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Reddit’s ‘GMEBagHoldersClub’ Is Where GameStop Stock Buyers Admit They Messed Up

54 points by miles 6y ago

atsushin 6y ago
FOMO is one of the deadliest threats to sound decision-making. I bought some GME just as it dipped to $90, smacked myself back to reality and sold the same day -- thankfully with a small profit. I'm dipping my toes back in with two shares at $70 but I'm not expecting anything to come next week. I think /r/wallstreetbets is going to be 'ruined' by its newfound popularity for the foreseeable future, we can already see the subreddit drama and disinformation in full swing.
- FeistyOtter 6y ago
  Isn't it what WSB is all about? Pick a stock, bet on it, and when you lose you post your loss porn to the subreddit? I assume people new to WSB will take this seriously, and it does pose a threat to the sub's health, but older members know exactly what they are getting into.
  - guerrilla 6y ago
    That was my view of it too. It really creeps me out that there are all these articles with "Should you take investing advice from reddit?" when WSB has never, as far as I know, been anything but high-risk fucking around for fun and profit (or loss.)
    - rahkiin 6y ago
      The sub, at least until 3 weeks ago, was all about showing losses and being called a retard because you lost hundred of thousands on some stupid bet. Of course there were some successes.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - jedmeyers 6y ago
    > Isn't it what WSB is all about? I mean, yeah, the "bet" is even in the name.
  - aahortwwy 6y ago
    The vast majority of WSB members weren't on the subreddit two weeks ago. At this point it may as well be a completely different community.
    - tourist_ 6y ago
      To put this in context, the member count went from (at most) 1.5M to 8.5M within weeks. No wonder it got crazy out there.
    - EQVEYWDCHQ 6y ago
      It was also a completely different community at 50k vs. 500k etc. At that point it started hitting /r/all consistently.
      - pjc50 6y ago
        /r/all does immediately ruin the subreddits that appear there.
  - yongjik 6y ago
    I don't know exactly what WSB is all about, but there are way too many people who seriously think this is some kind of popular uprising against evil hedge fund to take back the profit they deserve. (Or at least there were, until a few days ago.) I don't think they'll like "Bro, it was always about making fun of how much money you lost."
- rvz 6y ago
  > I think /r/wallstreetbets is going to be 'ruined' by its newfound popularity for the foreseeable future, we can already see the subreddit drama and disinformation in full swing. It already is ruined. Given the influx of media attention, new users, bots and the GME after-party of bag-holders who missed the ship. The 'actual' old members (who got in early as $5 - $20) are already gone with their gains. Now it's just full of latecomers who bought as high as $200 - $465 posting screenshots of losing their entire life savings. The subreddit already had users pretending and memeing to be idiots until the real idiots came in and those posting screenshots of their huge losses with their life savings with disinformation, ape emojis, 'diamond hands', 'hodl' as the stock fell etc. Not only they didn't know that they have become a meme, They are now going to be featured in the new WallStreetBets movie. Won't be surprised if they called it 'Diamond Hands' or 'The big short squeeze'.
  - atsushin 6y ago
    I wonder where the old users will be migrating to. There were quite a few aspects of WSB I really enjoyed before 2020 / 2021 happened.
    - harambae 6y ago
      /r/options and /r/thetagang are getting heavy influxes (which I think they are a little nervous about)
nikitaga 6y ago
If you want to get rich quick, you need to understand what you're doing, and put in honest work. Everything else is somewhere between fraud, gambling and a distraction (at best). Hyping up meme stocks is just the newest addition to tactics like wire fraud, MLMs, etc. It too will in time be thoroughly discredited, yet never eradicated completely. You can certainly get lucky gambling on crypto, TSLA, etc. You can also trade those profitably by knowing your shit. You will occasionally make poor decisions either way, so make sure you can handle the consequences.
- newswasboring 6y ago
  > Hyping up meme stocks is just the newest addition to tactics like wire fraud, MLMs, etc. I think your examples and meme stock are two completely different things. MLMs, frauds etc are by design lies while meme stocks are jokes and usually big hive mind mistakes. This is an apples to oranges comparison
  - nikitaga 6y ago
