meme stock

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors
by Spencer Jakab
Published 1 Feb 2022

And some who did hold on past the peak expressed regret at fortunes that got away rather than satisfaction at having stayed true to a cause. A separate subreddit was started at the tail end of the meme-stock squeeze, r/GMEbagholders, where Redditors commiserated about their losses on the meme stocks. It was unrealistic to expect so many apes to “hold the line” that short sellers would be forced to pay any price and incur infinite losses. As prices of the meme stocks climbed higher, the refusal on principle of many retail traders to sell weakened. That wasn’t part of the romantic narrative, but it is the natural thing to do when you have made the equivalent of several years of your salary in less time than it takes the milk in your fridge to expire.

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It held that hedge funds were engaging in something called a “short ladder attack,” somehow buying and selling from one another to artificially push down the prices of the meme stocks. There is no such thing. It is almost impossible to say how many of the millions of degenerates who participated in the meme-stock squeeze made money, but the episode made their forum hugely influential. Now WallStreetBets had to grapple with the downsides of that runaway success. It had drawn so many new members and so much attention in a week that the forum had begun to look for new mountains to conquer. Some suspected outside manipulators when many newer members on the board began to tout silver. Starting on the Thursday of the meme-stock squeeze, the day that trading restrictions were imposed on certain stocks, a silver exchange-traded fund saw a surge in activity.

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He said, “It’s a chance for Joe and Jane America—the retail buyers of stock—to flex back and push back on these hedge funds.”[16] It was a hopelessly romantic view of the situation. Notwithstanding those few that got whacked by the meme-stock squeeze, many hedge funds did very well and couldn’t wait to see Joe and Jane’s next bright idea—especially now that computer programmers have built algorithms to trade off what they are chatting about on Reddit more quickly than a human can read it. And even if that whole class of professional investor had been permanently disadvantaged by the meme-stock squeeze, it wouldn’t be to retail investors’ benefit. Ironically, as will be explained later, times when funds that can sell stocks short are running for cover can be the most dangerous ones for mom and pop.

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them
by Nouriel Roubini
Published 17 Oct 2022

It’s a new name for the rope that part-time gig workers can use to hang themselves. Millions have opened investment accounts on their mobile phones, where they leverage scant savings to speculate on flaky investments like meme stocks and crypto scams. Using their keyboards to close the stubborn wealth gap is doomed to fail, and to turn frustration to anger. The 2021 GameStop and other meme-stock narratives, featuring a united front of heroic small day traders fighting evil short-selling hedge funds, masks an ugly reality. A cohort of hopeless, jobless, skill-less, saving-less, debt-burdened individuals is being exploited once again.

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Using leverage provided by an online stock trading service, they bid up stock prices far beyond levels that earnings could justify. The motive: beat short sellers whose strategy counted on GameStop’s demise. This was a boom-bust-crash scenario in miniature. A debt bubble fueled an unsustainable asset bubble. When GameStop and other shares returned to earth, small investors suffered massively. Indeed, many meme stocks—shares of a company that gained a cult-like following through social media—lost over 70 percent of their value in 2022 from their 2021 bubble valuations. A similar boom-and-bust cycle occurred in 2021-22 for cryptocurrencies, another asset class with no intrinsic value and whose bubble was driven by the FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) frenzy of retail speculators.

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Many experts brushed off these episodes as a fleeting departure from rational judgment. But can we overlook the fact that the US government had just sent checks to millions of adult Americans? Is this how some of them spent the money? Millions were day trading and gambling their little savings in meme stocks or crypto assets with no fundamental value. It did not help them and did not help the economy as policy makers had intended. Their money just vanished into thin air, leaving behind debts and a commemorative sweatshirt with an image of the Fed chair as a Christ figure ringed in a halo of golden light, as the Times reported.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 7 Sep 2022

