While I am no investment expert and do not offer financial advice (disclaimer is now out of the way haha), I do know common sense and I see situations and outcomes from a variety of perspectives. If there is such a thing as multiverse, I like to imagine how the same thing plays out in other parallel universes from time to time. Here is a New York Times article titled The Hopes That Rose and Fell with Gamestop. In it, a guy named Shawn Daumer who happens to be 19 bought 47K worth of Gamestop stock before it really shot up. At 483 per share, he was up over half a million dollars. When the stock price started to nosedive, he could not watch it all go down and at some point he sold the shares off for 65K profit, as the article states. Now, I believe that some of you would say great, he got out with a decent profit. However, dearest readers, when I peak inside a parallel universe where Daumer did this but had a not so easy to trigger stop loss, a basic understanding of chart layouts together with support and resistance levels picked at least arbitrarily, at most through the use of moving averages and something like Bollinger bands. That way, he would have come out with a serious profit based on some level of technical analysis mixed with news and social media sentiment, he would have known very well he could lose a lot, and he would have gotten out with a life changing amount of money. In this universe, however, as far as I can see it, Daumer's 65K gain is a failure of epic proportions.
Why am I so hard on him and anyone else who had a similar outcome? Simple. I am hard on him for the same reason that I do not trade actively right now. People who day trade, swing trade or actively invest long term have to have a strategy that gives them an edge and, over countless trades, they need to win overall and enough to meet their needs and goals. Such people would never allow themselves to get in a trade and then watch their unrealized profit get cut down and just watch it happen without a strategy in place. If they let it go they may still profit, but a profit on a single trade has to cover for future slow periods and (hopefully) small losses that always come down the road. Losing lots of unrealized profit is therefore a recipe for disaster over the long term and you cannot do that.
Now, you may say wait a minute, Daumer did not want to be a trader or investor- he just wanted to YOLO invest in Gamestop or take a gamble on it and see if he becomes rich. Personally, I cannot agree with that. Have you ever seen someone get so lucky to profit almost half a million on 47K and then stop?! So no, people do not stop and they just delude themselves that it will be just a one time thing. Also, if you want to start anything without planning to grow it and make it successful long term even if you end up keeping it small, you will typically fail. Therefore, people typically get lucky on something like Gamestop, then go again based on hype and feeling, and the next time or some other time they do so they lose part or all of their gains. Had their first profit come not just from luck but also from preparation, analysis and risk management, they would be more likely to replicate that success because they would have an edge and would gain valuable experience by doing things the right way. Statistically speaking, the only way to ever become rich and successful as an entrepreneur or investor is to enter into a large number of transactions with a positive outcome; those who get rich off of just one such transaction are statistical outliers, and I think we should not model our approaches to doing things better based on outliers.
One final thing, dearest readers. When you start looking at things more carefully, applying risk management criteria and so on, you will realize one more important thing. Unlike many people who YOLO invested into Gamestop, corona stocks and so on, you are no longer playing all or nothing. How amazing is that? The problem with many people today is that they play all or nothing while not realizing (or lying to themselves that they are not realizing) this is exactly what they are doing. You need to talk to people who care about you about the potential downsides and losses as they are very real. You need to hear yourself say it to someone who cares about you. You need to see the look on their face. Then, if you still want to YOLO, go for it- though I hope you decide to sit it out until you learn to do it well, and eventually do it right.