Crypto's Massive Marketing Efforts Have Drawn Few New Investors (washingtonpost.com) 99
Over the past year, crypto companies like FTX, Coinbase and Crypto.com have shelled out tens of millions of dollars to attract new customers. "Fortune favors the brave," Matt Damon famously said in a Crypto.com TV spot as he tried to induce Americans to open their digital wallets. Now a core metric of how successful they were has been returned, and experts say it's an eye-opening one: not successful at all. From a report: The number of people who invested in crypto has not expanded since last September before the push began, according to a new study led by Pew Research Center. The results, released Tuesday, build off an initial survey in September. Back then, Pew researchers asked 10,371 Americans if they have "ever invested in, traded, or used a cryptocurrency." Some 16 percent said they had. Last month, the nonprofit asked another sample group -- slightly smaller, at 6,034 Americans -- the same question. The number hadn't grown, with the same 16 percent saying they had at some point invested or traded in the alternate currency.
The results suggest that, despite numerous splashy campaigns by crypto interests, the great majority of Americans remain immune to their sales pitches. "It's pretty striking that for all the spectacular commotion around crypto in the last year, the number of people who invest or trade in crypto didn't budge," said Lee Rainie, Pew Research Center's director of internet and technology research, who spearheaded the study. "Attempts to bring in new buyers to the market didn't seem to move the needle at all."
The results suggest that, despite numerous splashy campaigns by crypto interests, the great majority of Americans remain immune to their sales pitches. "It's pretty striking that for all the spectacular commotion around crypto in the last year, the number of people who invest or trade in crypto didn't budge," said Lee Rainie, Pew Research Center's director of internet and technology research, who spearheaded the study. "Attempts to bring in new buyers to the market didn't seem to move the needle at all."
Pyramid scheme marketing (Score:5, Interesting)
You can spend all the money you want to advertise your scam but by now most people with available play money have already figured it out.
A few of my younger family members push it hard on the rest of the family but no bites. No one else will touch it.
Re: Pyramid scheme marketing (Score:1)
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Re: Pyramid scheme marketing (Score:2)
Re: Pyramid scheme marketing (Score:5, Interesting)
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And I have a tulip bulb here worth 2 trillions, what's your point?
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No there isn't. If someone wanted to buy all the crypto tokens that exist, it would theoretically cost them a trillion dollars. A significant fraction of that is Bitcoin that was mined for nearly nothing and has been locked up ever since. The majority has never been bought or sold for anything like its current price (or at all).
Note that the 1 trillion figure does not count my cryptocurrency, which is currently valued at $1 trillion per coin, with one million coins minted.
Re: Pyramid scheme marketing (Score:1)
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I'm curious, of the 19 million bitcoins mined already, how many change hands every day? I could find the number of transactions online, but not the cumulative value.
The above to say that market cap is a tricky concept. To illustrate the importance of the marginal price setter: if I buy 1 million grains of sand at the beach for $0, and the next guy buys a single grain for $1, is the market cap of our joint stack $1million?
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Re: Pyramid scheme marketing (Score:2)
The trick is the dollar only fluctates anlittle. While crypti fluctates like the norovirus. It seems as though you did catch it, and then suddenly your vomiting and shitting yourself like mad, and feel like crap for a day or two afterwards. Then you leanr better not to get so close to it again
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The trick is the dollar only fluctates anlittle.
That's not at all the point. Of course not all stores of value are equal. I happen to think bitcoin is a bad one, but that's also beside the point. Everything is a store of value, and they all fluctuate relative to each other.
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Imagine going into a store to buy something that costs $20 but when you hand them a $20 bill they say "Sorry, that's only worth $19 today."
Actually, that is precisely what is happening with your money. Or how much did you pay for a beer or Big Mac 5 years ago? 10 years ago? 20? 50? Starting to notice a pattern?
I already have money. I can already buy/sell anything I want without problems. If I put my real money into a real bank it is extremely unlikely that I will lose it.
https://www.in2013dollars.com/... [in2013dollars.com]
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Of course salaries also change over time. But the money in your bank doesn't. A dollar sitting in a bank account already lost 10% of its value just over the last year.
