[opportune]

There is a cottage industry of financial advisors who do work with people on their personal wealth management. Of course there is a big difference between an investment bank, trading firm, and a person who does wealth management (I'd google it for precise terms, but I'll get hounded by ads for it for weeks). I know because my parents have a "wealth management guy"/broker and some of my friends' parents growing up were also in that business. And there are also of course mutual funds and pensions as you mention.

I am not super plugged into the financial industry so I can't say for certain, but I think while people may not understand the difference between traders shouting on phones, "wall street", and wealth management, people think about wealth management the most in the context of "wall street", because that's what they're personally most familiar with. They think that even though wealth management seems to me to be very decentralized and not really something physically centered around Wall St.

I think wallstreetbets is mostly a pretty unsophisticated subreddit (which somehow declined in quality even more as it grew) but I think the parent was valid in pointing out that they willingly eschew the old-school strategy of diversification + "value investing" done by a third party on your behalf and the new-school (boglehead) strategy of putting literally everything in the S&P 500 or a bond index with the allocation mix dependent on retirement date/age.

There has undoubtedly always been a group of people micromanaging their personal portfolios with less risk-averse strategies like this, and WSB mostly takes things way too far, but at least for me it exposed me to the idea that maybe I could personally do better picking stocks on my own than just blindly throwing everything into VOO (and for people not plugged into the online-personal-finance-geek community, it could be the first time they even realize they don't need to have a third party manage their investments for them).