wallstreetbets

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors

by Spencer Jakab  · 1 Feb 2022  · 420pp  · 94,064 words

the day three weeks earlier that had outraged everyone from leading politicians on both sides of the spectrum to late-night talk show hosts, making WallStreetBets a cause célèbre. Although the committee’s members had accepted millions of dollars in political donations from the finance industry, sympathies clearly were with

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Washington, inspire Hollywood, and rattle Wall Street. Knowing how Reddit and Robinhood work is key to understanding this story. Born of Silicon Valley Reddit’s WallStreetBets subreddit and Robinhood got started within a year of one another, in 2012 and 2013, respectively. Their growth trajectories have been remarkably aligned, and

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, the early retirement forum r/financialindependence, r/FinancialPlanning, and two very different ones devoted to the stock market, r/investing and, of course, r/wallstreetbets. Of the roughly one hundred thousand active subreddits, Chief Executive Officer Steve Huffman was interested enough in the now-famous forum to personally become an

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the Remaking of America.[27] Uniquely, Reddit tries to control content through human and also sometimes automated moderators. One of the early moderators of WallStreetBets was Martin Shkreli, the pharmaceutical executive who infamously raised the price of an AIDS drug more than fiftyfold and was sentenced to prison for an

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the pharmaceutical company KaloBios in 2015, briefly sending its shares up by 10,000 percent. The somewhat disturbing, but mostly tongue-in-cheek, motto of WallStreetBets is “Like 4chan found a Bloomberg terminal.” The imageboard 4chan is known for attracting anonymous young men, many just teenagers, who often share misogynistic,

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racist, and even violent content. Relatively little of that can be found on WallStreetBets, but it certainly isn’t a place for polite dialogue. Founder Rogozinski clashed with members and stopped moderating the subreddit in April 2020 since he

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Wharton School marketing professor Cait Lamberton. “The perception is driven by outliers.” But those outliers were engaging in a degree of speculation that made the WallStreetBets moniker “degenerate” apt. For example, a trader with no experience made 12,700 trades in six months, according to the complaint filed by the

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of eighteen. Speculative trading is efficiently taxed, and it benefits established, respectable companies, enriching their shareholders. The subtitle of a book he published about WallStreetBets in 2020 is How Boomers Made the World’s Biggest Casino for Millennials. To the extent that Wall Street had become like a much larger

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short sellers are the villains,” says an exasperated Jim Chanos, founder of Kynikos Associates and dean of the short-selling community.[4] But did the WallStreetBets crowd really engineer the “biggest short squeeze of your entire life”? Not unless they were very young. A (Short) History of Squeezes Volkswagen would

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we’ve been waiting for. Lets [sic] turn that lemon into lemonade,” wrote one poster in response to Left’s announcement. Another said that WallStreetBets could remain irrational longer than “Citron et al” could remain solvent. Shitron thought they could spook boomers into panic selling, not realizing that the majority

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make short selling even tougher. For example, WeLikeTheStock, a political Super PAC headed by the retail investor Chad Minnis to support the agenda of WallStreetBets, would support proposals to make hedge funds reveal their specific shorts, which would make targeting them for squeezes easier in the future. Funds that

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subreddit, written by the Wall Street Journal markets reporter Caitlin McCabe, who had been following the forum. “For weeks, members of Reddit’s popular WallStreetBets forum have been touting GameStop, encouraging others to scoop up shares of the videogame retailer and begin making bullish wagers,” she wrote. “Several posts on

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. Rather than teenagers, the 2021 version was likely run by people with a lot more resources and sophistication. There is widespread suspicion by many WallStreetBets users that the forum had been infiltrated by organized criminals using “bots”—algorithms or paid posters with multiple accounts—as GameStop became a front-page

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detective work, the suspicion that bots, or just individuals with multiple accounts and malign intent, were active on social media seems justified. A spokesperson for WallStreetBets told CBS News that it had detected a large amount of “bot activity in the subreddit,” including multiple posts with similar content.[19] “Large

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double its closing price. Several brokerage firms experienced intermittent outages because of heavy traffic. “We’ve officially broken the market,” wrote one proud poster on WallStreetBets.[1] The news story of the Reddit Revolution would get even bigger as the week wore on, but Wednesday, January 27, marked something of

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such a widespread ban among brokerages would have been achievable without a concerted effort in violation of antitrust laws.”[2] Even before trading was restricted, WallStreetBets users were feeling aggrieved. Late on Wednesday the subreddit had briefly gone private, an action taken by its own moderators, as they dealt with

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organization, was oddly silent on the trading halt by companies under its purview. The following day it issued a blog post seemingly aimed at the WallStreetBets phenomenon: “Following the Crowd: Investing and Social Media.” “No matter where you get your trading insights, and whether you are following a recommendation