    I guess that's true for wire fraud, but the similarity to MLM is undeniable: participants end up financially interested in perpetuating the bubble, enticing more victims. The last ones in end up holding the bag, the first ones in get the profits. But there are differences too of course. The virality built into modern tech makes it easy to amplify opinions into full on bubbles. You don't need to create your of Herbalife to defraud people. Now you just need to find an organic idea / trend that you could profit from ("Buy GME because short squeeze, let's show wall street!"), and hype it up with bots and followers to bootstrap the bubble, hoping that it will snowball on the same kind of virality that put it on your radar in the first place. The new scheme is better because you don't need to create a company that can be sued. You're just a redditor caught in a meme / joke with thousands of others like you. Some newbies took this too seriously and lost their money. Well duh, their fault, should have been more careful. Nice and clean, see.
    - newswasboring 6y ago
      Ok in your second and third paragraph you have described an actual person doing stuff. That's where I disagree. I have not seen any proof that there was real malicious player in at least the GameStop fiasco. (But I'm not upto date on this so I might be wrong). It all just feels like a bunch of people half jokingly egged each other on
raverbashing 6y ago
There are stocks (and options, of course) riskier than some bet options on bookmakers. (It's the same math pretty much and Bookmakers are doing the risk calculations in real time so for example you could settle your bet and get a partial return on a bet on the US election for example after the election but before the final counts came)
malwarebytess 6y ago
I think there's going to be some level of litigation and maybe prosecution at the end of this. It was clear by last thursday at least what was happening, and yet there were multiple actors -- some of them organized -- trying to pump the stock and persuade people to keep buying. One example that may not be criminal but is certainly suspect is the "top moderators" on reddit's WallStreetBets sub seem to have been suppressing all posts about $GME that weren't pumping the stock, quite thoroughly, until reddit staff stepped in and removed them. Some screenshots flying around that appear to depict the same moderators discussing payouts and investors. Doesn't seem right.
- pjc50 6y ago
  At least one of the possible instigators, a financial advisor, is under investigation: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/gamestop-reddit-trader-keith-gill-roaring-kitty-investigation-regulators-advisor-2021-2-1030044721 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/gamestop-red...
  - voisin 6y ago
    I don’t see what he did as wrong. He seems to be caught in a technicality in that he has a broker license (though was not, in his day job, in a role advising on investments), but never used his role (or even identified his role - or even his name for someone else to identify him and his brokerage license and consequently rely on his licensing in making their own decisions) to cause others to make investment decisions. He simply presented his own due diligence on the stock, which is only “wrong” in this cause because unbeknownst to viewers he has his brokerage license. I think it is ludicrous that they are going after him.
waheoo 6y ago
Seriously? Fuck off vice. Such shit reporting. GME bagholders didn't do anything wrong. Look at the candles. That isn't a short squeeze. That is a short squeeze into a week of market fuckery at the highest level to keep it low enough hedge funds don't go out of business and get a chance to cover at something that isn't astronomical. Yes, if they allowed it to happen it would have bought some institutions down. No I don't think that would have actually been a bad thing. Shits fucked and the media is all about that click bait. Silver was a complete pump and dump carried out by the media at the behest of Citadel. - made 400% of GME, got out when I noticed the bank's weren't going to let it happen.
- bo1024 6y ago
  I'm not convinced that you're right, but I would love the Congressional investigation to try to find out. It's hard to know what would have happened if buying hadn't been shut down, and it's still hard to understand exactly why buying was shut down by different parties. Guessing if we learn the one, we'll know the other.
  - _trampeltier 6y ago
    I just don't believe suddenly all exchanges for the "small people" are not allowd to buy (just sell) GME stocks because of a liquidity problem at the same time. I mean, it was not just about GME now. If it worked out, it would happen again. Now everybody knows .. the big guys just allways bend the rules and you have no chance, so you don't even try a second GME.
    - iamacyborg 6y ago
      > I just don't believe suddenly all exchanges for the "small people" are not allowd to buy (just sell) GME stocks because of a liquidity problem at the same time. This has the distinct flavour of QAnon esque conspiracy theories.
      - mckirk 6y ago
        Let's go with: No, it doesn't. QAnon requires you to believe absolutely insane stuff, like Anderson Cooper drinking the blood of babies. This theory would require you to believe that enormously wealthy entities would find a way to use their influence and their knowledge of the inner workings of the stock market they know like the back of their hand to prevent themselves from losing a metric shit ton of money. I'm not saying it necessarily happened, because it would still be awfully hard to hide your tracks and there'd be hell to pay if you failed, but those two conspiracy theories are definitely on different levels of 'hard to believe'.
