It has become notable for its colorful jargon, aggressive trading strategies, stories of extreme gains and losses acquired in the stock market, and for playing a major role in the GameStop short squeeze that caused significant losses for a number of US hedge funds and short sellers for a duration of time in early 2021.

Members of the subreddit are often young retail traders and investors who ignore fundamental investment practices and risk management techniques, so their activities are often considered gambling.

Members of the communities often see high-risk day trading as an opportunity to quickly improve their financial conditions and obtain additional income.

Considered by BBC to be the most hated man in America, Martin Shkreli was open about his identity to followers of r/wallstreetbets, frequently posting his theses on biotech and healthcare stocks (in one instance betting $20 million on the outcome of a drug trial[19]).

Other notable names to visit the subreddit include billionaire investor Mark Cuban,[20] popular YouTube content creator Mr.

Beast,[21] well-known Twitch streamer Pokimane[22] (who was a full-moderator in 2020), and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, although he has not posted on the subreddit.

[32] In an official statement posted to the r/wallstreetbets subreddit, moderators claimed that their efforts to automatically delete content that violated rules had been overwhelmed by the sheer influx of users, and criticized Discord for not providing the tools needed to take action to curtail hate speech on the server.

[citation needed] Reddit also ran a five-second commercial during Super Bowl LV celebrating the subreddit, stating that "underdogs can accomplish just about anything when we come together around a common area.

A few days later, some of the options were exercised against him, causing a loss of over $60,000; calculating from the original amount in the user account, $5,000, the negative return of the trade was 1,832.99 percent.

He used the money to buy put options on Apple stock, a trade which led to a loss of $46,000, enormous relative to his initial deposit of only $2,000.

[43] Many other users tried to exploit the glitch, which they referred to as the "free money cheat code", before it was fixed, with one in particular claiming to have opened a $1,000,000 position from a $4,000 deposit.

[45] Many of the brokerage firms, including Robinhood, stated that the restrictions were the result of clearing houses raising the collateral required for executing trades on highly volatile stocks.