It is the year of our Lord 1928, and the moron next door, yep, the one who chauffeurs rich schmucks around town, he just cleaned up in stocks better than you do with your nine-to-five day-in-day-out, all year long.
Nearly everyone and their mother-in-law are yapping about stocks like they are seasoned veterans. Folks are literally mortgaging the family farm to buy more friggin’ shares, and newspapers are filled with feel-good bullshit about regular shmos turning overnight millionaires.
Ring a bell?
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It’s mid 2025, and now your clueless office mate scored $50k overnight on some horseshit AI-stock he let ChatGPT predict. Crypto bros dominate coffee shop convos while plebs like us take out loans to gamble on Tesla calls. Instagram is drowning in obnoxious 22-year-olds showing off their trading “genius”.
Déjà vu? You’re damn right.
We are reliving the exact same mass delusion, and the only difference is this time the snake oil comes in the form of apps instead of ticker tape machines.
Every idiot thinks they’re Warren Buffett
Now, back in the roaring ’20s, ordinary Americans dove into stocks, and they were borrowing money much faster than Uncle Sam could print dollars, all through some stupid-ass scheme called “buying on margin”, a.k.a. ‘how to pretend you are rich by borrowing money you absolutely shouldn’t’.
And today’s idiots. . . they are all-in on Robinhood, and that is an app that is so friggin’ easy even your goldfish can invest. This is a trading app that makes it super easy for us regular hoomans (bored dudes and dudettes with zero financial literacy) to buy and sell activa like stocks, crypto, options, whatever. And. . . it has no fees and no fancy speak.
Just a bit of. . . gambling. Cause that is what it is.
Back then, it was the chauffeurs who were dishing out hot stock tips to rich dudes, and today, it is Gen-Z TikTokers who are explaining us the inner workings of stock options with balls-out arrogance.
The tech might be upgraded peeps, but the collective IQ stayed exactly the same.
Suuure, ‘democratizing’ investing sounds lovely. Robinhood and social media genuinely help more people play in the financial sandbox. Problem is, most of these schmucks couldn’t tell a bond from their elbow, and misinformation spreads faster than mono at summer camp.
Social media ticker tape for morons
In the old days, ticker tapes and radios democratized information relevant to trading, and all of a sudden, every schlemiel could see stock prices in real-time, and today it is even worse, cause we have social media and that is ticker tape on crystal meth.
Take Reddit for instance.
Reddit turned GameStop into a freakin’ moonshot circus, and let it go up 1500% because some sweaty nerds typed “HODL” enough times*. Studies confirm that schmucks buy stocks mentioned on Reddit regardless of context, logic, or whether the poster’s IQ is higher than room temperature.
Same shit, different century.
In the ’20s, morons bought stocks by coughing up just 10% and borrowing the rest, but today, we have evolved into options trading, crypto leverage, and straight-up gambling that we disguise as investing, and Robinhood even celebrates your first trade with digital confetti.
Farking adorable.
Yeah, that is until you realize that you’re financially screwed because the app just convinced you trading was as harmless as my Weiner eyeing a piece of ham.
Legend goes that Joe Kennedy bailed out of stocks when the shoeshine kid started giving him financial advice. Good advice, cause otherwise he prolly would’ve been flying straight off a skyscraper like the rest of the folk who went all in. And today’s shoeshine kid is your SoMe ‘expert’, and now every clown with WiFi thinks he is an investment genius.
But the thing is. . If everyone’s an expert, no one’s an expert.
“Permanent High Plateau” – ever heard of that phrase?
Yeah, right.
* HOLD you knob
Talking about permanent high plateau
In 1929, some fancy Yale economist declared that stocks had hit a “permanently high plateau”.
But lo and behold, a few days later, Wall Street shat the bed spectacularly.
So when I hear tech bros like chanting similar mantras like “This time it’s different”, or “We’re disrupting paradigms” – Jesus, spare me the horseshit. The specifics might change, but human stupidity remains timeless.
Now back in the day, the average joe jumped into stocks because he saw his neighbors swimming in cash, but today’s version is worse because social media cranks FOMO to unbearable levels. Haven’t you noticed that your Instagram feed can sometimes feel like a constant reminder you missed the Bitcoin boat?
Nothing changed but the tech, mate.
Psychology stayed as stupidly predictable as ever.
Every New Tech Craze Eventually Faceplants
Warning signs everyone ignores
Just like before, the warnings are all on the wall. We have absurd AI valuations, tremendous crypto speculation, debt rising fast, but it all gets dismissed by true believers as “FUD”. Billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller even bought Bitcoin out of sheer FOMO, after which he called himself a “moron”.
If billionaires panic-buy, we’re deep into clown territory.
But I think we all know deep down how this ends.
The 1920s didn’t implode because cars or radios sucked. It crashed because prices divorced reality by a light year, and speculation ran wild.
And when the bubble burst, Wall Street nose-dived from 381 points straight into the shitter, taking everyone down.
The silver lining is that survivors like RCA eventually thrived, because crashes don’t kill innovation, they just flush out the bullshit.
Okay, for y’all critics and know-it-alls, we do have some safety nets and smarter financial watchdogs now, but greed, fear, and FOMO still run the circus.
When the crash hits (oh boy, it will) tech itself won’t die cause it will only clear the stage of clowns who confused gambling with investing.
History rhymes, folks, and now, we are stuck in a remix from a century ago.
Signing off,
Marco
I build AI by day and warn about it by night. I call it job security. Big Tech keeps inflating its promises, and I bring the pins. I call that balance and for me it is also simply therapy.
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