This is where things get a little complicated and a bit more unclear.

So what if a bunch of people bought GameStop stock? It lets people trade stocks and even more exotic investments, like options, for little or no charge. There's also Robinhood, the app that is the unofficial stock trading platform of choice for WSB. On Wednesday, the people who run WSB temporarily made the community private and said they were 'experiencing technical difficulties based on unprecedented scale as a result of the newfound interest in WSB.' '100% of my portfolio on GME because of you idiots,' a person posted Jan. As the price of the shares rose, more WSB posters jumped on board. Its slogan is 'Like 4chan found a Bloomberg Terminal,' alluding to the fringe message board and the Bloomberg computer system that is nearly ubiquitous in finance.Īmateur investors on WSB have discussed GameStop (which they refer to by its stock ticker abbreviation, GME) for years, but things changed early this year. WSB takes something of an internet extremist's approach to investing. The internet has been used to prognosticate about stocks for decades, but there's never been anything quite like the Reddit community called r/wallstreetbets, also known as WSB. S3 Partners, a financial data company, said Wednesday that its analysis found that short sellers had lost $23.6 billion on GameStop this month. The speculative trading left short sellers with no more shares to buy to cover their positions, creating a short squeeze and leaving them with millions of dollars in stocks they had bought at a high price but which they then had to offload at an even higher price. In the case of GameStop, chatter on massive online trading forums invigorated interest in buying the stock, pushing up the price, which in turn fueled more interest. Any positive news or enthusiasm for the stock will push up the stock's valuation, minimizing profit for the short seller. Because short sellers - frequently hedge funds - in essence are betting against a company's success, it can be a risky position.

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