It seems that Donald Trump may have been holding internet autists in check. Because no sooner did he leave office than a bunch of online pranksters rose up to bring Wall Street to its knees.
Amateur investors piled further into niche stocks on Tuesday, sending professional short sellers scrambling to cover losing bets, with GameStop skyrocketing for a fourth straight day, thanks in part to Elon Musk.GameStop surged 50% in extended trade after Musk tweeted “Gamestonk!!”, along with a link to Reddit’s Wallstreetbets stock trading discussion group, where supporters affectionately refer to the Tesla CEO as “Papa Musk.” “Stonks” is a tongue-in-cheek term for stocks widely used on social media.
GameStop’s stock price skyrocketed to a high of $365 from a low of $80 thanks to Wallstreetbets’ call buying campaign. Melvin Capital, a hedge fund that heavily shorted GameStop, was forced to close out and may go bankrupt after blowing through a $2.75B bailout.
…. before the stock slumped following a report from CNBC that Melvin Capital, the nemesis of r/wallstreetbets which needed a $2.75BN bailout from Citadel and Point72 to avoid a terminal margin call, had “closed out its short position in GameStop on Tuesday afternoon after taking a huge loss” the fund’s manager Gabe Plotkin told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin. It was unclear what exactly this meant: did Melvin merely sell its now worthless puts, or did it also have associated GME shorts on the underlying stock? We assume both.
Additionally, moments after the CNBC report, short-seller Andrew Left’s Citron Research fund also announced in a Twitter clip that it had covered most of its GME short yesterday around $90.
And the kicker is that Wallstreetbets didn’t jack up GameStop stock as part of some get rich quick scheme. They explicitly did it to sow chaos in the financial system.
The situation became so serious that trading of GameStop stock was halted nine times. NASDAQ reps have threatened to step in and quash any Reddit-related shenanigans.
If you want to evaluate the significance of an event, look at its outcomes. Big Finance–the folks who enjoyed massive bailouts as teenage usury victims languished under unserviceable debts–went into panic mode over the GameStop affair. What that tells us is that Wallstreetbets scored a direct hit on one of the establishment’s weak points.
There’s an important lesson for the counterculture in Wallstreetbets’ joke-gone-too-far. Whether or not it was a good idea at the time, dissidents have been fixated on politics for the past four years. Now that we live in a one-party state, political action is a nonstarter. The name of the game for the foreseeable future is making ourselves costly to govern.
Surging the stock of a has-been outfit like GameStop is a model for how dissidents can throw wrenches in the ruling class’ machinery. For those who have qualms about fiscal warfare, keep in mind that the financial system is what’s keeping “Get woke, go broke” from becoming real. Big Finance is one leg of the Washington-Silicon Valley-Wall Street tripod–and, it would appear, the weakest one to boot. That makes it a desirable target for legal culture warfare.
Be unruly. Hit ’em where they ain’t. Stay nimble, and don’t let tactics drag on. These are the methods that cultural dissidents must adopt to remain effective in the era of Death Cult hegemony.
After all this, there are still people on the dissident side insulting gamers. Near seven years and they're one of the few groups still striking successful blows.
Perhaps it's a time to drop that boomer '90s mentality, if one wants to win.
Of course gamers would immediately realize what many are just now coming around to: It's all a game – a rigged game.
Nobody told them about the Lord British Postulate. Everquest devs have probably been afraid of something like this for 20 years.
Brian
Hmmmm. So basically weaponizing the common good to neutralize avarice. That's a brilliant chad move. We know since Bernoff, most Wall St managers aren't as smart as they presume
xavier
One beautiful thing about this is seeing media talking heads try to act like we aren't aware of how hedge funds and other companies have used the stock market for years.
"What's worrying is that these investors are buying the stock without a good reason for believing that Gamestop actually has that much real value", "It's concerning that these investors are discussing their opinions and not acting independently", "what is scary is that people who aren't actively investing could be hurt by market manipulation."
Do they really expect us to think that investment firms independently make decisions based only on which companies they think are valuable, and that they will not go forward if they might accidentally hurt the little guy?
We are beset on all sides by scoundrels claiming the moral high ground.
Clown World would crumble in a day if enough people simply realized that the ones pontificating to them are full of it.
What the system is trying to cover up here is that a sizable fund left itself fully exposed, presumably on naked shorts.
Redditors just did a public service. Any fund that sloppy NEEDS to die. And I'd bet they were angling for a really big win on a short-term short, possibly technical, to try to prop up shit performance across the board.
The other thing they're covering for is, once the stock started trending up, a whole heap of technical and day traders with no clue whatsoever that Reddit even HAS a trading board, would have jumped in and driven it higher.
It's funny to see folks at NASDAQ and Melvin Capital accuse Wallstreetbets of stock manipulation, as if shorting itself weren't an arbitrarily legal form of it.
It makes perfect sense. Gamers saw it for what it is, learned the rules, then exploited them for a specific purpose. The difference between Wall street and Vegas is that Vegas only lets you gamble with your own money.
Vegas also doesn't force you to hold or bet your chips like Wall St. is now.
This, from a comment on Zaklog the Great's Dissident Reads blog deserves a wider audience:
Come and listen to my story about a man named Gill
A poor working man, barely paid his 'lectric bill.
And then one day he was short squeezin on some stocks,
And up through the ground come a bunch of stock bucks.
Shares that is, Jew gold, NY tea.
Well the first thing you know ol Gill’s a millionaire,
The kinfolk said "Gill get away from there"
Said "Greedy politicians are gonna try to take your share"
But he doubled down again and gave them a bigger scare.