A popular craze in investing right now is meme investing. I few weeks ago, stocks like AMC, Game Stop, and Doge Coin say a huge spike in volatility and the prices sky rocketed. A lot of people made a lot of money, and a lot of people lost a lot of money.

It all started with Game Stop (GME), a reddit user who was big on GME informed other users that Wall Street investors (where most of the markets volatility comes from) were trying to short GME. Shorting is basically when you bet that a stock will go down, there’s a more complicated explanation for shorting but to keep it short I’ll leave it there. Wall Street bought more shares to short then were available, (most would consider this a shady practice). The reddit user who noticed this trend told everyone that if they bought GME then the price would keep going up and the wall street investors would be forced to pay a high premium in order to fulfill their shorts. Once this was noticed, people started literally pouring there life savings into GME, and it was spreading all over the internet. Suddenly people who knew nothing about the stock market were jumping in and buying shares. This was the start of meme investing.

This discovery led to investors finding more stocks like GME, some others included AMC, BlackBerry, and Nokia. These three didn’t have the same bang as GME but they still did. After all of this happened, people started to see the impact social media could have on investing. People wanted to band together to all buy stocks, if everyone buys one stock it will just keep going up. It’s easier said then done however because people will buy in early and then sell once they’ve made their fair share, this leads to the people who bought in fairly high to start losing money as the early investors pulled out. Because there was a lot of new investors throwing their money at stocks, they weren’t experienced traders and as a new investor it is scary watching your stocks go down in value, leading to lots of people panic selling and losing money.

Doge Coin was another popular meme investment that made a lot of people money. It was extremely attractive because you could buy a share for less than a dollar. Which means you could invest a small amount and still get a solid return. Not only that but also having Elon Musk as a proud endorser led to thousands of new investors trying to get their hands on Doge! The small price tag and millions of social media posts led to the price of Doge Coin to rise, I personally jumped in on this one, in total I profited about $300 because I was able to buy in at a low price and sell when it broke above my target price.

My personal view on meme investing is that I don’t like it, I think there is potential to make a lot of money but at the end of the day it makes a bad name for investing. I believe in investing for the long term and I try to only invest in companies that I believe in, and I don’t like the idea of pumping a stock for profits. To me, meme investing is the same thing as betting, you may as well go to a casino because at the end of the day you are betting, not investing. To me investing is about minimizing risk by diversifying your investments into strong companies that will more then likely grow in the next 5-10 years. I also understand the excitement with meme investing, and most people don’t want to be left out on the trend, but try to remember that if you don’t get in early then you will probably lose money.