It's a public community. Did you open it even once? People (yes, people other than the one guy who started it) post screenshots from their investment accounts.
Why do you not believe people didn't jump on the free money hype train? It's not like redditors havent gathered together to do stupider things before. The fact that almost every easy to use trading app had to limit buys on gme specifically should tell you that it was not a small thing.
I find the memes there funny, and I like interacting with the people and just talking dumb stuff.
I think most of the screenshots that get posted are fake, and that most people that frequent it also mostly do because they find it fun.
Not necessarily inspect element, but also screenshots from paper-trading accounts, etc.
If you follow the stock market, it is a relatively random place, and train collisions do often happen, so it is nice to have a place to talk about those with people that find them funny, and that also find "let's put out this fire with gasoline" funny.
/u/deepfuckingvalue is a real trader actually, manages trades for clients, etc.
On their free time they do tutorials about their process, their tools, etc.
Saying that they are a retail trader is like saying that Warren Buffet is a retail trader when they trade with their own private money and not the money of their clients.
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Also, you can just open a paper trading account and trade with fake money. Then the screenshots look real.
I do this all the time when I need to explain an options play to somebody. Just switch to paper trading, give yourself a million $, and enter the trade.
If I had to show somebody in a podcast how to trade, I would open a paper trading account just to put an amount of money that would be reasonable for that person, so that they can better get a feeling of what the wins and the losses look like.
You do know how easy it is to go into developer mode, inspect element, and make things say whatever you want to say, right? How do you prove that was not done?
Occam's razor: that dude started back in May to provide data and screenshots, I don't see feasible that somebody faked data for so long hoping to achieve what?
I'm not sure you can really argue occam's razor is that this guy just makes incredible bets on stocks. Surely the simplest answer is: People on the internet lie.
I'm not saying I feel strongly either way, but I think peopel on the internet lying is a pretty simple explanation.
It would be just as easy for DFV to create a second account and run a different strategy on that. Since DFV wasn't the instigator for the short-squeeze mania I am kind of hoping that he did.