Well, look who’s crawled out from under the wreckage of their 2022 portfolios. The retail trader—that persistent, unkillable cockroach of the financial ecosystem—is back, and they’ve brought their smartphones with them. According to the latest data that I was forced to read with my own two suffering eyes, a fresh retail-trading frenzy is currently reshaping the financial markets. The ‘experts’—those overpaid parrots in bespoke suits—are scrambling to find someone to blame. They can’t blame the government’s ‘stimmies’ anymore, as that particular well of inflation-inducing nectar dried up long ago. No, this time, the culprit is far more insidious: it’s the apps, and it’s the DORKs.

Let’s be clear about what we’re witnessing. This isn't the 'democratization of finance' that the Silicon Valley ghouls promised us while they were busy selling our order flow to the highest bidder. This is the gamification of economic suicide. We have moved past the era where people actually cared about a company’s price-to-earnings ratio or, heaven forbid, what the company actually manufactures. We are now firmly entrenched in the era of 'vibes' and zero-day-to-expiry (0DTE) options. These are financial instruments designed for people who find Las Vegas too slow and want to experience the thrill of bankruptcy in the time it takes to order a latte. It is a testament to the terminal boredom of the modern human that we’ve decided the best use of our collective cognitive surplus is to treat the New York Stock Exchange like a digital scratch-off ticket.

The narrative used to be that the pandemic-era surge in trading was a fluke—a product of bored shut-ins with a government check burning a hole in their pockets. But the stimmies are gone, spent on overpriced rent and artisanal beard oil, and yet the trading volumes persist. Why? Because the interface of the modern brokerage app is indistinguishable from a slot machine. They’ve replaced the somber dignity of wealth management with confetti animations and haptic feedback. It turns out you don’t need a stimulus check to gamble when you have a psychological addiction to green candles on a graph. The 'DORKs'—that subculture of individual traders who live in the fetid basements of Reddit threads and Discord servers—have realized that if enough idiots move in the same direction, they can briefly disrupt the predatory algorithms of the institutional sharks. It’s a battle between the moronic and the greedy, and as usual, I’m rooting for the asteroid.

From a philosophical perspective, this is the inevitable endpoint of a late-stage capitalist nightmare where the ‘real’ economy has become a hollowed-out shell. When hard work leads to nothing but escalating debt and the inability to own a home, why wouldn't the average person throw their last five hundred dollars at a highly leveraged bet on an AI-powered dog-walking app? The market is no longer a mechanism for capital allocation; it’s a theater of the absurd. The institutional players—the hedge fund managers who look like they were grown in a lab for the express purpose of being punched—are crying foul because the 'unwashed masses' are introducing volatility into their carefully rigged game. They talk about 'market integrity' as if they haven't been front-running the public since the invention of the ticker tape. Their pearl-clutching is as performative as a politician’s prayer.

We are watching the total decoupling of price from value. It is the financial equivalent of a Dadaist painting, except instead of a urinal in an art gallery, it’s a bankrupt car rental company being valued at billions because some guy with a 'diamond hands' avatar said so on the internet. Both sides are equally loathsome: the retail traders who think they are revolutionary heroes for buying call options, and the institutional titans who think they are the guardians of civilization while they strip-mine the planet for pennies. They deserve each other. They deserve the volatility. They deserve the inevitable crash that will wipe out the savings of the foolish and the bonuses of the wicked alike.

In the end, this retail frenzy isn't a sign of economic health; it’s a symptom of a societal fever. We have created a world so devoid of meaning that we seek fulfillment in the flickering numbers of a rigged casino. The apps provide the drug, the DORKs provide the peer pressure, and the market provides the slaughterhouse. Don’t expect me to be surprised when the bubble bursts and the 'investors' go back to complaining that the system is rigged. It was always rigged. You just thought you were the one holding the cards this time. You’re not. You’re the stakes. Stay tuned for the collapse; it’s the only honest thing left in this wretched industry.