Through a heady combination of lockdown-induced ennui, generous economic stimulus packages (on social media, memes make reference to investing your “stimmy cheque”) and the GameStop run, there’s never been so much amateur money sloshing around stock markets, nor such interest in arcane and impenetrable financial jargon. T his is the year ordinary people discovered financial markets. She sounds, in other words, like a roulette player on a losing streak. She sounds desperate, at once self-aware and blindingly deluded. I mean, if I can get some back, maybe I can find a good place to get out.” “Now I think I can invest,” she says, “but I don’t know. Does she view this as speculation, or investing? After a pause, she finally says: “I see it as gambling.” And yet Noor still thinks she can claw her way out. She bought stock depending on internet hype, or how she was feeling on the day.Īt the time we speak, Noor has lost her £10,000 initial investment, the £8,000 she made on bitcoin, and another £5,000 on top of that. Although she could use financial jargon fluently, she didn’t really understand what it meant: she watched the film The Big Short, but couldn’t explain what shorting was. The bigger issue was that she had no idea what she was doing. “I have no patience, and that’s a disaster,” she says. Part of the problem was that Noor is not a natural investor. By now, she’d stopped bragging about her investments to her boyfriend – she was too embarrassed. “I couldn’t eat, I was just constantly looking at my phone.” She spent even more time online looking for stock recommendations as a way of clawing back some of the money she’d lost, or else buying what other people were investing in on the popular trading apps. First Ripple crashed, then in February Noor got into the GameStop mania too late, and lost even more money. Pretty quickly, everything began to fall apart. “My boyfriend called it my Wall Street hand.” “My right hand was constantly cold from touching my phone,” she says. (“Ape” is internet slang for a bullish retail investor.) She couldn’t read a book, because she’d have to check her portfolio every half-hour. “I started talking like an ape,” she says. She learned the language of the online “meme stock” movement, the community of amateur investors that coalesces on social media platforms to discuss their options while swapping memes: “to the moon”, followed by a rocket emoji, means a stock will go up “diamond hands” means continuing to hold a stock despite market volatility while “tendies” is the profit made from an investment. I ask: What does that coin do? They say: We don’t know. By now, her entire news feed was about cryptocurrencies and stocks. “Being in that group was the highlight of my day.” She frequented the Reddit forum WallStreetBets, which shared tips (and in January infamously drove up the stock price of GameStop, an ailing bricks-and-mortar video game chain), and spent more time on Twitter, which has a huge investing community. She joined an investing group on the ultra-private messenger app Discord. Noor would wake up and watch the YouTube channel FX Evolution, where a headphone-wearing Australian trader talks through the stock market’s activity for hours on end, while amateur investors excitedly trade tips in the comments. Noor started to fantasise about a future in which she’d never need a mortgage, where she’d invest her way to extreme wealth.įlushed with success, she pulled her money out of bitcoin, downloaded the brokerage app Trading 212, and started investing in other cryptocurrencies and stocks: Ripple, a cryptocurrency and platform companies that invest in the legal cannabis industry psilocybin research brands Beyond Meat, makers of plant-based meat substitutes BioNTech, a German biotechnology company businesses developing gene-editing technology and psychedelic medicine and gold and silver.

“I’d be telling him, ‘Look, I just made £400 in a day,’” she says. “I’d look at it constantly.” All she talked about to her boyfriend was how well her investment was doing. (Unlike listed stocks, bitcoin can be traded 24 hours a day.) “It was cooking my brain,” she says. She’d sleep with her phone under her pillow and wake up during the night to check the performance of her bitcoin.

“I’d never invested before,” she tells me. So she bought £10,000 worth of the cryptocurrency bitcoin online, which turned into £18,700 within weeks. Because of Covid, Noor hadn’t spent much money over the year. She started reading about cryptocurrencies online, and the more she read, the more ads for trading platforms she was served on her social media feeds.

Waking up an angry giant