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8, 2019 Techmonk123, “Response to ‘Hey Burry, thanks a lot for jacking up my cost basis,’” Reddit, September 8, 2019, www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/d1g7x0/hey_burry_thanks_a_lot_for_jacking_up_my_cost. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1 Jason Zweig, “Robinhood Trader’s Battle Cry: ‘It

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4: Winter of 2019–2020 fieldG, “Response to DeepFuckingValue post, ‘GME YOLO Month end update-Feb2020,’” Reddit, February 29, 2020, www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/fbc49g/gme_yolo_monthend_update_feb_2020. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1 Keith Gill, Roaring Kitty YouTube video transcript, August 4, 2020. BACK TO

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-of-2020-so-far. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10 u/never_noob, “Official WSB Survey Results are in!,” Reddit, 2017, www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/52tfrg/official_wsb_survey_results_are_in. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11 Graham Flanagan, “Barstool Sports Founder Switches from Gambling to Day Trading during

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Chapter 6: April 2020 Cd258519, “Response to DeepFuckingValue post ‘GME YOLO month-end update-Apr 2020,’” Reddit, April 30, 2020, www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/gb3ctb/gme_yolo_monthend_update_apr_2020. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1 Jonelle Marte, “Trump Touts Stock Market’s Record Run, but Who Benefits

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NOTE REFERENCE 2 hiend87, “Response to DeepFuckingValue post ‘GME YOLO month start update-Sep 1 2020,’” Reddit, September 1, 2020, www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/ikrq8w/gme_yolo_monthstart_update_sep_1_2020/g3n848d. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3 RC Ventures LLC letter to board of GameStop filed with

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-111620.pdf. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4 Stonksflyingup, “GME Squeeze and the Demise of Melvin Capital,” Reddit, October 27, 2020, www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/jjctxg/gme_squeeze_and_the_demise_of_melvin_capital. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5 Chapter 9: Cheat Code Matt Stone, “Invincibility (God Mode) Cheat

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TheDrallen, “Response to ‘Robinhood free money cheat works pretty well, 1 million dollar position on 4k,’” Reddit, November 4, 2020, www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/drqaro/robinhood_free_money_cheat_works_pretty_well_1. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3 Lawrence McDonald, “New Vol Regime,” The Bear Traps Report (blog

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May 3, 2021. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12 Jeffamazon, “The REAL Greatest Short Burn of the Century,” Reddit, September 9, 2020,www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/ip6jnv/the_real_greatest_short_burn_of_the_century. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13 Chapter 10: Holiday Season 2020–2021 Eurekahedge Hedge Fund Database

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https://twitter.com/citronresearch/status/1351544479547760642. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6 NFTOxaile, “Response to ‘Shitron Attacking Begins,’” Reddit, January 19, 2021, www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l0lg6r/shitron_attacking_begins/gjv3z3x. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7 Truthposter 100, “Response to ‘Shitron Attacking Begins,’” January 19, 2021, www.reddit.com/r

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small fodder. Citron is the one we want to fuck badly,” Reddit, January 19, 2021. Response to “Shitron Attacking Begins,” www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l0lg6r/shitron_attacking_begins/gju7o8e. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9 Citron Research, “Citron Research discontinues short selling research to focus on long opportunities,” YouTube

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPoVv7oX3mw. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10 Cre8_or, “Response to “GME The Wreckoning,” Reddit, January 19, 2021, teddit.net/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l0hhqg/gme_thread_the_wreckoning. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11 Carleton English, “Tycoons Battle over Kids’ $37K-a-Month Child Support Payments,” New York

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/social-sentiment-etf-buzz. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7 Repfam4life, “These billionaires are not our friends,” Reddit, January 29, 2021, www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l7sx16/these_billionaires_are_not_our_friends. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8 Eliza Relman, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Thinks Billionaires Shouldn’t Exist as Long

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defend . Are you IN ?” Reddit, February 25, 2021, www.reddit.com/r/CCIV/comments/lsfnhm/comment/gor6o2v. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18 Stephen Gandel, “WallstreetBets Says Reddit Group Hit by Large Amount of Bot Activity,” MoneyWatch, CBS News, February 2, 2021. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19 Interview with Ben Hunt

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23 Chapter 16: January 27, 2021 Anonymous, “We’ve officially broken the market,” Reddit, January 27, 2021, original post deleted, www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l662z0/weve_officially_broke_the_market. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1 Interview with Ihor Dusaniwsky by telephone and email, April 6, 2021. BACK TO

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February 1, 2021, www.saverilawfirm.com/press/short-squeeze-stockbrokers-and-hedge-funds-face-proposed-antitrust-class-action. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2 Akane Otani, “WallStreetBets Founder Reckons with Legacy amid Stock Market Frenzy,” The Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2021. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3 Theseyeahthese, “Response to GME YOLO

