This exhibit was created to capture the discussion around investing through online forums both public and private. Discussion topics include hand-drawn technical analysis over trading charts, a method of sharing opinion or advice through visual means. Chats of users typing to each other in public spaces, communication to work through ideas with peers which is open to viewing and archived on the forum. Other chats include users reacting to public news, discerning amongst others their potential economic impact in real-time. There's also use of the forum to share in-depth and highly thought out research with large audiences, sharing the author's findings and opinions with everyone.
These discussions are important. Discussion around investing has historically been performed behind closed doors, using club lunches and private meetings to communicate privately on finances. This separates sources of knowledge from public audiences, gate-keeping lots of worthwhile financial discussion from open audiences. Technology has opened this discussion up to retail traders, the every-day investor. Advents in technology, chat forums such as Reddit and Discord, have led to the meteoric rise of stocks and options discussion online. This has been healthy for finance, the public setting of online forums means discussion can be seen by strangers across the globe and everyday people who take interest in trading can post their financial opinions for anyone to see. This threatens conventional financial advisors, and while many of them have openly condemned these online forums as "irresponsible" others have learned from the open discussion. Cathie Wood, founder of recent top-performing fund ARK Invest, opts in for transparent communication in contrast to her peers. Weekly emails disclose their trades and strategy for anyone interested, making them vulnerable to competition. Her exchange funds are grossly outperforming the market, utilizing the same growth stocks that are popularly discussed on chat forums. Transparent communication is healthy for the financial sector, the discussion that takes place publically online is done by individuals but managed funds are starting to follow suit. It's important to capture some of this every-day discussion that rages on. I'm archiving a sample so the audience of this exhibit can see an unadulterated view of how every-day users discuss investing.
The online forums of discussion, most commonly Reddit, also open up the types of discussion around investing. Memes and trolls proliferate in every corner of the internet, and investing forums are no different. An example is of user-generated content of a cat making financial decisions, posted by the cat's owner. Obviously it's intended as a joke, and most users react to it as such but within the comment section of every investing joke and meme there's serious investing discussion going on. On the other side of this, people use anonymity and ease of access to mislead others for personal gain. Lying is a common tool used to trick the public, but more crafty and nefarious forces use bots to hype up false sentiment. It's hard for one user to lie and trick the world, but it's easy for one user to be tricked by fake accounts pretending to be the opinions of the world. Moderators and users try to stop it and raise awareness, but it will take time for technology to find an answer to this new form of market manipulation.
We'll analyze the types of content and communication that's on a public investing forum and private investing forum. All artifacts will be examples that can be viewed by every member of the group to ensure this is an exhibit of open investing discussion.
Credits
Axel Lagergren 2021