Barstool Sports Founder DAVE PORTNOY is one of “millions of small-time investors” to open stock trading accounts in recent months, and some “are behaving like aggressive gamblers,” according to a front-page piece by Matt Phillips of the N.Y. TIMES. Portnoy had “almost no stock trading experience” before the coronavirus shuttered Barstool’s Manhattan offices, but he has “reinvented himself as ‘Davey Day Trader.’” He started with an initial outlay of $3M and began “buying and selling from his apartment and streaming the results to his loyal readers.” Portnoy: “I have a pretty good feel for when something is entertaining content for them.” Phillips notes Portnoy initially lost more than $1.5M “on repeated bets that the market would fall.” He invested another $2M-plus “and turned into a raging stock market bull, clawing his way back to positive territory” (N.Y. TIMES, 6/15). In N.Y., Andrew Ross Sorkin notes Portnoy has “refashioned himself into a sort of JIM CRAMER for the pandemic era.” He “live streams his profanity-laced trading sessions to millions.” He claims that he is “outperforming WARREN BUFFETT, and declared on Twitter last week, ‘I’m the captain now’” (N.Y. TIMES, 6/15).
