Camaraderie, competition and a strong bull market help troops accrue new wealth; ‘I was trying to punch my ticket’
Space Force Capt. Gordon McCulloh was sitting in a military propeller plane high in the calm, dark sky over New Mexico on a recent Wednesday night when his squadron’s group chat blew up.
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The squadron members—some on the ground, some in the air—were collecting data for electromagnetic warfare, but they also had money on their minds. Google’s stock price had just shot up in after-hours trading.
Once McCulloh landed he saw the messages: One officer on the ground sent a screenshot of the news. “To the moon,” another texted back.
It was shaping up to be a profitable day for McCulloh and his buddies.
The U.S. military may just be the world’s most lethal investing club, and it’s killing it in this bull market.
Servicemembers are making fortunes in tech stocks and bitcoin. They’re trading tips on obscure cryptocurrencies from the decks of aircraft carriers. Base parking lots are peppered with new Porsches and Humvees as the market hits new highs. And social-media influencers in fatigues tell followers how they, too, can become rich.
McCulloh, who works as a flight-test engineer, is heavily invested in nuclear-energy related companies. He’s betting the AI data-center boom will create more demand for electricity . So far, things are going swimmingly. Some of his stocks have doubled or more since the spring, although the 27-year-old wonders how much longer the market rally can last.
“I’ll admit I don’t understand why it continues to go up unfettered,” he said.
The market has seen some turbulence lately, but overall stock prices have been on a tear since April, boosting troop net worths.
Servicemembers helped fuel a surge in crypto prices that started in the fall of 2020 and peaked in 2021. In 2020, eight of the top 25 U.S. zip codes with the highest share of tax returns reporting receiving or disposing of crypto were around military bases, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Internal Revenue Service data. The price of bitcoin roughly quadrupled that year. In 2021, the share rose to 11 out of 25.
Around Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, 16.3% of individual income tax returns in 2021 reported receiving, selling, exchanging or disposing of crypto, according to IRS data. The share was even higher around Luke Air Force Base in Arizona (19.4%) and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California (18.1%). Across the U.S., just 4.1% of returns ticked the same box.
Military bases lost their dominant position in 2022, the most recent year for which IRS data is available. Crypto prices fell precipitously that year and far fewer people on bases and elsewhere reported receiving or disposing of crypto on their tax returns.
But that one-year crypto surge—and the meme-stock mania that happened around the same time—got a generation of troops hooked on investing.
While many servicemembers are long-term investors heavy on index funds, some are making short-term bets or are heavily exposed to a small number of stocks or coins. They are often young, have known little aside from market growth and have few hedges.
If there’s a big correction, “they’re in for some hurt,” said Brian O’Neill , a financial adviser and Air Force veteran.
Some have already felt that, with sometimes significant losses on a bad bet. But servicemembers are more likely to talk about their wins than their losses. “There’s a culture of braggadocio,” O’Neill said.
Coast Guard Petty Officer Third Class Bryson Saunders has ridden the roller coaster: He started buying dogecoin in 2021 because he kept hearing other recruits at his Tampa base bragging about how much money they had made with the cryptocurrency. Saunders also bought bitcoin, shares of pandemic-era memestock GameStop and “whatever else was going crazy.”
“I was trying to punch my ticket,” he said.
Saunders made a profit with Tesla shares, but said he lost more than $10,000 in a single day last winter trading a financial product that makes leveraged bets on the stock of MicroStrategy, a company that buys bitcoin and is now known as Strategy. He’s shifted to mostly stock-market index funds. He also earns five-figures monthly thanks to his side hustle as a TikTok and Instagram influencer.
His specialty: financial-advice videos for military servicemembers.
Zones of action
Bases are fertile ground for investing frenzies. They are full of young people—many already natural risk-takers—with time to kill, disposable income and few taboos when it comes to talking about personal finance, since military pay is public and based on rank. And while the armed forces provide guaranteed pensions after 20 years and unmatched job security, they don’t offer bulky salaries or six-figure year-end bonuses.
Members of the military have long been active investors. Some use zero-down-payment Veterans Affairs loans to buy rental properties. During the inflation years of the early 1980s, sailors locked away for months on nuclear-missile submarines killed time talking up gold bullion and raw diamonds. In the late 1990s, tech stocks were all the rage.
But two overlapping developments in the past two decades supercharged the get-rich culture: the rise of websites and later of apps like Robinhood that make it easier to trade, and the war on terror.
Starting in the early 2000s, hundreds of thousands of troops landed in remote bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. They got hazard pay, family-separation pay and were freed from federal income tax. Suddenly, they had thousands in extra income and were looking for places to put it.
F-16 fighter pilot Shawn Walsh opened his first brokerage account in 2008 while stationed in Iraq. His job was to bomb insurgents, but between sorties he spent hours sitting on call in a small shack a short sprint from his plane. There, kitted out in flight gear with nothing to do, he and his fellow pilots talked about investing strategies.
