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Calls, puts, froth, a death cross and a dead-cat bounce.
That’s just some of the standard stock-market vocabulary.
But have you heard of tendies, bagholders and diamond hands?
These are some of (printable) terms flying across Reddit’s WallStreetBets, a salty forum peppered with its own arcane language, now at the center of a frenzied stretch of trading in GameStop’s stock GME, +67.87%, and a handful of other companies.
As of midday on Wednesday, GameStop’s stock was up more than 1,500% in 2021. But major brokerage firms TD Ameritrade and its owner Charles Schwab on Wednesday started putting guardrails in place to control the buying spree, and the Biden administration said it was “monitoring the situation” with GameStop’s stock. The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -2.03% was off less than a percentage point and the S&P 500 SPX, -1.93% is up less than half a percentage point in that same year-to-date span.
Read also: Opinion: Stop laughing about GameStop’s stock mania — no, really
The WallStreetBets forum had 3.3 million members as of midafternoon Wednesday; the number appeared to be climbing throughout the day. Redditors — as Reddit users are known — in the forum casually throw around some of the standard internet fare like “newbie,” meant for rookie retail investors, and “boomer,” for the older crowd and the Wall Street establishment.
But here’s a look at some of the specific WallStreetBets phraseology:
‘Tendies’
Loosely speaking, that’s chicken tenders, shorthand for gains, profits or money. As one Redditor wrote, “LEVERAGE YOUR HOUSE!!!! LETS GET THESE TENDIES!!!!” — followed by nine icons of a rocket blasting off. (There are a lot of those on the forum, too, signaling a stock’s upward trajectory.)
‘Bagholding’ or ‘Bagholder’
There’s someone who makes a savvy play to sell high, but then there’s someone who holds stock that’s fallen in value and keeps holding, thinking the shares will recover. “I rather be bagholding a tech company than retail stock,” a Redditor observed.
‘Diamond Hands’ and ‘Paper Hands’
While we’re on the topic of holding, these two phrase refer to people’s hands — but it’s really about what they can stomach. If you’ve got “diamond hands,” you’re ready to hold a position for the end goal, despite the potential risk, headwinds and losses. If you’ve got paper hands, you exit a position, or fold, early on because the heat of the situation might be too much.
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Like rocketships pointing up, up, up, there are a lot of diamond emojis all over WallStreetBets.
One Redditor who used the diamond and hand emojis in talking about GameStop wrote, “I’m either going to the moon or losing my” — and then inserted a moneybag emoji.
‘YOLO’
Standing for “you only live once,” this acronym is already out there. But it’s got special meaning in WallStreetBets, where it’s sometimes used as a verb, to describe the act of gambling big, wagering like there’s no tomorrow. One Redditor said, “For those making large bank on this I congratulate you. For those who may lose a little, F it YOLO and this is epic history in the making. Go get em!!!!”
