Reddit’s small investors organized to screw over America’s richest hedge funds, lol

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I’m old enough to remember what kind of “internet age” we were promised. We were promised mass information, mass communication, and the rise of a socialist-lite egalitarian community. What we got was “too big to fail” banks wrecking the economy and the rise of Nazis, fascism and dumbf–k conspiracies like QAnon. But this story has made me hopeful that at least some people are trying to bring chaotic good to the stock market. The backstory: hedge funds wield their $100 billion-plus portfolios around, making massive bets that this stock will fail or that stock will rise. Some of the biggest hedge funds in the world decided to short GameStop’s stock, betting that the stock would continue to decline and that they would reap a huge profit. Then a wide variety of small investors, mostly self-organizing on Reddit, decided to mass invest in GameStop and a handful of other declining stocks. Reddit’s small investors pushed the price of GameStop’s stock so high, and now they’re cashing out, making a huge profit on their small investment. Wall Street is FREAKING OUT.

A real estate salesman in Valparaiso, Ind. A former line cook from the Bronx. An evangelical pastor and his wife in Huntington Beach, Calif. A high school student in the Milwaukee suburbs. They are among the millions of amateur traders collectively taking on some of Wall Street’s most sophisticated investors — and, for the moment at least, winning. Propelled by a mix of greed and boredom, gleefully determined to teach Wall Street a lesson, and turbocharged by an endless flow of get-rich-quick hype and ideas delivered via social media, these investors have piled into trades around several companies, pushing their stock prices to stratospheric levels.

Some of the names are from an earlier business era. BlackBerry’s shares are up nearly 280 percent this year. Stock in AMC, the movie theater chain, has surged nearly 840 percent. But the trade that captures the David-versus-Goliath nature of the moment involves GameStop, the troubled video game retailer that was once a fixture in suburban malls.

On Wall Street, individual investors are often derided as “dumb money,” destined to lose against the highly compensated analysts and traders who buy and sell stocks for a living. But in recent days, individual investors — many of them followers of a popular, juvenile, foul-mouthed Reddit page called Wall Street Bets — have upended that narrative by banding together to put the squeeze on at least two hedge funds that had bet that GameStop’s shares would fall.

While the hedge funds and other professional money managers had been shorting GameStop’s shares, betting that its stock was doomed to further decline, the retail investors — online traders, mom-and-pop investors, small brokers and others — have been pushing the other way, buying shares and stock options. That caused GameStop’s market value to increase to over $24 billion from $2 billion in a matter of days. Its shares have risen over 1,700 percent since December. Between Tuesday and Wednesday, the market value rose over $10 billion.

The tribal framing online, as a kind of team sport pitting plucky upstarts against well-heeled Wall Streeters, has been especially helpful in motivating more investors to participate. This week, Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, fueled the trading by posting about the Reddit page on Twitter. And speculation is growing that other investors are seeing fresh opportunities to push the stock even higher.

No one knows how this ends. Some analysts say the intense activity could eventually prompt a wider sell-off in the market by forcing hedge funds on the losing side of these trades to sell parts of their portfolios to raise cash to cover their losses. While this speculative frenzy played out on the market’s sidelines, the S&P 500 fell more than 2.5 percent on Wednesday, its worst day since late October, as the Federal Reserve gave a glum assessment of the economy and before a number of big tech companies announced their earnings.

[From The NY Times]

There’s no hedge fund which will ever be designated “too big to fail” – meaning, there is no bailout on the horizon. Instead, you have the so-called professional class of Wall Street commentators completely flummoxed by what is happening, and some of the richest hedge funds in America losing billions in a matter of days. It honestly is like an episode of Billions (a show I love). I saw one Wall Street analyst try to explain what was happening as “it’s a combination of boredom and people investing their stimulus checks.” Which is funny, because that’s the way these douchebags think – “we gave the peasants a few dollars and now look what happened!” Anyway, I’m proud of these small investors. I saw some screencaps from Reddit where the small investors were talking about donating portions of their profits to charity and helping family members pay for medical care. These are real people… screwing over faceless hedge-funds and feeding the poor.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked about this mess too, lol.

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76 Responses to “Reddit’s small investors organized to screw over America’s richest hedge funds, lol”

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  1. ItReallyIsYouNotMe says:

    I heard about this yesterday and tried to buy some AMC stock, but TD Ameritrade left the buy order as open for hours. So I think it’s true that TD Ameritrade blocks trading the reddit stocks once they realized what was happening. A friend of mine had a similar experience with Merrill Lynch. I had an idea after the article about Barbra Streisand to start a women’s investment club and look at trading stocks. At least something to do that hopefully will be productive in the long run and make some ordinary people some money.

    • Audrey says:

      Ladies, use robinhood app. I’ve been following it as well!! https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMJEKo1uR/

      • Wiglet Watcher says:

        Robinhoodapp also blocked it. AOC tweeted this and she backs an inquiry into this prevention.

      • SofiasSideEye says:

        I only did robinhood block buying, they’re also forcing sales on their users. This is after the hedge fund that owns them tripled down on their shorts last night. There will be lawsuits, but apparently the lawsuits and fines will cost them less than what they’re already losing now.

    • I pet goat 2 says:

      I love that idea

    • Lemons says:

      Do not solely use Robinhood app, they are doing the same thing and blocking users from buying these short-squeeze stocks or experiencing “outages” that are lasting longer than other brokerages….I’m using Webull and have not experienced the same thing. (You can also trade during extended hours, so it’s another plus).

      • Audrey says:

        Thanks!

      • Audrey says:

        @lemons robinhood, ameritrade and other trading apps have completely shutdown retail investors access to buy more stocks to protectthese hedgefunds. I’m only allowed to sell my shares. Wtf. It’s completely bs

      • Emm says:

        Yeah something is happening because GameStop is way down now and Robinhood putting a stop to buying. Big guys are getting involved now.

      • Lemons says:

        Just an update for those following. A class action lawsuit has been filed against Robinhood. There has been clear market manipulation from them and other trading apps…It’s going to get very interesting when an eventual investigation happens.

    • rrabbit says:

      Did you try to buy with your own money, or did you try to buy with borrowed money?

  2. Oatmeal says:

    Best thing ever

  3. Persephone says:

    Hmm…I may want to get in on this…

  4. Sarah says:

    Omg that lady Gritty meme made me die laughing! 😂
    Good for them. I can just imagine those Wall Street douches losing their minds. Of course said Wall Streeters are already talking about restructuring the system, how “flawed” it is. Funny how it was a perfectly fine model until the regular folks aka those that they consider the poor and uneducated started reaping the benefits against them.

    • Esmom says:

      I know, right? So funny. And yes, so rich that these guys are suddenly outraged about the system they learned to exploit.

      My college age has gotten interested in investing so of course I had to ask him if he had somehow fond some money to invest in GameStock. He said no but that he and his roommates were loving the story.

    • LadyMTL says:

      I like this story too, and I think short-selling should be banned because it’s ridiculous how these huge hedge funds use it to manipulate the system (admittedly I don’t know much about short selling other than the basics, but it’s always seemed shady at best.)

      • Emm says:

        I agree, short selling is BS and the fact that they aren’t just betting on a stock loosing value because of a numbers report from the company or data but they are manipulating the market so that the stock will in fact loose value and they make money.

      • idk says:

        Short sellers can play a valuable role, I think – sometimes a company itself is shady, and shorting it based on poor fundamentals is how the market judges and accounts for that. (Years ago I was consulting for a company that was being stalked by a short seller, whose argument was that the company had poor risk management and compliance systems and was a bad buy because of it. The company was beside itself because he was causing all kinds of problems with their stock, but the short seller was right.)

        I’m loving the GameStop situation, though!

