• Four years after GameStop mania and the rise of Roaring Kitty, a new crop of investing influencers has emerged.

• The new retail-trading icons say they’ve moved away from the popular WallStreetBets online forum.

• BI spoke to three popular traders about how they connect with the retail investing community.

With GameStop mania and the rise of Roaring Kitty now years in the past, there’s a new crop of retail-trading icons helping everyday investors navigate the market and turn a profit.

Similar to trader Keith Gill — who became famous for riding (and livestreaming) GameStop stock higher in 2021 — popular investing personalities today operate under meme-like personas online.

Many of these retail influencers came up during the pandemic stock boom. Their presence has grown in recent years as activity on once-popular communal spaces like Reddit’s WallStreetBets have become less prominent.

Here’s what three popular market gurus told Business Insider about their journeys, how they connect with investing communities online, and what some of their favorite all-time trades are.

Zach Kleinwaks, a 27-year-old futures trader based in New York, said he had been trading for years before he became known as a small-time mentor in the space.

On his personal accounts — under the user name “zachaustintrades” — he has nearly 10,000 Instagram followers, while more than 29,000 users follow his TikTok posts. He regularly flags stocks and posts trading tips. Kleinwaks also shares his trades on Stock Dads, a company that offers members exclusive trading tips from mentors like him for about $1,500 a year, according to its website.

Kleinwaks began trading full-time in 2022, but he had been veering down that path long before then, he says, noting that he always had an entrepreneurial streak and longed to be his own boss.

“I was always a hustler. I would sell things on eBay. I would do sports cards and stuff. I kind of just fell upon the concept and the idea of day trading before it was a big craze,” he said.

During the pandemic, he became a mini-celebrity among his college baseball team, who knew his stock trades were successful and were keen to get his advice on what to buy next. He ended up creating a Discord server to share his trades quickly, and, as people spread the word to their friends and family, later monetized it.

Like the others, Kleinwaks does not see himself as the typical WallStreetBets-style trader, many of whom he believes are gambling based on “uneducated hype.”

Kleinwaks thinks demand for his tips has grown in recent years, partly because retailer traders are more interested in serious analysis.

“My guess is it came somewhere around when people realized that their investing strategy can’t simply be: every time GameStop or AMC drops, just buy. I think too many people got severely, severely burnt on those stocks,” he said of the community.

Kleinwak says a call on Alibaba was among his favorite trades, and he sees a rebound ahead for Chinese stocks in general.

The trade involved the purchase of a call option on the stock in late January, before the stock rallied 40%.

In a matter of days, he made around $17,000 on that trade, according to statements he shared with BI.

Kevin Xu, a day trader in San Francisco, began to amass a small army of followers when he posted about his stock trades on WallStreetBets during the pandemic.

Nowadays, Xu still shares his trades, but on AfterHour, a “social copy trading” platform he launched several years ago. It allows users to share their portfolios and post about their stock trade ideas. Today, his portfolio is worth around $8.6 million, according to data from the app.

Xu, who has minimal social media presence outside the app, has 174,000 AfterHour users following his moves. On r/TheRaceTo10Million, a subreddit he created for those who aspire to make $10 million through trading, there are 347,000 members trying to emulate his success.

Despite the following he’s earned, Xu insists he’s an “accidental” trader. He began swing trading — a strategy where traders buy assets with the hopes of profiting on short-term market moves — in 2020, using $35,000 he received as a bonus at work.

Xu doesn’t have a clear answer as to why he “YOLO’ed” the money into stocks. Originally, he wanted to use the money to purchase a car, he told BI, but missed the deadline to request his bonus in cash.

“I’ve always wanted more. I think I had an epiphany in my twenties that you kind of have to take risks to make that quantum leap in your life, a calculated risk, right?” he said.

It was a rush for Xu to post about his gains online. He became quickly immersed in the community of WallStreetBets, he said, reading every comment and posting on a regular basis. Part of him was amazed by how casually everyone was talking about their finances on the subreddit. Part of him, he admits, also liked the attention.

“I think the highest order of posting online is being right,” he said. “It is a social status. It’s validation. It’s bragging rights, right?”

Xu, though, has since put some distance between himself and the WallStreetBets community. Unlike others on the platform, he says his strategy involves studying technical signals, volume spikes, short-term interest in a stock, and other indicators until he develops a thesis about a particular company. Then, he goes “all-in” on the trade.

“I believe in high conviction,” he told BI. “I believe in only one or two stocks at a time.”

Xu also hasn’t posted on WallStreetBets in years, despite being one of the community’s most regular posters during the pandemic. In his view, the subreddit has deteriorated into a “glorified Instagram meme page.”

“I think what people are hungry for right now is where do I go to find and learn about what’s hot in the market right now? What people are trading, why people are trading it,” he said.

One of Xu’s top trades of all time was a bet on shares of Norwegian Cruise Line, he told BI. After buying the stock at a low point in 2020, he made over $448,000 on the trade, according to a post he made on Reddit in 2021.

Offline, Vaughn McNair — a 31-year-old trader based in Illinois — is a husband and a father of three. Online, he goes by “Grandmaster Obi,” and he promotes his trading ideas to followers on his Discord server and on his YouTube channel.

McNair has around 10,000 members tuning into his trading tips on Discord, and around 40,000 subscribers on YouTube. Many of them regard McNair’s tips with sage-like importance, and frequently thank him for his advice and sprinkle diamond emojis in the comments section of his videos, referring to “diamond hands,” or traders who have a strong conviction in a certain trade and who resist selling even in tough times.

Learning how to invest was a long process of trial and error. McNair, who began day trading when he was 16, said he’s lost as much as $14,000 in a single day from a bad trade.

McNair has become a better trader over time, more aware of preserving his nest egg and hedging his bets so he can avoid slipping into the red. Now, he works as a full-time trader, which involves waking up at the crack of dawn to assess the pre-market moves and spending up to 12 hours a day trading and analyzing charts.

“Now my focus on each trade is just not to lose any money. It doesn’t matter how much money I make, as long as I don’t lose any,” he said.

McNair isn’t one to relish the attention. He describes himself as a shy person, and said he began broadcasting his trades on YouTube partly to get out of his comfort zone.

At times, he finds the job stressful, he said, due to how demanding his followers can be to get in on the hottest trade.

“When I alert a stock, actually, that’s when the stress comes,” he said.

During the pandemic, he was a moderator on WallStreetBets, but left the subreddit when Keith Gill, the trader known as Roaring Kitty, was hit with several lawsuits.

McNair said being involved in the community became too much for him. While his followers frequently liken him to Gill, he resists the comparison to a Roaring Kitty-type influencer, as he believes his trading strategy is more serious than picking meme stocks.

McNair’s favorite stock at the moment is Palantir. Previously, he made a successful call when he shouted out the company as a “top buy” in a YouTube video on December 2. Shares went on to soar as much as 62% before retreating in recent weeks, and are still up about 28% since McNair’s post.

Read the original article on Business Insider