The Upside of Our National Stonkmare
The takeaway from the Reddit-fueled stock mania isn’t a moral lesson — it’s a practical financial lesson
“We are all investors now,” Robinhood, the investing app, declares in its Super Bowl ad that will run this weekend. It’s a gauzy, feel-good spot, making the fintech company’s usual pitch as a democratizer of individual investing. This takes some moxie, given Robinhood’s controversial image at the moment — on Tuesday, its Google app store rating plummeted to one star for the second time in less than a week. And of course, it’s not true in any meaningful way to announce we’re all investors now; about half of Americans have money in the market, a figure that’s held steady for decades.
Still, it’s true that we’ve just lived through a singular chapter in the history of the stock market as something close to a pop-culture phenomenon: the white-hot story of the Reddit-fueled run-up of GameStop and other equities. Our brief, national stonkmare seems to be winding down; something else will fill the Trump-sized hole in our collective attention span. Fortunes have been made; hedge funds have been hurt. And perhaps there was actually a silver lining to it all — perhaps we genuinely learned a thing or two in the process.