praptak 6y ago
Obligatory reading (too late for these folks but still): http://edmarkovich.blogspot.com/2013/12/why-i-dont-trade-stocks-and-probably.html?m=1 http://edmarkovich.blogspot.com/2013/12/why-i-dont-trade-sto...
FrozenVoid 6y ago
what they expected? Stock market is ruled by big investors, funds and corporations, not people betting their life savings on random reddit meme. Retail investors are not market makers - they're simply pawns of these meme brokers directing them to specific actions, without any understanding of underlying mechanisms: Reddit crowds treated it as another cryptocurrency pump and WSB fed this delusion with vague memes(that look absurd and ironic in perspective, "Buy these stocks to punish greedy Wall Street and get big profits!").
LatteLazy 6y ago
It's sort of reassuring to see this all wrapped up in under a month. We waited over 4 years for the Trump bubbles to burst and at least some are still (physiologically) invested in those.
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  (meant to say psychologically)
buryat 6y ago
I lost $500k on GME so far, lessons learned, i guess i’m a bag holder now
- reitzensteinm 6y ago
  So far, meaning you're still holding?
  - buryat 6y ago
    yes, what’s the point of selling now, I hope it’s going to come back, at least that’s what people on wsb are saying and i’m a big sucker for believing everything
    - rasz 6y ago
      it was up to $80 today, meaning at worst you would lose 3/4 of whatever you put in. It will go down to 0. GME is worthless in digital age.
      - voisin 6y ago
        Worthless if you assume their business will not change and adapt. This is the fundamental risk in most short selling theses. People and businesses are not static, immutable objects. Given the dollars on the line you have to assume they will be seeking ways to pivot and adapt.
        krustyburger 6y ago
        They have been consistently losing money, quarter after quarter, for a long time. The dollars on the line were present all the time. Your logic applies equally well to long positions, if you believe all people and businesses are constantly in such flux.
- iamacyborg 6y ago
  Yikes. I hope that’s just play money for you and that you learn some hard lessons from this.
jimbob45 6y ago
If you read the threads, everyone always says, “never bet more than you’re 100% willing to lose”. I feel like these people shouldn’t be regretting anything if they followed that advice.
- onion2k 6y ago
  You can lose money that you can afford to lose and still regret it. You've still made a loss, it just means you're not going to starve.
technicolorwhat 6y ago
ELI5: I think I got this but just to be sure. Can someone just to make it extra clear to me just in case I miss something. If someone is making money with a stock, some other person is losing money right? Their ain't like some magic magic money making machine or premium added somewhere in the process? Right? If so, what were these people thinking investing. That they were the first to get out? One thing you could ask is is the average Redditor smart enough to see the consequences or is this really a bunch of teens putting up their savings being hyped by a hype machine?
- martin_bech 6y ago
  Well that was the idea, take the hedgefunds money.. At first it was a value play for some, GME was undervalued, then it became a, look all these funds are so short the stock, we can make them hurt, and make them pay us.
- amf12 6y ago
  > If someone is making money with a stock, some other person is losing money right? Not necessarily. Investing in stocks isn't necessarily a zero-sum game like a lot of people assume. Both the buyer and seller could make profit on a transaction. Imagine person A bought AMZN for 1000 and later sold it to person B for 2000. A made 1000, and now B made 1000+ on it.
  - thinkingemote 6y ago
    There's also people C and D who sold to A and bought from B... So looking at it from a whole is different from just the buyer and seller. There's a chain. I agree it's not a zero sum as stocks can rise independently of just market activity if the company is doing well.
- pjc50 6y ago
  No, there's a real flow of money: a stock entitles you to (a) the future dividends, if any (b) potential income from stock buybacks, which are basically dividends with a different tax treatment, and (c) a vote on the company to control the first two. (Some companies have non-voting stock, and some don't pay dividends, but in all cases everyone is holding out for the eventual promise of capital returned from the business's actual profits.)
mckirk 6y ago
