The GameStop saga is either a cautionary story about a bunch of reckless nerds destabilising the stock market for laughs or a David-and-Goliath morality tale.
This week, the biggest story in the financial markets is the absurdist, pretty-sure-I-hallucinated-it drama involving GameStop, a struggling video game retailer that became the rope in a high-stakes tug of war between Wall Street suits and a crusading internet mob.
The simplest explanation for what happened is that a bunch of hyper-online mischief-makers in Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets forum — a clan of self-described degenerates with user names like “dumbledoreRothIRA” and “Coldcutcombo69″— decided it would be funny and righteous (and maybe even profitable, though that part was less important) to execute a “short squeeze” by pushing up the price of GameStop’s stock, entrapping the big-money hedge funds that had bet against it.
