Rush 'n' Roulette in Late-Stage Capitalism
Writing, fighting & investing in a portfolio that generates alpha, or at the very least savagely beats inflation black ‘n’ blue
I. - On the Importance of Portfolios
Catching up with my friend one evening at the Catholic Club drenched in last year’s Christmas spirit, I was humorously castigated for not having posted in The Trench Dispatch for a while. My friend stated that as a subscriber he was owed some stories, which I wholeheartedly agreed with. Now, I do want to share all I’ve been doing. I have drafts being revised, drafts being birthed, and drafts ready to be sent out in the world. The dispatch is the bedrock, no doubt, and everything will eventually find its way to it, but the interim period between draft and published post has been getting longer.
For, I’ve been sending my writing to different publications. It’s not the most enjoyable process, I’d rather publish it in my newsletter for people who’ve directly subscribed, but the writing needs to cast a net as wide and expansive as possible to generate traction, and hopefully cash and capital. Turning tricks for magazines, journals, and other online publications has the advantage of tapping into established networks of readers, other writers, editors, and industry insiders. The good ones pay, even if nominally. Some pay exorbitantly.
Getting paid for your writing feels good, for a minute or so. Of course, building a newsletter is a great flex, but pragmatically, it makes sense to send your writing out to other platforms too. Practically, having written a story, or an essay, and sent it for publication elsewhere, I cannot publish it in my newsletter until a certain period (three months conventionally), and if accepted it’s another three months typically before I retain republishing rights (if it’s for a literary magazine). For journalistic pieces, I don’t think I even get republishing rights (idk). Anyway, a pipeline, a corpus of drafts must be ready so I can dispatch them off to different places simultaneously. That’s just the trade, the sport.
For the balancing act of jacking up the output, sitting with the uncertainty of whether your submissions will be accepted, and to keep on keeping on irrespective of the outcome, you’ll need the privilege of space and time. And you’ll have to be conscious of it, grateful for it, and be deliberate about it. So, joint at the hip, to my writing, is my financial portfolio, deliberately started as a hedge soon after my newsletter, a hedge to complement my writing portfolio. And no, it’s not a vein of gold, it doesn’t allow me to be a bona fide carefree dilettante. Not yet. Just like the writing, active investing also involves a relentless grind for that kind of alchemy.
Virginia Woolf, in her famous lecture-turned essay, A Room of One’s Own (1929), stated that “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”. The predicate of that iconic line holds true for everybody though, doesn't it:
“…must have money and a room…?”
She and her husband, Leonard Woolf, had the means to start their own publishing house, Hogarth Press, which published her writings and the writing of other Bloomsbury Group members; they also published early works of psychoanalysis and translations of Russian literature. Writers owning publishing houses, architects owning their own firms, musicians owning their masters, workers owning the means of production; or perhaps everybody owning a portfolio, an estate, that liberates them from material worry, to create and innovate with abandon. It sounds too Kumbaya, too utopian, but the simplest prescription for anybody’s material malady has always been – money and a room.
Woolf was writing back during the heydays of industrial capitalism, about a century ago. So, how do things stack up today in the postmodern Kaliyuga that is the neoliberal hellscape of late-stage capitalism? The age of ‘hustle-culture’, the aeon of the entrepreneur? A lot more confusing and cutthroat. And how important does a portfolio become?
Very. Because it’s brutal out there.
II.
The death of an employee, the murder of a CEO, and the public reaction to both these incidents illustrate just how the culture is feeling. May they rest in peace.
On September 2024, Anna Sebastian Perayil tragically passed away. She was a chartered accountant for one of the ‘big four’ accounting firms. Her parents blamed the long gruelling work hours, often extending into weekends and past midnights. The company bosses maintained that their working conditions were just fine, that it was just an ‘unfortunate incident’. Later another employee of the firm came out on Reddit stating that they got the news through a centralized email and that they were told she already had ‘health issues’, allegedly. Anyway, what is certain is that nobody from the company attended the funeral.