I'm a bit surprised by the general tone in the comments here, tbh. This was, originally, not a 'pump and dump' that everyone with two working brain cells should immediately have recognized as one. Buying into a pump'n'dump when it's already rising is not a smart decision -- but buying into a short squeeze of potentially HF shattering proportions, even after the underlying stock has already gone up dramatically in value, is a quite different scenario, and rationally justifiable imho. The point where it all went wrong was probably the buying restrictions for retail customers that killed the momentum completely. Without that element, ridiculously high meme prices like $1k per share could have been realistically achievable, driven by FOMO and further fueled by Melvin-copy-cat hedge funds that might actually have been margin called at those ridiculous prices. So, I'm a bit disheartened by the view here that 'of course it was always going to go wrong, what did they expect'. It definitely was naive to believe everything would go 'smoothly' when billions are on the line, and markets are put under stress they might have never seen before. But the whole thing wasn't destined to fail like it did. Looking back, I believe the only real mistake many made was not realizing the variant of the prisoner's dilemma that people were in had rapidly shifted on Thursday to favor defecting, even if just to let the dust settle and reevaluate their position. But when you're caught up in an echo chamber that still promotes 'holding' above all else, it becomes difficult to realize that, since holding would indeed have been the right decision if everybody else had done the same. In retrospect it's of course ridiculous to expect a huge group of ultimately self-interested people to coordinate on that level. Still, people held because they got caught up in the herd mentality. After that point though, it indeed turned into a serious of small pump-and-dumps that one should have better left alone. All in all, I think people shouldn't beat themselves up too badly about what happened, because there _was_ no good template for any of this that one should have consulted. It was at least a very interesting lesson in stock market mechanics and the kind of manipulation that people with tons of money will engage in when cornered. The decisions leading to retail being prevented from buying may or may not have been indirectly influenced by a motivation to stop the squeeze, but the 'WallstreetBets has moved on to Silver' was definitely a widespread disinformation campaign -- kinda cool to see one of those in action for once.
- aahortwwy 6y ago
  > The point where it all went wrong was the buying restrictions for retail customers that killed the momentum completely. In my opinion, the point where it all went wrong was when Melvin announced that they had closed their short position and the WSB hivemind decided that they were lying to the public. The conversations after that became increasingly conspiratorial and divorced from reality.
yawaworht1978 6y ago
True, r/wsb looks very similar to the many telegram channels pushing clandestine cryptocurrency coins. This has all the elements of a financial Jonestown, cult figure(dfv), listen to no reason from outside the echo chamber and hold on to the bitter end(hold or buy more or buy the dip etc).
domano 6y ago
Well i bought into it and i will hold, the damage is already there and this way i get to see it play out with some minor emotional investment. I've had more expensive lessons in my life so it is ok. Still i think Gamestop has a good future ahead of it, just nothing to warrant even the current stock price. But hey, maybe the squeeze will come ;)
thinkingemote 6y ago
The end result appears to be more regulations and more limitations on trading by retail / normal people. And it appears that normal people will welcome it (given the sentiment in these comments). Protect the people from economic and political scammers via regulations and censorship. After 2008 one of the "solutions" was to limit day trading to normal trading. In other words it's knee jerk bad solutions to make the problem disappear from view whilst ensuring the root cause continues as normal.
traveler01 6y ago
Clearly people here and these news articles are clearly missing the point. People aren't betting on GME not only because they think they'll get lots of profits. Heck, some clearly say they're expecting to lose the money. They're doing it to screw over Wall Street hedge funds and some of them really did get screwed. As always people lack to see the root of the issues and take or praise the wrong measures. It's as always the problem of the chicken and the egg but nobody seems to have the clue on who's the chicken.
- BoorishBears 6y ago
  No, I think you're missing the point. WSB has gotten very large very quick since the WSBGod saga In the old days enough people would have went in with that mentality to make it representative of the situations, but today most people there are just people looking for a ticker to buy because they heard WSBs has made people millionaires Percentage-wise the people who did this with the primary motive of screwing over hedges and were ok with losing money are a large part of where this started but an extremely small part of where this ended up. That's why places like Citadel are showing retail investors were net selling almost immediately after this blew up past the subreddit It's out of date to give WSB this much credit, a bunch of people saw dollar signs off a pump and "hold the line until I can dump" and got screwed

