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OPTO Sessions

Jaime Rogozinski on the GameStop short squeeze, DeFi, and NFTs

Jaime Rogozinski is the chief financial officer of Grupo Turbofin, who is more widely known for setting up the notorious WallStreetBets group on Reddit. In January 2020, he has published a book ‘WallStreetBets: How Boomers Made the World’s Biggest Casino for Millennials’ on the mental and investment evolution of Generation Z after it was hurt by the economic meltdown in 2008.

This next generation of investors see investing as an extension of ownership and prefer to gamify bets, which are widely discussed on WallStreetBets (WSB), a subreddit where participants discuss stocks, cryptocurrencies and trading. 

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WSB sprung to fame in January, when retail investors rallied together to boost the shares of ailing brick and mortar videogaming company GameStop [GME] by cornering hedge funds that had made significant short calls on the stock. As of October 21, the WSB community stands at circa 11 million.

The overarching philosophy of WSB is to democratise financial markets and allow for round the clock trading education and opportunities. “If we have enough people come together… we can do great things if we unite,” Rogozinski said.

WSB was started with the ideology of democratising retail investing because “it’s a community with like-minded individuals… hoping to make money”. Rogozinski’s approach to investing is that he is open to taking bigger risks with the possibility of bigger rewards.

“I use stories and entertainment fashion taken directly from WallStreetBets of individuals that did crazy things, [those who] took insane amounts of risk, got really lucky without understanding and turning a little bit of money in to fortunes or losing fortunes,” he said.

“I use stories and entertainment fashion taken directly from WallStreetBets of individuals that did crazy things, [those who] took insane amounts of risk, got really lucky without understanding and turning a little bit of money in to fortunes or losing fortunes”

 

The group frequently discusses synthetic stocks (also known as stonks), which are similar to derivatives in that they are the tokenised clone of the equity. Synthetic stocks comprise counter bets on stocks without any trade in the underlying share. The trades and the squaring off are typically executed in a cryptocurrency, and there are different platforms for different currencies, Rogozinski explained.

From there, the discussion on the Opto Sessions podcast branched out to another investment class that is gaining traction, NFTs or non-fungible tokens. NFTs are currently being used to own unique digital content. However, Rogozinski said, the application of NFTs are likely to expand significantly into several fields, including real estate.

Eventually, Rogozinsk expects cryptocurrency trading, decentralised finance, and tokenisation will converge.

As for his next big call, “I’m kind of getting excited about this stock called ANY, which is kind of blending in this crypto with the renewable energy,” he said.

“I’m kind of getting excited about this stock called ANY, which is kind of blending in this crypto with the renewable energy”

 

To find out more about Rogozinski’s journey, listen to the full episode.

 

 

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Listen to the full interview and explore our past episodes on Opto Sessions.

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