Culkin, “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan,” Saturday Review, March 18, 1967, 51–53, 71–72. 164   I wrote my dissertation : Douglas Rushkoff, “Monopoly Moneys,” PhD diss., Utrecht University, 2012. 164   the more frequently retail traders transacted : Dalbar, Inc., “Quantitative Analysis of Investor Behavior 2011” (Boston: Dalbar, Inc., 2011). 165   The stock shot upwards : Eric Lam and Lu Wang, “Steely Meme-Stock Short Sellers Stare Down $4.5 Billion Loss,” Bloomberg , June 3, 2021, https:// www .bloomberg .com /news /articles /2021 -06 -03 /defiant -meme -stock -short -sellers -stare -down -4 -5 -billion -loss. 166   A platform like TikTok : Shelly Banjo and Shawn Wen, “A Push-Up Contest on TikTok Exposed a Great Cyber-Espionage Threat,” Bloomberg , May 13, 2021, https:// www .bloomberg .com /news /articles /2021 -05 -13 /how -tiktok -works -and -does -it -share -data -with -china. 167   “They all know the algorithms” : Taylor Lorenz, Kellen Browning, and Sheera Frenkel, “TikTok Teens and K-Pop Stans Say They Sank Trump Rally,” New York Times , June 21, 2020, https:// www .nytimes .com /2020 /06 /21 /style /tiktok -trump -rally -tulsa .html. 167   formed a union : Zoe Schiffer, “Exclusive: Google Workers across the Globe Announce International Union Alliance to Hold Alphabet Accountable,” Verge , January 25, 2021, https:// www .theverge .com /2021 /1 /25 /22243138 /google -union -alphabet -workers -europe -announce -global -alliance. 167   “sometimes the boss is the best organizer” : Kate Conger, “Hundreds of Google Employees Unionize, Culminating Years of Activism,” New York Times , January 4, 2021, https:// www .nytimes .com /2021 /01 /04 /technology /google -employees -union .html. 169   an open letter about the frightening potential : Wikimedia, “Open Letter on Artificial Intelligence,” https:// en .wikipedia .org /wiki /Open _Letter _on _Artificial _Intelligence, accessed August 10, 2021. 170   “Things are getting … currently doing” : Cat Clifford, “Billionaire Tech Titan Mark Cuban on AI: ‘It Scares the S— Out of Me,’ ” CNBC , July 25, 2017, https:// www .cnbc .com /2017 /07 /25 /mark -cuban -on -ai -it -scares -me .html. 170   “Is the country going to turn” : Evan Osnos, “Doomsday Prep for the Super Rich,” New Yorker , January 22, 2017, https:// www .newyorker .com /magazine /2017 /01 /30 /doomsday -prep -for -the -super -rich. 170   Employees protested : Peter Kafka, “Google Wants out of the Creepy Military Robot Business,” Vox , March 17, 2016, https:// www .vox .com /2016 /3 /17 /11587060 /google -wants -out -of -the -creepy -military -robot -business. 170   four thousand Googlers : Kate Conger, “Google Employees Resign in Protest Against Pentagon Contract,” Gizmodo , May 14, 2018, https:// gizmodo .com /google -employees -resign -in -protest -against -pentagon -con -1825729300. 171   “the one who becomes the leader” : Associated Press, “Putin: Leader in Artificial Intelligence Will Rule World,” CNBC , September 4, 2017, https:// www .cnbc .com /2017 /09 /04 /putin -leader -in -artificial -intelligence -will -rule -world .html. 171   “I think the danger of AI” : Elon Musk Answers Your Questions!

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For some of these companies, like this community’s cherished but declining video game store GameStop, there was actually more short interest than there were shares. These hedge funders were so sure the company would fail—or could be made to fail—that they didn’t even worry about how they would cover their bets if the stock didn’t tank. So the kids on Reddit chose Gamestop as their first “meme stock” and used new, highly accessible trading platforms like Robinhood to buy as much as they could. All the gamers had to do was purchase enough shares and then hold them so that the billionaires couldn’t cover their bets. The stock shot upwards , and resulting losses for those who bet against the company were incredible.

Investing Amid Low Expected Returns: Making the Most When Markets Offer the Least
by Antti Ilmanen
Published 24 Feb 2022

As noted in the Acknowledgments, this book owes a large debt to the work of my AQR colleagues. Admittedly, this book gives an AQR-colored vision on good investing, but I strive to give a balanced picture. As I want to avoid letting this book become dated soon, I will steer clear of hot topics at the time of writing, such as meme stocks, Robinhood, bitcoin, NFTs, and SPACs. I share the worry with other old fogeys that many get-rich-quick efforts will end in tears and may discourage a generation of investors from the more boring but necessary type of retirement saving and investing. On the many footnotes: I use them to improve the flow and to actively segment two kinds of readers – those who like footnotes and those who don't know what they are missing by not reading them.

