We Graded 6,000 r/wallstreetbets Calls. The Crowd Is Right 45% Of The Time.

By Maya Koeva, co-founder of Quantral. Adapted from a study first published on the Quantral blog.

r/wallstreetbets is the loudest stock-picking community on earth: millions of members, hundreds of tickers a week, and a confidence level that never dips. So we did the obvious thing. We graded it.

Over roughly six weeks (late April through mid-June 2026) we ran more than 6,000 gradeable r/wallstreetbets calls through the same scoring we use on every voice we track: did the stock move the way the post implied, over the timeframe it implied? The verdict is blunt. The crowd was right about 45% of the time, a hair worse than a coin flip.

A coin flip that loses

45% is not nothing, but it is not an edge. Taken at face value, WSB calls would have been wrong more often than right. And when we ranked the most accurate finance voices in our coverage over the same period, the subreddit as a collective landed below every single individual account we track.

That does not make the subreddit useless. As a read on what retail is excited or scared about, it is unmatched, and that is real signal. It just is not a guide to who is right, which is a completely different thing.

It falls apart on the short side

The most striking pattern: WSB is a momentum-long machine, and it bleeds when it bets against a stock. Close to half of its bullish calls worked out. Barely a third of its bearish ones did.

You can see it in the wreckage. Every one of WSB's five worst calls over the window was a short that got run over:

When the crowd piles in against a name, it tends to pick one that is already running. And it keeps running.

It does land the occasional rocket

To be fair, WSB catches real momentum longs. Its best graded calls over the window, all liquid names, all inside a single week:

These are real, and they are why people keep posting. But they are the exceptions a 45% hit rate already implies. We also filtered out the true lottery tickets, like a $25M micro-cap that popped over 1,000% on a single press release. That is not a call, it is a coin toss with a megaphone.

What the crowd actually loves

The most-discussed names tell their own story. Micron was the runaway favorite with nearly 900 calls, overwhelmingly bullish, and it actually worked, around 57% right. Rocket Lab drew more than 400 calls and was the crowd's best big name at about 60%. But the crowd also fought the tape: it was net bearish on Microsoft and right only 42% of the time doing it.

The crowd vs named voices

Here is the comparison that matters. Over the exact same six weeks, the curated finance voices we track across X, Reddit, and financial news hit 55%, roughly ten points better than the subreddit. Same market, same window, same grading. The gap is not magic, it is accountability. A named account with a track record has something to lose. An anonymous upvote does not.

The takeaway

r/wallstreetbets is a brilliant sentiment gauge and a poor stock picker, especially when it shorts. Read it to feel where the crowd's head is. Do not read it to decide who is right. For that, you want voices you can actually hold to their record.

Methodology: graded r/wallstreetbets calls from late April through mid-June 2026 (about six weeks; only the 7- and 30-day horizons have matured). Hit rate is the share of gradeable calls that moved the called way, on a per-mention basis, using split-adjusted prices. Standout calls are screened for liquidity, so no thin micro-caps. Data covers only the curated sources tracked by Quantral (quantral.com), an investment ideas app that scores stocks 0-100 from finance chatter and grades every voice on its real track record. Nothing here is financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell.