Karl Marx would have loved Reddit. If the German philosopher were alive today, he’d be posting that everyone should get in on trading meme stocks and cryptocurrency. Not to get rich—though that’s a nice side benefit—but to strike back at the investor class. “It’s worthwhile running some risk in order to relieve the enemy of his money,” Marxwrote. I’m right there with you, Karl.
Working-class millennials have been denied the chance to build generational wealth over the course of our professional careers. Many of us are risking what little we have left as a way of raging against a machine we feel is rigged against us. And we’re following in Marx’s footsteps.
After a friend died in 1864, Marx received £820 in a bequest, his biographerrecounts. That comes out to roughly $151,500 today after adjusting for inflation and applying current conversion rates. Marx used a portion of his inheritance to become a financial speculator, often engaging in the same sort of penny-stock bubble schemes that the notorious WallStreetBets sub-Reddit has been accused of engaging in this year. “[Stocks] are springing up like mushrooms this year,” Marx wrote in a letter to his uncle, bragging that he had already made £400 from speculation. He added that many of his investments were typically “forced up to quite an unreasonable level and then, for the most part, collapse.”
Marx’s trading stories are difficult to substantiate, but millennials’ love of meme stocks is very real. I’ve already made more this year from trading meme stocks and cryptocurrency than I have as a professional writer. I’ve come to look at the meme stock boom as millennials’ chance to finally build wealth. But if not, we’re content with making the investors largely responsible for our financial woes feel a bit of the pain they’ve inflicted on us. Short-sellers are losing their shirts to the tune of$4.5 billionon meme stocks so far.
As a 34-year-old American, almost every generational stereotype applies to me. HuffPost’s Michael Hobbessummed upmillennials’ financial situation best in 2017: “My rent consumes nearly half my income, I haven’t had a steady job since Pluto was a planet and my savings are dwindling faster than the ice caps the baby boomers melted.”
Perhaps because we’re the only American generation to live through two major recessions and two wars in our coming-up years, we’re the first generation to be financially worse off than our parents, despite beingbetter educatedon average. We paid for it, too. A year of college that cost $10,000 for boomers set millennials back more than $15,000 on average in inflation-adjusted dollars, according toBloomberg. Millennials of color, particularly Black millennials, have it worse. They graduated witheven more student debtthan their white classmates, arefar less likelyto be hired in white-collar professions, and their households earnjust 60%of what their white coworkers make.
Millennials’ high-priced educations haven’t bought us much job security. A 2018 Gallup studycalledmillennials the “job-hopping generation.” Maybe, but not by choice. A 2019University of Chicago studyfound millennials actually long for a stable career. It should come as little surprise, then, that a generation plagued with job insecurity and mounting debt is leading the“baby bust.”The birth rate is at its lowest inthree decades. There may not be enough working-age Americans to care for the nation’s swelling senior population. Boomers effectively climbed the class ladder, then took a saw and cut off the rungs below them. (And they still ask us when we’ll give them grandchildren!)
If all that doesn’t make meme stocks and cryptocurrency more appealing, at least it might help explain why some of us just don’t care any more about playing it safe. I’ll be the first to admit that investing in meme stocks isn’t a sustainable way to build wealth. A lot more of us will get hurt than get rich. But I’m not primarily investing to make money: I want the investors who crashed the economy and got bailed out in my senior year of college—thustorpedoingmy career earning potential—to feel at least a little bit of the hardship they put my generation through. And given thepredominantly millennialcomposition of /r/WallStreetBets, I know I’m not the only rage-driven investor.
There’s plenty to be mad about. Like we saw withGameStop,workers organizing to make the stock market pay out in our favor results in strict blowback. After Redditors speculated GameStop shares through the roof in late January, mobile trading app Robinhood not only restricted trading, but evenreportedlysold investors’ GameStop shares without their consent. (Robinhooddeniesforced-selling occurred.) When it came to light that Robinhood had afinancial relationshipwith firms that help route its customers’ orders, it made a lot of newbie investors like me even more jaded about the markets.
In March, when New York City opened movie theaters, I decided to buy AMC shares on a lark for $7 apiece. As of early June, my investment has appreciated in value by more than 550%. That could evaporate, but I’m taking a lesson from GameStop. Its stock is still trading at more than $250 per share despite starting the year under $20. I plan on continuing to hold my AMC shares in hopes the value will increase even more. When it’s finally time, I’ll sell half and re-invest my profits in cryptocurrency.
When that happens, I’ll be far from the only millennial betting big on crypto. According to Business Insider, my generation ischiefly responsiblefor the sudden rise of cryptocurrency in 2021, in which both blue-chip digital currencies like Ethereum, as well as joke cryptocurrencies like Dogecoin, are thriving. Ethereum’s price has gone from $730.97 per coin on Jan. 1 to a peak of over $4,000 in May. Dogecoin hasappreciatedby more than 21,000% since its inception as a meme in 2013. (I’m still kicking myself for selling my Dogecoin when it was trading for less than 10 cents, even though I still made thousands in profit). Millennials’ commitment to crypto is now forcing the giants to play along: In March,Morgan Stanleybecame thefirst bankto offer Bitcoin funds to its wealthy clients. And as if on cue, now that the workers have made a little money in the rigged casino, U.S. regulators are reportedly preparing a “crackdown” on cryptocurrency.
Millennials went through childhood being told we had to work hard to have financial security. Then we were told we had to shackle ourselves with debt to get a college degree that would get us a good job. Then we were told that only a lucky few actually build wealth from their jobs and that to have true financial success, we should invest. And then when we invested, we were told we were doing it wrong. I get the message. Millennials aren’t meant to win. Financial security isn’t for us. So if we can make a few grand by speculating penny stocks to the moon and hurt a few smug hedge fund vultures in the process, we’ll settle for that.
Corrections & Amplifications: Citadel Securities is a market-maker that provides services for Robinhood, not a hedge fund. An earlier version of this commentary incorrectly reported that a subsidiary of Citadel Securities held a short position in GameStop.