The unhinged increase in investment scam online...
My friends from university are all hopping the bandwagon of cryptocurrencies and meme stocks. Good for them, I hope they do well.
But listening to them discuss their investing ventures is just pain. Gruesome pain. Apparently there's a guy on YouTube named Meet Kevin who gives them financial advice. I glanced at his channel and I almost lost a tooth. A dumbfuck who has no idea what in the actual fuck he's talking about or how dangerous he is, or maybe he does but chooses to knowingly pry on people. He's pumping and pumping to his audience — 1.73 million people — without any merit in his opinions. He doesn't approach any reasoning as to why he recommends buying at all, he just reads charts to impress the plebs — "OMG! I'm looking at this chart and it's returning 99% woww!!". Other times he's just reading Bloomberg articles about Tesla to his fans like gospel.
On tiktok it's worse (recently found out it's an actual app as opposed to a joke, sad times). The amount of users pumping trash stocks and cryptos is literally endless. Just yesterday I watched a video of a girl pumping a new coin called fantom. The girl says, word for word, that she's expecting it to be worth trillions in a few months. This video has hundreds of thousands of views. Another fellow on twitch was streaming how to read the cash flow statement. I watched it all the way through, and the guy couldn't even distinguish between free cash flow and cash flow from operations. I cringed the most when he said that the CF statement isn't actually as important as the income statement, where the actual earnings are reported. These are the sources that my friends — a bunch of adults — rely on to squander their savings.
I understand that people are infatuated with making money super fast, but this is legitimately scary. It's like more people are interested in making money this way than are people who seek to do it the right way. Even if you're a proponent of crypto, you can't deny it's a Ponzi scheme at this point. HFT and online brokers facilitated the way for these goons.
Ponzis are great long as you don't get caught holding the bag
If your "friends" are pressuring you into risky pump and dumps knowing you may very well be the sucker left holding the bag, then you need some new friends.
It's actually much worse. I work in multi-asset AM and can take care of myself. It's that my friends sometimes ask me what I think about their picks. At first I tried to explain it was all bullshit and they better be careful, but they'd always get super upset. So I just stopped. I avoid answering every time they ask me about it, or if I have any holdings on my own (I can't, compliance will kill me).
I'm just frustrated yknow
I would caution on providing any further advice or disclose any information to your friends, smart move.
It's actually very weird to hear a Tik Tok thot talk about a blue-chip crypto like Fantom (FTM). The token has a $7 billion marketcap and is the 29th biggest cryptocurrency. Very good DeFi ecosystem too. But it's absolutely not "new" - for normies it is, maybe.
From Investopedia. Bitcoin lost half its value in like a week, and you're trying to tell me that the 29th biggest cryptocurrency is "blue chip"?
No wonder you use the word "normie". Are you that 27 year old "intern" who has been on 4chan since he was a little boy that I ran into on the other thread?
Bitcoin is up 30% this month and broke its all-time-high 11 days ago so your claim is dubious. Yep it's me but I'm not 27 years old holy shit lmao
Both of those descriptors are accurate. 1) Fantom is absolutely a blue chip crypto. 2) You absolutely are a normie.
dogecoin is like in top 10 largest cryptocurrencies :)
2010 called. It wants its usernames back
I like FTM as well. Excited about the auto-compounding availability through GRIM and Reaper.
You might want to do some more research on Meet Kevin, specifically his investing background and what he says about his stock market knowlege. The dude is worth almost $30M and openly admits that he isn't an expert on the stock market. He is a real estate investor that is heavily invested in the equities market as well. But to act like becuase he is not an investment banker he can't talk about investing is an absolute fucking joke. Espically since people like him brought your precious hedge funds to their knees. Knowledge is not gated in elite circles.
LOL
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/millennial-couple-earns-6-million-dolla…
Almost all his money is from grifting and telling others how to get rich, not actual investments.
Do you know the difference between personal income and business revenues? Becuase based on this response it doesn't sound like you do. I have a business that I own that generates significant positive cashflow that I see exactly $0 of becuase it is all reinvested. How much of a simpleton are you?
"Brought your hedge funds to their knees" This is really the kind of stuff I avoid talking about specifically because this kind of pitting will make me sound either evil or condescending. Dude, HFs do sell short some companies sometimes because those companies are bust. That's not inherently evil, it's really how things are supposed to be in a free market — the best performer gets to earn it while failures are pushed out
A recent fresh case is what happened with Luckin coffee last year. Look that one up please
Another thing is that by "fighting" the long short funds, they have made the quant funds and prop traders extremely wealthy. Small, uninformed trades are the "noise" that makes those models profitable, and some of them have grown by 150% in just a year.
