/r/wallstreetbets: TO THE MOON 🚀🚀🚀🚀 : subredditoftheday

3,128,477 4,679,462 5,916,497 degenerates HOLDING for 9 years!

Okay, before we start this feature, I want to make two things clear. One: This is not financial advice. I think that should be pretty clear and if you're the sort of person to take financial advice from a Subreddit Of The Day post, you have bigger things to worry about. Two: I have literally no clue what's going on. While I think I have a bare-bones understanding of the whole situation, at the end of the day I am economically illiterate, so if I make any mistakes don't bully me too hard.

r/wallstreetbets is a land of wife's boyfriends, YOLOs, FOMOs, 🌈🐻s, among other things. The community description - "Like 4chan found a bloomberg terminal illness." - is fairly accurate. Recently, as you probably know, it has exploded in popularity - as of writing this right now there's almost a million users on the page at the moment, and the subscriber count has gone up by a few hundred thousand in the time I've been writing this so far. I go on Twitter, and #EatTheRich is trending alongside #RobinhoodApp and "Wall Street". I turn on TV, and they're talking about this subreddit on CNN. The mod team even has a Twitter account made a few days ago that is close to 600k followers AND is verified. When it comes to the title of "Subreddit Of The Day", this subreddit has got to be the most worthy in a while. The year is 2021 and Tucker Carlson is agreeing with AOC, who agrees with Donald Trump Jr. and Ted Cruz, who both agree with Ilhan Omar. And they're all agreeing on a subreddit being based. This is so far outside the normal realm of comprehension.

Here's an abridged version of the story - I'm sure a lot of you know the gist already and as said there's already extensive media coverage out there. A Redditor known as /u/DeepFuckingValue YOLOd 50k on GameStop, and now sits on tens of millions in profit. Why GameStop? Well, to plagiarise quote this post: "This is about more than GameStop, this for many it is about what GameStop represents. A small company struggling on its own finds itself in the sights of billionaire hedge fund managers mid COVID. The hedge fund owners short (bet the stock goes down) over 100% of the stock (making it nearly impossible to go up), the goal is to destroy an already struggling company quickly, and turn a quick buck. GME is the 'everyman' of publicly traded companies and the hedge fund elite are out to crush it. DFV has raised an army behind his charge, increasing the reddit channel to 3m user in days (it's closing in on 6m now!) & skyrocketing the price from $4 to over $300 in a few months."

Somehow, it seems as if this situation is simultaneously a meme and wholly serious for WSB now. It is not only a bit of a meme stock, but also a huge (and I'm talking King Kong Balls HUGE) "fuck you" to Wall Street professionals/hedge funds like Melvin Capital. And then there's the RobinHood fiasco. A trading app with the slogan "Let the people trade" restricts trading in GameStop. Funny how that works. However, as some have pointed out, this could be a blessing in disguise: EVERYONE is now talking about GME. Any talk about GME is good talk, they fucked themselves trying to silence it but did the opposite. 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀

RobinHood can restrict trade, the Financial Times can suggest wsb is somehow aligned with the alt-right for being on Reddit (seriously, wtf?), but one simple fact remains - to sum this all up in three words:

Here's a taste of what you can find on r/wallstreetbets:

"DON'T LET THE GENERATION THAT CAN'T CONVERT TO PDF PLAY WITH YOUR MIND! HOLD!!!" - /u/MrWallss