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Update-Jan 28 2021,” Reddit, January 28, 2021,www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l78uct/gme_yolo_update_jan_28_2021/gl5dab8. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4 “Billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya on GameStop Surge and Rise of Retail Investors

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–48, 154–55, 260 Gill’s Forrest Gump Twitter post on, 212 margin debt and, 58 poll on, 13 Reddit and, 37; see also WallStreetBets thousand-dollar price predicted for, 172–73, 176, 177 Volkswagen squeeze compared to, 77, 78 gamification, 29–31 gamma squeeze, 108, 109, 132, 141, 216

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, 228, 229, 234, 239, 245, 249, 260 and locating a borrow, 72–73 Robinhood’s trading restriction and, 197–99, 206 Volkswagen and, 77–78 WallStreetBets as, 139 hedonic products, 51 Hemingway, Ernest, xiii Hempton, John, 181 herding events, 238 Hertz, 60–61, 255 Hestia Partners, 222–23 Hickey, Mike

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Michelle, 239 Ledger, Heath, 138 Left, Andrew, 39, 116–26, 148, 191, 214, 217 GameStop and, 120–24, 129, 130, 133, 146 harassment of, 122 WallStreetBets and, 121–23, 126, 129, 130, 133, 136, 238 Lehman Brothers, 80, 117 Lending Tree, 162 Levie, Aaron, 26 Lewis, Michael, 16, 88 Lindzon, Howard

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, 36–39, 41, 42, 107, 122, 125, 162, 164, 199 founding of, 37–38 Gill’s influence on, 141–42; see also Gill, Keith; WallStreetBets karma on, 47, 141–42 mechanics and demographics of, and GameStop, 37 offensive subreddits on, 38 r/ClassActionRobinHood, 196 r/GMEbagholders, 140 r/investing, ix

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, 46 r/wallstreetbets, see WallStreetBets Super Bowl ad of, 12 Volkswagen squeeze and, 78 Reddit Revolution, xv, 41, 42, 75, 99, 152, 170, 192, 206, 211, 219, 220, 230, 

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246, 261 see also GameStop, GameStop short squeeze; WallStreetBets rehypothecation, 80, 92 reinforcement learning, 35 Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (Lefèvre), 78 Renaissance Technologies, 237 retail trading, xiii, xiv, xvi, 4, 7, 9–

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200 technical snafus by, 53–54 Top 100 Fund and, 61 trading restricted by, 187–89, 194, 195–200, 203, 206, 209 valuation of, 49 WallStreetBets and, 22–23 wholesalers and, 33–35, 49, 104, 106 Robin Hood (charitable foundation), 196–97 robo-advisers, xv, 27, 257–58 Betterment, 27, 

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, 9 Virtu Financial, 49, 55, 178, 202, 207, 218 Vision Fund, 105 Volcker Rule, 42 Volkswagen, 77–78, 81 Vrabeck, Kathy, 114, 223 W WallStreetBets, ix–x, xii, xiv, 2, 4, 8, 11, 14, 15, 16, 19, 22–23, 36, 38–40, 43–47, 55, 57, 67, 69, 75–77

The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees

by Ben Mezrich  · 6 Sep 2021  · 239pp  · 74,845 words

promise,” Kim said, pointing toward the computer. “It’s not about politics.” Finally, Chinwe shifted forward in his seat and gave the screen his attention. “WallStreetBets?” he read off the top of the screen. “What is this, a gambling site?” Kim laughed. “I guess, sort of. But no, it’s

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fun? “What does this mean?” Chinwe asked, running his finger along the top of the screen, reading the small print an inch beneath the WallStreetBets logo/mascot, the image of a blond-haired trader in sunglasses and a suit and tie, like something out of an eighties video game—“‘Like

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. And a Bloomberg terminal was what real Wall Street traders used to take money from regular people like her. “It’s kind of a motto. WallStreetBets is a place to talk about stocks, buying and selling.” “You mean investing.” “Sometimes. Sometimes gambling. Sometimes they’re one and the same. The

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relatively clean, but when you had a large number of anonymous people posting, sometimes you got ugliness. If Facebook was the model social network, WallStreetBets had a fierce antisocial tinge to it. The moderators didn’t appear to be there to silence anyone—just to keep it somewhat civil. The

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Like many others, she assumed, it was that crazy Reddit board that had driven her to the slick online brokerage. Before she’d stumbled onto WallStreetBets, she didn’t have any memory of being interested in the stock market. Though she’d taken a few economics courses in college, finance had

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she waited for her baby to be born. Maybe there really was something else she could do. Maybe those crazy, foul-mouthed, degenerate posters on WallStreetBets were on to something. Reclining in the chair, running one hand over her grapefruit-cantaloupe belly while she scrolled through the Robinhood app, looking at