Ever the immaculate gaslighter, our finance minister, spewed some platitudinal bile about “inner strength” to the media in response to the tragedy. Elsewhere, tone deaf and unable to read the room, the founder of Infosys, Narayana Murthy, continued defending his statement that Indians should be working 70 hours a week, ranting about the shift to the five-day workweek being a travesty. Social media lit up with people venting about 18-hour workdays, and the pressure to work through ill health and stress, not even getting public holidays off. Discourse on ineffective Indian labour laws and the need for trade unions in corporate India resurrected in the news cycle. People vented their vexation against the system, the finance minister, the out-of-touch businessman, and the shark tank of the corporate world.
Ofc, it’s all business as usual again for corporate India now.
Three months later, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson was gunned down in the streets of New York. For many, the alleged shooter, Luigi Mangione became a folk hero; they thirsted after him; they defended his alleged action (it ought to be pointed out that Mangione has pleaded ‘not guilty’). Poor Thompson though, he was just a cog in the wheel of the headless and thoughtless system of capital. There are many appalled at the jokes, the sympathizing even the celebration of the assassination, but most noticeable has been the public indifference at the fact of a man’s murder, and the cathartic glee at the killing of a symbol – the rich CEO of a health insurance company noted to have a high number of claims denial, legitimately causing many sick people pain and suffering through cold structural violence.
Such is the divide and disenchantment in late-stage capitalism.
III.
In this country, the 2010s were supposed to be when we liquidated the ball and chain of corrupt bureaucracies, politicians and crony capitalists and go skyrocketing into top-gear economic growth. Some people had great optimism for Amritkaal. And how did that turn out?
We got the electoral bonds system in 2018 – literally corporations paying political patronage to parties. In return for what? For interest payments on a principal? The principle of crony capitalism is what. The Supreme Court ruled electoral bonds as unconstitutional months before the 2024 general elections, but more than half a decade of damage was done. When the details emerged, it illustrated a protection racket at the highest level, benefitting the apex corporations and the politicians in power. The public, the majority of smaller and medium-sized businesses were just squeezed out of their dues and their agency– out of political representation and economic opportunities.
It's estimated that the top 1% own 40% of the national wealth today, a level of disparity not seen since colonial times. Yes, concessional social welfare policies exist as carrots for the poor, but the “invisible hand of the market” wields the stick against everybody, save the rich.
Consumption data indicates the middle class has shrunk, at least in participation in the consumption economy. There is widespread wage stagnation and a long-festering unemployment crisis. They tried to bury the data, back in 2019 when the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE) reported that unemployment was at a 45-year high of 7%. Fast forward to June 2024, CMIE clocked it at around 9.2%. The International Labour Organization reported that young people (18 to 29) made up 82.9% of the country’s unemployed in 2022. Meanwhile, 90% of the workforce still works in the informal sector, where conditions are worse. The only things increasing are corporate profits, direct and indirect taxes, property taxes but not corporate ones, and inflation.
The government is an ostrich with their head in the sand. Huffing copium.
IV.
Digital brokerage and demat apps, like Zerodha, Groww, Angel One, and so on proliferated in the late 2010s. Suddenly you could invest and trade in securities through your phones like it’s candy crush. Volumes of people leveraged the moment. As per SBI securities, from 1997 to 2022, 110 million demat accounts were opened, whereas just between January 2023 and August 2024 60 million new ones were opened. Passive investing in mutual funds has been steadily rising too – from 83.9 million in April 2024 to more than 100 million active SIP accounts by December 2024, as per the Associations of Mutual Funds in India.
I had no particular insight when I entered the market, even though I felt like I did. I was just another statistic that made up that wave of new entrants.
The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) reported that many newcomers come from beyond the metropoles; between FY22-FY24, only 23.5% were from Tier 1 cities - Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune and Kolkata – the rest were from tier II, tier III cities, and even smaller towns and villages.
