Getty James never paid much attention to the stock market. The 41-year-old has worked for 20 years at the same aerospace company in Cincinnati, coating jet-engine parts with a protective layer of aluminide. He lives in Cheviot, a working-class Ohio suburb just minutes from his childhood home. He’s not particularly emotive, and his goals in life are modest—his greatest ambition is to own a house of his own, maybe a new car. He is a thoroughly ordinary guy. But when lockdown orders were issued last spring and the economy cratered, James, a longtime Reddit user enamored with the swashbuckling environment of r/WallStreetBets, a subreddit for high-risk retail investors, saw an opportunity to turn a quick buck in the stock market. Less than a year later, his account in the mobile stock-trading app Robinhood had grown to $80,000.