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even when the stock was hovering around $5 a share, that he had found value that others had missed. When he’d first posted on WallStreetBets about GameStop, the responses had varied between amusement and outright hostility. That hadn’t changed until August 2019, when Keith had woken up on a

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to his friends in bars, at dorm parties, maybe even at frat houses. Instead, he was socializing over the Internet, in a frat called WallStreetBets. YOLO was something that made perfect sense in that environment. And Jeremy had come to believe YOLO investing in GameStop made even more sense. Not

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meme-friendly pet food entrepreneur. She believed something deeper was happening. Alone in the examining room, waiting for the doctor to return, she scrolled through WallStreetBets to a post she had bookmarked, which she’d first found when she’d been reading backward through different comment streams to try and understand

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practice in the industry—make any waves? Certainly, he couldn’t have predicted that a bunch of anonymous people congregating on a subreddit board called WallStreetBets would suddenly single Melvin out, to represent all of the short sellers taking aim at GameStop. Nor could he have imagined that he himself would

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side. And it was unlikely—if not impossible—that a stock could get disconnected from its fundamentals simply by being pushed by retail day traders. WallStreetBets wasn’t populated by professionals—it was mostly amateurs, gamblers, hell, they called themselves “retards,” “apes,” and “degenerates,” terms that disturbed Gabe, and that

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glowing numbers and rapidly rising graphs. Kim had made over $1600 in the past twenty-four hours. Her cheeks felt hot as she went from WallStreetBets back to her account; she was so swept up in the moment, she didn’t notice that Chinwe was suddenly hovering over her shoulder. “

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was just trying to help, but he wasn’t seeing what she was seeing. Battle lines had been drawn. It was easy to think of WallStreetBets as a disjointed, chaotic gathering place for fools and gamblers, because that’s how they often portrayed themselves. But Chinwe didn’t understand: the

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in perfect rhythm to the sea shanty that he’d already set to memory, even though he’d only stumbled upon the post—dropped onto WallStreetBets by a user calling himself or herself quigonshin—that very morning. It was no wonder that The Tendieman was fast going viral among the

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Zoom, and a crappy wireless connection on her side running headlong into his obvious preoccupation with the other windows still open on his laptop—particularly, WallStreetBets and his trading account—it still would have been going poorly. Jeremy had also been fairly competent at dating; especially, in the physical world,

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poker game. Stock back to $20 fast. We understand short interest better than you and will explain. As one would expect, the tweet had hit WallStreetBets like a stick of dynamite. The community had immediately rallied together, going after Citron and Left in the manner of their medium. Vicious memes, personal

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this rock star trader, groomed by Steve Cohen, one of the most feared men in finance. Plotkin was smart, probably smarter than everyone on the WallStreetBets board. But, Jeremy believed, Plotkin didn’t understand what he was up against. He decided to put it in terms his brother might understand.

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Journal—which was even delivered to Orlando—so he was well aware of the brewing battle between the retail traders, communicating with each other on WallStreetBets, and the Wall Street firms who held large short positions in the stock. He certainly had followed the Twitter drama that had occurred when

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understood the sentiment—GME at $1000 might seem nuts to the uninitiated, but to those who had spent most of the past weekend scrolling through WallStreetBets, reading comment after comment by people shouting about their diamond hands, people from all different walks of life who had bought in and then

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an option because it prevents Mr. Musk from claiming he could have fixed the problem if he’d stayed. Like his ideological siblings on the WallStreetBets board, Elon had taken the battle personally, and hadn’t merely been angry at the short sellers, but apparently had been disgusted by the

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Pretty soon, Melvin and the rest of those damn shorts were going to have to rush to cover. And as long as the rabble on WallStreetBets held tight, those shares would be incredibly difficult to find—and incredibly expensive. Elon took another sip from his blended Martian eggplant, or squash,

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fundamentals, and create a squeeze out of what was essentially, from the short perspective, thin air? Or was something more nefarious going on? Clearly, on WallStreetBets, there was a coordinated effort—at least in targeted posts and comments—to attack Melvin’s positions—all of their short positions, not just GameStop

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a stock go nuclear? Gabe would never say it out loud, maybe he wouldn’t even think it to himself, but those “suckers” on WallStreetBets, those retail losers on their couches with their Covid checks—their “stimmies”—were probably only half of the story. They’d swallowed up a lot

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accurate, meant the firm had lost more than $6.5 billion. Primarily on GameStop, but also on many of their other short positions that the WallStreetBets community had gone after: companies such as AMC, BlackBerry, and Bed Bath & Beyond. It was hard not to see what was going on as

