Not unlike certain lawyers, bankers are beginning to discover that gamers are really freaking good at playing games once they figure out what the rules are. No matter what the game is.
Investors on Reddit have launched an attack that’s both trolling and serious on Wall Street firms by purchasing shares in GameStop, pushing the stock price up over 480{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} in a week, costing hedge funds millions of dollars, and skyrocketing young investors’ portfolios and egos.
Popular subreddit r/WallStreetBets (WSB), whose tagline is “Like 4chan found a Bloomberg Terminal,” has over 2 million members reading and posting “stonks” tips and news. Its biggest obsession in recent weeks has been raising the stock price of GameStop, the old-school video game mall retailer.
“They’re digitally doing it in a coordinated attack,” Howard Lindzon at Social Leverage, an early stage seed investment fund, told BuzzFeed News.
Lindzon thinks the investors chatting across Reddit — who tend to be millennial and Gen Z men — are just having a fun time causing trouble for hedge funds who’d bet on shares in the gaming retailer dropping. “They’re just playing a game,” he said. “And they’re having a blast.”
But Wall Street hedge funds, including Citron Research and Melvin Capital, had shorted the stock, meaning they had bet against it and needed it to drop in price in order for their investments to be successful.
Even the cries about “it’s unfair, it’s coordinated” are the same. It’s perhaps worth noting that historically, dating back to the days of Rome, once the people get sufficiently irritated, they have no trouble at all slaughtering the elite whose power is based on the very authority they have been abusing and in which the people no longer believe.