Walsh, then a recent college graduate, had real money in the bank for the first time. He started investing—first in mutual funds, later in index funds, individual stocks and rental properties. By the time he retired from the Air Force in 2024, he was a multimillionaire, he said.
Spencer Reese shuttled soldiers between Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan in 2013 as an Air Force transport-plane pilot. “Every mission was a crash course in some other investing strategy,” he said.
One guy told him about his investments in gas stations and 7-Eleven convenience stores. Another recommended covered call options. A third liked bitcoin. On longer flights, Reese read investing books.
The military has basic training programs on how to save, budget and invest, but word-of-mouth is often a favored adviser. While troops are fiercely competitive, they also share a sense of camaraderie—even in investing. When people make money, they tell others because they want them to make money, too. Officers routinely pull out their phones to show others their investing account balances.
Cryptocurrencies spread through the military like wildfire in the early 2020s. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Zach Rodriguez dove in, putting more than $100,000—half his family savings—into coins like Chainlink, Polkadot and Quant. A buddy got him interested while they toured the Pacific on an aircraft carrier.
He did well at first as values surged, before the coins crashed. He said he lost $250,000 worth of crypto to a scammer. Today the helicopter pilot is a “bitcoin and chill” guy: he invests in bitcoin and bitcoin-related companies, and said his holdings are up to around $1 million.
Meme-stock mania hit the military with similar force. Staff Sgt. Durelle Bailey , a health-services administrator in the Air Force, was sitting in a classroom at George Mason University in 2021 with two dozen military servicemembers studying for Master’s degrees when one of them mentioned an education-technology stock called Chegg . The price had fallen, which, according to the tipster, was a great chance to buy the dip.
“He was like, ‘Do it right now before it climbs back up,’” Bailey said. Immediately, eight or nine of them pulled out their phones and bought the stock.
Bailey, who put in a few hundred dollars, lost money. Chegg, which briefly peaked at over $113 a share early in 2021, fell to a close below $25 late in the year. It most recently traded closer to $1 .
Stocks and crypto were conversation topics wherever Bailey went. “We would talk about it in the barracks, we would talk about it in the gym, we would talk about it at the chow hall,” he said.
When he joined the Air Force in 2015, Bailey had no savings. Now, his and his wife’s net worth is in the solid six figures, thanks in large part to stock index funds. “We’re set for the future,” the 31-year-old said.
New wealth, and worries
Signs of rising wealth are hard to miss around military bases.
Army Warrant Officer Eric Rawlings , a helicopter pilot based in Colorado and currently deployed in the Middle East, said he recently bought a $10,000 Rolex to celebrate a milestone: For the first time, he made more money off his stock investments than his military pay.
He’s hardly alone. “There’s some dang nice cars driving around base,” the 29-year-old said.
Some financial advisers and veterans worry the good times won’t last. Price-to-earning ratios are near record highs, and stock indexes are increasingly dominated by a small number of tech companies.
“I fear we could be in for a bubble burst,” said David Ashcraft , a retired Army officer.
During the tech boom of the late 1990s, Ashcraft, at the time a young lieutenant, bought shares in Cisco and Sun Microsystems. When the market crashed, the value of his IRA account fell from $10,000 to around $3,000. Since then, he has stuck to index funds.
“If someone tells me they’ve invested everything in crypto or a few stocks,” he said, “there’s always that worry.”
Bonds have largely fallen out of favor with servicemembers because they haven’t performed nearly as well as stocks in recent years. And few troops say they hold much cash.
Many servicemembers argue they can afford to take greater risks because they have job security and guaranteed pensions after 20 years of service. Even conservative investors are more exposed just by the nature of the market. McCulloh, the Space Force officer in New Mexico, said a handful of tech and energy-related stocks now account for the majority of his net worth simply because they’ve appreciated so much.
Risky bets can still flame out in a strong market. In 2023, Moises Gonzalez earned $38,000 as an Albany, Ga.-based truck driver in the Marine Corps—and lost $20,000 day-trading gold and stocks.
“Some days I would just really be going through it because I’m just like losing and losing and losing and losing,” he said.
His biggest daily loss was $15,000, his biggest gain $6,000.
He set up three computer screens in his room on base—a scene that once caused a colonel to raise his eyebrows during a routine inspection—and took a laptop to the motor pool where he worked so he could trade during quiet periods in the morning.
Over time, Gonzalez got better. In 2024, he made $30,000 day-trading. A few months ago he left the Marines, moved to Hawaii and started trading full-time. The 25-year-old hopes to clear $10,000 a month in the market, but isn’t there yet.
“I make $7,000 in the course of three, four days,” he said, “and then I blow it all on the fifth day.”
Write to Konrad Putzier at konrad.putzier@wsj.com