![]() ![]() Viewed through still another lens, someone on Reddit who’s investing for profit is merely doing what professional Wall Streeters do every day. (Unfortunately, as with other internet hordes, some from this one have a taste for harassment.) As long as there are enough amateur investors to throw weight around, they can decide whether a stock moves up or down. TikTok teens and K-pop stans can sabotage the ticketing operation of a presidential rally. Viewed through another lens, the rebels of r/WallStreetBets are doing old-fashioned internet organizing of the guerrilla kind you might find in politics today. When I Became a Personal Trainer, I Thought My Clients Would Idolize Me. If one considers the Redditors to be untowardly moving the market by talking in public, aren’t professional traders doing the same when they talk in private? Is there any difference between internet dorks hyping a stock and some hedge fund magnate going on CNBC to explain why the market will do as he’s predicted? Financial professionals spend all day talking about stocks on their Bloomberg terminals and yelling at one another on the phone about them. It’s not clear why Porsche’s boardroom should have any more authority to dictate what happens in the market than a group of internet users operating in public view.Ĭertainly, GameStop isn’t the first stock to move heavily based on what a specific group of people has to say about it. When Porsche bought up a bunch of Volkswagen stock in 2008, short sellers scrambled to get out of their positions and briefly made VW the world’s most valuable company. After all, GameStop isn’t the first stock to be subject to a giant short squeeze or to see its resulting value make little sense. ![]() If this feels outrageous, it might only be because a bunch of supposedly unwashed Reddit users are involved. The most famous is a user calling themselves “DeepFuckingValue” who had apparently turned a six-figure investment into nearly $14 million by this Monday. The stock’s boom has made some of them big money. Hype around GME continued bubbling up around r/WallStreetBets over the ensuing weeks, from posters who apparently saw it all along as a profit opportunity. R/WallStreetBets users delighted in the idea and took it as a chance to egg one another on. In September, an enterprising subredditor had posted a seven-point treatise titled “Bankrupting Institutional Investors for Dummies, ft GameStop.” The subredditor noted the stock already had a significant short exposure (months before Cohen joined the board) and predicted that short sellers would be forced to abandon their positions and, in buying back their stocks, drive the price up. The Wall Street speculation community has more than 2 million members, hundreds of thousands of whom are online at any given time, to say nothing of lurkers. One group that noticed the shorts on the stock was r/WallStreetBets. That’s when the company’s story went from typical to bizarre. Two days after the announcement that Cohen had joined the board, GameStop’s stock surged more than 50 percent, going from $20.42 to $31.40 after reaching as high as $38.65. Cohen’s arrival turned GameStop into a “cult stock,” one financial analyst explained to Bloomberg News, where retail investors believed he’d be a corporate savior. By January, GameStop appointed Cohen and two associates from his investment company to serve on a newly expanded board. He took specific aim at GameStop’s CEO and blamed the company for squandering billions of dollars and “a massive amount of market share.” In November, he wrote a harshly worded letter to the company’s board, lambasting it for not keeping up with “the transition from physical hardware to digital streaming,” among other errors. ![]() In August, the well-known investor Ryan Cohen-founder of online pet food giant Chewy-took a 13 percent stake in GameStop. ![]()
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