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Most institutions have taken the latter course unless laws and regulations push them to the former. In short, public DB plans and endowments are trying to boost their portfolios' expected returns, while many corporate DB plans are leaving the field. Individual savers are hoping for the best. Some are saving more, others are buying lottery tickets in meme stocks and options, yet many are not investing very differently. Figure 3.10 US State and Local Pensions' Assumed Returns Compared to 30-Year Trailing Realized Returns and Yield-based 60/40 Expected Returns, 1992–2020 Sources: Census of Governments in https://publicplansdata.org/quick-facts/national/#investments, Robert Shiller's website, Survey of Professional Forecasters.

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This conjecture rings true since fair relative pricing of assets is easier to enforce by arbitrage than the absolute level of asset prices. However, it is debatable whether the world of low expected returns implies an irrational bubble, while the relative pricing of value and growth stocks in 2021 seems far from efficient markets (let alone the pricing of meme stocks).13 Are some end-investors more likely to be skilled or to identify skilled/successful active managers? Overconfidence is such a prevalent trait that humility is warranted, Yet, better-resourced organizations with better compensation and better incentives presumably have some edge. As noted, institutional funds have tended to outperform mutual funds, and some institutions have a compelling long-run track record – reflecting some mixture of lower costs and asset allocation or manager selection choices.

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest
by Edward Chancellor
Published 15 Aug 2022

The app-based broker offered zero-commission trading, margin loans at 2 per cent and options trading for the masses, and blended techniques developed in Silicon Valley to attract users to its app with those developed in Las Vegas to keep gamers hooked. Neophyte speculators gathered on WallStreetBets, a subreddit forum, where they styled themselves ‘retards’, ‘autists’ and ‘degens’. The WallStreetBets crowd mocked investment norms. Instead, they sought out the next ‘meme’ stock, or ‘stonk’ in their parlance. Their trading mantra was YOLO – You Only Live Once. They were driven by fear as much as greed – Fear of Missing Out. A bet that went stratospheric was called a ‘mooner’. More money was raised by US public offerings in 2020 than in any previous year, including at the height of the Dotcom frenzy.

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Known as Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs), they were used to purchase speculative ventures, in electric-vehicle technology, space travel, flying taxis, cannabis farming and a company to ‘augment humans to enhance productivity and safety’. Like the original bubble companies, some SPACs were obvious frauds. Others didn’t take themselves seriously, adopting emoticons (LMFAO, viz: ‘laughing my fucking arse off’) for stock tickers. Meme stocks weren’t confined to new technologies. The autists also pumped up the shares of bankrupt (Hertz) and near-bankrupt (GameStop, AMC Entertainment) companies. Their game was to squeeze the short-sellers on Wall Street, leveraging bets with stock options and margin loans. A share-buying frenzy in GameStop, a troubled retailer of electronic games, sent its shares from $20 in early January 2021 to over $480 a few weeks later.

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In a year-end letter to clients, Klarman wrote that: The idea of persistent low rates has wormed its way into everything: investor thinking, market forecasts, inflation expectations, valuation models, leverage ratios, debt ratings, affordability metrics, housing prices, and corporate behavior … Moreover, by truncating downside volatility, forestalling business failures, and postponing the day of reckoning, such policies have persuaded investors that risk has gone into hibernation or simply vanished.10 Warren Buffett agreed that ultra-high valuations were supported by ultra-low interest rates. ‘Interest rates,’ said the Sage of Omaha, ‘basically are to the value of assets what gravity is to matter.’fn1 Once this gravitational force was removed, Dogecoins, NFTs, meme stocks and other speculative assets were free to float into the stratosphere. A disconnect between finance and the real world lies at the heart of all great bubbles. Defoe described John Law’s Mississippi System as ‘an inconceivable Species of meer Air and Shadow … making the meer speculations of Things, act all the Parts, and perform all the Offices of the Things themselves’.

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
by Nate Silver
Published 12 Aug 2024

I spoke with Matt Levine, the author of Bloomberg’s Money Stuff newsletter. Levine is a droll observer of what he calls the “boredom markets hypothesis”—the idea that boredom related to the COVID pandemic, coupled with an injection of COVID stimulus cash, was at least partly responsible for the run-up in crypto assets along with meme stocks such as GameStop. The timing lines up relatively well. Bitcoin first hit a peak in March and April 2021, right around when vaccines became widely available and many of the remaining COVID-era restrictions on interpersonal activity were being relaxed. Then Bitcoin fell rapidly as social life got back to normal—before rising again in late 2021 amid concern over the Delta and Omicron variants.