    • Noodle says:

      @sarah, as a result, the sub got banned yesterday in Reddit. Whoever did the banning said it was because of hate language within the sub (which most likely existed before this erupted, because well, a lot of people are morons), but yesterday it got shut down. And I don’t think it was shut down by the moderator volunteers. I’m fairly certain those former billionaires exerted their power to get it shut down so they can be free to decimate the 99% again. As they scream about the importance of regulations to prevent this from happening again, of course.

      • Allygator says:

        The sub wasn’t shut down, it was taken down by the moderators to deal with the insane influx of bots and spam trying to confusing people and spread misinformation. The subs discord is what got taken down for “hate speech” under what I understand are very sketchy circumstances. The sub is back up now but the discord was nuked.

      • Noodle says:

        @allygator, I leave open the idea that it might have been the mods who shut it down due to bots or people trying to wreak havoc or hate speech. That said, I also don’t discount that A LOT of powerful people lost a lot of money, and it seems natural that they would want it shut down until a strategy to deal with it could be established. There were some very angry people spouting off on financial media yesterday about the audacity. I don’t know the answer. I HOPE it’s the former. I’m glad it’s back and hope it will be monitored to weed out bots and malfeasance.

  5. FrenchGirl says:

    Note that Michael Burry one of the guys showing in the movie « the big short « is also involved. Some months ago ,he invested 17 million $ in GameShop and yesterdayhe gained 600 millions $

    • Christina says:

      Yes, Frenchgirl.

      I know NOTHING about investing. Just flagging that CBS’s financial expert just pointed out that hedge funds invest rich people money that can be lost, can handle the risk, but their short selling warns the rest of the market about non-viable companies. She said, “Enron was short-sold, and that’s how the rest of the market found out” that it was poorly run.

      Michael Barry’s very recent investment and windfall make me suspicious. I’m glad that a lot of regular people made money, but somebody will lose and lose big who can’t afford it. The CBS report said that GameStop sells products that are wisely available in other places. I want the small investors to get out while they can. The stock market needs regulation, and the wealthy need to pay their share in taxes, but this makes me nervous for the small investors doing this who can’t afford to lose. When the rich lose, they don’t get evicted or end up on food stamps.

      Our family loves GameStop, and we shop there.

    • CV says:

      Michael Burry is out of the stock, and well before this started FYI

  6. SarahCS says:

    I saw a story and out this yesterday and between these people and the K-pop fans who keep taking on great justice causes I have hope.

    I’m also really enjoying the internet’s reaction to this, there was one tweet highlighting how legit media outlets now have to reference people’s reddit names as sources in their articles and it’s hilarious.

    On a more serious note, the stock market is a joke. I worked for a construction/services business here in the UK and we were doing fine. Not as profitable as we could have been but change was happening. But investors weren’t happy so our CEO agreed to a rights issue (create/sell more shares), this wasn’t the success anyone hoped for with banks who had guaranteed the issue having to pick up leftover shares. So sure enough share price tanked and stayed down. CEO was pushed out by the same investors which started a ripple effect where so many jobs were cut (mine included) as part of a restructure. Which happened because investors wanted more on their dividends more quickly. Ugh.

  7. MellyMel says:

    When I signed up with Robinhood last year, the free stock they gave me was for Game Stop. At the time I was like “meh”, but I woke up very happy yesterday. This whole thing is hilarious to me.

    • Sarah says:

      Good for you! Sincerely hope you were able to reap the benefits! Just goes to show you never know what craziness can happen!

    • Emm says:

      My husband’s cousin is a Reddit user and got in on GameStop a couple of weeks ago. He’s made some money, to say the least and he’s the last person I would’ve guessed to get in on something like this. Right place right time.

      I love all of this and that’s awesome you got GameStop! My husband has been trading on the side for a few years and the manipulation that goes on in the market is insane and so many people don’t understand or even believe it goes on. He starts talking to me about shorts and the Fibonacci though and my eyes glaze over, I leave that stuff to him. And no one give a flying rats ass that these multi millionaire hedge funders are getting hurt, give me a break. Sad.

    • Pusspants says:

      @Mellymel, I love that you made some money off this!

