GameStop + Robinhood + Reddit

[JSH]

Anyone else watching the Gamestop drama with interest?

For those that don’t know Gamestop is a brick and mortar store that sells video games and other things. Their business has been poor and they are losing a bunch of money and closing hundreds of stores. Since their business is going down the tubes their stock is heavily shorted (a bet that it will go down). Nothing abnormal about that.

Add in an investment chatroom on Reddit called WallStreetBets where small investors / gamblers got together and said “If we all buy Gamestop that will drive the stock price up. The “shorts” will lose a lot of money, they will have to sell their short positions, and the stock will continue to go up. The plan worked and the stock of an failing company is up 1700% year – to –date.

So the question is- how long can a group individual investors organizing on social media pump a stock before it falls apart and people decided to take their profits? Today is looking like it might be the turning point with the stock down 50% as a result of multiple brokers refusing to allow buyers to buy Gamestop and some other stocks that they have been pumping on margin. Robinhood basically said: “Sorry we will no longer loan you money to buy a stock up 1700% in less than a month”.

[Stubby79]

News to me, but interesting. Keep us up to date!

[ME_Andy]

I've been following it. A lot of people blame the internet mob for what's going on. The shorts should carry even more blame IMO. Over 100% of shares were sold short. If you understand what short selling is, you should be asking how that's even possible.

[ME_Andy]

Basically, the shorts set up a really unstable, ticking time bomb.

[ME_Andy]

I would like to see us get back to the old days. Only buying and selling stock. No options, no derivatives.

[freebeard]

https://youtu.be/zTT4it_f7JcThis is the best show in town. It has united the political Left and Right like nothing else.

Via patriots.win:



So you can't buy the stock [reportedly], but they can sell it for you. Nothing to see here, move along.

edit: Krystal Ball: GameStop And The Ecstasy Of Making Elites Pay
Saagar Enjeti provides the latest updates on the Reddit versus Wall Street story.

I always saw it as nineteen people sitting around betting a dollar on whether the twentieth person will get off their *ss and do a dollars worth of work.

[Cd]

I lost hundreds of thousands in the stock market by being the idiot that I am
I met a lady, figured I needed to get money fast, and cashed in my work stock.
I had over 2,000 shares 10 years ago .
It had never gone past 30, and I cashed in at around 26.
It is currently at 176.
I then took the money from cashing in my stock, abd invested in Netflix.
The president of NF did a shifty move by splitting the company into two parts - DVD mail service, and streaming.
The stock sank like a rock, and since this was my first purchase, I listened to the guys at work that played the market for advice. " You better get out. It looks like they are going under ".
So I pulled out at 61 dollars, and the pres of NF "suddenly changed his mind " and merged the services again.
It took off like a rocket, and hasn't dropped since.
Reed Hastings - the Netflix president made millions shorting his comany.
So, after getting burnt, I figured I would leave $10,000 in stock in Sears.
We all know the story there.
I held and held. I think I have about $5 now ?
What burns me on Sears, is that the president owns a lending agency that Sears borrows from to stay afloat.
So live or die, he makes money, and could care less about all the people that lost their jobs at Sears.
Greed.
I saw that Tesla was looking good, and was about to invest - when suddenly, there were some electric cars that caught fire from Fisker ( this was years ago )
I backed out out on Tesla too.

So - not only did I lose my savings, but I also lost a lot of self respect ( what little I have )
And I lost the girl.

About this lady -my car used to be quite nice.
She told me she was allergic to carpet. Even car carpet.
So I ripped it out of my car.
And the car has steadily been getting worse.
I'm at the point to where I'm numb, but hey - at least now I can add goofy looking aeromods to my car and not worry about how the car looks.

[ME_Andy]

That sucks. I have some "lost fortune" stories like that, too. I guess most people do.

[Fat Charlie]

Yeah, but the fortunes lost by shorting Gamestop are a story for the ages.

What I don't get is why anyone is still putting money into it. Now that the hedge funds have taken their losses, what good can come from spending $300 for a $6 stock? In the beginning, the best you could say was that you were throwing money at it for entertainment. Now it's more like I put my kids' college money into Gamestop and all I got was this lousy tee shirt.

[freebeard]

Fortunes lost and won is incidental. The big story is small-i infowar.

Richard M. Stallman was a a prophet that wandered in from the desert and ranted against proprietary software. Some listened (Apache, Linux, Blender), but most didn't (Google, Facebook, Smartmatic/Dominion).

Richard Matthew Stallman (/ˈstɑːlmən/; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms,[1] is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in a manner such that its users receive the freedoms to use, study, distribute, and modify that software. Software that ensures these freedoms is termed free software. Stallman launched the GNU Project, founded the Free Software Foundation, developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and wrote the GNU General Public License.

Stallman launched the GNU Project in September 1983 to create a Unix-like computer operating system composed entirely of free software.[2] With this, he also launched the free software movement....[5] In October 1985[6] he founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF).

Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft, which uses the principles of copyright law to preserve the right to use, modify, and distribute free software, and is the main author of free software licenses which describe those terms, most notably the GNU General Public License (GPL), the most widely used free software license.[7]

In 1989, he co-founded the League for Programming Freedom....

In September 2019, Stallman resigned as president of the FSF and left his "visiting scientist" role at MIT after [he was cancelled by the Left]

GNU is self-referentially GNU's Not Unix. At minimum the software that controls elections should be auditable.