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Less prestigious than CryptoPunks and more often associated with the NFT bubble of 2020–22; the term apeing refers to impulsively buying a new token or NFT collection without considering its underlying value. Boredom Markets Hypothesis: A theory proposed by Matt Levine that attributed the run-up in NFT prices, meme stocks, and other speculative assets in 2020–22 to the boredom and anxiety caused by the COVID pandemic. Bracelet (poker): The gold bracelet awarded for winning an event at the World Series of Poker; there are now more than one hundred bracelet events every year between live and online WSOP tournaments, but bracelets remain highly coveted.

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Megalothymia: A term adapted from Plato by Francis Fukuyama to refer to the profound desire to be seen as superior to others. See also: isothymia. Meme Creation of Value*: Matt Levine’s term for distorted prices generated through spontaneous coordination in online communities, which make no pretense of caring about the fundamental value of the asset. Meme stock: A stock such as GameStop driven up to irrational values due to viral enthusiasm on platforms like r/wallstreetbets, temporarily squeezing out short sellers. Middle (sports betting): A form of arbitrage in which you bet both sides of a line, taking advantage of price discrepancies. For instance, if you bet Lakers +5 at DraftKings and Celtics -3 at FanDuel, you’ll hit the middle and win both bets if the Celtics win by exactly 4 points.

The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees
by Ben Mezrich
Published 6 Sep 2021

Usually, the deposit requirement was tied closely to the actual dollars being “spent” on the trades; a near equal number of buys and sells in a brokerage house’s trading profile lowered its overall risk, and though volatility was common, especially in the past half-decade, even a two-day settlement period came with an acceptable level of confidence that nobody would fail to deliver on their trades. To that respect, over the past week—even with the incredible volume of trading taking place in what were being called “meme” stocks, particularly GME—Robinhood’s deposit requirements had been high, but understandable. On January 25, the deposit requirement at the start of the day had been $125 million. By the twenty-sixth, as GameStop’s volume had exploded and the price had shot toward the moon, Robinhood’s deposit requirement had risen to a heavy $291 million—a significant figure, beyond anything they’d seen before, but still manageable.

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On his desk, one of his screens was open to the WallStreetBets board, which had been made fully public again and was now mostly chronicling a volcanic eruption of anger, conspiracy theories, and despair; most of it revolved around Robinhood—and could be summed up by one of the many tweets Keith had stumbled upon while riffling through the site that morning, this one by another YouTuber, whose Twitter handle was @OMGitsBirdman: An app named “Robinhood” stealing from the poor and giving to the rich can’t make this up Keith had read Robinhood’s blog post—and received their e-mail—at the same time as everyone else who had a Robinhood account; even though it was probably the result of an automated function that involved a massive mailing list, it had seemed directed squarely at him. We are restricting transactions for certain securities… In Keith’s mind, they should have just come right out and said it. The millions of Robinhood customers could no longer buy GameStop through the app, along with a half-dozen other meme stocks—basically anything that Melvin Capital and their Wall Street colleagues had shorted and were trying to cover. And it wasn’t just Robinhood that had restricted buying into GME; many of the other online brokerages, such as E-Trade, Interactive Brokers, Webull, TD Ameritrade, and Schwab, had enacted varying degrees of restrictions of their own—but the one uniting feature was that all of the restrictions squarely targeted the same group of traders: regular people, on their couches and in their basements.

Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis
by Jeanna Smialek
Published 27 Feb 2023

She made it clear that creating a digital dollar would be a serious process, one that would probably require buy-in from Congress, since it wasn’t clear if the Federal Reserve Act allowed it to issue a digital currency. She was outlining first, careful steps. The urgency to keep up with digital innovation only intensified as the months passed, though. Internet-famous “meme” stocks took off in 2021, and so did cryptocurrencies, with everyday investors and major banks alike piling on. Stablecoins, private-sector digital tokens that were backed by a bundle of currencies or other assets, were growing exponentially as that happened, in large part because people used them to transact in and out of the new crop of crypto offerings.

