Business Opportunities: r/wallstreetbets

As you might’ve noticed, we are currently in love with Reddit — we can’t stop analyzing subreddits. So we decided to follow our gut feeling and do another Reddit issue this week, and maybe for the weeks to come.

Falling in love with Reddit inevitably makes one take note of r/WallStreetBets.

Y’all probably know this community by now. It’s the subreddit that went viral earlier this year due to the Gamestop ($GME) short squeeze.

Thoughts and Observations

Besides the historical $GME event, this subreddit is such an interesting community to study. It is a great place for learning and becoming part of 21st-century internet culture.

The sub’s culture perfectly reflects today’s millennial internet- and meme-culture. There’s this ethos against the century-long established institutions that no longer serve the interest of those millennials.

So they decide to rise up against them. And the $GME event is a milestone for this cultural movement: it shows that small players have a chance to take down big players. It’s the David vs. Goliath narrative that’s so thrilling.

This represents a broader trend within this culture: the motivation to break down strong, centralized players and to support smaller players through decentralization and redistribution of power. This is the notion of the 21st century, and r/WallStreetBets is a prime example of this ethos.

Another thing we found interesting is that there seems to be an almost sentimental mood in this sub: every millennial kid used to buy games at GME stores. And now those big, centralized players want to put our childhood game stores out of business? F**k them, we’ll put them out of business!

All of those observations are reflected in the culture of this subreddit: in the language (stonks for stocks, boomer media for traditional media), the content they produce (memes and gifs), the politically motivated jokes they make, but also the strong gambling-tendency within the sub (like here and here).

Having said all of this, the sub is really worth diving into. It has definitely been the funniest community we’ve researched so far. We repeatedly had to laugh out loud while scrolling through the sub. Today, this sub counts 11m (!) members and grew crazy due to the GME event:

We hope you enjoy this report on business opportunities around r/WallStreetBets and we’re looking forward to hearing from you.

📰 WallStreetBets Media

Problem: Traditional media doesn’t speak the language of wallstreetbetters

Wallstreetbetters (WSBers) dislike traditional ‘boomer’ media heavily (for good reasons 🤷). But they actually seem to LOVE consuming media; otherwise, why would there be 11 million (!) WSBers in this sub consuming content heavily? To serve this hunger for content, you could become:

Solution: Morning Brew for WSB

What differentiates Morning Brew from all other business newsletters is the language they speak: they originally targeted business school students, for whom the Wall Street Journal is a pain to read due to its formal language. Given its recent $75m acquisition, this seems to be an interesting media niche to look into.

So what you could do is to create a newsletter for WSBers that speaks their language and covers topics relevant to them. Your job would be to create and curate funny memes and gifs, make fun of current political or economical developments, share Elon Musk’s tweets, and talk about $GME. Sounds like a fun job!

👨‍💻 Technical Analysis

Problem: WSBers want to get technical analyses of stocks.

WSBers (sometimes) like to make an educated decision on the stocks they’re buying. One way of providing this type of education is through technical chart analysis of those stocks. Even though to us, some of the analyses out there seem more like spiritual — eh technical woo-woo, people seem to be liking it.

Solution: Provide technical analysis on WSB stocks.

There are specific stocks that get the most attention in WSB: $GME, $AMC, $TSLA, $BB, and $NVDA are some we encountered often. You could become the WSB technical analyst by targeting this sub and frequently providing technical analyses of those stocks. Try to make yourself a name by providing good content, then pull the users onto your site where you could introduce a paid model. Here’s an example of a WSBer who’s doing something similar.

🤝 Insider Trading

Problem: Politicians and CEOs know more about upcoming events that will influence stocks.

Politicians and CEOs usually know more than we do. And they use this knowledge for insider trading. Luckily for us, there are some great resources that track insider trades, like insidertrades, finviz, insidertracking, and secreports. You don’t need to be Nostradamus to understand that WSBers will love this type of data as it could help them identify interesting stocks to invest in. So what could you do with that?

Solution: Become a Finance Influencer.

You could start by analyzing insider trades and identifying promising ones. You might be able to find that specific CEOs or politicians seem to be making great deals all the time (cough Musk cough Bezos). You could then do deep dives on the deals those people make and share them. One Redditor apparently followed the investments of politicians quite successfully.

There’s this TikTok influencer explaining recent insider deals. Given that this account got 1.1m followers, there seems to be demand for this type of content. You could go down this route, carve out your own niche and become a finance influencer yourself. The Hustle seems to think this space is worth diving into as well!

👕 Meme Merch

Problem: People want to show off their belonging to a specific culture through merch.

WSB is almost like a cult. And cults are usually characterized by a strong sense of belonging. Since cult members are always happy to display their membership and even try to convince others to join, you could jump on that train and:

Solution: Sell meme merch.

This could be shirts or cool gadgets like this one. We’re neither meme nor merch experts, but if you’re creative and knowledgeable in this space, you might find a way or two to offer WSB fans cool merch that matches their taste and culture. But be aware, WSB already sells merch with their own branding, so you’d need to establish a new brand within this cult.

If you enjoyed this report on business opportunities around r/WallStreetBets, feel free to share it!

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