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I vividly remember how, in the days of Gamestop, even normally reasonable people on the left bought into that “Sticking it to Wall Street” narrative. Sadly, I’m not surprised at how things turned out.
it always confused me a bit, just due to the ‘you know wallstreet people can read reddit right?’ factor.
Hedge fund managers (and their staff) can read reddit, of course, and they can even participate and - for example - manipulate people into betting on a stock they themselves have a “leveraged long” bet on (or desperately need to dump for whatever reason). It’s important to remember that those with the deepest pockets are very likely to win here, and also that hedge funds (and other institutional investors) might have deep pockets in part because they use investment money from everybody’s pension funds. In rare cases (such as Gamestop) they may be taken by surprise, but only when there is a very specific attack from an angle they didn’t expect, which is hard to replicate systematically IMHO.
Traditional collective action is successful mainly because actual people show up (or refuse to show up at their workplaces) in large numbers. IMHO it’s impossible to replicate that via accounts on a trading app and anonymous sock puppets. This is simply not how financial markets work.
Also, if this gets more people addicted to gambling on the stock market (which obviously happened), Wall Street is going to win either way through fees etc.
IMHO, the only way to “win” here is not to play.
Gamestop just seemed to me like a ‘that will only work once’ thing, as now their moves are predictable and dumb, and dumb predictable people are easily exploited on the stock market. Just sell them BBBY!
