‘OUR AMBITION IS EVERYBODY’
THE frenzy began slowly when a mystery man uploaded a screenshot depicting a single $53 000 (thenR805000)investment in the ailing American video-game retailer GameStop. Users were stunned – what would possess anyone to take such a crazy gamble?
The user, a day trader using the alias DeepF***ingValue, posted the evidence of his stock-options purchase to the social media platform Reddit in September 2019 along with the message “YOLO” (You only live once). Specifically, he shared it on a Reddit forum called r/WallStreetBets, a raucous community of mostly amateur investors who swapped expletive-filled insults, cheered one another’s triumphs and failures and proudly called themselves “degenerates”.
GameStop’s widely scorned shares were then worth about $4 (R60) each.
For the next 15 months the trader built excitement around GameStop on Reddit, on Twitter and through his Roaring Kitty YouTube account, where he live-streamed himself for hours at a time from his home in suburban Boston fielding stock-market questions, sometimes while swigging beer and wearing aviator sunglasses with a red bandana holding his shoulder-length hair in place.
In mid-January 2021 GameStop’s value began to rise steeply. Euphoria gripped the Wall-StreetBets message board as investors goaded each other to take bigger positions, pushing the price higher still.
Hedge funds that had shorted GameStop (borrowing the shares to sell them in the belief that when time comes to return the shares to their owner their value would have dropped so they can buy them back at a much lower price than they originally sold them for) were forced to buy the share at much higher prices, feeding the GameStop frenzy even more. A sense that the Reddit community had the Wall Street establishment on the run took hold.
Wild swings ensued. On 27 January
