No caste of people, in the entire world, projects more confidence than men in their 20’s talking to other men in their 20’s in the beer line. Sometimes, though, one man in his 20’s outshines the rest.
Such was the case at Jester King on Saturday (pastoral brewery out in Hill Country, for those of you not in Austin). They’ve got a complex system out there—order from your phone, pay from your phone, go pick up in person after waiting in this roundabout open-air line with no straightforward exit once you have your beer and/or food—and the result of that complex system was that I spent ten minutes in front of a couple bros who were talking about the stock market shenanigans.
One of them was fairly standard for a dude in his 20’s. Knew a little about what he was talking about, knew he wasn’t a full-on expert, was projecting that he knew everything about it all because he was trying to impress his buddy but wasn’t trying to argue about anything—just trying to fit in. Short. Skinny. A little slouchy.
The other, though, was a stock market expert.
Now.
There’s no way this guy actually works in finance, or at least not at a high level. He might say he works in finance, and he might have a job with finance in the title, but this guy doesn’t really work in finance. He was throwing vocab terms out there like a freshman in high school trying to get through a speech in Spanish class. He was making sure the other guy knew he does not use Robinhood, but instead uses one of the first alternatives that comes up when you search “Robinhood alternatives” on Google. He was entirely focused, just like his buddy, on this one small section of stocks that’d been the source of all the news last week, but unlike his buddy, he was doing this seriously, and rigorously, and successfully, all evidently with just as much background and knowledge and time as his buddy.
This was, as you can imagine, hugely entertaining. Skinny-slouchy-dude would say some observation-that-sounds-like-an-independent-thought like, “Yeah, so there were a lot of shorts on GameStop and AMC, but there weren’t actually many on Nokia and Blockbuster and BlackBerry. Those were just people speculating,” and within two sentences, having used the terms “call option,” “covered put,” and “stop-limit,” the stock market expert had communicated only exactly what his skinny-slouchy buddy had implied: That buying Nokia and Blockbuster and BlackBerry didn’t really make sense. Then, over the next eight or twelve sentences, stock market expert elucidated how buying those three stocks was the stupidest thing someone could do, how those would not make you money, how to make money you had to find the stocks where hedge funds had a lot of shorts, and how you needed to be on this reddit thread and trading through this app and you couldn’t just mess around with this stuff in your spare time if you wanted to make your investing seriously matter. It was a masterclass in being a beer line alpha.
Anyway, after those eight or twelve sentences, stock market expert got distracted by something on his phone and stopped talking for a moment. At which point skinny-slouchy-guy goes, “Yeah, so I had to sell out of Nokia and Blockbuster and BlackBerry.”
And the best part? Stock market expert didn’t even seem to hear him. Just went right back into the monologue, telling his silently-nodding-and-unknowingly-extremely-bored buddy everything he believed everyone should know about the financial world, most of which I’m pretty sure he got on Reddit, and the rest of which I’m pretty sure he got through misunderstanding something he read on Reddit.
He was unstoppable. Indefatigable. The kind of person who will corner you at a party and tell you about the music festival he hosted in his fraternity’s backyard in college, which was, believe it or not, the sickest party Wilmington, North Carolina has ever seen (to be fair, that might be true—it sounded like it got a good crowd). Just going on about the stock market, not listening to his friend, and growing stronger with every passing word as he realized he could talk about this, and that no one was going to stop him, and that in his worldview, that made him an expert.
I think that’s the best part of this whole GameStop saga. The number of beer line alphas it has birthed. Without it, who knows what these guys would be talking about? Certainly not the coup in Myanmar. But thanks to the GameStop thing, breweries everywhere thrived this weekend, carried aloft on a bed of dudes-who-have-a-strong-opinion-on-the-best-way-to-increase-your-bench-press.
So thank you, GameStop. For my ten minutes, and for the ten minutes of so many like me this Saturday.
