https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55843829
[GameStop: Meet the amateur traders fighting Wall Street
Until the start of the pandemic, it had never
occurred to
Alex Patton that he could
become an amateur trader.
But now, in the wake of the GameStop shares frenzy,
he is something of an unlikely
veteran of the financial markets.
"Before Covid struck, I didn't know the
first thing about investing," says the
28-year-old railway cyber-security engineer,
of Kingston upon Thames, south-west London.
But after the stock market took a
bad tumble in March last year and dealt
his pension savings a blow, he decided that
he should, as he puts it,
"take a more active role in managing my money".
As a dual national with British and
American citizenship, he had no
difficulty in setting up an account
with US trading platform Robinhood,
which has found itself at the
centre of the GameStop furore.]
[Eighteen-year-old
Myron Sakkas,
of Coventry, who is studying at Warwick University,
lost £30 on GameStop shares,
which he owned for "a couple of hours" and
sold when he saw what was happening.
He has had an account on the Trading 212 platform
since August last year and is hoping to go into
investment banking after he gets his degree.
But for now, he is disillusioned by what he sees as
"market manipulation" directed against people like him.
For him, there was a definite target in the GameStop
share wars: as he puts it,
"the people that were responsible
for [the financial crisis of] 2008
and were never held responsible".
"We understand that there are risks, but this wasn't
an actual crash. It was caused by people protecting
corporate interests and normal people lost again.]