“The popularity of online celebrities like Cohen and Musk and the dangers they introduced were symptoms of a new cultural landscape in which people had stopped trusting the old institutions and leaders who used to guide American life. The American disease of distrust that became so prominent after the financial crisis had grown much worse. The faith that Americans expressed in a wide array of institutions and in each other fell year after year in surveys done by Pew, with the youngest generations showing the least trust.14
These suspicious attitudes exercised a deep influence on the way the youngest investors approached trading and investing. Gen Z investors were most likely to list social media as their top source of information when it came to investing, according to a survey done by regulators and academics. The financial professionals who used to be the primary source of information about the markets came in at the bottom of the list. It was distrust that led the young traders to seek out new leaders, but new leaders like Musk and Cohen often ended up giving their followers even more reason to distrust the world around them. This was one of many areas in which the technology used to address one problem created a whole new set of problems people hadn’t considered before.”
“The Fed survey also showed that the people who were trying out stocks for the first time were not just the old white guys who had dominated the ranks of the day traders in earlier eras. The proportion of American women and Hispanic and Black households who owned stocks had risen at faster rates than ever before. Some of the smartest and most visible commentators writing about the new wave of retail investors were themselves women. Even among the least wealthy Americans, who had previously totally avoided the markets, there was an uptick in the number holding stocks. But the biggest increase appeared to be among young white and Asian men. Given how normal this had come to be seen, it is worth recalling that right after the financial crisis, the youngest Americans had been the least likely to own stocks. Now they were the most likely.
All of this was, of course, bigger than WallStreetBets or Robinhood or the elimination of trading fees that had swept the American brokerage industry. Women and other minority groups had often felt unwelcome on WallStreetBets and Reddit more broadly, and Robinhood was now losing its hold. But it was hard to avoid the conclusion that WallStreetBets had been part of a new online world that had come together to make the markets seem more approachable for ordinary people than they had ever been before.”
“The social dissatisfactions that fed communities like WallStreetBets were worst among the young and especially among young men. Richard Reeves, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, published a book in the fall of 2022 that described how young men continued falling further and further behind their female peers in almost every category of social, academic, financial, and emotional well-being. At the beginning of the pandemic, there had been some data suggesting that young women were more hurt by the economic shutdown than men. But as the pandemic went on, it became clear that the quarantines had in fact exacerbated the previous trends and put young men at even more of a disadvantage. Reeves argued that the mainstream media and political institutions had largely ignored this issue, fanning the distrust that many young men had developed toward mainstream society and leading many of the youngsters to embrace a more crude and retrograde form of masculinity. Reeves argued that the uglier aspects of the manosphere had emerged in part because American society had focused on offering young women many attractive models for how to be strong women but had fallen down on the job of giving men a similar vision for how to be strong men in the modern world.”