When Everyone Started Trading

Around 2020, something wild happened. A bunch of things came together at once, says Gregory Blotnick: free trading apps, stimulus money burning holes in people's pockets, everyone stuck at home with nothing to do, and social media turning stock picking into the new fantasy football.

Suddenly, your neighbor was day trading, your cousin was explaining cryptocurrency at family dinner, and everyone seemed to know what a "YOLO" trade was.

The real game-changer? Apps like Robinhood made trading completely free. No more $10 fees every time you wanted to buy a stock. You could literally buy a piece of Apple with your coffee money. Other big names like Fidelity and E*TRADE had to follow suit or get left behind.

Now, the big money guys are scrambling to keep up.

The GameStop Madness

The moment came that changed everything: GameStop.

In early 2021, a group of Reddit users basically said, "You know what? We're tired of these Wall Street hedge funds betting against companies and making money when they fail." So they decided to do something about it.

They all started buying GameStop stock (GME) and wouldn't sell. The price shot from $20 to over $300 in weeks. The hedge funds that were betting against GameStop? They lost billions.

It wasn't just GameStop, either. AMC Theaters got the same treatment. Even Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that literally started as a joke, hit a $90 billion value because regular people decided it was their thing. The financial world was left in shambles trying to make sense of it all.

Where People Get Their Stock Tips Now

Here's what's really interesting: people aren't getting their investment advice from traditional sources anymore. Forget financial newspapers or bank advisors. Now it's YouTube channels where college kids break down why Tesla might go up or down, TikTok videos explaining stock options in under a minute, Discord groups where thousands of people share trade ideas 24/7, X threads that move stock prices when they go viral.

The crazy part? Sometimes these random internet sources are more accurate than expensive Wall Street research.

Wall Street Had to Adapt

The big financial firms initially called retail investors "dumb money." Well, they're not laughing anymore. Now they're hiring people specifically to monitor social media and figure out what regular investors are thinking.

Some hedge funds literally have employees whose job is to scroll through social media looking for the next big thing. They're building computer programs to track what stocks people are talking about online. The same people who used to mock day traders are now trying to copy them.

What This Really Means

Here's the thing: regular people now make up about 20-25% of all daily stock trading. That's huge. When that much trading is driven by what people are saying on social media rather than boring financial reports, the whole market acts differently.

Stocks can move 20% on an unsourced tweet. It's wilder, more unpredictable, and honestly, more fun to watch.

This isn't going away. An entire generation has grown up with free trading and getting their financial news from social media. They're not going back to the old way of doing things.

What's Next?

The government is still trying to figure out how to handle all this. Do you regulate what people can say about stocks on social media? How do you protect people from making bad decisions without ruining the party? Is it safe for a new investor to put all their money into a 0DTE option, which expires the same day they buy it and can result in a 100% loss of capital? Nobody really knows yet.

Meanwhile, the financial industry is scrambling to keep up. We're seeing more apps designed for regular people, better educational content, and products specifically made for the social media generation.

The Bottom Line

The old world where Wall Street professionals made all the decisions and everyone else just went along with it? That's over. The new world is messier, more chaotic, and way more democratic.

Sure, the big money is still in the game, but now they're sharing the playground with millions of regular people trading from their phones while watching Netflix. And honestly, the regular people are doing pretty well for themselves.

Whether this makes the market better or worse depends on who you ask. Personally, from everything I've seen over the years, it's hard to say. But one thing's for sure: investing used to be boring, and now it definitely isn't.

Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.

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The opinions expressed here are the author's views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.org/MyersBizNet.