- The Reddit r/WallStreetBets community captivated the investment community for days last month, when it helped send the share price of GameStop soaring some 5,000%. That’s led to book and movie deals about the story of these amateur investors who burned Wall Street professionals.
- Now, one hedge fund has posted a job listing that seems tailor-made for a member of r/WallStreetBets. In fact, being a member of that subreddit is a requirement.
- Among the requirements: This hedge fund is looking for someone who loves memes.
As of the time of this writing, there are a total of three movie deals and two book projects in the works, all focused on a previously obscure subreddit called r/WallStreetBets which managed over the course of a few days in January to hijack national media attention and send professional Wall Street investors running for cover. Those Redditors, as most of you probably know by now, helped jack up the price of GameStop shares by more than 5,000% last month, leaving hedge funds with short positions on the video game retail chain standing to lose billions of dollars. In fact, Melvin Capital almost went bankrupt, and it took a $2.5 billion cash infusion for that hedge fund to stay afloat.
Meanwhile, the story is still not finished. A New York City-based hedge fund called Cindicator Capitol reportedly wants to hire a trader at a base salary of $200,000 who’ll open six-figure option trades and spend most of his or her time “on Reddit, Discord chats, and Twitter to feel the pulse of the tens of millions of retail traders.”
“As a Sentiment Trader,” a LinkedIn job posting for this role reads, “you’ll be the voice of the millions of traders. With a combination of our qualitative approach to measuring market moods and your ‘street-smarts’, you’ll actively manage our internal multi-million corporate treasury. Then you’ll turn the resulting insights into new features, products, and trading strategies for clients.” Among the non-traditional traits that this hedge fund is looking for in candidates, according to the posting, are “clear, unbiased thinking that defies authority” and “a refined taste for memes and a sense of humor.”
Yes, this is 2021, and an NYC-based hedge fund is looking for a Redditor who loves memes. Oh, and one more requirement, just for good measure: “NO higher education in economics or finance. Alternatively, prove that you’re free from any mainstream financial brainwash.”
GameStop sitting amongst Tesla and Amazon after reddit users make it a Fortune 500 company pic.twitter.com/AVUtcjs6gl
— Jordan Deeb (@Jordan_Deeb) January 27, 2021
This is another fascinating turn of events in the Reddit-GameStop saga — which, as we’ve previously noted, was fascinating to watch unfold and didn’t elicit much sympathy for the professional Wall Street investors who got burned. Many people, one of my BGR colleagues noted in a previous piece, “argued that what Redditors did was no different than what hedge funds have been doing for decades, namely manipulating the market for their own benefit, everyone else be damned.” Some people have even gone so far as to connect the Reddit-fueled GameStop story to the unorthodox political rise of Donald Trump.
“At the core of Donald Trump’s angry populist appeal was — and is — this sentiment,” explains a CNN writer in a piece titled “How Trumpism explains the GameStop stock surge.” Continues CNN editor-at-large Chris Cillizza, who says Trump’s appeal to a certain kind of person is as follows: “The elites think they know better than you. They think they can tell you how to live and what to believe. But guess what? We the people are smarter than the elites!”
