the next struggle sessions
But speculating about upcoming struggle sessions will cause upcoming struggle sessions.
So that people can give each other help and resources on how to be smart with their money.
I will teach you all how to use YNAB and maybe even buy some of you a one year subscription.
Pay for a subscription to YNAB and you'll help a comrade budget for a year.
Help build a free software alternative to YNAB and you'll help thousands of comrades budget for the rest of time.
The free alternative is an excel spreadsheet. Also I don't know anything about programming. The idea is that, if they actually just have budgeting problems and not income problems, they should be able to save the $7 a month it costs for a yearly subscription. But you can't budget your way out of not having enough money if that's actually the issue.
A non toxic alternative to /r/personalfinance would probably be something a lot of people could benefit from.
I don't agree with the reasoning behind not having one. I don't think it would attract chuds anymore than c/games attracts gamergators. I don't think a leftist will get into casual trading and then suddenly become a chud. I think if getting paltry amounts of money from watching a line go up makes you a capitalist, then you weren't a leftist to begin with. You just wanted healthcare. I don't agree with trying to paint normal people trading with some unique affront to workers. This borders on "yet you own an iphone? Curious" territory. If the aesthetics of it are the concern, then that's why it's here. That's why people here can mod it. It's as contradictory to being a leftist as shopping at insertmegacorphere and benefiting from affordable goods created on exploitation and killing the planet.
Some people at home making trades isn't going to bolster capitalism and stall the leftist project. You can think it's icky and that's just, like, your opinion. But you have the option to unsub from it and hopefully sometime in the future block it entirely from your feeds.
Sorry for the necro post but I agree, people are going to want to improve their situation but a lot of users on this site gatekeep the fuck out of anything that might make people more money on what they have. I don't have a ton of excess cash but I have put a little aside a each month over the last few years to get some crypto and a few stocks, I've ended up getting an extra 2k in the last 2 years because of this which is great for me.
They can say we shouldn't have a place to talk about that stuff on here, but where does that leave people who want to talk about that kind of stuff? going to r/wallstreetbets etc? Is their solution to not wanting comrades to become chuds really to push them into using chud sites instead of having a space to talk here? how does that make any sense?
Ok people can we be fucking materialists about this shit please?
Yes you are technically correct that making your living off of being a day trader is completely parasitic. You are also completely wrong that you need a lot of capital to participate in retail trading overall. Plenty of people get started with less than 100 dollars and they might not get very far but you can make some money and even accumulate enough capital to start really bringing in money.
And yes comrades I know what you’re thinking; how Is that different from being a day trader? One magic ingredient: DEBT! Go on r/Wall Streetbets and count how many stories are either paying off debts or paying for medical processes that should have been free at the point of service. There are hundreds, probably thousands. These fucking Wall Street demons don’t have the same kind of debts that normal people do, if any at all.
So why isn’t this a real redistribution of wealth from the capitalist class back towards people who have undoubtedly spent much more time in their lived doing alienated labor that the capitalist class benefited from? Yes ideally the people making this money from GameStop would be the employees and the people who make the games and game systems. That’s not the reality we have to work with here folks. It’s still a good situation and one to learn from.
On top of that another thing that makes this a truly historic moment we can’t afford to be reactionaries over is that technological change and democratized access to the stock market have created a very unique dynamic that has clearly caught the bourgeoisie class off guard. Obviously what we all want is to democratize the means of production and to have some form of a planned economy where production is dictated by use and not profitability. Like it or not, this is the most Democratic input Americans have ever had on the stock market or the economy. And they’re taking those fucking demons for a ride! The largest transfer of wealth away from the capitalist class that has happened in my lifetime is happening right now and we’re over here trying to make sure we aren’t going to catch any of the runoff users after the inevitable ban.
What is the goal here people? Do you know what made fascism so effective against the communists in Italy when they first came to power? Better access to capital. Do you know what will always be an organizing barrier for our politics? Access to capital. Having capital is not what makes you a capitalist, people. What you do with it is. The revolution will require some amount of capital folks and it’s definitely more than we have access to now.
And These people already understand the stock market is a rigged game, and they fucking print money out of it. They aren’t well groomed Ivy Leaguers. They probably have plenty in common with most of us. It boggles my mind that we would be actively antagonistic towards some of those folks migrating here. Yes the terminology is ableist and offensive, but I can’t think of a better line of attack than to continue to try and exploit things like GME. It simultaneously builds capital, and heightens the contradictions. You’re not being a materialist if you aren’t at least learning from what’s going on right now and rethinking tactics a little.
Again, we will require some amount of capital to build any kind of revolutionary left movement. If for no other reasons than to buy time out of peoples immiserated existences where they’re so burdened with debt they can’t come to a meeting because they have to work.
