First and foremost, if you have lost a lot please don't do anything rash. It might be a good idea to cash out and salvage what you can. Take some time off from this stuff to recoup.
Resources to stop gambling on stocks: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 . Thanks to /u/read_freire for providing these.
This will be the last one of these for a while. I assume a lot of people are burnt out or bored. I just wanted a debrief thread before going back to AOC struggle sessions and talking about student loans.
I don't have a technical analysis of what happened or what will happen. Reddit is quickly becoming more useless due to infighting. I expect a lot of them to sell tomorrow. More and more the "diamond hands" threads are being overtaken by criticism. By next week, this will just be another quirky thing that happened in hell world 2021.
I bought in around $240 with $50. That's now worth $15. For my own personal situation I'm better off waiting until it hits $100 again and then pulling out. I suggest everyone think about their own needs and pull out when you need to. No shame here. Paper hands is just a meme.
As far as lessons go, I think the one people said at the beginning is good. If you're just hearing about it on social media, it's probably over. By the time it got hyped enough on reddit to break on r/all and twitter, the time to get in was gone.
Companies had to cover shorts but they actually didn't. Or they had enough tools to hold off until the price plummeted. Or they did cover and nobody (on reddit) noticed. Either way, you can't rely on "but they have to do this thing by this date or else" because they don't.
If you make assumptions about the market, you have to be able to test those assumptions and have a plan for when you're wrong. Here the plan should have been to pull out at $400 and then reinvest if necessary. It's just that when the price was $400 a lot of people were locked into selling only and locked out of buying.
Another thing is to not trust your brokerage app. If there's ever a situation where the plebs are making money, it will be restricted. Just like social media, these apps are only going to end up serving higher interests rather than be actual democratic platforms.
All this passive income stuff is going to go away because the people at the top can't let people sit at home and collect money. Not even when it's capitalism doing it. When they say 'side hustle' they mean driving for uber or making some other SV prick rich. With covid killing so many, all those jobs need to be replaced. That means you. They need bodies not home investors. They have investors that are worth more to them than you will ever be.
So I guess that's it. Final thoughts before we pretend we never did this?
I made a grand total of $17 and it was by far the most entertaining week I've had in the last year but yeah the subreddit has me really, really sad. I'm clearly too WAY sensitive for stonks if I cry about knowing that other people are losing money days after it happens. But again, to double down on my statement last week it SHOULD be radicalizing to people that they can change the rules on you when they are losing the game. When they literally remove the "buy" button it's really only going to go one direction and that direction is down.
Actually, this is part of why women are better portfolio managers on average lmao
lmao this actually makes me feel a little better. I did learn a lot about the stock market in the past week after knowing closer to zero about it and one of the really surprising things I learned (that I'm sure anyone who knows about this stuff already knows) is that picking individual stocks or funds that are really actively managed rarely outperform the market. So why do regular investors spend so much time and energy investing in individual stocks if that's the case? Thinking you can outsmart the market is big time male tendencies imo and I'd much rather take the less sexy but more reliable option. I think we're due for some sort of correction but if I end up with a little money to put into the market at the market in a dip I would put 90% of it in S&P500 funds or ETFs and treat the remaining 10% like a yolo gamble because that's basically what it is.