“FOMO” — Fear of Missing Out
FOMO is the only phrase to describe many millennial investment strategies, whether it is facilitated through traditional markets or crypto exchanges, the result is the same: eye-popping results lead to more greed, which today has left the door open to more individuals seeking to profit off a digitized token.
So far the internet mirrored what made-up reality, now memes have become the reality. Regardless if it’s a rug pull or DOGE, one thing is clear, the memes are winning out over the majority of hedge funds.
In real life, last year (2020) hedge funds “[had] frequent bursts of soaring volatility to score a near 12 percent return.” An 11.6% annual return is normal for a Boglehead, but millions of dollars have poured into projects thanks to the advent of TikTok and the genius of coins such as DOGE, Safemoon, Scamcoin, Poocoin, and ASScoin; drawing returns of 150% or more.
The ETHER maximalist or Bitcoin prophet viewing those returns can’t help but wonder if they’ve become the ‘boomer’, with their confidence, analysis, and circle of influence. ‘Cash grabs’ ‘scams’ ‘risky’ are all adjectives describing any investment strategy involving these tokens, exemplified by Safemoons detailed 2 file Github page.
Perhaps it’s a kind of virtue signaling, a way for members of any community to emphasize that they would never participate in such activities. However, if TikTok investors outperform maximalists, who is truly winning?
Early investors of meme coins are making millions off of coins that have little use. These coins are pumped on social media, with a web of Z-List Influencers running their promotional videos that are intended to be educating people into the crypto space.
Accounts like TikTok Investors on Twitter enjoyed 100,000 new followers in the past 8 months, thanks to ‘Big Brain’ individuals following for the aggregated popular ‘StockTok’ videos. There’s no doubt that the founders are stocking up on tokens before uploading videos, with that kind of following, driving sentiment is simply pressing the ‘Tweet’ button.
The early bird special isn't strictly for popular Twitter investors (pun intended). Early birds and project developers thrive in the age of “pump and dump” that has emerged with Binance. Everyone who invests in these coins is playing a game with the cards stacked against them. Insiders or Whales with a large supply of tokens won’t have a long-term vision for a ‘project’ that took just a few hours to dream up and fork.
Walt Disney was right, “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” A simple Binance account and a flashy website will garner millions of dollars, given some clever marketing or virality.
One thing is clear, social networks move markets. Enthusiastic subreddits, coordinated Discord servers, Twitter memes, and Tiktok ‘stock’ pickers are a new reality to investing. Hell, even the WSB Index (made out of popular stocks from r/wallstreetbets) is up 194%. The vast majority of Hedge Funds and rational crypto investors are losing out to ‘mania’ created online.
Drawing similarities to Google in 2004 reviving the tech industry in the form of indexed search, memes are reviving DOGE and all of its Tokenized meme-friends. Whatever category of the cryptocurrency market has your money, we’re all playing different parts of the same game, whether we’re using meme tokens, blue chips, or stablecoins, and we should take pride in the fact that we’ve all outperformed hedge funds.