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’t as simple as had been advanced in the press—that this was only a battle between institutional shorts like Melvin and the rabble on WallStreetBets. Gabe knew that the retail traders, with their Covid checks, might be powering the current, but the real money was up top, surfing those

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later go on CNBC, flying the WSB banner even higher. In the appearance, Palihapitiya would describe how he’d spent the entire night reading the WallStreetBets board, and how he believed what the world was seeing was “a pushback against the establishment in a really important way.” He didn’t

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and station, the retail trader “doesn’t have to be the bagholder…” Portraying Palihapitiya as just another “diamond handed” culture warrior, in lockstep with the WallStreetBets rabble, would be poor framing; he’d reportedly closed out his calls on GameStop before the CNBC interview, and would donate $500,000 of the

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microphones pointed in his direction from time to time. But Gabe understood that the forces aligned against him and Melvin had moved far beyond the WallStreetBets board, which, even with 2.5 million members now and rising, was still firmly lodged in the basement of the Internet. GameStop was no

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Gabe had already unloaded his vast short position, at an enormous loss. Musk’s tweet—which simply read Gamestonk!!—followed by a link to the WallStreetBets board, sent out to his 42 million followers, had hit the market with the force of a musket bullet; the stock had immediately surged 60

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, Twitter, and in the mainstream media, that something dirty was afoot, that Wall Street cronyism and favoritism would find a way to halt the WallStreetBets revolt. But Ken Griffin was not afraid of Reddit and Twitter. Even if this story was beginning to read like some sort of millennial version

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and morning. It was no shock that Musk’s tweet had sent the board into a frenzy. Not only had he linked the tweet to WallStreetBets for his 42 million followers; he was already an iconic figure to the Reddit mob, who worshipped him for his success, his antiestablishment attitudes,

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words and the forceful demands he’d made on a lack of sleep, since he’d tossed and turned for two straight nights, intermittently checking WallStreetBets, Discord, and his trading account for after-hours news and motion. Deep down, though, he knew there was more going on than exhaustion, or

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, probably because of the tone of his voice. But he remained focused on Michael, who was still reading his phone. “They just shut down the WallStreetBets servers on Discord. Completely kicked it off, I think permanently.” “What?” Jeremy felt his cheeks growing warm. “Who did?” Michael shrugged. “Says here the

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company banned it for hate speech.” “Hate speech?” Josie asked. “Who do they hate?” “‘The WallStreetBets server has been on our Trust & Safety team’s radar for some time due to occasional content that violates our Community Guidelines, including hate speech

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server and its owner from Discord—’” “This is nuts,” Jeremy said. “They can just do this? Why now?” “Gets worse,” Michael said. “Looks like WallStreetBets has frozen, too. Says here the site is going private temporarily—closed to new users.” “Why?” Jeremy said, hastily pulling his own phone out of

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day—” Jeremy was barely listening as he scrolled through the site. He still had access as he was an existing member, but Michael was right—WallStreetBets was going temporarily dark. “Seems mighty suspicious to me,” Michael said. He was almost grinning. But Jeremy didn’t see the humor in this

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at all. With Discord gone, and WallStreetBets shackled— “Discord goes down because of bad language—right now?” Michael said. “While the stock is flying? Why not a week ago? Or a

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, and after a beat, Josie followed. “You okay? You want to talk about anything?” Jeremy didn’t know what to say. Discord was gone, WallStreetBets was dark—he didn’t believe in conspiracies but the timing seemed incredibly suspect. No doubt, the Discord site had been getting complaints about “hate

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the mega-billionaire and TV star, tweeted, as he had the day before—I got to say I LOVE LOVE what is going on with #wallstreetbets. All of those years of High Frequency Traders front running retail traders, now speed and density of information and retail trading is giving the little

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the result of a series of logical, if coincidental, occurrences. Melvin’s short position had exploded into a short squeeze because the retail traders on WallStreetBets had targeted GameStop, had bought and bought and bought, causing massive volume and price volatility. Robinhood, through which a large portion of those retail traders

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with Steve Cohen. And also, also true, all of this had, by EVEN UNLIKELIER COINCIDENCE, happened right after the GameStop rallying cries on Discord and WallStreetBets had been, at least, temporarily, silenced or curtailed. But from Vlad’s perspective, all of this was purely circumstantial. His users might not be happy

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once the short squeeze had begun, and many had bought near the top. They were losing money—and it seemed extremely unfair. Even the WallStreetBets board itself had taken to Twitter to voice their dismay at the turn of events. A tweet from the moderators had been posted that morning

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later, when in premarket the stock had eclipsed $500 a share—and his account value had reached $175,000. And he’d been on the WallStreetBets board, reading comments, when the Robinhood blog post had gone up—and all hell had broken loose. A day later, the stock had grudgingly