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In a memorandum for the congressional hearing titled “Game Stopped?” the committee argued that the episode was raising “important questions” about “whether technology and social media have outpaced regulation in a manner that leaves investors and the markets exposed to unnecessary risks.”[11] Meme stocks making national headlines in 2021 did, at some level, trace back to the Fed, as participants in the phenomenon would tell you. “Ty Jpow” (translated: Thank you, Jay Powell) posts were frequent on WallStreetBets, the Reddit discussion board at the center of the phenomenon. Memes abounded in which people took real CNBC footage of Fed press conferences and superimposed, in place of what Powell had said, the chyron “Powell: F*** Your Puts.”

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See employment/labor market Lamont, Thomas, 53n Laubach, Thomas, 115, 128 Lehman Brothers, 90, 93, 94 Lehnert, Andreas: “cover the waterfront” strategy for pandemic response, 163–4, 167–8; financial stability division and disaster planning role of, 163–4, 163n, 212; housing market presentation by, 91; pandemic rescue program planning by, 136–7, 151–2, 158–9, 162, 212 Leonard, Elissa, 15–16, 17–18, 18n, 141n Libra, 152–3, 153n, 274 Lincoln, Abraham, 48, 287 Linton, Louise, 140–1, 141n, 193 lobby, coining of phrase, 118 Logan, Lorie, 32–3, 34, 143, 149, 334n4, 334n6 Lombard Street (Bagehot), 50–1, 336n37 M macroeconomic management, 61–2, 82, 86, 130, 230, 341n9 Main Street program, 204n, 212–14, 238, 245–9, 294, 301, 349n3 Marcus, David, 152–4 Martin, William McChesney, Jr., 74, 76–8, 81, 108 masks and face coverings, 219, 222–3 McAdoo, William, 59–60 McCabe, Thomas, 72–4 McConnell, Mitch, 138, 178, 179, 191, 192, 251–2, 267 McFadden Act, 62 meme stocks, 274, 291–2 Mester, Loretta, 154n Metropolitan Club, 11, 333n1 Mexico, 139, 145, 197, 266, 334n11 Missouri, 59 Mnuchin, Steven: allocation of money for programs, 192, 199, 208, 211, 213, 247–8, 251–2, 253–62, 347n10; background, education, and expertise of, 140–1, 170, 192–4; character and personal style of, 140, 141, 192–5; confirmation hearing of, 193–4; deregulation under, 104, 169; economic ideology of, 256–7, 294; Group of Seven call by, 142, 143; January 6 riots and loyalty to Trump, 281n; junk bond–buying discussion with Powell, 210; pandemic rescue program role of, 161–2, 165, 175–81, 183–4, 188–9, 191–5, 199, 205, 206–7, 208, 212, 214, 251–2, 345n25; planning response to pandemic with Powell, 139–40, 141; post-government career of, 298–9; Powell firing threat from, 107; relationship with Powell, 139–40, 141; role in selection of Powell, 20–1; Treasury secretary role of, 104, 192–5; 2020 presidential election and continuation of pandemic relief efforts, 253–62, 263; wealth of, 140, 298–9 monetary policy: economic slowdown and, 108–10, 111–16, 341n9; Fed Listens outreach events on, 22–3, 27–8; financial crisis of 2008 and, 4–5, 24–6, 90–8; full employment and, 22, 77–8, 80, 96–7, 97n, 101, 233–4, 239–44, 250; inscrutability of, 23, 23n; interest rates, economic trends, and, 111–16; modern monetary theory and inflation, 351n1; pandemic and, 4–5, 29–35, 38–41, 238–43; Powell role in as Fed governor, 17–18, 129; review of under Powell, 21–2; Taylor rule, 341n22; voting on by Fed governors and regional bank presidents, 13, 13n, 130 money/currency: Bretton Woods system and linking dollars to gold, 75–6; cash supply and flow management by Fed, 3, 12–13; cash supply and withdrawals at start of pandemic, 39–40, 335n10; concept and history of, 44–6, 335nn11–12; control over by Fed and political goals, 8–9; creation by Fed, 5; creation of during pandemic, 4, 176, 185–6; Federal Reserve note, 57; fiat currency, 48–50, 272; global financial system with dollar at core of, 75–6, 82, 196–8; greenback currency, 48–50; impact of pandemic on currency markets, 141; money supply as driver of economic outcomes, 79–80; national bank notes, 48, 53; pandemic and role of the dollar in global finance, 196–8; specie, 49, 335n11.

