As of this August, ordinary investors, or what the media refers to as the retail market, have lost everything they came to the market with during the pandemic. The loss comes, amazingly, despite two consecutive years of record-breaking returns, amidst an unprecedented run of stock market euphoria.

As I wrote in Jacobin at the onset of the GameStop saga, the stock market is not a place where the average American can go to earn passive income; it is not a place where we can make up for stagnating wages across the last half-century by way of wise, well-timed moves. Like the workplace itself, for most of us the stock market is simply another arena of capital extraction.

Today’s retail investors are in a position analogous to that of homeowners during the foreclosure crisis period: average people sucked into a market where sustained success was structurally precluded. And if adjustable-rate subprime mortgages were the oppressive product of the Great Recession, options trading might’ve filled their shoes for the current downturn.