But here’s the other thing, the number of intra-day traders pole vaulted from around 1.5 million in 2019 to 6.9 million by 2023. For a segment of people, long-term investing is an irrelevance compared to the rush of trading. As per SEBI, the number of traders in the riskier futures and options (F&O) derivatives increased from 5.1 million to 9.5 million from 2022 to 2024. And still counting. Everybody wants a piece and they’ve been gambling recklessly!
SEBI reported from FY22 to FY24 that 91.1% of retail traders lost money in derivative trading; 92.8% lost on average around ₹2 lakh, only 7.2% made a profit, and only 1% made a profit of over ₹1 lakh . The participation of people below age 30, rose from 31% to 43%, and 93% of those young bucks incurred losses in F&Os.
India Today talks of people losing ₹8.75 lakh (875,000) in a matter of minutes in failed trades and of people entering gambling spirals after losing ₹3.5 lakhs (350,000) in a single day, shedding light on the crazy speculative circus out there. Meanwhile, the tale of a mere 20-year-old circulates as a cautionary example of the madness, the mayhem; the kid stacked up ₹20 lakhs in losses trying to leave the game, but only came back to stack up another ₹26 lakhs the next year, having borrowed from friends, moneylenders and even stealing from his parents.
In reporting on the 2024 Bharat Options Traders Summit in Bangalore, Financial Times contextualizes the extremities of frenzy by referring to a 26-year-old’s suicide after a failed trade and an almost $12000 debt to banks in Chennai. At the summit, they interview 30-year-old Akash MB who quit his sales job and entered trading full time; he tells them that he “initially lost the equivalent of $2400” (over ₹2 lakhs) and that he’s game about learning and getting better. They talk to a 23-year-old Anand, who tells them he’s travelled 300 miles to be at the conference, that he’s poor but has big dreams for his life.
Do you see the rush, the cavalier chances being taken?
SEBI did. They had to patronize and protect people from their own impulses. They introduced new rules – increasing lot sizes from ₹5-10 lakh to ₹15-20 lakh, having an upfront collection of option premiums rather than deferred payments and so on – making F&O trading more expensive, to deter the little guy. SEBI also cracked down on unregulated finfluencers, removing over 15000 finfluencer content sites, pushing for others to register with them.
Because the ‘finfluencer’ space was going overdrive on snake oil – creators making magical claims and ‘guarantees’, running pump-and-dump schemes, soliciting on WhatsApp, Telegram and YouTube channels. For some making content was more lucrative than actual stocks. In 2023, SEBI banned the YouTuber ‘Baap of Charts’, Mohammed Naseeruddin Ansari, and ordered him to return ₹17.2 crores (172 million) in unlawful gains made through selling ‘educational courses’ to his followers, all the while having losses of up to more than ₹2 crores (20 million) through his actual trades. The Sadhana Broadcast stock scam was another such highlight; the promoter of Sadhana Broadcast, Gaurav Gupta, the finance YouTuber Manish Mishra and even actor Arshad Warsi (our very own Circuit), amongst others, were banned and fined by SEBI for misleading people about the stock and making an alleged total of ₹41.85 crores (~418 million) of illegal profits – a classic pump and dump scheme preying on people’s financial frenzy.
V.
Akshat Shrivastava, a finfluencer, gives insightful investing advice on YouTube. However, he keeps saying his content is pure economics and not political. I think he means to say ‘partisan’. At times, his comment section becomes a political slugfest, especially when he’s critical about economic policies. Akshat Shrivastava now gets into Twitter fights with people who deep-throat the party line, you know the kinds with the awareness of frogs in slow boiling water. He’s just one of the content creators in the Indian cyberspace of finance and economics perhaps still in denial, but begrudgingly realizing that it’s all tied to the political. Again – tied to high politics (scientific and theoretical politics), not partisan realpolitik bullshit.