    • Louisa says:

      MellyMel, I was about to sign up last week on Robin Hood as my son wanted to invest his birthday / Christmas money and I said I would match it and do it with him. Not a lot of money but when it asked for my bank account number I bailed. I just don’t feel comfortable giving that online. Am I being paranoid?

    • Anna says:

      Damn. I’m happy for folks making money but I sure wish I’d gotten in on that. I know nothing about stocks and feel so dull about it all. All I want is to pay off my student loans.

  8. Kyla says:

    I’ll admit I have no idea how any of this works. I’m Canadian so I don’t know how exactly this applies either,

    I’m not rich. Nowhere near it. But, I’ve worked my ass off for more than 25 years, contributing to RRSPs every year since 1996. I’m single, no siblings, both parents deceased. I have no safety net other than what I’ve managed to earn and save. My job pays well, which makes me fortunate (it’s also a high stress job which has taken a toll). But I live in an expensive city on one income, so I’m not getting rich. I’ll be 50 this year so it’s not like I can start over either. All I have is what I’ve managed to put into RRSPs for 25 years. I sacrificed a lot to do that. To see the value of those RRSPs drop by a not small amount yesterday isn’t something that pleases me. I have no idea if the drop is the result of the Reddit stuff. And while I have no sympathy for people making millions a year, like hedge fund managers, I can’t be the only regular person out there who was negatively impacted in a way that really hurts.

    • Briarpear says:

      This!!! I have been trying to figure out why people think this is screwing over the rich. A lot of that money is people’s pensions, life savings and charity endowments. The rich and analysts will bounce back just fine but the people who will endure the most fallout for a longer period are regular people. I think if people want to invest and make money they should but don’t think they are screwing over wallstreet or making some huge ideological point.

      • Alisha says:

        It is only screwing over a very specific set of rich people. The ones who bet against corporations and get insanely rich specifically from by profiting off of other people’s losses and misery. However nobody knows what the fallout is be yet and for all the people who are cheering them on, there are also people worried that this is going to screw regular folks over more in the long run. I image the SEC will cave to the pressure of these rich folks and probably pass some regulations that won’t allow normal people to fight back ever again.

    • Emm says:

      I’ve asked my husband about this and he said no it’s not the GameStop/Reddit stuff fault and the market is back up today. He said there was some report from yesterday that brought the market down. He did say this could be the catalyst for the bubble to pop though because when the market gets too “frothy” it gets cut and that we’ve been on a long bull run. Idk what half the stuff I just typed is but we are middle class, not rich people who can loose money and bounce back and he made me feel better. He said they might blame the Reddit thing for the bubble burst but it would be BS because they have supported this market by printing money and 401k are going to get cut anyway because of the bull run. So yeah…idk. That’s what he said, I think.

    • emmy says:

      If Reddit users can tank pension funds, it’s probably a good idea to look at the structures and the people who set them up and benefit immensely.

      The stock markets these days aren’t reflective of the economies they allegedly are built on. The entire thing has gotten away from us and I personally don’t invest because a) investing in funds usually means investing in shady corporations and b) I don’t understand it and don’t trust the people who do. That might mean I’m going to end up with less money I could potentially make but I can live with that.

  9. Golly Gee says:

    I hope this is the beginning of a trend. F**k them.

  10. Faithmobile says:

    We were able to invest some of our stimulus money and have made some serious returns. My good friend is adding an addition to her house with the money she made last year, the addition will include a granny unit that she can rent out for income. When she divorced, her husband got everything so she is clawing her way back and it’s been amazing to witness. check out Ark and get a robin hood app, start with a couple of hundred and see where it takes you.

    • Louisa says:

      I was about to invest through Robin Hood but didn’t feel comfortable at all about giving my bank account number. Is there another way to invest with them without giving out this info?

      • Jessi says:

        @Louisa – I don’t know anything about Robin Hood (although I think I heard they were being investigated for some shady fees?) but if you want to give it a try and they need a bank account, you could consider setting up a separate bank account and putting in a small amount of money (say, what you planned to invest, plus a little more to avoid bank fees) and using only that account. That way, if there is something fishy, they can’t access the rest of your money.

