The Weekly Summary presents a Special Issue on wallstreetbets
Recently, Reddit investors from the collective niche group known as wallstreetbets (WSB) disrupted the stock market in the United States. They banded together to buy stocks typically targeted by large hedge fund investors with the intent to short them. Hedge funds set their sights on GameStop, stock symbol GME, America's last brick-and-mortar video game retail store. In other words, shorting is when hedge funds are investing in the company's demise in hopes that the price of GME stock is going down.
wallstreetbets made a group decision to counter this short on GME by pouring a lot of money to pump the stock price upwards. As a result, hedge funds lost billions of dollars.
Since following this historic trading event for the past few weeks, I've seen this subreddit trading army grow from 2 million to over 8.6 million members or as they refer to themselves as - "degenerates".
Meme coins have been part of the cryptocurrency community for many years. Our favorite meme coin on Pubish0x of course is BANANO with a close second place going to Dogecoin. In the process, of wallstreetbets declaring a trading war against the institutional hedge funds that short companies on the verge bankruptcy or collapse, we witnessed the first meme stock created with GameStop.
It wasn't too long ago that short sellers were trying to break Tesla. So in a possible strike back at the shorties, Elon Musk had his say on Twitter. And all it took was one word from Musk on Twitter to pump the meteoric price of GameStop even higher with - 'Gamestonk!'
As small investors were beating huge hedge funds like Melvin Capital and Citron Research at their own game, many investing platforms like Robinhood started placing trade limitations on GameStop because of the unusually high market volatility. This did not go over very well. It caused outrage with Robinhood users who were airing their grievances on social media and posting negative reviews on the Google Play Store.
The following video explains this stock saga best with what really happened between wallstreetbets versus Melvin Capital, one of the big hedge fund companies that lost billions. It's EPIC!
Data storyteller chartr has an excellent illustration summarizing the GameStop sage in four charts.
GME hit a high of $483 on January 28, 2021, but the stock has been dragging downward since.
In my closing thoughts, I remember the last time I did business with GameStop as a consumer about a decade ago. GameStop bought 10 used video games from me for a few bucks. Hey GameStop, any possibility for a do over on that trade we did?
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