There’s literally nothing funnier than this in the world
If you guys missed this, basically this subreddit full of idiots who make dumb day trading decisions because it makes them laugh decided to buy stock in GameStop (a dying company) and enough of them did it that it created indication of a bullish up swing so stock traders bought tons of stock. Now everyone who shorted stock in GameStop (because it’s a dying company) are getting reamed and losing millions. Fucking clown shoes economy lmao
this tweet that screenshots a Reddit post explains it better than I can but basically a hedge fund bought a bunch of Gamestop stock because Gamestop is a dying company and they would make a bunch of money once the price stock went down. A bunch of Redditors saw this happen and, to screw over the hedge funds, bought a bunch of stock, causing the price to go up, and in return, the hedge funds have to keep buying the (Reddit-inflated) increase price of Gamestop in order to keep their placing their bet. Some of the most parasitic people on the planet are mad because Redditors showed how bullshit the stock market is for the fun of it. The owner of the New York Mets lost 3 billion dollars in 24 hours.
Okay, but this post is missing a couple of things:
1. Ryan Cohen, the founder of Chewy, actually purchased a 12.9% stake in Gamestop last year with the intention of turning the company around. You can find articles about him talking about wanting to turn Gamestop into a major e-commerce player. In that respect, it wasn’t really dying, just on the verge of a lot of change.
2. This entire Reddit (small-time) investor solidarity movement was inspired by a user on reddit named DeepFuckingValue. It’s noteworthy that their original investment was 53k and was within a roth IRA, which means they were not making 1% money prior to this. The subreddit actually laughed at their investing decisions all through 2019 and much of 2020. While the subreddit is private now for various reasons, their journey and rationale is pretty well-documented. It was more than dumping money in just for kicks. It was a personal investment turned into a larger statement/movement by the community.
3. This is very likely going to lead to bills being drafted in Congress to limit options for small-time investors because billionaires hate when people that are not them manipulate the market. If you’re in the US, I would track the bills they introduce very carefully. While we can and probably should laugh at the guy on CNN saying that stock talk on social media should be restricted/banned, we should also note that both Democrats and Republicans have strong ties to Wallstreet. This type of bill would be a bipartisan effort.
4. Brokers have already started limiting the amount of shares people can buy due to ‘fluctuation.’ (This is bullshit because investing in stocks is literally gambling on value fluctuation over time. They just want to prevent common folk from making the stock more overvalued even though they did nothing when the hedge fund moved to undervalue the stock…)
not getting my hopes up at all but god how fucking funny would this be
please God
wallstreetbets is unironically starting a class action lawsuit
aaaand it’s already filed
this also demonstrates how the “free” market is a lie- powerful private entities like robinhood app can manipulate the market in favor of the ruling class just as much as any state can, and indeed in this case the state is the only thing which hypothetically could put that kind of market manipulation in check.
it won’t, of course, because the state is run by and for the bourgeoisie, and the only way to address this kind of market manipulation is dissolving the bourgeoisie state and creating a new state run by and for the working class, but still, a great demonstration here of why the free market is a lie.
