FEAR GREED - Fascination

A wild, emotional year drew investors to meme stocks and Bored Ape NFTs—and changed markets

- Pat Regnier and Paula Dwyer

There was a huge merger in 2021: the combination of popular culture and modern finance. Tom Brady and Matt Damon were suddenly shilling for cryptocurrency exchanges. Digital tokens that started off as elaborate pranks represented tens of billions of dollars of paper wealth. And cartoon pictures of apes were selling for millions of dollars on something called the nonfungible token market, which almost no one had heard of in the long-ago days of 2020.

This wasn’t always a friendly merger. Small investors teamed up to buy shares of GameStop Corp. and AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. with the express intention of bankrupting hedge funds that were betting against the companies. Wall Street pros were as flummoxed as anyone by the rise of crypto markets.

Everyone seemed to want in, from teens trading during Zoom school to older folks who missed out on dot-com-era riches and were determined not to let another bubble pass them by without claiming a piece. It’s difficult to know exactly how many people turned themselves into traders. One indicator: Verified users of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase alone grew to 73 million by September, from 32 million at the beginning of 2019. And the percentage of the affluent using self-managed accounts for at least part of their investments jumped to 69% in 2021, from 35% in 2015, according to a report from research firm Cerulli Associates.