'Slumdoge Millionaire' wants to have the last laugh despite dogecoin's slide

NEW YORK • In February, when Mr Glauber Contessoto decided to invest his life savings in dogecoin, his friends had concerns.

"They were all like, you're crazy," he said. "It's a joke coin. It's a meme. It's going to crash."

Their scepticism was warranted. After all, dogecoin is a joke - a digital currency started in 2013 by a pair of programmers who decided to spoof the cryptocurrency craze by creating their own virtual money based on a meme about Doge, a talking shiba inu puppy. Investing money in obscure cryptocurrencies has, historically, been akin to tossing it onto a bonfire.

But Mr Contessoto, 33, who works at a Los Angeles hip-hop media company, is no ordinary buy-and-hold investor. He is among the many thrill-seeking amateurs who have leapt head first into the markets in recent months, using stock trading apps like Robinhood to chase outsize gains on risky, speculative bets.

In February, after reading a Reddit thread about dogecoin's potential, Mr Contessoto went all in.

He maxed out his credit cards, borrowed money using Robinhood's margin trading feature and spent everything he had on the digital currency - investing about US$250,000 (S$333,000) in all.

He watched his phone obsessively as dogecoin became an Internet phenomenon whose value eclipsed that of blue-chip firms like Twitter and General Motors.

The value of his dogecoin holdings today? Roughly US$2 million.

On the surface, Mr Contessoto - who dropped out of college and has no formal financial training - seems no different from a lucky gambler who walks into a casino, bets all his chips on a single roulette spin, and walks out a millionaire.

But he is also emblematic of a new kind of hyper-online investor who is winning by applying the skills of the digital attention economy - sharing memes, cultivating buzz, producing endless streams of content for social media - to the financial markets.

These investors, mostly young men, pick investments not based on their underlying fundamentals or the estimates of Wall Street analysts, but on looser criteria such as how funny they are, how futuristic they seem, or how many celebrities are tweeting about them.

Their philosophy is that in today's media-saturated world, attention is the most valuable commodity of all, and that anything that is attracting a great deal of it must be worth something.

"Memes are the language of the millennials," Mr Contessoto said. "Now we're going to have a meme matched with a currency."

Strange as his investment thesis might seem, it is hard to argue with the results. Even after a recent crash following Mr Elon Musk's appearance on Saturday Night Live (in which he joked about dogecoin being a "hustle"), the joke coin remains a very lucrative trade. A dollar invested in dogecoin on Jan 1 would be worth US$203 today - much more than a comparable investment in bitcoin, ethereum or any stock in the S&P 500.

Dogecoin's stratospheric rise has also fuelled plenty of grumbling among cryptocurrency buffs, who see it as a tacky sideshow that overshadows more serious uses of cryptocurrency. One of dogecoin's original creators has disavowed the coin, and even Mr Musk has warned investors not to over-speculate in cryptocurrency.

What explains dogecoin's durability, then?

There is no doubt that dogecoin mania, like GameStop mania before it, is at least partially attributable to some combination of pandemic-era boredom and the eternal appeal of get-rich-quick schemes.

But there may be more structural forces at work. Over the past few years, soaring housing costs, record student loan debt, and historically low interest rates have made it harder for some young people to imagine achieving financial stability by slowly working their way up the career ladder and saving money pay cheque by pay cheque, the way their parents did.

Instead of ladders, these people are looking for trampolines - risky, volatile investments that could either result in a life-changing windfall or send them right back to where they started.

Mr Contessoto is a prime case study. He makes US$60,000 a year at his job now - a decent living, but nowhere near enough to afford a home in Los Angeles, where the median home costs nearly US$1 million. He drives a beat-up Toyota and spent years living frugally. But in his 30s, he decided to go looking for something that could change his fortunes overnight.

When Mr Contessoto recalls the way he used to pursue wealth - working hard, cutting back on expenses, saving some money from every pay cheque - he sees evidence of a system that is rigged against regular people.

"I feel like those experts on TV, the older generation of old money and wealth, they try to scare people into staying safe so nobody gets too rich," he said.

Many things about Mr Contessoto's investing philosophy would turn a traditional financial adviser's stomach. But despite his spectacular gains, he has not cashed out his dogecoin millions.

Instead, he is branding himself as a dogecoin expert, adopting nicknames like "the Dogefather" and "Slumdoge Millionaire" and making YouTube videos promoting dogecoin to others.

Of course, as with any volatile investment, there is a real chance that Mr Contessoto's dogecoin holdings could lose most or all of their value. Already, the price of dogecoin has fallen nearly 50 per cent from its all-time high, shaving hundreds of thousands of dollars off his portfolio.

But gamblers rarely leave the table the first time they lose, and Mr Contessoto's commitment is to HODLing - an acronym favoured by cryptocurrency traders that stands for "hold on for dear life".

NYTIMES