54 points by miles 6y ago

FOMO is one of the deadliest threats to sound decision-making. I bought some GME just as it dipped to $90, smacked myself back to reality and sold the same day -- thankfully with a small profit. I'm dipping my toes back in with two shares at $70 but I'm not expecting anything to come next week. I think /r/wallstreetbets is going to be 'ruined' by its newfound popularity for the foreseeable future, we can already see the subreddit drama and disinformation in full swing.

FeistyOtter 6y ago
Isn't it what WSB is all about? Pick a stock, bet on it, and when you lose you post your loss porn to the subreddit? I assume people new to WSB will take this seriously, and it does pose a threat to the sub's health, but older members know exactly what they are getting into.
- guerrilla 6y ago
  That was my view of it too. It really creeps me out that there are all these articles with "Should you take investing advice from reddit?" when WSB has never, as far as I know, been anything but high-risk fucking around for fun and profit (or loss.)
  - rahkiin 6y ago
    The sub, at least until 3 weeks ago, was all about showing losses and being called a retard because you lost hundred of thousands on some stupid bet. Of course there were some successes.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- jedmeyers 6y ago
  > Isn't it what WSB is all about? I mean, yeah, the "bet" is even in the name.
- aahortwwy 6y ago
  The vast majority of WSB members weren't on the subreddit two weeks ago. At this point it may as well be a completely different community.
  - tourist_ 6y ago
    To put this in context, the member count went from (at most) 1.5M to 8.5M within weeks. No wonder it got crazy out there.
  - EQVEYWDCHQ 6y ago
    It was also a completely different community at 50k vs. 500k etc. At that point it started hitting /r/all consistently.
    - pjc50 6y ago
      /r/all does immediately ruin the subreddits that appear there.
- yongjik 6y ago
  I don't know exactly what WSB is all about, but there are way too many people who seriously think this is some kind of popular uprising against evil hedge fund to take back the profit they deserve. (Or at least there were, until a few days ago.) I don't think they'll like "Bro, it was always about making fun of how much money you lost."
rvz 6y ago
> I think /r/wallstreetbets is going to be 'ruined' by its newfound popularity for the foreseeable future, we can already see the subreddit drama and disinformation in full swing. It already is ruined. Given the influx of media attention, new users, bots and the GME after-party of bag-holders who missed the ship. The 'actual' old members (who got in early as $5 - $20) are already gone with their gains. Now it's just full of latecomers who bought as high as $200 - $465 posting screenshots of losing their entire life savings. The subreddit already had users pretending and memeing to be idiots until the real idiots came in and those posting screenshots of their huge losses with their life savings with disinformation, ape emojis, 'diamond hands', 'hodl' as the stock fell etc. Not only they didn't know that they have become a meme, They are now going to be featured in the new WallStreetBets movie. Won't be surprised if they called it 'Diamond Hands' or 'The big short squeeze'.
- atsushin 6y ago
  I wonder where the old users will be migrating to. There were quite a few aspects of WSB I really enjoyed before 2020 / 2021 happened.
  - harambae 6y ago
    /r/options and /r/thetagang are getting heavy influxes (which I think they are a little nervous about)

nikitaga 6y ago

If you want to get rich quick, you need to understand what you're doing, and put in honest work. Everything else is somewhere between fraud, gambling and a distraction (at best). Hyping up meme stocks is just the newest addition to tactics like wire fraud, MLMs, etc. It too will in time be thoroughly discredited, yet never eradicated completely. You can certainly get lucky gambling on crypto, TSLA, etc. You can also trade those profitably by knowing your shit. You will occasionally make poor decisions either way, so make sure you can handle the consequences.