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No, I was administratively barred from posting after slamming the CCP. I listed their specific human rights violations every time someone said "but the US is bad, too!" to demonstrate there are different unequal levels of "bad". (No, I am not blindly pro-US government; the US government has done a lot of bad shit but no it is not the same).
Eventually the China Pooh Bear loving human rights violators will notice and I'll have to make another account to continue reminding people how utterly devoid of humani
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Is anyone surprised? (Score:5, Interesting)
If they can’t sell it to boomers and the elderly, they are going to run out of new suckers to sell this stuff to in my opinion.
And with near weekly articles describing some crypto exchange or another shuttering snd running with everyones imaginary, or closing down withdrawals, or the total collapse in value of another cryptocurrency, They’ll be hard pressed to gain many converts from the ‘anti crypto’ crowd.
Early on I could not see the point of crypto, its initial incarnations (as ‘internet currency’ seemed like buying chuck-e-cheese tokens for use on the internet. Then it morphed into a high value stock market like investment, and I briefly wondered if I had misjudged, and then the circus of failure and collapse started, and I was re-assured that I made the right choice.
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divided into two camps, the “already owns crypto and thinks everyone should” group, and the group that thinks crypto is just a new model of pyramid scheme, and refuses to touch it with a 10 foot pole.
I suspect the first camp also thinks crypto is just a new model of pyramid scheme, which is why they own it and think everyone should.
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Some, sure. But I think a lot just does not get it at all and is irrational and greed-driven. "Fear of missing out" is also a large factor, for sure.
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There are a lot of people with a vague notion of "taking control from the gubment" too.
Re: Is anyone surprised? (Score:2)
Yeah, they're called "marks"
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That nicely sums it up. Of course, with hindsight one could have made some killer profit, but if I could predict the future, I would just play the lottery and make an even greater killing. Fortunately (for a number of reasons), the future is by its very nature unpredictable.
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Seems some of the scammers have mod-points. Here is news for you cretins: The facts of the matter do not change if you try to hide them. They are blatantly obvious and clear to anybody not befuddled by greed.
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Seems some of the scammers have mod-points.
You've been here this long, and you haven't figured out who the other users are?
They don't need to be scammers. They're merely neckbeards who wish they were the scammers. It is a more credible fantasy for them to have gotten in on a pyramid scheme early than to have started a company or something to get rich.
They also likely bought in during the pandemic, and thought for awhile they had a giant stack of free money, then saw it evaporate. They may have bought some earlier, that is still way up, but they so m
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Seems some of the scammers have mod-points.
You've been here this long, and you haven't figured out who the other users are?
I have. I just like to insult them occasionally. I do not consider the stupid to be a protected group that deserves special consideration.
They don't need to be scammers. They're merely neckbeards who wish they were the scammers. It is a more credible fantasy for them to have gotten in on a pyramid scheme early than to have started a company or something to get rich.
They also likely bought in during the pandemic, and thought for awhile they had a giant stack of free money, then saw it evaporate. They may have bought some earlier, that is still way up, but they so much more later when it was up that they're now way down overall, but they still look at the portion that is up and dream about a future where all of it is up that much.
98% of users are complete assholes, and dumb as a nail. But they're very certain they have all the answers, on account of how sciencey their received knowledge is.
I do not disagree. They are still part of the scammers though.
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If they can't sell it to boomers and the elderly, they are going to run out of new suckers to sell this stuff to in my opinion.
This is the right opinion about all tech. There's always early adopters for new technologies, who can make up their own stories about how a technology might be used and choose to buy into a new technology. But every technology's purpose should be gauged by the "elderly grandmother" test. If a 70 year old woman (just picking some profile here, could be any average person) can understand why they need your technology, then you've got a story that can break into the wider market and the tech has a chance to
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Heh, for a while I regretted "not having invested in BC" early on when they were available for a few cents. Knowing myself though in hindsight I probably would have sold out once they were at $1 and I'd be kicking myself now, earlier or even later for not having held on to them longer, so it was probably for the better not getting involved in crypto in the first place.
