Should you buy Meme Coins?

Did you buy any Trump Coin

This weekend my text messages were filled with tips to buy something called “Trump coin.” It was early and I had no idea what they were talking about. Apparently, during the wee hours of the morning, President Donald Trump launched his own crypto coin and the price was sky rocketing. As of Monday, the coin had a $10 billion market cap. I’ll skip the political and ethical debate of this and just get to the point…should you invest in meme coins?

My first experience with meme coins was with Dogecoin. A cryptocurrency that started as a joke and began to pick up steam backed by Elon Musk. I had lots of friends making money when the price began to peak and I thought…did I miss out? Eventually, the bubble popped and for those who didn’t get out soon enough, lost their initial investment. I’ve always stood pat that I don’t invest in things I don’t understand. While people were chasing Dogecoin with no value, I continued investing in reputable companies and index funds and I’ve done well.

Another meme example was from Hailey Welch, the “Hawk Tuah” girl who launched her own coin called “Hawk” in December. The coin peaked at a $490 million dollar market cap and immediately crashed about 95% leaving some investors with huge losses and accusations of a scam.

This is called a pump and dump, where the price gets inflated and the biggest holders liquidate quickly leaving the small guys holding a bag. There’s also the good meme stock moments like GameStop where many retail investors made money controlling trade swings on their own. But even in that frenzy, there were losers who didn’t time it right and lost everything. The way social media works is we only hear the winning stories, never the losers.

Meme coins can be high risk, high reward. There are definitely opportunities to make some quick money and to lose money. Most of the time people are investing with FOMO. A hot stock is flying and you see social media posts of someone making 100k in a few hours. How could that not be exciting? We all want to be rich. But most of the time you don’t know how much these people lost or what tactics they used to circumvent any systems. If you want to try any meme craze, I wouldn’t commit a large amount of money. I personally wouldn’t go over $100 because I'm okay with losing that. But if you’re leveraging your life savings, I’d extremely advise against it. Whatever you decide, remember that wealth is built over the long with consistency and compounding. If your investing journey consists of chasing every meme craze you’re doing it all wrong.

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