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 shoul

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.