![]() ![]() So who won, David or Goliath? Maybe both. ![]() The original WallStreetBets page has more than doubled in size since the GME rally, going from about 5 million at the end of January to over 11 million now – an explosion of popularity that’s put off some early adherents who broke off to form new, more specialized investing groups on Reddit and elsewhere. “They’re not going to stop looking for these things.” “They’re little accounts, but they’ve now figured out how to push a stock price, even with their insignificant size,” Rogozinski told CNN Business. Jaime Rogozinski, the founder of WallStreetBets, acknowledges that what happened with GameStop wasn’t a revolution per se, but that doesn’t mean the community or the ethos that guided it - sniffing out market inefficiencies and exploiting them for profit - is dead. ![]() These days, GME trades around $145 - up nearly 700% for the year, but far from January’s highs. Those who joined late, buying the stock at its peak of around $480, were left with huge losses. The Reddit army’s moment fizzled in early February when GameStop cratered to around $45. “And a lot of young people are still convinced that they’re fighting some kind of virtuous fight against evil hedge funds… but, basically, the story is the same: If you think you’ve figured something out to beat Wall Street, you probably haven’t.” “Most people saw it as this revolution,” says Spencer Jakab, a Wall Street Journal columnist and author of a forthcoming book about the GameStop rally. Once GameStop caught the public’s imagination, Wall Street could no longer afford to dismiss social media or the investors who congregate on it. But the spectacle of the uprising was every bit as important as the result. Did the Apes overthrow the establishment? No, far from it. The GameStop saga, brief though it was, marked a turning point for Wall Street. But the giant was merely caught off guard. It looked, in the moment, like David had taken down Goliath. Melvin Capital, one of Wall Street’s elite hedge funds, was so financially gutted it had to be bailed out by two other firms. Citron, meanwhile, shut down its short-selling business after the episode. In the end, the GameStop rally sent the stock up 1,600% before coming back down to Earth. The more people tried to dismiss the Reddit crowd - Citron Research called them “the suckers at this poker game” - the more they drove up the stock, squeezing the short sellers. They were doubling, tripling, their positions by the day, chanting “diamond hands,” and “to the moon,” rally cries to hold onto their shares rather than cash out. The term “meme stock” sauntered into the mainstream.īetter still, these amateur traders, who winkingly referred to themselves as “Apes,” were sticking it to the fat cats on Wall Street who’d heavily shorted GameStop. (GME) - a brick-and-mortar retailer that most analysts expected to go the way of Blockbuster - began surging, fueled by a pile-on of day traders from the WallStreetBets forum on Reddit. Nearly a year ago, a bunch of day traders from the fringes of the internet figured out how to beat Wall Street at its own game. ![]()
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