The political economy is fertile for pop discourse, often in conflation with pop culture; the opulent Ambani wedding got people talking about the galactic levels of wealth disparity in the country. Plus, the fact that billionaires can get the government to allow their backyards to become an impromptu international airport and get the Indian Air Force to handle the air traffic had eyes rolling. More recently, the rumour that it’s London calling for Virat Kohli and Anoushka Sharma following Kohli’s retirement from cricket has sparked another round of internet discourse about the flight of the wealthy to foreign shores. There’s outrage and scorn at the absurdity of high-level policy discussions about salted popcorns being taxed at 5% and caramel popcorns at 18%; at Gukesh D paying ₹4.8 crore ($470,220) as tax out of his ₹11.45 crore ($1.3 million) prize money after winning the world chess championship. There’s frustration and wounded pride all around.
The internet is rife with rants lamenting wasteful public expenditure on vanity statues and monuments in a time of crumbling roads, congested and polluted cities and collapsing bridges; lamenting relentless inflation, privatization of services and the hollowing out of public education and healthcare; over the feeling of entrenched corruption and particular over the byzantine levels of taxes even though most services have to be increasingly purchased through private means – even clean air to breathe in cities now require people to buy air purifiers.
Meanwhile, Big Business mints money, vampirically leveraging public resources. Reliance Jio captured the mobile internet data market on the backs of the telecom infrastructure of BSNL, a state-owned company run on taxpayer money. Firms like Larsen & Toubro, Adani Enterprises, and others bag lucrative contracts for developing roads, ports and airports, for which people have to pay private tolls and a premium to access; things that once upon a social contract the government was supposed to provide in exchange for people’s taxes. They say the market will take care of all the negative externalities of roided-out privatization, except that Big Business owns the market.
Online investing communities exalt their efforts in investing as a fighting chance to beat inflation and grow their wealth, and to get in on the elite capture of the political economy, and perhaps get a share of the profits. They’re also aware of the state favouring certain companies over others, distorting market competition, market manipulation by larger institutional firms at the cost of small-time retail investors, and just how much of an unfair advantage Big Money has over the humble individual and their humble portfolio.
Although, retail investors cannot eschew private enterprise in entirety, and many will still see socialist policies like reservations and welfare measures with myopic disdain, and try to position themselves above ‘politics’. Their preoccupation may be just market returns, but they find it harder and harder to ignore the inherent political dynamics of the economic base. Politics and economics are natural bedfellows. They always were, always have been. Because to say, taxation regimes, the union budget, fiscal and monetary policies, and market competition are not political is the same logic as saying the East India Company were just a bunch of really talented shopkeepers.
VI.
Back in 2021, Wall Street faced a rebellion from the lower rungs of the investor-trader hierarchy – from the retailers. A rebellion that momentarily demonstrated the potential of popular mobilization against Big Money on their home turf – in the securities market.
While on the streets they had the Occupy Wall St. movement from the fallout of 2008, online, on Reddit, Jaime Rogozinski started r/wallstreetbets. A subreddit for people who wanted to share experiences, advice and opinions on trading in the American stock market. This is not a forum for careful long-term, diligent investments, SIPs, mutual funds and retirement pension plans, it is a place of cavalier trades that either make you or brake you or even leave you in debt. The people in the forum are aware of their reckless approach, and while some do make bank on their bets, even more go bust.
Rogozinski’s book WallStreetBets: How Boomers Made the World’s Biggest Casino for Millennials (2020) discussed the economic and cultural shifts that fostered this mindset in a generation of Millennials and older Gen-Zs. Times of financial struggles, job instability, inflationary castration rendering people unable to buy homes and start families, and the rise of the digital brokerage app of Robinhood, the flourishing of internet communities all combined to create a new generation of traders and investors. There are people diligently making million-dollar nest eggs along with thirteen-year-olds executing derivative trades before eventually being found out and banned; people making fortunes through complex trades without understanding any of what they’re doing, and people pushing the luck on their winning streak, losing it all and going into debt. All of it being posted on the subreddit, live journalling for the rest of the community. Rogozinski points out, while the community roots for people to make obscene wealth, cash out and ride off into the sunset, the berserk ballsy trades that lose people money, that get them in debt are the real fuel to the fire.
