How boomers made the worlds biggest casino for millennials.
The book is about the changing world of personal finance, the access to zero fee commission trading and the implications this has had on the Millennial generation. I have a personal interest in this space as those products are pitched directly at me and in my time looking after my own personal finances i have see the explosion of options (excuse the pun) spring up in front of me on the screen of my smart phone. Its good to have a zoomed out view of the world through this book.
I started my personal finance journey with access to a traditional brokerage and can remember placing a call to a broker during office hours to make a trade, which all came at a commission cost, now I can access even the most complicated instruments for free on my smart phone and start trading on anything if that market is open. Zero barriers. Perhaps not the best personal finance strategy.
Do we think this is the next boom/bust scenario? ala MBS and CDO’s? Dont know, all I know is when the waiter at my favourite restaurant tells me ‘I am keen to end my shift to start day-trading on JPY/USD currency swaps‘, this cant be a good thing. Jaimie digs into this burgeoning ecosystem.
Blurb: The stock market and by extension the greater financial system has lost touch with its fundamental purpose for existing. There was a time when the stock market was a mechanism for growing businesses to raise money, playing a large role in the industrial revolution—boosting America to a global superpower. Today the stock market has morphed into a high-tech system of fluctuating arbitrary numbers which are used by individuals and industries alike to find profit opportunities by placing bets, masqueraded as sophisticated financial manoeuvres with fancy labels and acronyms. Nowhere is this more evident than with the tendencies observed today. There is a shocking trend by today’s Millennial generation to shamelessly and unapologetically find ways to use the stock market to place very high-risk bets. And unlike formal Wall Street investment institutions, these gamblers, of sorts, don’t attempt to disguise the game: they are proud to call Wall Street a casino. Jaime Rogozinski combs through various elements of how reckless investors play Wall Street similar to a casino. He illustrates these often in playful ways, using entertaining and compelling real-world anecdotes. His stories are taken straight from Reddit’s r/wallstreetbets community which Jaime founded in 2012, and currently has more than 800,000 followers in addition to 3 million unique visitors a month. WallStreetBets is a forum based gathering where people are notoriously known for taking a brazen and public approach at gambling with the stock market.
I also know, that in the context of the famous quote ‘the market can stay irrational longer than we can stay solvent’. This is more true that ever.