For what seems to be the first time ever, the fate of the stock market rests in our hands—the people.
Over the past week, hopeful investors have coordinated mass purchasing of certain dying companies’ stocks. GameStop, AMC Theatres and Nokia grace the top of the list. Consequently, investors have made up to 700% in returns. To put that into perspective, that is a heck of a lot of money.
The semantics of how stocks, options, calls, put options and shorts work aside—this is an unprecedented event. Average everyday people have successfully made hedge-fund billionaires lose millions and millions of dollars. Some companies even went bankrupt. All because a bunch of kids on Reddit thought it would be funny to dump their life savings into GameStop.
They were right, it was hilarious.
That is the beauty of the previous day’s events. We operate under a free market; we have always had the ability to do this. Now that we have done it once, who knows how many more times we can do it again. How many more times can we outsmart—no—work around the market? The possibilities are endless when we work together.
The theory is achieving financial freedom. As college students, that sounds pretty nice if you ask me. All of us at the University of Idaho probably fit into the general guidelines for stock trading: 18 years or older and have a bank account. I am telling you that you can be a part of this financial surge too. But should you be?
All this excitement and potential should come with a strict warning. The stock market is more than just a fun money game. It’s a cat and mouse game that can easily end in drastic losses.
Sure, you can put all your money into AMC Theatres on a whim and hope for the best. You can wake up the next morning to tripled profits. You can wake up to $0.
I’m not trying to dismay you from participating in all the fun. But don’t do it because some guy on TikTok told you $AMC is going to the moon. The reality is it probably won’t.
Instead, learn from this worldly event. There is truth to the whole thing. Having a good investment portfolio is a key step to financial freedom. It probably won’t happen overnight, but it certainly won’t happen if you don’t try at all.
If you are genuinely interested, talk to a licensed professional. There are people there whose main job is to tell you what stock to buy. I’m not one of those people.
If we all manage to learn how the market works, how to coordinate between us and what stocks are worthwhile, we can perpetuate this trend. What happened this week would surely happen again. And again. And again.
We have the power to influence the stock market. We have always had that power but we’re just now realizing it. Now, we should focus on mastery. But don’t take it from me—I am not a professional. I’m just a kid who likes to see the rich lose a lot of money.
Carter Kolpitcke can be reached at [email protected] or at @carterkolpitcke on Twitter.