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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

I think there's a mix of in-on-the-joke and not.

I've read some sad stories about, for example, a student betting student loan money in the market and losing it instantly, lured to make risky bets from the other stories of dumb luck success.

Here's someone I don't think is in on the joke: https://i.redd.it/at7gloeb5ck41.jpg ... oops

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It’s a obnoxious to know nothing about the culture of wallstreetbets and then to make declarations as if you know after reading a few posts.

Posts like that are par for the course. Its called “Loss Porn”. The subreddit is absolutely geared towards stock/options trading as gambling and if you think otherwise then you’re wrong. They are very self-aware and do it for fun. And yes some may lose a lot of money but they know exactly what they are getting themselves involved in.

There are people making and losing fortunes every day in the market. These kind of crazy bets aren't new, just more visible.

I remember being in college in 2005 and seeing people going wild with Forex and penny stocks. WSB is just a small subset of traders who like to discuss it on social media.

Marjory if what happens in that sub is humorous. And its pretty clear that there is a lot of satire and it's not the place you go to for in depth analysis 99% of the time.

Loss and gain porn are a normal part of the culture as are the slurs used.

The gains and losses are often real but this is the community you go to the laugh about such things

The person posting it in the subreddit clearly understands the theme of the subreddit. Whoever took the screenshot and shared it somewhere likely doesn't even know what WSB is.

They didn't actually lose that much money, since they bought options. By my mental math they lost about $9000 (give or take a few hundred). Still bad, but better than losing hundreds of thousands.

Edit: I stand corrected, see below.

How are you calculating this? You wouldn't have a total return of -$722k if you only lost $9k.

They could easily have 1M worth of options that have now decreased in value, which is what it looks like since AMZN went up Friday and today.

Edit: see below. My math was a bit off.

no... it’s 140 option contracts which provides the option for 14000 shares. they were bought for $66 x 100 x 140 = $924,000 and are now worth $14.43 x 100 x 140 = $202,000.

Risk / reward is proportional. You could have easily made a killing if the markets moved the right way. In fact, anything could happen by Friday. He only needs and 10% move up be in the black

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