I almost hesitate to write about this mostly because I have yet to fully understand the stock market, but the drama and ramifications are too good not to discuss. In the last week or so, it seems a bunch of underground "little guys" got together via Reddit and took a stand against the big money hedge fund managers who normally use the stock market to make themselves rich and richer. These are the sons-of bitches that quietly make hundreds of millions of dollars a year, yet don't add any value to society by creating anything new.
The game, as I barely understand it, was that the hedge funders decided to "short" the stock for Gamestop, the video game store, when they saw its price hovering around under $20. As it was mentioned in one of the many stories I saw yesterday, once these piranhas pick a stock, they then put out an article talking about how bad that stock is doing and how it is a dead player in the market. This usually prompts others to then react and sell their shares, so it drives the price down even more. The complicated part was explained on Ben Shapiro's show last night. Let's say stock company A holds the shares, well the hedge fund managers decide to "rent" the shares for a short time, I reason it is called a short because it only lasts a month or so. To rent, they might pay the company $10, as Shapiro said, to make the math easy to follow. Now that they "own" the shares, they start hoping the price goes down. People buying or owning shares at the start of the month might have been at $50 a share, and if the price goes down to say $20 a share, the hedge fund people make $30, minus the $10 they pay to company A who really holds the stock, and the hedge fund people walk away with $20. Well, when Reddit got involved and started buying shares, instead of the price going down, they drove the price up. Now, instead of the hedge fund people making a little money in the loss, now they are holding something that is worth up to $400 a share. This is legal, but the hedge fund people are on the hook to company A for the difference the stock has risen plus that $10 fee. This was a beautiful explanation because I did not understand how or what "short" meant.
The result, I guess as the month is ending is that some of these hedge fund managers owe billions of dollars which they have to pay. The stinky part in all of this is that yesterday Redhand, an ap on people's phones which people can use to buy and sell stocks as well as e-trade and the other access points to the stock market online all decided to "freeze" buying of these (Gamestop, Nokia, and a 3rd stock were all being played this way) stocks, but they were nice enough to still allow people to sell their shares. Who benefits in this manipulation, the hedge fund people, of course. It was actually amazing that both republicans, such as Ted Cruz and democrats like AOC both got together and condemned this vile activity. On the surface it sounds illegal as hell, I mean this is outright wrong and there is no way to paint a pretty picture on it. Of course, there is already notification that Janet Yellen, the new Biden Secretary of the Treasury was gifted $800,000 by one of this wall street groups, so you know how this will play out. Biden himself has yet to address the issue, but the poor guy doesn't know where he is at most of the time, I believe.
This is literally a modern day David and Goliath story and although we are all supposed to be pre-disposed to root for the little guy, in today's fucked up world, there are already whispers I see in some tiktoks and short videos protecting and siding with the wall street people. The Reddit people did nothing wrong, they got information of activity in the stock market and played to it much like people are supposed to. The stock market does not belong to the upper class billionaires and rich fucks that "play with money" daily. According to the stories, many Reddit people got rich yesterday doing this, and if the stock was bought at a lot of $4, where it was, and sold at near $400, all I can say is wow, congratulations.
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