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud
by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Jul 2023

CHAPTER 1 MONEY AND LYING This is a book about cryptocurrency and fraud: a parable of money and lying, or rather a parable of fake money and lying for money. Thematically, it bears striking resemblance to a popular folktale. Unlike that tale, however, this story is true. We begin during the wild speculative mania of the Trump years. It was the fleeting era of meme stocks, NFTs, and land sales in the metaverse. While the marketing may have been new, the economics were familiar: These get-rich-quick speculative schemes were merely the latest iteration of casino capitalism. Political economist Susan Strange populated the term in the 1980s, but its roots stretch at least as far back as the 1930s.

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Some investors claimed that the short squeeze plan was being pushed by big CEL holders looking to dump their own tokens on the community. These warnings were generally ignored. Like doomed soldiers charging at the Somme, there were periodic short squeeze pushes that led nowhere—except to more losses and charges of market manipulation. Like many failed meme stock pushes, short squeezers weren’t sticking it to the man, and they never would, as long as the game was rigged. For Celsius and its hundreds of thousands of community members, there was no easy ending. The litigation would likely go on for years. (As always, congrats to the lawyers.) James sounded the alarm on Celsius, but few wanted to listen.

Trillion Dollar Triage: How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic---And Prevented Economic Disaster
by Nick Timiraos
Published 1 Mar 2022

But what if the Fed were forced to stomp on the brakes? Given record levels of corporate and government borrowing, sharply higher rates could wreak havoc on global financial markets. Emerging markets in particular might have to raise rates as well, though many lagged behind the US on vaccinations. Of meme stocks and stimmies Before the Georgia elections at the start of 2021, few economists inside or outside the Fed predicted that, by spring, the economy would be pulsating with $2.8 trillion in new spending. It made some at the Fed uneasy. “In some ways, you might say there’s too much spending there, I think,” said James Bullard, president of the St.

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When the stocks began to decline—for example, when ViacomCBS found tepid demand for an offering of new shares—Archegos was forced to liquidate its holdings, triggering some of the biggest and most sudden trading losses in the history of Wall Street. Japanese investment bank Nomura took a hit of $2.85 billion, while Credit Suisse recorded a staggering $5.5 billion write-down.12 The debacle followed an earlier frenzy in a handful of “meme” stocks promoted on social-media platforms by retail investors. In the last week of January, the shares of GameStop soared 400 percent, while those of movie-theater chain AMC jumped 278 percent—moves that appeared completely divorced from the companies’ less-than-stellar financial performance. Some investment advisers attributed the burst of trading to the “stimmies”—stimulus checks—newly filling traders’ accounts.

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All
by Adrian Hon
Published 14 Sep 2022

For everyone involved, the game was all the more entertaining because of the effect it was having on the real world, where newspapers and politicians were forced to explain the meaning of r/wallstreetbets lingo like “stonks” and “tendies.” The excitement reached its zenith on January 28, when Robinhood began limiting the purchase (but not sale) of GameStop shares along with AMC, BlackBerry, and Nokia shares, three other “meme stocks.”67 Though Robinhood said this was because they temporarily ran out of cash to cover obligations to their SEC-required clearinghouse, many onlookers were dismayed—not just r/wallstreetbets users but also politicians as ideologically varied as Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Republican senator Ted Cruz.68 As other brokers including TD Ameritrade and Interactive Brokers also restricted trading, the GameStop share price began slipping, adding to the confusion.

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In an interview with The Information, Raj Gokal, chief operating officer of Solana, a DeFi company that raised $314 million in 2021, made the comparison explicit: “I think what happened in the last year is that the traditional capital markets for large enterprises started to look like games, too. And that’s what we saw with GameStop and all the meme stocks. And Elon Musk. So I think those worlds are going to continue to merge together. And yeah, I mean, if it’s more fun, why not?”92 CHAPTER NINE THE TREASURY OF MERIT ONE WAY TO PREDICT THE FUTURE IS BY EXTRAPOLATING EXISTING TECHNOLOGICAL and social trends. It’s a blunt tool lacking nuance, but it can identify possibilities and areas of interest, especially in the near future.

