Everyone is a Hedge Fund Manager / Portfolio Manager / successful options trader on Fin Tweet.
If you don’t use twitter, Spaces is the voice chat feature on twitter, where friends of friends join and chitchat about whatever. I recently joined a stock focused space out of pure boredom. It was run by someone named Ape [fake name just in case] who trades stocks and his pal who works in wealth management. They debated viewpoints about future market trends, stocks, charts, options and crypto. Most of the people chatting work in restaurants, barber shops, data science, law; some were in college and some were stay-at-home moms. It was interesting to be a fly on the wall and hear eloquent arguments being shared about financial conditions and price action. The conversation was fun at times when witty remarks made the group chuckle. But the conversation was not always fun. In many occasions, aggressive put-downs, which most often than not resulted in the group verbally belittling someone to the point of total humiliation for claiming superior returns or clairvoyant market timing were deployed. You know, the typical ad hominem attacks mature people use to communicate.
They spoke about options as if they understood options. Terms like debit and credit spreads were used to sound exotic. In their attempt to boost ego, they used financial jargon like gamma squeeze and delta. Some even predicted hostile takeovers between rival companies. Most of them trade on a daily basis, using leverage and options in hopes to squeeze as much alpha from the market. None have worked in investment banking, private equity, or corporate finance or hold a degree in business.
Remember the scene in The Big Short when Mark Baum calls, Vinny and says " hey, there’s a bubble! Call Vennett and buy 50 millions of swaps on the MBS Garibaldi triple B"? I feel like some of these wannabe hedge funds managers on fin tweet with zero finance background are the stripper with the 5 houses and a condo.
But the market doesn’t seem to care.
