The creator of the Reddit forum in the midst of the ongoing stock market frenzy calls the recent coordinated strategy to pump diseased stocks like GameStop and AMC a ‘train wreck’.
Jaime Rogozinski, 39, who founded Reddit’s r / WallStreetBets in 2012 as a platform to discuss unconventional investment strategies, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal about the astronomical increase in the forum.
“It’s a bit like watching one of the horror movies where you can see the bad guy slowly going up the stairs,” Rogozinski told the newspaper.
“You see this train wreck happening in real time.”
WallStreetBets has played a prominent role in boosting GameStop and other similar ebbs and is hosting many of the amateur investors who have raised their share prices.
The move has led to billions of dollars in losses for hedge funds that have shorted the same businesses.
Rogozinski, a married father of three-year-old twins living in Mexico City, started WallStreetBets while reporting as an information technology consultant in Washington, DC.
In the early stages, only a few thousand users subscribed to the channel. After shooting over the GameStop boom in the spotlight, the number of subscribers has risen to 2 million.
“A large group of people have arranged where they will sit together at the poker table, which was previously only invited,” Rogozinski told the Journal.
“You can no longer ignore them.”
Despite being the founder, Rogozinski was kicked out of the forum in April for trying to dispel the hate speech that plagues the community.
“There were a handful of mods who were white supremacists,” he said.
“I have very thick skin and people can tell me what they want, but at some point there is a moral point of view – as with my children, I do not want them to think: ‘Well, they can say what they want about you, ” he told the newspaper.
Rogozinski was insulted, saying last week he received a call from Andrew Left, the founder of Citron Research – one of the companies that lost big by shorting GameStop – who said WallStreetBets users were threatening his family.
Rogozinski was disturbed by the threats and condemned, but could not do much about it.
“It was no longer what it used to be,” he said of the forum.