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downward pressure took some of the steam off the short squeeze, but she’d always assumed it would be temporary, and she knew from reading WallStreetBets that the community was determined to see it through. Anyone who talked about selling was roundly ridiculed, and the peer pressure, along with the

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recognition that this was now a national story, driving millions and millions of new members to WallStreetBets and to GameStop, should have kept the rocket heading skyward. And for a time, Kim had remained cautiously optimistic. Friday the twenty-ninth, the

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open, for everyone to see—if something nefarious had been behind their move. But the more her anger multiplied, and the more she read WallStreetBets, the more she’d become convinced—when you added Robinhood’s restrictions to the actions of Discord and the temporary blockage of the WSB board

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being called to testify, he might have turned off the livestream right there. Losses sustained by retail investors as a result of volatility? If the WallStreetBets mob had suffered losses, whose fault was that? Who had caused the volatility in the system? And if the system really was rigged against

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questions during the event because really, who was he anyway?—he turned off his camera, glanced at the comments flashing one after another down the WallStreetBets board—and then shifted back to his trading account. As he looked at that beautiful ticker, GME, multiplied 50,000 times, once for each

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still, somehow, their interest remained mostly under the radar, perhaps because, by then, the business media had become distracted by the drama unfolding between the WallStreetBets mob and Melvin. A little Montreal-born fund named after an anti-shoplifting tag couldn’t possibly compete with such a movie-ready, David versus

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On February 19, one day after the congressional hearing on the short squeeze that rocked the world, Keith Gill posted his first YOLO update on WallStreetBets in over two weeks. According to the screenshot attached to the post, Keith had added an exclamation point to his testimony—putting more of

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

by Vivek Ramaswamy  · 16 Aug 2021  · 344pp  · 104,522 words

The Wolf of Wall Street.3 Goldman’s effort to change the narrative didn’t go unnoticed. As one Redditor on the now-infamous forum WallStreetBets observed, “They want to make sure that any IPO they bring to market has a brown or black person on the board of the company

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what happened earlier this year to online chat groups focused on trading stocks. Early in 2021, a group of traders on a Reddit forum called WallStreetBets realized Wall Street might have made a mistake. As it turns out, hedge funds had short-sold more shares of struggling video game retailer GameStop

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wokeness comes in. Just hours before the Thursday short-selling onslaught, the online chat company Discord shut down a WallStreetBets discussion server with 250,000 members over allegations of “hate speech”—WallStreetBets moderators claimed the entire Discord server was banned because one user had managed to bypass a filter for vulgarity.29

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Apr. 2016, www.wsj.com/articles/malaysias-1mdb-the-secret-money-behind-the-wolf-of-wall-street-1459531987. 4. “r/Wallstreetbets—Goldman Sachs Alludes to GME & WSB.” Reddit, www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l3ucyv/goldman_sachs_alludes_to_gme_wsb/. 5. Chappell, Bill. “Malaysia’s Former PM Najib Razak Begins Trial

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, 8 Apr. 2021, www.theverge.com/2021/4/8/22373290/intel-bleep-ai-powered-abuse-toxicity-gaming-filters. 29. Peters, Jay. “Discord Bans the r/WallStreetBets Server, but New Ones Have Sprung to Life.” The Verge, 27 Jan. 2021, www.theverge.com/2021/1/27/22253251/discord-bans-the-r

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-wallstreetbets-server. 30. Stanley, Alyse. “Facebook Bans Popular Stock Trading Group amid GameStop Stock Price Chaos.” Gizmodo, 29 Jan. 2021, gizmodo.com/facebook-bans-popular-stock-

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All

by Adrian Hon  · 14 Sep 2022  · 371pp  · 107,141 words

reason for the hearing? The stunning gyrations of the share price of a company called GameStop. THE BOREDOM MARKET HYPOTHESIS We need to visit r/wallstreetbets to understand why Robinhood and GameStop captured the attention of the world’s financial markets and US legislators.62 This immensely popular Reddit forum describes

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a Bloomberg terminal” where users compete to make the most attention-grabbing posts about how to get rich through trading. I first came across r/wallstreetbets at the beginning of 2020, just as COVID-19 was making its effects felt in Asia and then in Europe. The community had just shy

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Dothraki horde with short sellers, and the hapless defenders with vulnerable shares like airlines, office landlords, and cruise operators. I suspect few people join r/wallstreetbets expecting responsible financial advice. At the same time, every day sees dozens of users posting screenshots from Robinhood and other apps, purporting to show tremendous

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fun gamble, and a compelling story arc of trial and redemption, than one that is doing fine.”64 The boredom market hypothesis, combined with r/wallstreetbets’ propulsive memes and Robinhood’s gateway for novice traders, explains GameStop’s meteoric rise and fall in early 2021, in which the share price went