  11. STRIPE says:

    If the mechanisms of this are unfamiliar to you, the podcast “The Indicator” from NPR did a good episode on what short selling is in general and this situation specifically!

    • FancyPants says:

      Thanks, I’m gonna have to look that up. I don’t understand how buying one thing makes the other thing drop.

  12. Lemons says:

    It is so awesome to see that some ladies here are investing. The Reddit groups can be hyper masculine, so you forget that we do exist!

  13. Betsy says:

    I’d rather we just regulated and taxed Wall Street like they ought to be. Kyla upthread is right – who else is going to get hurt by this? The douche bros won’t be, not long term anyway.

  14. Veronica S. says:

    It wasn’t just that they borrowed the shares to get the price lowered and to cash out on the buyback, it’s that they borrowed more than actually existed, which is shady AF and the Reddit forum (r/WallStreetBets) caught them out on it, buying it up and then holding it until Friday to force the buyback. I was actually on Reddit when this really started to go down, and everything from the forum being temp banned to censored to called out by media literally occurred in the span of maybe five hours. Hilarious to watch them freaking out about it, seeing people who aren’t on the inside play their own game against them. Reveals just how much of a scam it is that we’re forced to tie up our 401Ks and retirement savings into a system where rich people can play astrology with it.

  15. Cerise says:

    This has been such a bonkers year for the stock market… Tesla alone has quintupled in value !
    Glad to see these Redditors making serious money but cautious as to how this will affect the rest of the market.

  16. Margot says:

    I enjoy Reddit. Have learned a lot about personal finance from lurking on several forums on there. A lot of users address each other as “dude” or “bro” but they get corrected. Depends on which subreddit you’re on. The personal finance pages all reference r/WallStreetBets as wild and crazy.

    Also, Gritty Woman is absolutely amazing!

  17. Mi says:

    It was glorious, finally we did it on r/wallstreetsbets, we fucked over some big people! And now all the memes all over the whole of Reddit it the icing om the cake!

  18. AmunetMaat says:

    I don’t know. I have a different take than most of my contemporaries. It was dangerous and shortsighted. Our economy and markets aren’t strong or healthy enough to sustain what happened. A coordinated effort of thousands did some serious damage and that makes me think our markets are severely weak. A big clue is when they mentioned the Fed Reserve having to make a comment or potentially step in. Also, there was mention of how this spreads across the entire stock market in general and what the dips mean in terms of our projections/predictions. Originally the market was making gains due to the prediction of vaccines, etc. opening up a business. Due to that goodwill, the markets were bouncing up. Now that the prediction bubble has been popped and it’s possible that the market may dip. The discussion is that we may have inflation all the small impact of this stunt. So I’m not ecstatic over this and instead I’m more cautious. 🙃 It’s unsettling how quickly the Redditt group was squashed as well.

    • Annaloo. says:

      Thank you– anyone who has a 401k should be scared to death of this! An unstable economy does nothing for anyone bc what other system do you have ready to go to replace this one? You don’t want anarchy in your financial systems or economy. This punk rock move is not good if it continues, no one wants an unstable economu

      • AmunetMaat says:

        YES! I actually kind of like Elon Musk but he is an anarchist and for him, breaking the rules and sowing the seeds of chaos won’t kill him, it won’t destroy him, it entertains him and makes him feel more self-important. He can take these types of risks and be ok. Other rich, well-off, well-known supporters of the Reddit-Stockbros-Campaign are also in a great, stable place financially to take this risk and come out roses but for the everyday layman, this should make us all weary. This proves how delicate our market systems are and that frightens me to a great degree.

      • L4frimaire says:

        What’s being said is that Elon Musk is using this as payback against this particular fund because they bet against Tesla a while back, so for Musk, it’s purely a spiteful move to get back at a fund that affected his bottom line. Musk is a very smart and innovative, but he’s not a good actor in this. He sees himself as some sort of brilliant evil genius and it’s a game to him. He’s also doesn’t respect workers rights, have had many discrimination lawsuits, and bullied the state of California into opening his plants during the first Covid lockdown by threatening the regions economy and countless livelihoods, saying he’s relocate the plant if he didn’t get his way.