newswasboring 6y ago
> Hyping up meme stocks is just the newest addition to tactics like wire fraud, MLMs, etc. I think your examples and meme stock are two completely different things. MLMs, frauds etc are by design lies while meme stocks are jokes and usually big hive mind mistakes. This is an apples to oranges comparison
- nikitaga 6y ago
  I guess that's true for wire fraud, but the similarity to MLM is undeniable: participants end up financially interested in perpetuating the bubble, enticing more victims. The last ones in end up holding the bag, the first ones in get the profits. But there are differences too of course. The virality built into modern tech makes it easy to amplify opinions into full on bubbles. You don't need to create your of Herbalife to defraud people. Now you just need to find an organic idea / trend that you could profit from ("Buy GME because short squeeze, let's show wall street!"), and hype it up with bots and followers to bootstrap the bubble, hoping that it will snowball on the same kind of virality that put it on your radar in the first place. The new scheme is better because you don't need to create a company that can be sued. You're just a redditor caught in a meme / joke with thousands of others like you. Some newbies took this too seriously and lost their money. Well duh, their fault, should have been more careful. Nice and clean, see.
  - newswasboring 6y ago
    Ok in your second and third paragraph you have described an actual person doing stuff. That's where I disagree. I have not seen any proof that there was real malicious player in at least the GameStop fiasco. (But I'm not upto date on this so I might be wrong). It all just feels like a bunch of people half jokingly egged each other on

raverbashing 6y ago

There are stocks (and options, of course) riskier than some bet options on bookmakers. (It's the same math pretty much and Bookmakers are doing the risk calculations in real time so for example you could settle your bet and get a partial return on a bet on the US election for example after the election but before the final counts came)

malwarebytess 6y ago

I think there's going to be some level of litigation and maybe prosecution at the end of this. It was clear by last thursday at least what was happening, and yet there were multiple actors -- some of them organized -- trying to pump the stock and persuade people to keep buying. One example that may not be criminal but is certainly suspect is the "top moderators" on reddit's WallStreetBets sub seem to have been suppressing all posts about $GME that weren't pumping the stock, quite thoroughly, until reddit staff stepped in and removed them. Some screenshots flying around that appear to depict the same moderators discussing payouts and investors. Doesn't seem right.

pjc50 6y ago
At least one of the possible instigators, a financial advisor, is under investigation: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/gamestop-reddit-trader-keith-gill-roaring-kitty-investigation-regulators-advisor-2021-2-1030044721 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/gamestop-red...
- voisin 6y ago
  I don’t see what he did as wrong. He seems to be caught in a technicality in that he has a broker license (though was not, in his day job, in a role advising on investments), but never used his role (or even identified his role - or even his name for someone else to identify him and his brokerage license and consequently rely on his licensing in making their own decisions) to cause others to make investment decisions. He simply presented his own due diligence on the stock, which is only “wrong” in this cause because unbeknownst to viewers he has his brokerage license. I think it is ludicrous that they are going after him.

waheoo 6y ago

Seriously? Fuck off vice. Such shit reporting. GME bagholders didn't do anything wrong. Look at the candles. That isn't a short squeeze. That is a short squeeze into a week of market fuckery at the highest level to keep it low enough hedge funds don't go out of business and get a chance to cover at something that isn't astronomical. Yes, if they allowed it to happen it would have bought some institutions down. No I don't think that would have actually been a bad thing. Shits fucked and the media is all about that click bait. Silver was a complete pump and dump carried out by the media at the behest of Citadel. - made 400% of GME, got out when I noticed the bank's weren't going to let it happen.

bo1024 6y ago
I'm not convinced that you're right, but I would love the Congressional investigation to try to find out. It's hard to know what would have happened if buying hadn't been shut down, and it's still hard to understand exactly why buying was shut down by different parties. Guessing if we learn the one, we'll know the other.
- _trampeltier 6y ago
  I just don't believe suddenly all exchanges for the "small people" are not allowd to buy (just sell) GME stocks because of a liquidity problem at the same time. I mean, it was not just about GME now. If it worked out, it would happen again. Now everybody knows .. the big guys just allways bend the rules and you have no chance, so you don't even try a second GME.
  - iamacyborg 6y ago
    > I just don't believe suddenly all exchanges for the "small people" are not allowd to buy (just sell) GME stocks because of a liquidity problem at the same time. This has the distinct flavour of QAnon esque conspiracy theories.
    - mckirk 6y ago
      Let's go with: No, it doesn't. QAnon requires you to believe absolutely insane stuff, like Anderson Cooper drinking the blood of babies. This theory would require you to believe that enormously wealthy entities would find a way to use their influence and their knowledge of the inner workings of the stock market they know like the back of their hand to prevent themselves from losing a metric shit ton of money. I'm not saying it necessarily happened, because it would still be awfully hard to hide your tracks and there'd be hell to pay if you failed, but those two conspiracy theories are definitely on different levels of 'hard to believe'.

praptak 6y ago

Obligatory reading (too late for these folks but still): http://edmarkovich.blogspot.com/2013/12/why-i-dont-trade-stocks-and-probably.html?m=1 http://edmarkovich.blogspot.com/2013/12/why-i-dont-trade-sto...

