Is 2021 the next 1848 or 1968, a year of insurrection? It’s still January and we’ve had two seismic stormings of seemingly impregnable ramparts organized by very different sets of disaffected outsiders on social media. After the Capitol and Wall Street, which citadel will be targeted next?
Anyone still in possession of their reason was obviously appalled to their very core by the Jan. 6 attack on our democracy. An assault on Wall Street hedge funds that seek to profit from the woes of troubled companies, on the other hand, will naturally elicit a wider range of emotions. Schadenfreude, for one. Short the short sellers! And what could be more peak pandemic-innovation than people coming to the rescue of mall mainstays Gamestop and AMC from the comfort of their homes?
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01/26/2021 08:00 AM EST
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Go read this story about how r/WallStreetBets triggered a huge rise in GameStop’s stock price
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Photo by Aimee Dilger/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
The market, like Soylent Green, is made of people. That’s never more clear than when there’s something bonkers happening like what’s happened with video game retailer GameStop’s stock since last September. Back then, it was trading at around $6.68; by this morning, however, it was trading at $146.97. (Since that astounding high, it fell to $61.13 as of 12:26PM EST.) What happened?
Bloomberg, which reported exactly how the subreddit r/WallStreetBets grabbed hold of a huge opportunity found, naturally, in the mass shorting of GameStop stock. As writer Brandon Kochkodin explains, the stage for the rise was set in 2019, when two important things happened. “One was Michael Burry of