> I still have yet to hear a compelling argument for this not being a pretty transparent pump and dump by some whales, institutional investors, or some mix of t

> I still have yet to hear a compelling argument for this not being a pretty transparent pump and dump by some whales, institutional investors, or some mix of the two WSB was a relatively small sub up until the last month or so, and the rise in the price of GME didn't start until news sources started painting WSB as the creator of this "pump and dump", so I don't think this was initially created on WSB > There is a mature market for reddit accounts and reddit upvotes. It would actually be really strange if there had already not been at least one major instance of institutions or other sophisticated actors using social media to move prices for an options payday. Yeah, you're right, but people on reddit tend to be quite aware that new accounts with sufficient (100+) karma to post are readily available to buy, so they tend to be quite suspicious of these type of accounts (especially since the posting history is generally public) and usually call them out in the comments and/or get banned by moderators. > Whats the argument that this isn't the case right now? Putting aside their colourful language, there's a surprising amount of good due diligence (DD on the subreddit) done by its members. The idea is that given the number of stocks shorted is over 100% (As of Jan 1st it was ~121%, down from ~130%), the hedge funds will eventually have to buy back the shares, and that will cause a price spike. Yeah, the price of the stock has gone down, but if you check the sale volume in the last 2-3 days, you can see that it is no where close to the amount of shares that people have bought in the last month and a half or so. What this means is that even though the price is low, the number of people willing to sell at that price is still relatively small, so as soon as hegde funds are forced to buy back their shorted share the price will rise quickly because the number of people willing to sell shares at that price is low.