FrozenVoid 6y ago

what they expected? Stock market is ruled by big investors, funds and corporations, not people betting their life savings on random reddit meme. Retail investors are not market makers - they're simply pawns of these meme brokers directing them to specific actions, without any understanding of underlying mechanisms: Reddit crowds treated it as another cryptocurrency pump and WSB fed this delusion with vague memes(that look absurd and ironic in perspective, "Buy these stocks to punish greedy Wall Street and get big profits!").

LatteLazy 6y ago

It's sort of reassuring to see this all wrapped up in under a month. We waited over 4 years for the Trump bubbles to burst and at least some are still (physiologically) invested in those.

LatteLazy 6y ago
(meant to say psychologically)

buryat 6y ago

I lost $500k on GME so far, lessons learned, i guess i’m a bag holder now

reitzensteinm 6y ago
So far, meaning you're still holding?
- buryat 6y ago
  yes, what’s the point of selling now, I hope it’s going to come back, at least that’s what people on wsb are saying and i’m a big sucker for believing everything
  - rasz 6y ago
    it was up to $80 today, meaning at worst you would lose 3/4 of whatever you put in. It will go down to 0. GME is worthless in digital age.
    - voisin 6y ago
      Worthless if you assume their business will not change and adapt. This is the fundamental risk in most short selling theses. People and businesses are not static, immutable objects. Given the dollars on the line you have to assume they will be seeking ways to pivot and adapt.
      - krustyburger 6y ago
        They have been consistently losing money, quarter after quarter, for a long time. The dollars on the line were present all the time. Your logic applies equally well to long positions, if you believe all people and businesses are constantly in such flux.
iamacyborg 6y ago
Yikes. I hope that’s just play money for you and that you learn some hard lessons from this.

jimbob45 6y ago

If you read the threads, everyone always says, “never bet more than you’re 100% willing to lose”. I feel like these people shouldn’t be regretting anything if they followed that advice.

onion2k 6y ago
You can lose money that you can afford to lose and still regret it. You've still made a loss, it just means you're not going to starve.

technicolorwhat 6y ago

ELI5: I think I got this but just to be sure. Can someone just to make it extra clear to me just in case I miss something. If someone is making money with a stock, some other person is losing money right? Their ain't like some magic magic money making machine or premium added somewhere in the process? Right? If so, what were these people thinking investing. That they were the first to get out? One thing you could ask is is the average Redditor smart enough to see the consequences or is this really a bunch of teens putting up their savings being hyped by a hype machine?

martin_bech 6y ago
Well that was the idea, take the hedgefunds money.. At first it was a value play for some, GME was undervalued, then it became a, look all these funds are so short the stock, we can make them hurt, and make them pay us.
amf12 6y ago
> If someone is making money with a stock, some other person is losing money right? Not necessarily. Investing in stocks isn't necessarily a zero-sum game like a lot of people assume. Both the buyer and seller could make profit on a transaction. Imagine person A bought AMZN for 1000 and later sold it to person B for 2000. A made 1000, and now B made 1000+ on it.
- thinkingemote 6y ago
  There's also people C and D who sold to A and bought from B... So looking at it from a whole is different from just the buyer and seller. There's a chain. I agree it's not a zero sum as stocks can rise independently of just market activity if the company is doing well.
pjc50 6y ago
No, there's a real flow of money: a stock entitles you to (a) the future dividends, if any (b) potential income from stock buybacks, which are basically dividends with a different tax treatment, and (c) a vote on the company to control the first two. (Some companies have non-voting stock, and some don't pay dividends, but in all cases everyone is holding out for the eventual promise of capital returned from the business's actual profits.)