Obviously we shouldn’t tolerate the same level of discourse but if we can organize enough on this website to accomplish anything even close to what WSB is doing right now than we can actually accomplish something here that threatens power as opposed to just fighting all the time about shit that ultimately doesn’t matter that much.
And we should be humble enough to admit that while we don’t like how they talk, those folks on WSB are much more of a threat to power right now than anyone on this website has ever been. Because they’re acting collectively! Something we also don’t do!
So if WSB is this much of a threat to power through collective action why would we shy away from adopting similar tactics that also allow for us to raise capital that, if nothing else, can remove the boot of debt from some of our comrades necks. A comrade who tries playing the market instead of paying a student loan is doing the right thing IMO. Atleast there’s a chance to be debt free before middle age. Let’s go C/investing. Let’s raise some money and build some fucking power here. Come on people.
The idea that people can win by day trading instead of just investing in a market index is contradicted by the last 30 years of academic research into this topic.
Ok dude there’s plenty of academic research saying communism is a failed ideology too. That’s not a materialist analysis of the moment we’re in. If you have a ton of capital and time then yes that’s the correct way. But not If you’re correctly viewing the stock market as it’s constituted today as a casino for the rich where they store a lot of their hoarded wealth that we can all just walk into for like a hundred bucks. Yes some of us will lose money but if those of use who can only gamble what we can and we share information and act collectively we can actually extract some fucking wealth back from these demons. I think we’re missing a huge opportunity not trying to catch some of the runoff from WSB or even just not starting our own community for investing. Could anyone here not use more money? Ask yourself, what kind of revolutionary activity could you undertake if you, as a worker, were able to buy back some of your own time from this horrible exploitative system we have to interface with to survive. I’m just saying all this resentment towards the idea of investing is extremely reactionary and ignorant of what makes you a capitalist and what more capital could do to aid any revolutionary left wing movement you can think of. They all are always accepting donations for a reason. Hell maybe even we could all afford to donate more to ChaCha to help our mods get paid for the labor they do. Let’s do this people.
Well fuck I guess why bother listening to academics about anything, right? Climate change isn't real I guess. One stock acting wonky doesn't disprove what the evidence points to: day trading is a losers game. You will not beat the house at this and this GME shit pisses me off because we've got lots of comrades now who are gonna lose money chasing this. You wanna give more of our wealth to the bourgeois? Then yeah, day trading is a great way to do that.
Ok academic analysis of something made up like the stock market and something as real as Ice levels on the poles are inherently different and one analysis is way more likely to be based in material reality than the other. Applying dialectical materialism is not just trusting academic consensus wherever it forms. Sweet straw man tho. Ok listen close: no one should bet more than you can afford to lose. It’s a casino. This is always true of gambling. I hope my comrades get paid but some of them will lose what they invested. As I said, as long as we understand that the stock market is not some sacred institution and is actually a lot more like a casino for the rich then we’ll all be fine if we just treat it that way. I’m sorry but if anyone’s betting more than they can afford to lose then yeah that’s bad. But don’t act like you’re here trying to fucking protect your comrades from losing money or some dumb bullshit like that. If that’s what you really are after you should be in favor of them being more well informed on this. They’re holding right now for a reason. No one should put money into the stock market they aren’t prepared to lose and if they lose it that was the kind of poor judgement we would be advising against in a C/investing comm. oh and guess what? The bourgeoisie don’t even need to take our money, because they control when the money gets printed! That’s what bailouts are! Why would we not want to heighten the contradictions around the stock market? Can no one else see a left wing utility to understanding and participating in the stock market to a limited degree? Yeah it’s contradictory, but isn’t contradiction what dialectics is all about?
But don’t act like you’re here trying to fucking protect your comrades from losing money or some dumb bullshit like that. If that’s what you really are after you should be in favor of them being more well informed on this.
I spent many years working alongside people in academic finance roles. You'd be surprised - most folks in academic finance know pretty well that markets are screwed up. They work within a paradigm that never considers alternative models to capitalism, so no you're not gonna see many advocating socialism. But the academic world is way more "wow yeah capitalism is screwed up" than people here realize.
Yes, I do care about my comrades. IRL, I'm the one telling my family and friends - begging them, a lot of the time - to stop day trading or owning like 6 stocks or things like that. Because yes, finance isn't the same as climate science but it's not complete junk science either. And what we know is decisively against personal investors doing anything other than index investing.
And yeah, you can say "don't invest more than you can afford to lose" but you know damn well there are comrades who will not heed that advice.