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boring US video game retailer with almost five thousand stores, might cope with the existential threat of video games’ shift toward digital distribution. Instead, r/wallstreetbets users came up with dubious but entertaining reasons why GameStop was underpriced (e.g., the new owners might figure out a plan, institutional short sellers

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stock) and schemed to send the price sky-high (“to the Moon”) by buying highly leveraged call options to execute a “short squeeze.” Since r/wallstreetbets had almost two million users by this point, even a small proportion of its users could move the share price if they were sufficiently coordinated

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interview, he had lost over $800 on his $1,035 investment, but he believed his commitment to the stock earned him “internet points” on r/wallstreetbets. 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

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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

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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

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be done.”69 This would hardly be the first time the stock market was compared to a game, and comparisons are ever-present on r/wallstreetbets. Users constantly refer to their hobby as a video game; one poster joked, “Robinhood’s ‘Stonk trading’ augmented reality game has quickly grown to be

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hovered around $130—much lower than its January peak but still six times its original price. It’s likely the saga of GameStop and r/wallstreetbets will have even wider consequences. In late 2021, the Securities and Exchange Commission requested information and public comment on the use of gamification on digital

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individuals into market-shaking actions. One of the witnesses who testified at the US House Financial Services Committee’s hearing in February was the r/wallstreetbets user most responsible for driving the GameStop short squeeze, Keith Gill (a.k.a. Roaring Kitty on Twitter and YouTube). Gill, a financial analyst, denied

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analysts working together to compile research and critique investment ideas, while individual investors have not had that advantage. Social media platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and WallStreetBets on Reddit are leveling the playing field. In a year of quarantines and COVID, engaging with other investors on social media was a safe way

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sentiment trader position with unusual requirements.75 Alongside the usual three years of active trading experience, applicants had to be “an active member of r/wallstreetbets with an account age of >365 days and karma of over 1000” and have “a refined taste for memes.” Successful applicants would spend “most of

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,” Hearing, US House Committee on Financial Services, February 18, 2021, https://financialservices.house.gov/calendar/eventsingle.aspx?EventID=407107. 62. “wallstreetbets,” r/wallstreetbets, Reddit, accessed November 28, 2021, www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets. 63. James Chen, “2020 Was a Big Year for Individual Investors,” Investopedia, December 31, 2020, www.investopedia.com/2020-was

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.com/watch?v=7RH4XKP55fM. 70. u/sentientpork, “#1 mobile gaming app for 2020 crushes the competition and it’s players,” r/wallstreetbets, Reddit, June 24, 2020, www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/hf5ndx/1_mobile_gaming_app_for_2020_crushes_the. 71. u/josephd6, “Here it is in all its glory,” r

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/wallstreetbets, Reddit, January 30, 2021, www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l8hfhy/here_it_is_in_all_its_glory. 72. “SEC Requests Information and Comment on Broker-Dealer and Investment Adviser Digital

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.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-toxic-for-teen-girls-company-documents-show-11631620739. 79. Elon Musk (@elonmusk), “Gamestonk!! https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/” Twitter, January 26, 2021, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1354174279894642703; Dorothy Gambrell, “A Brief History of Elon Musk’s Recent Market-Moving Tweets,” Bloomberg, February

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

by Nate Silver  · 12 Aug 2024  · 848pp  · 227,015 words

have moved online, and the company has suffered a net loss every year since 2018. But the stock had become popular on the Reddit r/wallstreetbets, a forum for day traders and options traders. Why GameStop in particular became popular is hard to say. It was partly because it was being

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“dog,” sometimes associated with pictures of a cute Japanese dog named Kabosu) and fonts (Comic Sans). And yet, Dogecoin went viral, gaining acclaim with r/wallstreetbets traders and Elon Musk. Valued at $0.00026 shortly after its creation in 2013, it eventually reached a peak of $0.74 in May 2021

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what if Pepe and Satoshi can coordinate—say, on a groupchat that they joined at the Miami yacht party, or on a forum like r/wallstreetbets? Well, now things get interesting. They could gamble on keeping the NateCoin rally alive. If they can just hold on for twenty-four more hours

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, there’s usually no rational way to ensure that the other guy won’t defect and screw you over. Except, in the context of r/wallstreetbets, there might be reason to trust the other guy. There is camaraderie among traders because of the David (vs. Goliath) role that they saw themselves

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Gambling Is Still Gambling: The Runbo Li Story Runbo Li won big on his first major options trade. He’d seen a tip on r/wallstreetbets that Nvidia, the semiconductor manufacturer, was about to announce a new GPU.[*8] A year or so earlier, Li had bought some stocks on the

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his first job—big consumer stocks he knew like Nike and JetBlue. The stocks had made a modest return. But what was happening at r/wallstreetbets was much more exciting. “I saw that some people were making just insane amounts of money trading stock options,” he said. He later came to

