First off – I am not a financial advisor nor am I giving financial advice.
I’ve been on /r/wallstreetbets on Reddit for a couple of months. It was mostly curiosity seeing people brag and boast to each other about the positions they had taken. By nature, I’m a pretty risk averse person and therefore my boring retirement portfolio in a Roth IRA consists of mutual funds. There isn’t any reason to login usually as they creep up slightly and sometimes go down but year over year – the portfolio continues to grow.
One night after going to the gym, I was reading Reddit again where it seemed more and more people kept talking about GameStop ($GME) and so I figured that I had a small amount of money unallocated in my Roth and why not buy some shares. I purchased some shares at $40. I figured I would probably lose all of my money but why not have a little fun being a part of what seemed to be a movement.
The next day the stock starting going up like crazy and so I bought more shares this time at $97. Once again, I figured that it would probably bottom out but it didn’t, it kept climbing and climbing and I found myself feeding into the frenzy and started logging in to track the progress almost hourly.
A few days later, Robinhood locked all of their users out of purchasing $GME and other volatile stocks. However, I was with Charles Schwab and had no such restrictions so I sold out a smaller mutual fund holding I had and snapped up more shares at $240 this time during a dip and now I found myself watching it every 15 minutes.
The stock ended on Friday at $325 and I’m still holding all my shares and up 144% in one and half weeks which given my usual 8-10% annual growth of my boring mutual funds is unheard of. However, I’m unsure how all of this ends. Obviously GameStop is not worth $325 / share and at some point has to come crashing down. However, I feel like this is about something bigger, that the collective online army of investors are making a statement about the uneven playing field that is the financial markets.
Have any of your also entered the frenzy and if so, what are your plans?
” I’m a pretty risk adverse person”
*averse big difference
Perhaps you’d be well-served by a strategy as you don’t seem to have mentioned one. “I’ll pull out enough to recoup $x (or my investment, etc.)”. Then you could enjoy the ride on house money and know you can always say you didn’t lose any money on this, no matter what.
But good on you for saving and best of luck to you.
The point isn’t to make money at this point. It is to support a movement and hopefully force change in the stock market, to protect us all from people and financial corporations who have had their way and parasitized off of the innocent for far too long. Plan to buy in Monday and don’t care if I lose. If it helps others have a fair chance in the future, that’s money well spent.
What Earl Lee said. Bail out, immediately. Pigs get fat and all that. In these days of Covid, your ride probably cost less than you’d have spent on travel in a typical year.
But bail, and watch from the sidelines.
I did not buy any GME. One can make money on investing, and one can also make money on trading. The reddit people did not buy the stock for fundamentals, valuation, etc. They ride the momentum. There’s nothing wrong with trading the momentum.
This is totally foolish of you to buy a company like this for such high valuation. You and the rest of the Redditers will eventually lose your money if you stick with this position. Take your money and run while you can.