Ok plenty of us also went to college and are aware of the ivory tower. Yep they know and aren’t revolutionary, the SDS taught us that. And I mean they literally had to invent their own Nobel prize so agree to disagree. If it ain’t Marxist economics or financial advising I don’t heed it. the motto is actually don’t BET more than you can afford to lose and that’s the important operative word. But hey if you wanna advise all your friends and family to sell all their other investments Rn then go for it. But IMO, any comrade with GME stock should HOLD TILL 1000$! and hey if you’re so confident on the subject why don’t you try shorting it for like sometime after Friday? It’s literally free money which is obviously a bad thing, but that’s what’s so funny about of all this. Take that green and purple pill all the way to the bank comrade.
yeah basically this. They're fucking one over better than their actual enemies ever could lol
After we make the investing community we should consider making a community for landlords and bosses to share strikebreaking tips.
I've met landlords who considered themselves to be leftists.
They still evicted people for falling behind on rent payments, same as any other landlord.
They also pretended that they weren't the bad guys here, same as any other landlord.
They just blamed capitalism rather than the renters themselves.
So... yay?
Hey comrades in case you think you can rob capitalists by day trading in stuff like this, I promise you... the capitalists would absolutely LOVE for you to think that and will gladly take your money away. You're not gonna be robbing hedge funds by day trading in the future, GME is a pretty rare thing and in the big picture if the capital class suckers a bunch of people into day trading because of this they're gonna be the winners in the end.
Academic finance is actually a pretty robust field. And the conclusion that most really smart people who study this come to is unless you can invest in large enough sums to move the market (i.e. buy a forest in New Zealand with Yale endowment money), anything other than buy and hold index investing is gonna lose in the end.
unless you can invest in large enough sums to move the market
That’s where coordination via the likes of /r/WSB comes in.
buy a forest in New Zealand with Yale endowment money
The politics of forest investment in NZ are pretty wild. I’m not even joking.
It means being invested in broad portfolio - like hundreds or thousands of stocks. Usually just meant to replicate the overall market.
I mean honestly, yeah, it is a bit morally precarious to invest in that, too. Arguably though in order to survive in a capitalist world you need to save up, and saving anything involves being a part of capitalism, whether it's savings in bank or in the market.
Damn you really said no fun allowed :deeper-sadness:
-7DeadlyFetishes
You live in a capitalist society, yet you participate in it?! Investing, financial planning and financial literacy (not yolo WSB) are arguably much more important to the poor and working class than anyone else. There's a reason these subjects aren't taught in school.
You're not wrong at all but I just don't want to be poor and It'd be cool if other people here weren't poor.
Capitalism isn't going to stop because I held out.
Yeah i posted the c/investing stuff sorry about that. Just got excited because of the free $GME money
Hey don't worry about it - I could see your post was made in good faith, I thought of it briefly myself as well. All of us lefties sticking it to the man and taking their money WITHIN THE SYSTEM? would be wild. But it's sadly not their money we'd be taking. It also wasn't specifically aimed at you, I just wanted to discourage that type of post. But thanks for the apology <3
Sorry for the harsh tone.
Maybe this is a hot take and I'm not sure who needs to hear this - not really directed at anyone in particular - but if you don't understand how the stock market works, how modern financialized Capitalism functions, it's a joke to call yourself a Communist. You want to defeat Capitalism and you don't even know the basics of how it actually works? Communism isn't a lifestyle brand. Actually learn something about how the current economy functions if you want to have any hope at all at fundamentally changing it.
We live in a capitalist society and we’re all struggling to make ends meet. I don’t fault anyone out there for getting into something like this to try to dig yourself out of a hole but you gotta own what you’re doing. This shit is wrong and you are not being a good leftist by participating in this shit. That said, I got loans and debt to that pay off and it would be nice to pay back my parents for all the help they’ve given me through the years. I’ll take a chance to make some money when I finish getting set up.
Right and my thing is... it's gambling but a lot of folks here are pretending that going forward there's some sort of "Marxist day trading" that will lead to free money for all comrades.
If you want to take some money to the casino to try and hit it big and pay off some loans... more power to you. Problem is placing bets on wall street is gambling with no better odds than a casino BUT people are going into this not realizing that's this is what's up.
I disagree with that.
People would say the same thing about fantasy sports but if you do the research and know your shit you can win consistently.
This is very similar, instead of players you’re looking at companies, researching the market, etc. it takes a lot of time and you’ll never have the resources to beat the whales unless you get lucky. But I think average folk can make it consistently good on this.
But no matter which way you cut it it’s always going to be exploitation of the working class. That money doesn’t come from no where, and if it did then it would devalue the rest of our money.
Do it if you feel you must to survive but don’t lie to yourself about it. If you start lying to yourself about it then you will eventually become what you’re fighting now.
The thing is, fantasy stakes are near zero. With investments, there's trillions on the line. It's not just you researching, there's so many people looking at it that any ability to make excess profit on continuous basis is effectively zero. All the research over the last decades points to the fact that even the very best out there are unable to replicate success in the market.
