Remember when your mom said you’d never make money playing video games? Well, she was technically right, but she didn’t account for making money talking about stocks on gaming platforms.
Meet Moody Nashawaty and Risley Mabile, two guys who went from swapping memes in Discord DMs to managing $5 million in actual investor money. Their fund, Enders Capital (yes, named after that sci-fi book you pretended to read in high school), is proof that the future of finance might just be happening in the same place where teenagers argue about Fortnite skins.
Here’s how it went down: Back in 2022, these two were just regular Discord users hanging out in retail trading channels. You know the type – part investment club, part support group for people who’ve been burned by meme stocks. They started chatting about market trends, probably while someone else was posting rocket ship emojis about GameStop.
“What started as ‘hey, what do you think of this stock?’ turned into longer conversations until we were really close,” Nashawaty explains. It’s like a bromance origin story, but with spreadsheets.
The twist? These aren’t your typical basement-dwelling day traders. Nashawaty spent years in digital marketing before diving into Discord’s investing servers. Mabile? Dude’s literally a radiology resident who learned derivatives trading in medical school. Because apparently, some people’s idea of stress relief is calculating option Greeks between surgeries.
Their approach is refreshingly nerdy: they use quantitative models and automated trading through a platform called Composer. Think of it as building trading bots, but for people who don’t want to code everything from scratch. They’re basically the IKEA of hedge fund strategies – sophisticated results, some assembly required.
The fund’s been crushing it in tech, gold, and emerging markets. Not bad for a couple of guys who met in what’s essentially a glorified group chat.
But here’s the kicker: they think this is just the beginning. “The next generation of hedge funds won’t be from Wall Street,” Nashawaty says, “and I think that’s a good thing, since the talent is no longer centralized.”
Translation: Why pay some Ivy League grad in a $3,000 suit when you can find equally smart people hanging out in Discord servers at 2 AM, sharing both market insights and terrible memes?
Composer’s CEO agrees, predicting that AI will handle most of the boring operational stuff, leaving room for “upstart funds to be evaluated on their skill rather than their credentials.” Finally, a meritocracy where your trading algorithm matters more than your alma mater.
The moral of the story? While everyone’s been dunking on retail traders and their “dumb money,” some of them were quietly building the future of finance. Sure, Discord might be chaotic, but if you know how to filter out the noise, you might just find your next business partner.
Or at the very least, someone who can explain why your portfolio is bleeding while making you laugh about it.