      • LaurieLee says:

        But if this highlights some significant weaknesses in our financial system in a way that lots of people will be paying attention to, maybe it will drive some improvement in the system.

      • Veronica S. says:

        On the other hand, it should highlight to everyone how dangerous and exploitative it is that instead of pensions, which are steady and ensured retirement payments, we’ve all been pushed into 401Ks, which allow the ultra-wealthy to play around with everybody else’s money for their own gain, simply because CEOs want them big paychecks. The more people aware of how badly late-stage capitalism is a system eating itself alive from the inside, the better. This should be sparking a conversation among a lot of people about the volatility of markets and forcing people to tie their money to it.

        Should this kind of market manipulation probably be restricted or possibly illegal? Sure. But then you should probably be thinking about regulating shorting better then, too, since it’s clearly being used in ways that create market vulnerability.

  19. one of the Marys says:

    Everyone loves a great David versus Goliath story even if I don’t understand the half of it lol

  20. Ann says:

    The top comment on this post has a really good ELI5 (explain like I’m 5) on what is happening. https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/l6p84y/warren_and_aoc_slam_investors_for_criticising/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

    As an active redditor I love that my fellow reddit peeps are fighting back AND winning! Yeah! Stick it to the man, reddit!

  21. Miss617 says:

    My mom is a neoliberal financier and cried about how artificially inflating a stock value was illegal and the feds will come for the reddit bros and arrest them when I told her I support the reddit bros screwing over rich hedge fund managers. If that does end up happening, it’s disgusting that the feds will come for these everyday Robin Hoods while only one person ever served time for causing the Great Recession. She also tried to insult Reddit as a despicable place that “hosts QAnon crazies”, to which I told her that no, Reddit tries to actively ban all far-right forums, and is home to r/qanoncasualties in which people can share their stories about the pain of losing loved ones to right-wing conspiracy theories.

  22. Jamie says:

    To me this is all fascinating. My husband bought 70 shares of GME back in December so we are looking at some possible serious gains but the rules are being twisted by big money as we watch, so we’ll see how this all plays out. We are solidly middle class, by the way, just starting to get into stocks beyond our 401k’s. I saw a comment on twitter that this is showing the real battle isn’t between the left and the right, but between the 1% and the 99%.

  23. Annaloo. says:

    If Wall Street freaks out, that is never good for the general way of things. No doubt we have a lot of corruption and crap in our current economy, but what is plan B if our economy crashes and burns? You don’t want instability around the markets.. no one wants instability, you don’t know where you will land on the other side of it.

  24. CV says:

    I have 30 years experience trading professionally and personally and maybe I’ll get flamed for this but I would like to explain why this phenomenon is unhealthy for everyone in the financial markets, not just hedge funds. If you have a 401(k) or pension or mutual fund, by definition your money is run by professional money managers. We all have a stake in this.

    First, let me explain short selling, which is borrowing shares of a company to sell in the marketplace in the hopes of buying it back lower. Shorting also involves *unlimited* downside risk. If I short a stock at $20 and hope to buy it back at $5, the most I make is $15/share. If it starts trading at $40, to buy it back (called covering) I’ve got to pay 2x what I took in when I shorted it. You can see the damage when it gets to $400/share. Also, the cost of borrowing rises as shares become more scarce, so heavily shorted names will come with an increasingly high cost to borrow, and you have to provide collateral against positions that are losing money. This will be important later in this discussion.

    Why do people short stocks? Sometimes it’s because of suspected fraud, which short-sellers did reveal in cases like Enron, WorldComm and Tyco in the early 00s, mortgage fraud and Lehman Bros in 2006 etc. But more often than not, it’s simply a short term view of the value of a stock relative to its peers, the overall market, or its fundamentals (like GameStop, a brick and mortar retailer that has suffered from the onset of online gaming and downloadable game sales). Not every business survives big disruptions to their model, or to changing tastes, and so those businesses will eventually earn less and less money and therefore be worth less. It’s not evil to recognize this.

