STRF/STAR MAX/IPx
GameStop wasn’t doing all that well, not as a business or a stock—until a couple of weeks ago.
About a decade ago, we first heard the phrase “Occupy Wall Street,” which referred to groups of young people, fed up with a rigged economic system, taking over a small park in Lower Manhattan and demanding an economy that works for everyone and not just the one percent. It had a short shelf life, as police, in paramilitary mode, dismantled the encampments. And life went on.
It went on until the past couple of weeks, when we’ve discovered yet another meaning for “Occupy Wall Street.” A group of online-investing enthusiasts, congregating on Reddit message boards and armed with the app-based trading device Robinhood, have busted into the Wall Street gambling hall and reduced the balance sheets of some well-established financial players to smoldering ruins. They did this through brute force, bidding up stocks that Wall Street had left for dead.
In so doing, they used approximately the same tactics as the big-money boys to intimidate and pummel the competition. They’ve also revealed the public stock markets as essentially artificial—markets where anyone with capital behind them can just decide something has value. They’re using this power to pummel hedge fund short sellers, who gladly use the same tactics whenever it can help them. It’s one of the most hilarious bits of poetic justice I’ve seen in the past decade.
I’ll briefly explain the situation. There’s a subreddit (essentially a message board) called r/wallstreetbets where bored, quarantined day traders have been congregating. They have a mischievous bent: “Like 4chan found a Bloomberg Terminal” is the subreddit’s motto. And at some point, they came up with the idea to coordinate buying of individual low-cost stocks, as a way to turn a profit.
The first big one they identified was GameStop, a retail outlet where customers can rent video games. Given the depressing state of retail generally, GameStop wasn’t doing all that well, not as a business or a stock. Four weeks ago, it started the year at about $17 a share. And the “smart money” on Wall Street, meaning institutional investors like hedge funds, had placed their bet on GameStop: They expected it to go down, and put billions of dollars toward that end on so-called “short” bets.
The short sellers hadn’t anticipated the Robinhood guys, however. Because a stock like GameStop doesn’t trade very much, if you can just drive a lot of purchases into it, you can really move the market. Some Robinhood accounts allow for margin trading, which means a trader can use borrowed money to purchase shares, adding to the overall amounts. Add in the ease of trading, the “YOLO” (you only live once) mentality of the traders, and the internet’s boundless tendency to make things go viral, and the GameStop gambit quickly grew into a frenzy.
On January 12, the buying spree began, distributed among thousands of traders. By January 13, GameStop was at $31. The next day, $39. On January 22, it leaped to $65. Four days later, it hit $147. By the end of trading on Wednesday, it closed at $347 a share, an almost impossible run.
That’s good news for these traders and good news for GameStop, which certainly can use the newfound surge in the stock price to its advantage. And GameStop isn’t the only beneficiary: AMC Entertainment, BlackBerry, and Bed Bath & Beyond are among the other YOLO stocks. On Wednesday, shares in Tootsie Roll—yes, you can apparently buy stock in the Tootsie Roll company—jumped 53 percent at one point.
The only losers at this point are the shorts. If you bet on a stock to go up and it doesn’t, you lose some of the money you put into that stock. If you bet on the stock to go down, every time it goes up you lose more and more money. A hedge fund called Melvin Capital, which made heavy bets against GameStop, lost $3 billion of its assets under management in about a week, and pulled out of its position.
Hedge fund pals Citadel and Point72 decided to prop up poor Melvin (the hobbled financier), investing billions to save it. Gabe Plotkin, the founder of Melvin Capital, used to work at the predecessor to Point72. Business journalists have reported that other hedge funds with ill-fated short bets are in similar trouble. Most of these firms use borrowed money to make short bets, and there’s an entire industry known as securities lending with an inventory of stocks to facilitate those trades. They could suffer as well.
The only real difference here is that ordinary investors are driving the train, and the hedge fund guys are getting run over.
This is, and there’s no other way to put it, hilarious. A bunch of people trading stocks on their phones have brought some of the lords of finance to their knees. They weren’t using some amazing or novel strategy: The run-up in GameStop is just the “pump” of a pump-and-dump scheme, where hype pulls people into a stock before the rug gets pulled out. In fact, that’s what hedge fund managers do all the time, making bets and using research to puff up a stock, then taking the profits off moving a stock, through force of will—theirs—rather than the inherent value of the company.
The only real difference here is that ordinary investors are driving the train, and the hedge fund guys are getting run over. The hedge funders are mad because distorting corporate stock prices beyond the fundamentals is supposed to be their thing, not the work of the hoi polloi. Now, they’ve been outfoxed. If you can think of a better use of $600 stimulus checks, let me know. Never was there a more apt name for an app in this moment than “Robinhood.”
Now, this will not stay hilarious forever; we still have the “dump” part of the pump-and-dump scheme to reach. And there appears to be a lot of institutional money front-running the whole thing, capitalizing on the populist story line to take their winnings. But that’s why this can also be a teachable moment, and a moment to fully re-regulate this entire casino.
The idea that the stock market value represents a snapshot of a company’s true worth or expected future profits was always a little cockeyed, and now it’s just been revealed as absurd. Financial-market rigging was always discreetly lurking in the background of stock tickers, like the one that flashes across CNBC, and now it’s been screamingly placed into the foreground. The same dopamine rush that fuels sports betting and online poker has moved into retail market trading, but it was always there at the level of big money. These markets were always reckless and disconnected from reality.
I’m certain that institutional investors will use this as a moment to demand regulation to stop the Robinhood frenzy. But that’s a slippery slope, as there’s not much difference between what the Robinhooders are doing and the normal course of Wall Street looting. Maybe all of that should be investigated. Maybe financial transaction taxes should be applied to encourage limits on trading, and pump-and-dumps strongly restricted. Maybe the real economy should be nurtured with public investment, and these private, more corrupt markets subject to root-and-branch overhaul. (It’s also funny to see the hedge fund guys super-mad that a stock is going up.)
GameStop and these other companies really don’t have much of a future, and if those fundamentals mean anything, at some point the bottom will fall out. As righteous as it is, I don’t think app trading heralds some new dawn for our economy. But you can see it as the inevitable by-product of a system built on massive inequality. The little guys figured out how to band together and stick it to the big guys. In so doing, they protected retail companies with lots of workers who now get a reprieve, however brief. They revealed the rot in our system, essentially took over Wall Street, and made a lot of rich and amoral people cry.
I’m going along for the ride.
