Roaring KittyThe 93-year-old CEO of Berkshire Hathaway is leading a tribe of “older-generation boomers” who believe in reasonable price-to-earnings ratios, said But the 37-year-old Keith Gill—known as RoaringKitty on Twitter, or DeepFuckingValue on Reddit—is leading a younger generation of millennials and zoomers with a distinctly different investing ethos, the hedge fund partner told “The only way to really approach it is with humor and online community, because their entire experience with the financial system has been extremely volatile and clearly manipulated by the FED,” said Palley, whose firm “A lot of these people were in high school or even younger than that in the financial crisis of 2008,” he added, “and that was their first introduction to how the financial world worked.”In turn, a generation of financial nihilists was raised. This group sees the financial system as broken, Palley explained: housing is unaffordable, inflation is rising, and government policies aren’t helping. For them, the way of investing outlined by Buffett doesn’t work as well as it used to, forcing youngsters to look for alternative approaches. This is why Palley believes the financial nihilist is looking towards Roaring Kitty the same way the boomer generation follows Buffett.“Both groups look to the leader to understand how they should think about investing. And then second, they more or less mimic everything that they do,” Palley said. “It’s nearly a religion, and anything else other than [the leader’s approach] does not constitute investing.”At its essence, Palley suggested, these forms of tribalism are the same despite the varying investment approaches. Aside from investing ethos, the main material difference is that Roaring Kitty is able to get his message out there much quicker, While there are similarities between their disciples’ actions, in many ways “Warren Buffett has only ever been a very serious investor, doing significant research on what he buys with the intention of holding it for a long time—and being generally very pro-United States,” Palley said. “Whereas Roaring Kitty has never purported himself to be anything other than a joke, and a protest vote against how the existing government and financial system works.”In that sense, the two figures are complete polar opposites. Buffett explains his investment thesis in lengthy “The Wall Street Bets tribe is like an anti-Warren Buffett vote,” Palley told In a way, Buffett is just the original financial influencer. Some 19,000 people traveled to Omaha, Nebraska to hear Buffett speak at the The stage they preach from is different and the people in the crowd may vary—but that tribal spirit has carried across generations.Edited by Andrew Hayward