    What happened here, shorting GME (the ticker for GameStop) definitely got extended in the professional trading community, which is the #1 reason these reddit bros went after it. It was hard (and costly) to find shares to borrow. The reddit/wsb guys took advantage of the fact that as a shorted stock goes higher, losses pile up fast. They also piled into options, which is for our next lesson, but let’s just say that buying options is another way to force buying as the stock goes higher, but this time just from dealers that are trying to stay NEUTRAL in the position. So some collateral damage to guys just on the sidelines too.

    So ultimately I don’t care about a hedge fund going out of biz or losing a ton of dough in this or any other instance, they’re big boys and they know the risks. What I do care about is the way this stock traded was completely divorced from its economic potential, which rarely ends well for the incremental buyer at these prices. What happens to the guy who follows these trades and buys some GME stock at a price that puts the value of a dying business at $25 billion, equal to 1/3 of the value of Target. Or the same value as Best Buy. Is that truly reflective of the prospects for this business that is losing money? It will not end well for those folks, and that will be the real tragedy. Bubbles burst. People will get hurt.

    So yeah, I’m fine laughing at rich guys losing money, but I hate to tell you that it’s going to be plenty of non-rich guys losing it too.

    • Nocturne says:

      If you read through reddit comments, for a lot of people its not just about the money. So many people were seriously screwed over during the 2008 economic crash and now they have a chance to screw over those same hedge fund managers that caused the crash to begin with.

      These managers were not punished but were instead rewarded with bailouts. They’re now getting a taste of what they did to others and it is glorious.

      This is personal for a lot of people, and If you only have a few hundred dollars to your name anyway, what happens if you lose it on stocks? Not much. You’re basically in just as bad a position as you were before, but you have the satisfaction of screwing over the people who screwed you, and that is priceless.

      • CV says:

        You know who they *actually* rewarded though, in addition to whatever “satisfaction” they got from screwing over a rich guy? Another rich guy, a guy named Donald Foss who owns 5% of GameStop and made most of his money …. screwing over poor people. ie he made his billions in the subprime auto lending market, meaning he charges very high interest rates to people w poor credit who need financing to buy cars. Well played.

    • A says:

      ” it’s going to be plenty of non-rich guys losing it too.”

      Except a lot of the people involved in shorting the stock are people who don’t have a 401k, don’t have a pension plan they need to care about, and don’t have mutual funds. I don’t know what world you live in where the people who do have these things are somehow the “little guy” bc as a millenial, those things are, and remain, a fast disappearing luxury afforded to a shrinking middle class that doesn’t exist any more.

      You don’t worry about investing in mutual funds for a retirement plan when you can’t afford a house because you’re up to your eyeballs in student loans. You don’t concern yourself with a pension or a 401k when job security is fast becoming non-existent in this country, to the point where it isn’t very likely that millenials will be working at the same company for the length of time required to qualify for a pension on which they can subsist on after retirement. Add to this the fact that healthcare is a fucking joke in America at the very least, and what you’ll get is where I find myself and a lot of the other millenials I know of are in right now, where our retirement plan is to just not fucking retire. Many of us are looking at a life where we see ourselves working until the day we die, because we can’t afford to retire.

      So yes, the stuff that’s happening right now is bad. Yes. People will get hurt. But the sort of people who are engaging in this shit are the sort of people who have nothing left to lose any more. That devil-may-care attitude is the very ethos of the WallStreetBros subreddit. No one cares about any of the stuff you outlined, because it’s all a fucking joke. The fact that a 70 year old in this world has to worry about their 401k or their pension losing value, because the govt has systematically decimated any and every safety net that has been available to the middle class in America, to the point retirees have to pick up jobs at fucking Walmart because they can’t afford food or medication is a fucking JOKE. The fact that hedge fund billionaires can line their pockets off the misery of people, and manipulate markets as much as they like for their own bottom line, all while lobbying the govt and politicians to implement policies that only enable them to continue making money off of poverty is a fucking JOKE. That any of this can happen at all, that a bunch of cheeto dust encrusted gamer bros on Reddit can game a fucking made up system in this way for a dying company, only to be met with this level of alarm, while approximately 15 shadowy billionaires can do the exact same thing in hotel conference rooms, but quietly, is a joke. That’s the whole fucking point.

