Finance
Got Lucky, Got It Right: How Newbie Stock Jocks Beat the Market
- Did retail investors know something Wall Street didn’t...
- Or did they go bold in a market that’s rewarded such behavior?
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It doesn’t sit well in the ivory tower, that at a time of peak complexity in markets, when a pandemic raged and a recession seethed and new-wave experiments were conducted in fiscal and monetary policy, it wasn’t the quants or the prop traders or any other blue-blooded Wall Street constituency that figured it out first. It was the amateurs.
In a year of extreme volatility, the stocks newbie traders love most have soared 56%, beating the usually bulletproof S&P 500 by 45 percentage points and nearly doubling the return on hedge-fund favorites, going by Goldman Sachs data. Thanks to bets on cruise operators and airlines and electric cars, screen shots of six-figure brokerage accounts inundate Twitter, the lockdown’s accessory of choice.