This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Like most journalists who cover business and finance regularly, I don’t buy individual stocks. My investments, such as they are, are exclusively limited to vanilla retirement accounts. But when the WallStreetBets furor entered the headlines and forgotten early 2000s stocks — from GameStop to AMC to Nokia — started to surge, I found myself both fascinated and perplexed. Lurking on the Reddit board, it quickly became apparent that the investors there — regular Janes and Joes with dead-end jobs — were going in on these companies for a mix of reasons. Nostalgia. Animus towards big finance during a global crisis. A fundamental belief that without short-selling, these companies could (or should) still have some juice. And definitely some greed as well. If hedge fund managers could get rich using techniques like short squeezes, why not everybody else?