Who said Hfs are evil? I am merely saying that non finance people actually do know what they are talking about and how to take advantage of things in ways that have put immense pressure on high finance "professionals". No one here is saying that they brought the HF industry down. But tanking a few hedge funds and forcing billions of dollars of industry funded bailouts is something that wouldn't have even been possible 5 years ago by a disconected group of individuals.
completely agree. I also see cryptocurrency ads in a lot of YouTube comments. always written kinda like that: Mr. Smith helped me to become financially independent and now I make thousands of dollars per day in passive income. and such comments have like 10x more likes than others and a bunch of fake comments confirming how Mr. Smith helped others as well. and it's all over YouTube, even on videos unrelated to finance at all.
also I get messages on Facebook and whatsapp from people who try to push crypto. and at first they introduce as somebody who just got your number on accident (on WhatsApp) and then they try to become friends and push crypto.
this shit is such a clear pyramid scheme. I'm very surprised how many dumb people actually get fooled and buy into these shit crypto scams. but to be honest, they deserve to lose their money. cause if you believe a YouTube comment telling you about Mr. Smith on Cardi B's video, you don't deserve to have money.
Social media is an absolute shit show with scams, pump & dumps, daytraders, and course selling gurus. Not just on YouTube and TikTok but also on Instagram and literally all social media. The crazy thing is that these people are actually successful. They can get an ignorant audience to buy their alt coin that they will pump and dump. People are following course selling daytraders like Ricky Gutierezz and he’s making bank. One of Meet Kevin’s friends, Graham Stephan is all clickbait now. I used to love his personal finance videos but now Graham talks about stocks and stuff that he knows nothing about.
Everyone wants to get rich quickly and easily. The truth is that most people trading single stocks and betting on random crypto currencies are going to lose. This has shades of the late 90s/early 00s tech bubble all over it.
Literally salivating waiting for the next correction or bear market. Most of the people that got into the equity and crypto markets post-COVID will get steamrolled. Even if you've made a ton of money the past two years, reversion to the mean will crush the gamblers because they'll keep taking crazy amounts of risk. Rationale people would say thank you, cash out and stop playing the game while they're ahead, but we know 99% of these speculators aren't rational and are going for broke.
Cope, the Fed will do ANYTHING (i.e., print endless amounts of $$) to keep the music going
That's not how things work champ. When inflation is persistent, rates get raised because the alternative (hyperinflation) is unthinkable. When rates go up, asset class bubbles cool off.
Freezing cold take
they have to learn somehow, protect YOUR neck and those of your parents, fuck the rest of them. if someone doesn't take the time to fact check or do deeper research than watching a tiktok video, then they're beyond help. don't waste another breath on them.
this shit always happens and if it's not your generation or your wheelhouse it'll feel different than the last time. same shit happened in dot coms with newsletter peddlers, new technologies that will change everything, etc., then again in GFC with real estate, house flipping, exotic fixed income products with leverage out the wazoo, this is just a different variety of the same shit that's always shellacked people - greed, novelty, get rich quick
no one is forcing you to watch their youtube channels, so I'd suggest you cut off the source of your stress by leaving the conversation via not looking at social media on those topics and finding a way to respond to your annoying friends by letting them know that's not your thing, you wish them well, but you don't engage further
godspeed
Religion is back
Lawrence Fields: Your big mortgage bet concerns us. We have no confidence in your ability to identify macroeconomic trends.
Michael Burry: You flew here to tell me that? Why? I mean, anyone can see there's a real estate bubble.
Lawrence Fields: Actually, no one can see a bubble. That's what makes it a bubble.
Michael Burry: That's dumb, Lawrence. There are always markers. Mortgage fraud - it's quadrupled since 2000. Average take home pay is flat yet home prices are soaring. That means homes are debts not assets.
Sure is a lot of retail margin out there....
Bro I keep seeing adverts everywhere on the tube in london saying "missed out on doge? meet floki coin" and I just have no idea how thats even legal.
the issue is most of these things aren't registered as securities so they're currently skirting law in almost every jurisdiction. add to that the anonymity of it all and here you go
A fool and his money are soon parted.
Yeah the tiktoks and whatever else prey on those who buy into the get rich quick scheme, which to me by definition, is a load of shit almost all the time. It's actually crazy that a lot of these "coins" are literally pump and dump schemes which are, for the most part, highly unregulated. There are shades of all these schemes all over all historical investment scams and we are just in the middle of new ones which have not yet been properly prosecuted due to lack of understanding on the regulators part. Sooner or later, I'd wager most of these will come tumbling down
TBH I've seen dozens of these frauds on social media ranging from financial advice to real estate and every time I inform their viewers it's all bullshit fraud they all tell me I have no idea what I'm talking about. It's natural selection at this point. Whatever, not my problem.
Having met people personally who have stayed at a MLM pyramid cult for years (some even a decade plus) making less than minimum wage - I'm sure there are people out there that sadly put a good chunk of their money into these scams.
Weirdest was seeing some very educated people I know read books from Dan Lok and other known scammy businessmen.
I hope you're happy now buddy, I know I am
Quality way to show just how scammy and bullsh** the crypto industry is - by promoting a scam. Nice.
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