“I don’t envy any of them,” WallStreetBets founder Jaime Rogozinski told Julia Chatterley on Thursday. “I enjoy it from the sidelines.”
He later added: “I predicted the course of things, but by no means did I predict its timing or magnitude.”
Rogozinski founded the Reddit group in 2012, but was removed from the platform because he allegedly took advantage of the WallStreetBets brand, an accusation he denied in a previous interview with CNN Business.
The reward in GameStop is in part unprecedented because of the way no-commission trading applications, such as Robinhood, have democratized investment – giving investors away from traditional banks free access to sophisticated trading tools, such as options.
The process is “completely gamified on people’s mobile phones,” Rogozinski said.
Rogozinski, along with much of the financial world, is shocked by the rally. “I can’t imagine ever imagining this,” he said, adding that there are “a lot of forces at play that have just never been tested.”
The turning point, for him, came on Wednesday, when the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, declared that the administration “monitors the situation”.
“No one is prepared to deal with the regulatory side, the government side or the forum itself,” Rogozinski said.
GameStop’s wild ride – up more than 600 percent since early January – showed no signs of slowing Thursday. The shares were extremely volatile, causing the New York Stock Exchange to stop trading.
Allison Morrow from CNN and Paul R. La Monica contributed to this story.