A smart, unsettling take...ambitious” — Fortune
“Incisive...While other journalists have portrayed WallStreetBets as the David to Wall Street’s Goliath, Popper depicts the subreddit as a refuge for young men starved of connection whose disaffection deteriorated during the Trump presidency into a wellspring of racism and misogyny. Vividly reported and remarkably evenhanded, this stands out as one of the more critical assessments of the GameStop rally.” — Publishers Weekly
*A Next Big Idea Club "Must-Read Book" * —
“A disruptive tour-de-force. The Trolls of Wall Street explores in an elegant and precise narrative the bros and the subculture behind the WallStreetBets phenomenon and how together, they changed Wall Street forever.” — William D. Cohan, author of Money and Power and The Last Tycoons
“Every investor should read this book. Few tell a story like Nathaniel Popper, and The Trolls of Wall Street is a great reminder that markets don't always obey the clean, rational laws of finance: They are driven by people, who occasionally lose their minds.” — Morgan Housel, author of The Psychology of Money
“Popper deftly opens up private chat rooms and late-night screens to tell the story of the very human humans behind a movement to crack the wizardry of Wall Street. An engrossing examination of how one of Reddit’s communities grew from fringe to a force capable of moving markets.” — Christine Lagorio-Chafkin, author of We Are The Nerds and editor-at-large at Inc. magazine
“A vibrant testament to the power of the internet, The Trolls of Wall Street captivates with stories of digital Davids taking on financial Goliaths. Nathaniel Popper's immersive reporting and entertaining storytelling illuminates this unprecedented upheaval in the financial world.” — Bradley Hope, co-author of Billion Dollar Whale and Blood and Oil
“A brilliant exploration of human behavior in the internet age. To most of us, the frenzy surrounding GameStop and other meme stocks seemed like just another financial bubble. Popper shows it was something entirely different and new: stock trading motivated as much or more by anger, loneliness, and a need for male companionship as by the eternal desire to make money.” — Joe Nocera, co-author of The Big Fail and All the Devils Are Here
“Popper has untangled the hyper-complex story of meme stocks and WallStreetBets and spun it into a fascinating, meticulously researched narrative about the lives of the real people involved.” — Dale Beran, author of It Came from Something Awful
2024-05-04
A sidelong though revealing look at the odd “laddish” subculture that has fueled private Wall Street trading for the last few years.
Whereas Ben Mezrich’s The Antisocial Network and Spencer Jakab’s The Revolution That Wasn’t were straightforward takes on the GameStop meltdown, former New York Times finance and technology reporter Popper, author of Digital Gold, is more interested in some of the subthemes behind the debacle. Though he pays attention to the bigger picture, he is especially good in his portraits of the little actors whose interactions turned disastrous—and even dangerous. At the center of the narrative is WallStreetBets, an online forum that “fed into a whole universe of lonely, often mistrustful young men.” The community arose at a time when many young men decided that they were just aggrieved enough to become vocal Trump supporters, some diving headlong into QAnon and 4chan, most venting at some point or another about the unfair economic cards they’d been handed after the recession of 2008. In the process, Popper writes, WallStreetBets and its founders remade the small-investment landscape: Whereas $21 billion came onto the table through amateur traders in 2019, four years later, that figure was $118 billion. Much of the side-bet activity centered on cryptocurrency. However, as a survey conducted by Charles Schwab revealed, those young investors “started with the goal of notching short-term wins but were learning from their mistakes and focusing more on long-term investing,” democratizing the market with fresh blood and money. Popper’s account is densely detailed on both the financial and technical fronts—aspiring investors will learn some valuable information—but the author never loses focus on the people involved, however disaffected and conflicted.
A look inside what one investing whiz kid called a Pandora’s box—one that, Popper makes clear, won’t soon be closed.