The past year has been extraordinary by any measure. The stock market experienced whipsawing volatility and rising prices. The COVID-19 lockdowns, zero-interest rates, stimulus checks, lack of sports, and apparently sheer boredom fed a superchanged bull run. And the year saw unprecedented growth in new accounts from individual investors at the full-service online brokerage platforms that make up Barron’s 26th annual Best Online Brokers Survey.
This fllow of new investors also produced some drama ore recently. In late January, the shares of struggling videogame retailer GameStop (ticker:GME), whipped up on an online message boar at Reddit called r/WallStreetBets, erupted. Suddenly, nearly everyone was opining on covered calls, short squeezes, meme trading, and the rapidly rising, then plummeting, prices of a group beaten-down stocks. Read more…..
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Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Business Insider’s parent company, Axel Springer, recently sat down with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to talk about the early days of creating Amazon, what he’s learned since then, how he funds his rocket company, Blue Origin, and what it’s like when the president of the United States is your biggest critic.