This isn’t a bull market or a bear market. It’s a know-nothing market.
Bragging rights used to go to those investors who worked the hardest at learning the most. Now the glory often goes to those who know the least and don’t even care. That has turned the traditional investing hierarchy upside down, although it probably won’t last.
“I don’t know what the f— I’m doing,” a young man said in a TikTok video in January. “I just know I’m making money.” He added that he’d been trading stocks for only three days, but “just like that, made $300 for the day.” In the next few weeks that young man, Danny Tran, racked up roughly 500,000 followers on TikTok.
At the WallStreetBets forum on Reddit, the online chat community, comments like “I can’t read” and “I have no idea what I’m doing” are common. Users insult each other’s—and their own—intelligence as terms of endearment and badges of honor. In February, commenters on WallStreetBets called themselves “stupid,” “idiot” or related terms 3,550 times, according to TopStonks.com, which tracks stocks mentioned on Reddit and other sites.
Why are traders suddenly bragging about their own ignorance?