Buy Now, Pay Later: The Extraordinary Story of Afterpay
by Jonathan Shapiro and James Eyers
Published 2 Aug 2021

The suits of Wall Street were about to be toppled by people power. ‘This is the regular Joes versus Wall Street,’ a young Texan, Colin McLelland, told news reporters. ‘Even if I lose everything, I like being part of it.’4 The GameStop trade was David and Goliath meets Revenge of the Nerds. The company itself became a meme stock. GameStop shares were hot because a critical mass of people had determined it to be so. The underlying business and the price didn’t matter as much as the fact that the digital collective had decided they wanted it to go up. Then reality collided with the market’s plumbing. Robinhood, the brokerage that processed most of the buy-orders, had to stump up hundreds of millions of dollars in cash to assure sellers that their customers were good for the money.

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But Zip had a large cohort of retail traders, and Gray’s argument seemed to resonate with them. Remarkably, Zip was often the most traded share on the CommSec retail stockbroking platform, owned by Commonwealth Bank, even though it was not among the 100 largest companies in Australia by market capitalisation. Indeed, Zip had become something of a meme stock in the Australian market. While the strong trading update on 21 January 2021 had led to a near 25 per cent share price pop, Zip’s stock kept rising until 16 February, when its valuation reached $7.7 billion. In three weeks, buyers added $3.6 billion to Zip’s market value, more than it had created in the six years since its backdoor listing.

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning
by Justin E. H. Smith
Published 22 Mar 2022

In light of this, one way of understanding the crisis into which the internet has thrust us is that it has deprived us of this character that reading, writing, and communicating naturally share with philosophy (and indeed with hunting) by aggressively metricizing them. One might put this another way and say that whatever is metricized or gamified, whatever keeps itself centered before the user’s mind with the promise of accumulating more points of some currency (likes, faves, followers, up-votes, not to mention also—with the rise of “meme stocks” and cryptocurrency exchanges—real money), has the power to harness and hold the user’s concentration, but not their attention. In its current form it is as if we have had imposed on ourselves a gadget that does nothing more than count the number of ducks we have killed, broadcast that number to the entire world, rank us with that number alongside all other duck hunters, and invite all of them, as well as whatever interlopers feel so inclined, to praise, criticize, or mock us for our ranking.

Nothing but Net: 10 Timeless Stock-Picking Lessons From One of Wall Street’s Top Tech Analysts
by Mark Mahaney
Published 9 Nov 2021

During January 2021, shares of GameStop (GME) skyrocketed $1,900% from $17 to $348, before correcting 90% over the next month back down to $41. This was one of the biggest roller-coaster rides I have ever seen, and I have been to more than my share of amusement parks. The GME rally was a dramatic short squeeze featuring Bullish options bets that helped popularize the concept of meme stocks—stocks that are popular with millennial-aged retail traders and move more on hype than on underlying fundamentals. Comments on Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum suggested a lot of momentum day-trading activity with one popular goal being to go Long the most heavily shorted stocks in the market, of which GME was certainly one.

The Missing Billionaires: A Guide to Better Financial Decisions
by Victor Haghani and James White
Published 27 Aug 2023

As we've seen, the “how much” question goes beyond investing decisions, to just about every important financial decision we'll encounter: how much to spend now and over time, how much to give to others, how much capital gains to realize, and how much to work. There is a large academic literature addressing these questions, but not enough has been written in a nontechnical form. We hope that this book will go some way to filling that gap. We cannot ignore the market excitement of 2021 over meme stocks, extreme growth stocks, single stock options, SPACS, and cryptocurrencies. Whatever the final value of these investments turns out to be, it is fair to say that many investors have likely been too concentrated in their portfolios and taken too much risk, relative to a reasonable set of beliefs about expected returns, risks, and risk‐aversion.

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century
by Fiona Hill
Published 4 Oct 2021

McMaster, Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World (New York: HarperCollins, 2020). malicious leaks: Entous, “What Fiona Hill Learned in the White House.” “Tariff Man”: Jen Kirby, “Trump called himself ‘Tariff Man.’ The internet did the rest,” Vox, December 4, 2018, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/4/18126061/tariff-man-trump-china-tweets-memes-stock-market. “ultimate catastrophe”: Glenn Plaskin, “The Playboy Interview with Donald Trump,” Playboy Magazine, March 1, 1990, https://www.playboy.com/read/playboy-interview-donald-trump-1990. fruitless effort: Paula Span, “From the archives: When Trump hoped to meet Gorbachev in Manhattan,” Washington Post, December 3, 1988, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/from-the-archives-when-trump-hoped-to-meet-gorbachev-in-manhattan/2017/07/10/3f570b42-658c-11e7-a1d7-9a32c91c6f40_story.html.