Reuters/Mike Segar
- Mark Cuban said Wall Street Bets members are disrupting Wall Street’s old guard.
- The billionaire “Shark Tank” star said they’re applying lessons from crypto trading.
- “They want to change the game and kick their ass. Which they should and have every right to.”
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Day traders are shaking up the status quo by applying the rules of digital assets to the stock market, billionaire investor Mark Cuban said in a blog post on Sunday.
The “Shark Tank” star and Dallas Mavericks recalled that as a child, he once attended a stamp show where he bought a stamp from one dealer then sold it for 50 times the price to another dealer in the same room. The experience opened his eyes to the fact that traditions and inefficiencies exist in every market.
Wall Street Bets members joining forces to pump stocks such as GameStop and AMC in recent days reminded him of his stamp-arbitrage days, he said.
Moreover, younger investors have learned from trading Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that they can collectively boost the prices of digital assets and generate wealth for all involved, he continued.
"WSB traders are applying the same principles of the digital/crypto world to the stock market and they are loving the fact that the old schoolers are hating it," Cuban said. "The old schoolers think they are smarter. They are not."
The amateur investors - a crowd that includes Cuban's 11-year-old son - are more than happy to ignore conventional metrics such as price-to-earnings ratios and free cash flow.
"This generation doesn't care what Old School Wall Street thinks, or says about valuations," Cuban said. "They have learned from their experiences watching Wall Street go up and down and making people who aren't them a ton of money, that it's a game designed to reward the people with the most money."
"That all these narratives are just sales pitches designed to sell stocks," he continued. "They want to change the game and kick their ass. Which they should and have every right to."
Cuban added that the trader collective could target "any hedge fund, any stock, any time, for any reason and change the game."
He said it was the same as a major Wall Street analyst moving a stock by putting out a recommendation, but the Reddit version has "much more power and impact."