mckirk 6y ago

I'm a bit surprised by the general tone in the comments here, tbh. This was, originally, not a 'pump and dump' that everyone with two working brain cells should immediately have recognized as one. Buying into a pump'n'dump when it's already rising is not a smart decision -- but buying into a short squeeze of potentially HF shattering proportions, even after the underlying stock has already gone up dramatically in value, is a quite different scenario, and rationally justifiable imho. The point where it all went wrong was probably the buying restrictions for retail customers that killed the momentum completely. Without that element, ridiculously high meme prices like $1k per share could have been realistically achievable, driven by FOMO and further fueled by Melvin-copy-cat hedge funds that might actually have been margin called at those ridiculous prices. So, I'm a bit disheartened by the view here that 'of course it was always going to go wrong, what did they expect'. It definitely was naive to believe everything would go 'smoothly' when billions are on the line, and markets are put under stress they might have never seen before. But the whole thing wasn't destined to fail like it did. Looking back, I believe the only real mistake many made was not realizing the variant of the prisoner's dilemma that people were in had rapidly shifted on Thursday to favor defecting, even if just to let the dust settle and reevaluate their position. But when you're caught up in an echo chamber that still promotes 'holding' above all else, it becomes difficult to realize that, since holding would indeed have been the right decision if everybody else had done the same. In retrospect it's of course ridiculous to expect a huge group of ultimately self-interested people to coordinate on that level. Still, people held because they got caught up in the herd mentality. After that point though, it indeed turned into a serious of small pump-and-dumps that one should have better left alone. All in all, I think people shouldn't beat themselves up too badly about what happened, because there _was_ no good template for any of this that one should have consulted. It was at least a very interesting lesson in stock market mechanics and the kind of manipulation that people with tons of money will engage in when cornered. The decisions leading to retail being prevented from buying may or may not have been indirectly influenced by a motivation to stop the squeeze, but the 'WallstreetBets has moved on to Silver' was definitely a widespread disinformation campaign -- kinda cool to see one of those in action for once.

aahortwwy 6y ago
> The point where it all went wrong was the buying restrictions for retail customers that killed the momentum completely. In my opinion, the point where it all went wrong was when Melvin announced that they had closed their short position and the WSB hivemind decided that they were lying to the public. The conversations after that became increasingly conspiratorial and divorced from reality.

yawaworht1978 6y ago

True, r/wsb looks very similar to the many telegram channels pushing clandestine cryptocurrency coins. This has all the elements of a financial Jonestown, cult figure(dfv), listen to no reason from outside the echo chamber and hold on to the bitter end(hold or buy more or buy the dip etc).

domano 6y ago

Well i bought into it and i will hold, the damage is already there and this way i get to see it play out with some minor emotional investment. I've had more expensive lessons in my life so it is ok. Still i think Gamestop has a good future ahead of it, just nothing to warrant even the current stock price. But hey, maybe the squeeze will come ;)

thinkingemote 6y ago

The end result appears to be more regulations and more limitations on trading by retail / normal people. And it appears that normal people will welcome it (given the sentiment in these comments). Protect the people from economic and political scammers via regulations and censorship. After 2008 one of the "solutions" was to limit day trading to normal trading. In other words it's knee jerk bad solutions to make the problem disappear from view whilst ensuring the root cause continues as normal.

traveler01 6y ago

Clearly people here and these news articles are clearly missing the point. People aren't betting on GME not only because they think they'll get lots of profits. Heck, some clearly say they're expecting to lose the money. They're doing it to screw over Wall Street hedge funds and some of them really did get screwed. As always people lack to see the root of the issues and take or praise the wrong measures. It's as always the problem of the chicken and the egg but nobody seems to have the clue on who's the chicken.

BoorishBears 6y ago
No, I think you're missing the point. WSB has gotten very large very quick since the WSBGod saga In the old days enough people would have went in with that mentality to make it representative of the situations, but today most people there are just people looking for a ticker to buy because they heard WSBs has made people millionaires Percentage-wise the people who did this with the primary motive of screwing over hedges and were ok with losing money are a large part of where this started but an extremely small part of where this ended up. That's why places like Citadel are showing retail investors were net selling almost immediately after this blew up past the subreddit It's out of date to give WSB this much credit, a bunch of people saw dollar signs off a pump and "hold the line until I can dump" and got screwed