Ornamental Gourdes – The Investment Of A Lifetime
Gamestop and its resulting fallout has overshadowed r/Wallstreetbets for months now. But I think we should celebrate the real heroes who made the sub what it is. That’s the plucky users with little understanding about what they’re even doing and strategies that are so undercooked you get food poisoning just reading them. This is the story of u/TheEmperorOfJenks. This story starts bad but it only gets worse.
“This summer I invested $17,500 (six months salary and my entire life savings) into ornamental gourd futures” he posted in mid January. This seemed like a pretty smart idea at first. But Coronavirus tanked the gourd market because nobody was hosting any parties that required them. “I had invested early enough that I thought I would still be fine, but then on the morning of December 2nd, a new email in my inbox caused my stomach to turn into a pretzel. The massive gourd shipment from Argentina, scheduled for early March, had arrived. I was planning on selling off my futures right before this, in February, but this ruined everything. To top it off, the gourds in this shipment were absolutely gargantuan, some topping 4 pounds each, causing the price-per-pound to drop like an anchor into the range of 6 cents per pound. I am ruined.”
Faced with roughly 115,000 lbs of gourd, he had to get creative. At first Jenks researched how to turn them into instruments. This apparently wasn’t working out since his next post was about how to cook and eat ornamental gourds. He left a helpful recipe on the sub, but the cliff notes version is that you need to boil them for over 3 hours to make them soft enough to serve over rice.
He ran out of ideas at that point and started redistributing them around the neighbourhood. “Some are in my apartment, some got dumped in the woods, and some ended up in the Arkansas River.”
His luck, with nowhere to go but up, then gets put to the test when he does some legitimate gambling on the Superbowl. His $1k bet goes the way of the vast majority of bets. Thin air.
Next he moved into precious metals after Rhodium skyrocketed to $20k. As we all know, the best time to buy something is when it’s the highest it’s ever been. Getting squeezed for rent money and needing a quick play he bought $4k (8.5 grams) worth of “rhodium” on his credit card from a dodgy Russian website. Eagle eyed users were quick to point out that the hunk of misc metal he bought was oxidising exactly the way rhodium doesn’t.
Getting it checked by a professional, he found that it “Turns out it’s pyrite, which is essentially worthless. Moral of the story? Just invest in Tesla or Amazon. This BS is ridiculous and I’ve had it.”