‘You only live once’, YOLO, is a literal rallying cry for r/wallstreetbets, with users saying they are going ‘YOLO’ while executing a trade. Perhaps that indicates the place they were coming from; the nihilistic, desperate irony-poisoned but also fantastical fount of their actions. They disdain more conservative subreddits like r/personalfinance and r/stocks as “Boomers recommending 1.5% return crap to young people…”.
A year after the book’s publication the world caught a glimpse of the community’s true glorious potential. People rallied around the GameStop Corp. stock, an electronic and video game retail chain being shorted by fancy private equity firms, hedge funds and institutional finance. These institutions with millions, even billions, bet against the GameStop stock, expecting a sustained fall in its price; because how could a brick-and-mortar retail store be competitive in the era of online libraries like Steam and Amazon? Instead, over the course of the year the stock kept rising, buoyed by guerrilla long positions taken by masses of retail traders, coordinating in internet forums, specifically r/wallstreetbets. Some made millions, at Big Money’s expense, others lost money when they didn’t cash out in time and the stock price corrected. But the narrative was how the short squeeze inflicted massive losses on institutional finance, so much so that the investment firm Melvin Capital had to shut down in 2022. That was the dominant narrative, a big fuck you to Big Money, to the financial institutions, by a cabal of the proverbial ‘little guy’(s).
Chris Gabriel puts it more enticingly in his YouTube video ‘GameStop and WallStreetBets: The Memetic Economy’,
“…the past few thousand years have been an experiment in collective energies of the people as opposed to structured established powers, and the direction we're going to take is entirely dependent on how fast we can get memetic, how fast can we figure out that we have the ability to perform 'meme magick'. That our intentions are strong…”,
Gabriel says grinning, wearing a leather jacket, sporting a goatee, out in a parking lot on a chilly winter day. It all feels very revolutionary chic. And you can almost feel like the financial revolution of the masses is around the corner.
But the Empire did strike back. Robinhood halted trades of GameStop and other companies also facing coordinated short squeezes like Nokia, Blackberry and AMC. Meanwhile, institutional hedge funds themselves got in on the action making fortunes, but that’s what they do, right? Hedge their bets and make money either way. Many GameStop investors actually ended up losing money; there were lawsuits against Robinhood filed by people, with one accusing them of halting trades to protect the interests of institutions at the expense of retail investors. The US Congress also raised its eyebrows and launched enquiries into market manipulation. But a year later, while some retail traders made fortunes, and others went bust, intuitional finance got savvy about the potential for social media, digital brokerage apps, and the memetic energies of the antagonistic masses to disrupt business as usual. The disruptive potential was ‘priced in’, as they say.
VII.
When I told my friend, that Catholic Club evening, about my musings on stock market socialism, he listened, then laughed. A scenario with every adult citizen owning equity in the political economy, their portfolios managed with civic deliberation, really does sound like a fairy tale for an investment banker’s bedtime story. He told me it was an interesting thought, but reserved his scepticism. And why not? He works in the food sovereignty movement, he works with farmers around the world fighting corporations, fighting capital, from co-opting, monopolizing seed banks, and usurping people’s lands and liberty. The food sovereignty movement aims to bring back a more communal collective ownership of food, land and resources.
Now, the stock market itself, tied to capital as it is and to the legacy of colonialism, inflicts some very real, industrial levels of structural violence across Earth. Invest in private hospitals and pharmaceuticals you’ll be betting on rising costs of healthcare, on profits made off people’s sickness. Invest in energy or mining companies you’ll be funding systematic ecological destruction and violent appropriation of tribal land and resources. Capital functions by creating scarcity, appropriating the common for the private, denying the many to affirm the few.