  25. L4frimaire says:

    I don’t really understand what is happening here but this was a wayto check Wall Street and put a bit of power back in the hands of small investors to make a statement. Not sure what exactly the motivations were behind it other than regular bro dudes messing with the wealthy bro dudes to check them, but they got Wall Streets attention and they’re afraid. This isn’t sustainable or necessarily rational, and the trading platforms like Robin Hood are panicking and curbing the sales of GameStop, AMC etc because the hedge funds are crying. Now some in Congress are getting involved and saying this is market manipulation to benefit hedge funds, and hopefully gives them more scrutiny . These big funds have very little regulation and not taxed enough, so shouldn’t be complaining when small investors decide to teach them a lesson with their own rules. There’s a good article on this in NYMag about the implications, good and bad. If this can be away for people to have a direct way to make Wall Street listen and hold some of big companies accountable, I can see this as a tool of protest and persuasion. However, a lot of small investors are going to lose money they can’t afford to lose, and the fallout won’t be good for some of those people. This was gambling in another form. Not sure of wider implications, especially if it negatively affects pensions, investments and 401ks.

  26. Mia says:

    Lmao this story is awesome. I’ve seen so many people paying for rent and student debt with this. It’s protesting! It’s great.

    My friend set his game stop stock to sell at 420.69 and it actually got that high lol.

    Class action lawsuits are proceeding with these trading platforms.

  27. Emily says:

    My husband, who reads Reddit, was explaining to me that these hedge funds own so much stock they basically manipulate the market. They sell off all their Game Stop stock, causing the price to drop, then buying it back cheaper. The Redditers screwed up their plan and the hedge funds are contractually obligated to buy back those stocks at a stupidly high price. What the hedge funds were doing shouldn’t be legal anyways.

    I’ve never had an interest in the stock market because it’s really imaginary and has nothing to do with the real life economy. It exists for rich people to get richer.

    • CV says:

      none of that is correct

      The price of a stock will reflect the value of the future performance of the underlying business, it’s not imaginary. People will differ on what they expect the future to look like for the economy or a particular biz, which is why you have buyers and sellers at any given time.

      What’s happening w GameStop is reddit tried to squeeze the short-sellers (mission accomplished btw!) and now they’re all holding onto a dying brick-and-mortar retailer with a $15 billion valuation and no end game.

      • Emm says:

        Yeah that is how the stock market is theoretically supposed to work and what we learn in school about it and for some stocks it does but if you don’t believe there is any kind of market manipulation by these big guys you are being very naive. Like I said below, it is everywhere.

  28. Emm says:

    I agree, ever since my husband started trading and studying all the aspects of the market about 4-5 years ago I’ve learned that none of it is real, it’s all manipulation and illusion. These giant hedge funds hire people to go on SM to spread misinformation, they pay journalists to publish articles to get people out of good stocks, this manipulation runs deep and wide, they cover everything to make sure they make the money so this has caught them completely off guard. Oh and spare me the “We are so worried for the everyday working Americans that could loose their savings trying to get in on this.” They have been taking our money for decades and it was fine, they dgaf about any “little” person that could loose their ass in all of this, they only care about their own ass, always have, always will.

    Oh and if you know nothing about the stock market and don’t have money to loose then I suggest you don’t go throwing your life savings into something like this. No one is saying you have to do this. They are just putting it out there what they are doing.

  29. Mrbojanglesisreallyagirl says:

    The majority of hedge fund capital comes from foundations, endowments and pensions so…way to stick it to the teachers?!!!