Bad headline: (Score:2)
Is anyone surprised? The non-tech people still see crypto as confusing and complicated. The tech crowd that does not find it ‘new and scary’ is pretty well firmly divided into two camps, the “already owns crypto and thinks everyone should” group, and the group that thinks crypto is just a new model of pyramid scheme, and refuses to touch it with a 10 foot pole.
In other words, everyone who can figure out Crypto has figured out its a Ponzi scheme. The celebrity ads were just an attempt to keep the bottom layer of the scheme filled with willing suckers. Sounds like it's not working.
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I'd think that the recent returns of crypto investments have more to do with their lack of widespread adoption.
I don't care how much advertising you do or how easy you make crypto transactions... when your investment is down 60% for the year (Like Bitcoin currently is), most people aren't going to think that investing MORE money in it is a good idea.
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Ever watch how closely the NASDAQ and bitcoin are correlated? That's because the big runup was the late trend asset gatherers and momentum chasers like Cathie Wood and Microstrategy. Look at Friday, bitcoin took a big dump just when the shorts pulled the trigger.
"This Hedge Fund Trend Monitor, which analyzes 795 hedge funds with $2.4 trillion of gross equity positions ($1.7 trillion long and $764 billion short)"
All those shorts that were carried out on stretchers in the "most hated rally" since June, came b
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Ever watch how closely the NASDAQ and bitcoin are correlated?
So I did that, I went to yahoo finance and loaded the bitcoin chart, clicked "comparison" and then "NASDAQ" and there is no significant correlation at all.
Stop being an idiot who repeats shit they heard on social media. This is a website for nerds. Look shit up before you make claims. You're way outside your wheelhouse, and still didn't look up your claim? That's called a "moron."
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BTW, you are correct. Bitcoin does not track NADAQ very closely. NASDAQ is down 22% for the year. Bitcoin is down 60% for the year. I hope you don't have a lot of money invested in the crypto Ponzi scheme.
Re: Is anyone surprised? (Score:2)
Your statement was that it was closely correlated. Apparently it's not.
It may be worse, but that's not the point.
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What wealth transfer? You really think that you'll inherit anything from the boomers? They're gonna blow their dough on the way out, either trying to have a few last thrills themselves or to buy themselves a longer life.
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Wrong period to look at (Score:2)
Re: Wrong period to look at (Score:1)
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Well, at least the normal economy produces something tangible and useful, if only as a side effect.
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There are some morons that buy into any and all debunked crap all the time. Flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, etc. are all going strong.
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There are some morons that buy into any and all debunked crap all the time. Flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, etc. are all going strong.
Except that it doesn't directly cost anything to skip your shots or post pseudoscience on online forums. Being a crypto sucker "investor", however, requires having money left over after paying for the rent, the payment on your coal-rollin' truck, and the alcohol and/or tobacco habit(s).
There probably is no shortage of people who are foolish enough to dump money into crypto, but there's not many who also happen to earn 1%er incomes.
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I disagree. "Skipping your shots" comes with a high risk-cost and you may seriously harm or kill others as a result, see Covid, Measles, etc. It is completely unacceptable as long as you live within a society that includes people that cannot be vaccinated or vaccinations are not close 100% effective (many are not). If you isolate yourself in a community of all anti-vaxxers that have made an informed decision (!), (so no children), I am completely fine with it. Otherwise, it is a selfish, immoral act that sh
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I disagree. "Skipping your shots" comes with a high risk-cost and you may seriously harm or kill others as a result, see Covid, Measles, etc.
Those are externalized costs, and it's also probably likely someone who doesn't get their shots and ends up getting sick will also end up with society footing their hospital bill, too. Now yeah, if they end up dying, they've certainly paid for their ignorance - just not with money.
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How could one not invest? (Score:2)
What with all the stories of outright fraud, hackers stealing funds, crypto portfolios changing value faster than a roller coaster, who wouldn't want to invest?
Some investors can recognize a scam (Score:1)
And stay away. As usual, the small hopeful morons are the ones getting fleeced, some exceptions (that were luck, not smart) notwithstanding. Better play the lottery.
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I see some of the scammers have mod-points today....
Customers - is that we call them now? (Score:1)
The real win (Score:2)
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Shit, didn't see the woefully wrong moderation in time. Would have tried to bump this up if I didn't comment already.