But the social contract and the nation-state were already supposed to be a communal and collective organization, and irrespective of private property, the economy was supposed to be an abstract ideal of publicly shared wealth. The stock market, the bond market, the money and the commodities market, and even real estate comprise the political economy, which everybody ought to have a stake in. Yet the elite capture makes it function like a casino for the rich to invest, bet and speculate, with everyday people reduced to bystanders who nonetheless have to foot the buy-in, the blinds and the bills (think all the taxes, the labour, all the banks’ lending your deposit money to fuel credit cycles and all that).
I mentioned to my friend pension funds, sovereign wealth funds (especially the Norwegian one), corporatism and the optimistic economic theories of market socialism. But they all felt like anaemic counterpoints. Shareholder activism has at times been employed for ethical and moral concerns; the Interfaith Centre for Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) mobilized shareholders of companies like IBM and GM to push for divestment from Apartheid-era South Africa. More recently, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement has seen shareholder activism petitioning companies like Cisco, Motorola, Boeing, and even Goddamn Lockheed Martin to divest from Israel. Of course, the impact of these resolutions is highly debatable. Anyway these are all just fragments of noble possibilities in the fantasy of market socialism.
The structural violence of capitalism percolates into the individual psychological level when people feel the scarcity of time and space to pursue things. Meanwhile, the economy continues growing on paper; layoffs, automation, and the increasingly transient nature of jobs do not hurt the corporate bottom line. And the future appears even more exploitative, with AI replacing workers, and depressed wages in an oversaturated labour force. But Big Businesses’ proprietary ownership of the political economy will continue unabated. Now, this is fantastical, but what if everybody had an active stake in that proprietorship and could live off the rent generated by the market (essentially a kind of universal basic income)…
and yeah…it’s fantastical…yeah…fuck…idk…ugh…
But technology did democratize access to the playing field of finance. The millions shooting their shot at active and passive investing, at the more hardcore trading is a testament to that. It’s a collective reach for that wizardry that we always saw in movies and heard those people in suits did, it’s a grasp at the financial magic of usury and compounding. The wonders of which are silting in the well of public consciousness, along with the awareness of capital's destructive and contradictory nature.
In fact, culture is saturated with the critique of capital’s destructive nature. Do you know the meme of the little infant swaddled and sleeping, captioned with something like “me in 2000, wasting time resting, instead of buying real estate”, or buying Apple stocks or whatever? Or the meme about “your unemployed friend on a random Tuesday”, imagining the whimsical fantastic freedom they live with? Or, the “born to ____, forced to ____” memes, that always yearn for our instinctual desire over formal sterile responsibilities. Sally Rooney novels, Eat the Rich movies and series, Black Mirror, and a cornucopia of think pieces and video essays on the brutality of late-stage capitalism. Ironically, all of which being commodified further fuel the engine of capital.
Capital subsumes everything, even critique and resistance, as has repeatedly been observed. Marx saw capitalism as inevitable, as much as all the crisis and instability it creates. Perhaps the only way out is through; to enter the field and push through from within – that’s what the motley crew of retail redditors demonstrated with the GameStop short squeeze for one beautiful flash before they were neutralized by the powers to be. Perhaps you don’t storm the citadel – you’re not Hannibal sacking Rome, no barbarians at the gates. Instead, perhaps, like the Achaeans did to the Trojans, you bring it all down from within, or consciously force its hands to be more equitable and sustainable. Provided capital’s bedfellows, greed and sociopathy, don’t consume you on the way.
Or, being a little less grandiose, perhaps everybody ought to have a portfolio that beats inflation, accrues and compounds wealth, and allows them the liberty and leisure to go berserk in creating, experimenting and enterprising, free from the mundanity of short-term monetary concerns, birthing wealth of the more ethereal kind. For observe, how Virginia Woolf said “…money and a room…to write fiction”, and not the inverse; that we are not to write fiction in order for money and a room. Nor did they have to invent the airplane, the automobile, or the internet to get money and a room, quite the opposite.
Anyway, this is what happens, when you have some money and a room, your imagination starts running wild.