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trade options at much higher volumes than at stodgier, more traditional brokerage sites like Charles Schwab. Finally, there’s the influence of forums like r/wallstreetbets—the camaraderie and competition between mostly young men who are inexperienced traders. Look, I’ve got no problem with talking shop. When I was a

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’d made $80,000 in the last month might go on a losing streak and never be heard from again. “Generally, I don’t think WallStreetBets is skilled,” Li said. “The posts you see of the success stories—it’s one in a million. It doesn’t show the 999,000

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, with an interest in probabilistic forecasting and internet irony, was inevitably going to plug in somewhere in the River. The world of NFTs and r/wallstreetbets might seem like the most natural place; the internet has developed a superintelligence of its own, creating ever-shifting focal points through the Meme Creation

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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

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, then put the gun to your temple and pull the trigger; it implies a 1-in-6 chance that you’ll shoot yourself dead. r/wallstreetbets: A Reddit forum (subreddit) popular among amateur day traders and instrumental in facilitating meme stock bubbles like GameStop; known for trolling with adolescent humor and

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pull (crypto), 496 rule utilitarianism, 368, 500 Rumbolz, Mike, 138, 142, 153, 167, 186 running good/rungood, 496 Russell, Stuart, 441 Russian roulette, 496 r/wallstreetbets, 314–15, 317–18, 321, 411, 489, 496 Ryder, Nick, 415n, 430–31, 433, 479 S Sagan, Scott, 425, 426 Sagbigsal, Bryan, 127 Saltz, Jerry

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest

by Edward Chancellor  · 15 Aug 2022  · 829pp  · 187,394 words

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

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when the price of time is set at nothing or turns negative, and central banks print money without limit, finance becomes absurd. The autists on WallStreetBets found the situation intensely amusing. Serious investors, such as Klarman, found it deeply worrying. THE COVID TRANSITION The novelist Michel Houellebecq claimed that the ‘banal

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of, 98–9, 101, 105, 108; predictions/warnings of, 93–5, 96, 101, 105, 308; reversal of international capital flows (late-1920s), 93, 93*, 261 WallStreetBets, 307, 309 Walpole, Horace, 62–3 Warburg, Paul, 94 Warsh, Kevin, 228 wealth: ‘Buddenbrooks effect’, 216; conspicuous consumption by mega-rich, 54–5, 208–10

Just Keep Buying: Proven Ways to Save Money and Build Your Wealth

by Nick Maggiulli  · 15 May 2022  · 287pp  · 62,824 words

all it took. Over the course of the next hour the conversation in our group chat descended into the merits of GME and whether the wallstreetbets Reddit forum was right about its imminent price increase. As soon as the market opened, it was clear that

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wallstreetbets had called it perfectly. GME started the day at $96, up from its previous close of $65, and didn’t stop there. By 10:22

The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America

by Mehrsa Baradaran  · 7 May 2024  · 470pp  · 158,007 words

feel like I was doing the right thing by holding.” Among retail-investor communities, none is more infamous than the devotees of the Reddit subthread WallStreetBets (WSB). Days after the Capitol siege, and spurred on by a supportive tweet from Musk (who typed, simply, “Gamestonk”7), followers of WSB took advantage

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, 272, 273, 276, 278, 279, 287–88, 290–91, 293, 295, 298–301, 305, 309, 310, 315, 317, 325, 332, 334, 340, 344, 348, 349 WallStreetBets (WSB), 331, 332 Wall Street Journal, The, 26, 167, 280, 337 Walmart, 214 war, endless, 361 Warren, Earl, 100, 144. See also Warren Court Warren

Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century

by W. David Marx  · 18 Nov 2025  · 642pp  · 142,332 words

evangelism: “I’m a proud Bitcoin maxi now. I’m toxic as fuck.” This culture of financial speculation spilled into traditional markets. Reddit thread r/wallstreetbets orchestrated one of the most symbolic events of the 2020s: the GameStop short squeeze. Led by Keith Gill (a.k.a. Roaring Kitty), the group

Nothing but Net: 10 Timeless Stock-Picking Lessons From One of Wall Street’s Top Tech Analysts

by Mark Mahaney  · 9 Nov 2021  · 311pp  · 90,172 words

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

Buy Now, Pay Later: The Extraordinary Story of Afterpay

by Jonathan Shapiro and James Eyers  · 2 Aug 2021  · 444pp  · 124,631 words

Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber  · 29 Oct 2024  · 292pp  · 106,826 words

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back

by Bruce Schneier  · 7 Feb 2023  · 306pp  · 82,909 words

Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis

by Jeanna Smialek  · 27 Feb 2023  · 601pp  · 135,202 words