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The means of exchange is just an incentivizing tools to have people be productive.
The value of savings is based on what future people are willing to give you for it. People who might very well decide they don't want your gold and certainly won't want your fucking bitcoin, however hard to produce a bitcoin is now ... what do they fucking care? They put real honest work into products, not burning electricity on creating digital tokens with no intrinsic productive or leisure function.
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Cryptocurrency as an "emergency" or "crisis" currency is bollocks. You need working computers and a working internet, two things you might not really have if push comes to shove.
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I couldn't figure out why... (Score:5, Insightful)
Social media traps you in a bubble of misinformation and fomo, so then I put 2+2 together and figured they were working on promoting cryptos on social media... makes sense to me... All the younger people I've surveyed have a kind of religious fervour, a system of "beliefs" lacking logical rigour, with all the talking points at hand. You don't want "The Man" knowing all your business, do you?
I'm going to say that cryptocurrencies ARE a form of social media. Amirite?
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The majority of people in any crypto business are in the "Sales" segment. Or as we generally call it "Hype and Astroturfing".
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Modern crypto is like multi-level marketing perfected. You don't have to deliver a product, or worry about weird accounting. Once people buy, they start convincing their friends on their own.
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then you don't need thousands of programmers/engineers
The only thing you can run exclusively with programmers/engineers are tiny tech consultancies. As soon as you get more than a couple of engineers you end up with overheads which include other staff.
Coinbase is known by all. Coinbase has business dealings with others. Coinbase is quoted in stories involving the FTC. Coinbase was on TV. Why is this relevant? Marketing, Legal, Sales, Finance, HR, PR. If you staff those by programmers/engineers your business will fail.
That should be self evident by the fact tha
There's your problem... (Score:4, Insightful)
have shelled out tens of millions of dollars
You're supposed to shell out your own cryptocurrency units. They were supposed to magically solve all our problems, remember? Using real money instead of your made up bullshit just shows how little confidence you actually have in your own bullshit product.
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Cryptocurrencies are currencies not investments (Score:3)
Cryptocurrencies are currencies, not investments. Their purpose is to facilitate a transaction like $, €, and ¥. Yet they fail at being currencies because people seem to think they're investments to be bought & held.
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Cryptocurrencies are not Holy Grease. They are a mechanism to part the stupid of their money. One should, for obvious reasons, rate the Cryptocurrencies in "Barnums".
Re:Cryptocurrencies are currencies not investments (Score:5, Insightful)
Cryptocurrencies fail at being currencies for many reasons, including slow/indeterminate transaction times, high transaction costs, high volatility, complicated exchange, and more. After bitcoin, new cryptocurrencies set out to address one or more of these issues and none are a stand-out success. The intention of crypto may be to be a currency but in practice crypto falls flat as a currency.
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Mostly because they fail at being currencies. If it takes forever and a day to pay with a currency, unless you're willing to accept ridiculous costs of doing business, it's quite useless.
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That's not quite fair. If you live in the USA and you wanted to pay someone in US dollars, but they lived in a different state, you'd have to drive there and hand over the cash. It would be even slower and more expensive if they lived in another country.
In practice it's fast because you are not paying in physical currency, but in a kind of electronic promise made by banks. Your bank balance falls, the other person's increases, and everyone trusts that in the end you will be able to convert the electronic
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While I don't agree that cryptocurrencies are real currencies, even if they were, the argument doesn't make sense. Real (traditional) currencies are also bought and sold as investments. For example, people who hold euros, a currency that is falling in value, might well buy dollars as an investment to hedge against their own depreciating currency.
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> I believe especially in the b2b space first
Honestly, this makes no sense. Why would a business pay a transaction fee to buy crypto with a fiat currency, pay a transaction fee to transfer crypto, and then pay a transaction fee to sell crypto for fiat? Its cheaper and easier to use traditional banking, plus safer. Very few businesses want to hold and use crypto, its volatile and a distraction from the actual business.
In my opinion, it is very difficult to create software that is 'safe' for financial tra
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> I believe especially in the b2b space first
Honestly, this makes no sense. Why would a business pay a transaction fee to buy crypto with a fiat currency, pay a transaction fee to transfer crypto, and then pay a transaction fee to sell crypto for fiat? Its cheaper and easier to use traditional banking, plus safer. Very few businesses want to hold and use crypto, its volatile and a distraction from the actual business.
