Investing in suicide itself: the dark side of stock market slang

Suicide post in a stock trading forum exposes the cynicism of financial culture

What drives someone to write "I'm going to invest in suicide" in a place devoted to analyzing charts and multiples? That phrase, posted just hours ago in an investor community, triggered a cascade of reactions that sums up the state of mental health in a subculture that has no idea how to handle a confession like this.

The most shared response was to tell the author to "go 32x leveraged," a high-risk trading expression used here as a macabre taunt. Another comment had no qualms about pointing out that "the market is trending up," turning a personal drama into a clumsy stock market analogy. On the opposite side, some people offered help directly or recommended contacting a psychologist. There were also replies that downplayed the seriousness of the matter and pointed out that this was no place to ask for help, along with a few crude messages attacking the person who was suffering.

Most worrying is that the author had been posting similar messages since the night before: up to a dozen attempts to be heard. Some of the site's more veteran readers picked up on the pattern, caught somewhere between irony and helplessness.

The episode reflects two problems. First, the trivialization of suicide through market jargon, in an environment where risk is measured only by the money that can be lost. Second, the inability to recognize when a repeated message is a genuine cry for help and not trolling. On a platform where leveraging at 32x is legal, the only leverage nobody knew how to calculate was that of offering a hand.