If America is a clown country, the ruling class on Wall Street, along with their ruling class friends in Washington, are driving the clown car.
Enter Reddit.
You might have noticed that the suits are very upset this week. That’s because anonymous Redditors, while presumably brushing the Cheeto dust off their laptop keyboards, decided to do a little bit of stock speculation.
They had no fancy tools, no quantitative analysis, no Bloomberg terminals, and they’re certainly not members of the elite class who are entitled to engage in such sophisticated business.
What they did have was unbridled rage and disdain for the drivers of the clown car, and when they found a way to exploit them, they hijacked the clown car for themselves and took it for an epic joyride.
Reddit realized that a billionaire member of the Wall Street ruling class had a massive short position on GameStop stock—position that was coming due on Friday—and they decided to stick it to him. They bought thousands of shares of the fledgling stock, driving the price per share up approximately a gazillion percent.
That was bad news for Mr. Moneybags. It was, and perhaps still is, going to cost his fund, Melvin Capital, billions of dollars to cover his short position.
It was great news for the newly-minted Reddit stock speculators. As more and more people bought, the price of the stock increased. Regular people were making cash hand over fist, and sharing “Wolf of Wall Street” memes on Twitter. The peasant class’ revolt against their rulers was both lucrative and fun.
But if there’s anything the ruling class hates, it’s losing money—especially to a bunch of unwashed punks who were laughing in their faces while they sent Melvin Capital hurtling towards bankruptcy. In an instant, the rightful owners of the clown car demanded it back.
Read the whole thing.
Related: Can’t stop the signal: Silver price surges as GameStop traders move into precious metals.