Yes, the parties in the transaction would be motivated to stay in the cryptocurrency until it was necessary to use the value as fiat, otherwise there will likely be fees and regulations to deal with. I believe the volatility will settle. We are still so very early. Stable PoS chains are emerging. After that's established dApps will be omnipresent.
In my opinion, it is very difficult to create software that is 'safe' for financial transactions using the tools that many crypto projects use, let alone using the models behind some of these projects. Slashdot readers that have been around here for a long time know about software bugs, if you keep up with crypto news you see this in practice on a regular basis. None of the current crypto software will stand the test of time, it will fail for one reason or another in time. It is not that I'm a crypto hater, its that I can see the house of cards that crypto implementations are. I highly recommend you pull back the covers on some of your favorite crypto projects, because people looking to break the system definitely are doing that.
Yes, it is difficult to create robust software. Do you pay attention to the communities creating blockchain technology? They are dedicated. And, there's ple
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Crypto-currencies cannot be deposited at actual banks to earn interest. The accounts where you store crypto are not insured. If I somehow ended up with crypto-currency, the transaction fees to convert it to real currency and deposit in a bank would be well worth it.
In PoS crypto earns 'interest' while being used to validate transactions. Yes, it's not in a 'bank', but who needs a bank when it's handled by the chain? I think you are referring to exchanges like Coinbase and Bittrex when you say 'accounts where you store crypto'... Yes, many people entrust exchanges to hold their private keys and those people do bear some risk by doing so. Many others use wallets to store their crypto, where is arguably much less risk. If you feel better in 'real' currency (however y
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> It is definitely time to buy crypto now.
Is crypto a currency with which you do business or is it an investment? You seem to be saying that crypto is an investment now because it will be functional as a currency later. I can tell you that b2b transactions will require more guarantees, insurance, and forms of reversible transactions - the same features b2b transactions get today.
It should be obvious in 2022 that being open source does not infer security (by many eyes or otherwise). I'm certain that comp
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> It is definitely time to buy crypto now.
Is crypto a currency with which you do business or is it an investment? You seem to be saying that crypto is an investment now because it will be functional as a currency later. I can tell you that b2b transactions will require more guarantees, insurance, and forms of reversible transactions - the same features b2b transactions get today.
Yes, crypto is an investment as it's value will certainly (imo) rise as it becomes more entrenched as a low-cost currency for transactions, b2b and otherwise. Guarantees and reversible transactions will be things that smart contracts provide. Insurance will also be available, you can't keep the insurance industry out of anything in this world.
It should be obvious in 2022 that being open source does not infer security (by many eyes or otherwise). I'm certain that companies that makes security related software are dedicated and well funded too, yet they all have bugs, serious security bugs. Crypto is no different and will continue to have crippling bugs for the foreseeable future.
To me, open source infers greater security than a walled garden. Yes, there will be volatility related to security and other things as the space matures and grows.
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Crypto is an exercise in discovering why we have regulations.
Re:Crypto will run up again... (Score:5, Funny)
Found the person with a large portfolio desperately looking for dupes to dump it on.
Contrary to P T Barnum (Score:1)
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Saturated market is saturated (Score:2)
Like with every pyramid scheme, at some point there simply are no more people who can be duped into joining.
"Fortune favors the brave" (Score:2)
Invest is the wrong word (Score:2)
Cryptocurrencies are at best a gamble and at worst a scam
Nobody wants to buy a craptocurrency shit sandwich (Score:2)
Anyway...
P.T. Barnum as a consultant (Score:2)
When most lose their money, it's fairly obvious... (Score:2)
The hype train no longer works, when everyone knows someone who saw their own ass on the way down.
We've all chatted with family or colleagues bursting with enthusiasm (greed) at some points during the hype.
If you had to ask them again "hows your cryptocurrency thing going?", it would probably end up with them changing the subject.
"So, how much did you lose?"
It would be interesting to have some stats on how many actually made a profit - I'm willing to bet, very few.
Most "retail investors" get onboard a hype