Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy can’t tell you precisely the moment to venture into stocks, amid the carnage taking shape in U.S. equity indexes this year, but says he maintains one belief on investing now: Suppress the urge to be fearful.
“It is human nature not to invest at a time like this,” Portnoy said during an interview with MarketWatch on Wednesday afternoon.
“That’s just how humans work.”
He added, however, that “right now is an awesome time to invest in the stock market.”
“But everyone wants to ride the wave of up-markets,” he said, referencing the stock market’s surge immediately after bottoming in the spring of 2020.
It is, perhaps, ironic that Portnoy appears to be borrowing from an adage most closely associated with Warren Buffett: Be “fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.”
The outspoken Barstool founder, who enjoyed a brief, but apparently lucrative, stint as a day trader at the start of the pandemic two years ago, has referred to Buffett, one of the most revered investors on Wall Street, as “washed up.”
“I’m sure Warren Buffett is a great guy, but when it comes to stocks he’s washed up. I’m the captain now. #DDTG,” he said via Twitter in June 2020.
Back then, worries about the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic gave way to a full-throttle burst higher in markets, underwritten by government stimulus checks and endorsed by central bankers who were intent on keeping interest rates low.
As individual investors were stuck at home due to public-health protocols with little else to do, Portnoy became an avatar of a culture of high-risk, high-reward investors who were making massive bets on a rapid recovery from the depths of the pandemic in 2020. The rush of new individual investors is credited with the emergence of so-called meme stocks, such as GameStop
GME,
-4.38%
and AMC Entertainment
AMC,
-6.39%,
which tend to be influenced by social-media sentiment rather than fundamentals.
A 2020 article in the Financial…
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