Pauline Bell, analyst at CFRA Research. That’s up
from 10% to 15% during 2019 and most of 2020.
Giving those smaller investors even more heft
is the communication they can do over social
media. That’s one part of what makes the recent
movement an evolution from the day-trading
craze of the late 1990s.
It was cool then for retail investors to ride tech
stocks like JDS Uniphase higher, but while they
had access to internet chatrooms they didn’t
have a Reddit or other social media to quickly
amplify their voices and convince others to get
in as well. They also didn’t have the ability to
trade stocks on their phones, while sitting on a
couch with little else to do amid a pandemic, all
while paying zero commissions.
“We believe a structural change may be afoot
and that retail investors are likely to remain
bigger players in the U.S. equity market going
forward,” Lori Calvasina, head of U.S. equity
strategy at RBC Capital Markets, wrote in a
recent report.
Consider Bartosz Skokuń, a 27-year-old
computer programmer in Wroclaw, Poland.
His investments were fairly conservative until
he bought GameStop shares a month ago,
after a friend told him about it and Reddit’s
WallStreetBets.
He made a healthy profit on GameStop, and he
expects to stay connected with WallStreetBets,
sifting through the many stock ideas that users
pitch on the forum to find opportunities he likes.
Some of the ideas on what’s known as r/WSB are
brilliant, he said, and others are “totally stupid.”
Therein is the beauty of it, he said: “those people
share their ideas and effort for FREE because