Trading as Gambling: Social Investing and Financial Risks on the r/WallStreetBets Subreddit

Financial trading has become commonplace, involving the purchase and sale of securities such as stocks and bonds. While HCI research has investigated people’s financial literacy and decision-making and how to design for it, little is known as to how people form financial conversations on social media. To answer this question, we used a grounded theory approach to analyzing financial conversations in the YOLO (‘you only live once’) posts on the r/WallStreetBets subreddit (WSB), one of today’s largest financial online communities. We describe how WSB’s discursive culture portrays its gambling-like, high-risk trading by likening trading to gambling, celebrating it, and normalizing financial risk-taking. We discuss the rise of social investing, including how individual investors’ affective relationships encourage their outsized risk-taking, as well as reflect on its looming financial risks, especially to already marginalized groups. Lastly, we propose implications for design and policymaking.