The Paradoxical Politics of the GameStop Pump

[robertpaulsen]

The Paradoxical Politics of the GameStop Pump

r/WallStreetBets and the double-edged sword of a self-aware Internet.

By Ryan Broderick

We are now barreling into our third week of financial meme hell. Video game retailer GameStop’s stock rose over 1,000 percent after it was championed by the r/WallStreetBets subreddit. The stock fell 30 percent on Monday, however, leading many to believe a crash may be imminent.

What started as a half-serious Reddit campaign to rally around GameStop has ballooned into something much larger. Is this Occupy Wall Street 2? Or is this a second Gamergate? Are the Redditors that are leading the movement right now populist heroes? Or is this, as Elizabeth Warren has suggested, just a psychotic Internet casino that is tearing the fabric of society apart?

What can’t be denied is that a Reddit community was able to harness its scale to bend the market to its will. That’s a genie you can’t put back in the bottle.

r/WallStreetBets is a 7 million-strong subreddit for stock traders. It was created in 2012 by a banking technology consultant named Jaime Rogozinski. Its users—who commonly refer to themselves as “retarded degenerates”—bond over edgy memes, insane bets, idiotic financial trolling, and sharing what they call “loss porn”—screenshots of their tremendous losses. To get a sense of where the community’s values lie, Martin Shkreli—the former hedge fund manager who became a target for public hatred when, as CEO of a pharmaceutical company, he jacked up the price of a lifesaving drug by 5,000 percent, and was later convicted of fraud—was a frequent contributor. In a 2017 thread, a user asked the subreddit why they loved Shkreli so much.

more...

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/gamestop-stock-r-wallstreetbets-meme/

[intrepidity]

1. Unfortunately, too many of those small "retail" customers

relied on middlemen "brokerage" outfits without sufficient liquidity to manage the rollercoaster, thus actually contributing to their difficulty in enacting the short squeeze.

It's unfortunate that the "free" market is more free to some than others.