The creator of the Reddit forum at the center of the ongoing stock market frenzy has called the recent coordinated strategy for pumping troubled stocks, such as GameStop and AMC, a “train wreck.”
Jaime Rogozinski, 39, who established r / WallStreetBets in 2012 as a platform to discuss unconventional investment strategies, expressed concern over the astronomical rise in the forum’s influence in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
“It’s a bit like watching one of those horror movies where you can see the bad guy slowly climbing the stairs,” Rogozinski told the newspaper.
“See this train wreck happening in real time.”
WallStreetBets played a prominent role in stimulating GameStop and other similar declining companies, playing many of the amateur investors who raised stock prices.
This move has led to billions of dollars in losses for hedge fund companies that have shortened the same business.
Rogozinski, a married father of 3-year-old twins living in Mexico City, started WallStreetBets while employed as an information technology consultant in Washington, DC, the report said.
In the early stages, only a few thousand users subscribed to the channel. Now, after being shot in the spotlight over the GameStop boom, the number of subscribers has increased to 2 million.
“A massive group of people have organized where they have a collective place at the poker table, which was previously just an invitation,” Rogozinski told Jurnal.
“You can’t ignore them anymore.”
Despite being its founder, Rogozinski was kicked out of the forum in April for trying to eliminate hate speech affecting the community.
“There were a handful of mods that were directly white supremacists,” he said.
“I have very thick skin and people can tell me anything they want, but at some point there is a moral point of view – as for my children, I don’t want them to think, ‘Well, they can say whatever they want.’ about you, “he told the newspaper.
Adding insult to injury, Rogozinski said he received a phone call last week from Andrew Left, founder of Citron Research – one of the companies that lost a lot by short-circuiting GameStop – who said WallStreetBets users were threatening their families.
Rogozinski was upset and condemned the threats, but could not do much about them.
“It’s not what it used to be,” he said of the forum.