In Historic Event, Actually Does Something Right, Increasing GameStop’s Stock Prices By Over $270 In The Past Year By Jackie Calabassus

Image courtesy of paramount pictures 1983

(Disclaimer, I cannot promise any journalistic integrity with this article, as I am using this article as my primary source due to the nature of my website. I do personally believe all evidence in the article is factually true, which is why I’m using it)

Amid the brutal pandemic sweeping the world, millions of people are losing their jobs, lives, and well-beings, one group is still sitting pretty and making money… or at least, they were.

Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, stocks of many non-essential businesses have depreciated in value, the effects of which are creating joblessness and homelessness for a lot of people worldwide. One of such businesses is GameStop, a video game retail store which is specifically vulnerable according to the company, due to difficulties in managing stock and assisting customers. I will clarify that I don’t believe GameStop should have attempted to stay open amid the pandemic, but I also understand that the company ~14,000 full-time employees and ~22,000 to ~42,000 part time employees, and so I understand their desire to stay open.

Unfortunately, however, when one citizen (or in this case potentially 14,000 to 56,000 from along) is losing their livelihood, there’s bound to be a greedy Wall Street pig making money off of their misfortune. And when there’s a declining stock, there will be profiteers trying to hedge money from it. However, one internet group recently took some big measures to turn the tables.

In a plot taken straight out of the 1983 movie Trading Places, r/WallStreetBets (WSB), a community on the website Reddit is fighting back against these gold pocketed hedge funds by coordinating an effort to buy as many GameStop (GME) stocks as they can collectively afford in an attempt to bankrupt these multibillion dollar companies, and it’s working.

Last year on this date (Jan 27th, 2021), one GME stock was valued at $4.28 in United States currency. Today that number is $275 (as per ~9:30 AM EST Jan 27th, 2021). Wall Street sweats. (Editor’s Note: At 11:00 AM on the same day, the highest price point of this stock was $372.74.)

On one recently removed post I managed to catch while doing some research for this article, a user on the WSB forum posted this to 43.5k likes: “FOR ALL THE BIG F[ALLIBLE] HEDGE FUNDS MONITORING US, THIS IS A MESSAGE FROM US TO YOU, WE F[REAK]ING OWN YOU NOW, [I HATE]. YOU. GO BUY THE [DARNED] NEWS. LIKE AND COMMENT SO THEY SEE THIS POST. [SCREW] YOU MELVIN CAPITAL. [I LOATHE] YOU CITRON RESARCH. YOU HAVENT CLOSED [CRAP]. THIS IS GONNA GO DOWN IN HISTORY.” This quote comes in response from Andrew Left, of Citron Research (short selling firm), that claimed the prices would stabilize soon.

Whenever the poor and average are making themselves heard, especially financially, there’s always some rich investor douchebag who has a problem with it. Totally unrelated, founder of Trace Wealth Advisors, Peter Heilbron, said of the issue to Buzzfeed News, “All of this is just raw human emotion masquerading around as something more profound...” criticizing the participants. Additionally, he called the entire controversy “My take on the insanity that is $GME…” on his twitter last night at around 1am, to a whopping 2 likes. It should also be noted that according to his company’s website they “[Provide] fee-only financial planning and investment management to affluent individuals and families in Los Angeles, CA and beyond.” So if you’re rich and you want to get richer through vaguely defined methods, you can check that out... I guess.

Howard Lindzon, manager and founder of StockTwits (a social media investment site), also weighed in on this incident in an interview by Buzzfeed News about the situation. When asked about the incident, he said “It’s like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park; they get smarter, and eventually they hop the fence.” That is all you need to know about this man and his position on his topic, likening human beings investing their money (in a not dissimilar way that he invests his) to ravenous killing machines only smart enough to open doors and hop fences. What a guy.

Not all of the affluent were as shaken or even upset about this situation, though. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted in supposed support of WSB, saying only “Gamestonk!!” (A reference to an internet meme where a man stares at a stock price that is drastically increasing.) As a man who has publically battled with investors because he smoked a bit of weed, I’m sure this tweet from him was only motivated by “trolling” and nothing else at all.

Now for the most fun part, let’s discuss how much money rich people are losing! According to , Investment company Melvin Capital Management has lost an estimated 30% of annual revenue, and will be receiving a bailout to the tun of 2.75 BILLION DOLLARS from Citadel LLC and (both of which are hedge fund companies, unsurprisingly). I feel it important to remind you that Melvin Capital Management currently holds an estimated 12.5 Billion dollars in assets.

Melvin Capital has since closed out it’s short position from GameStop according to a recent article from marketwatch.com. So just to restate the facts, this plan from the WSB worked, Melvin Capital hemorrhaged money.

Image courtesy of paramount pictures 1983 Now it’s no surprise at all that a victory of this magnitude from a group of average people is causing some great stress for some rich folk out there. Suspiciously, the Kleenex’s parent company (KMB) stocks have risen in the past few days, as has the stock for Tokyo Rope Manufacturing Co (5981:JP). Whatever connection between these stocks and GME you draw is up to you. I have a guess, but I feel like it may be inappropriate to say, even for this site.

Since this is my first article, I wanted to leave you all with a final personal message from myself. If you are a news site, of ANY partisan side and I catch you biasing a story unfairly like this, I WILL flip it. I don’t care if you’re an anti-masker blog with 2 followers or FOX news, I WILL flip your script, I WILL profit off of it, and I WILL use the fruits of your time and effort to do so. If you have a problem with that, then maybe YOUR games need to stop.

THE flyppur CODE With this website, I intend to escape the bias inherent in writing by declaring all relevant biases at the bottom of my articles. This preserves my integrity as a journalist despite how heavily slanted my articles may be written. This declaration includes a transcript of questions asked to my source article’s original writer, a testimony from me personally about my bias in writing this article, and what I would consider proof of a biased article. I ask that you include this section as part of your reading.

Questions The following is the exact questions and responses from Amber Jonieson (my spelling mistakes have been corrected), but no questions or answers were omitted or shortened.

Do you believe your article 'An "Angry Mob" On Reddit... Wall Street Firms' includes moderate to heavy bias?

No.

How long did your article take to write?

I worked on it over two days.

What are your opinions on the users of the subreddit forum r/WallStreetBets? (Asking since in your article, you used a quote likening them to the raptors of Jurassic Park) I don't have any opinions on them, I don't know them, there are 2 million people and I'm sure they are all different. I just think it's really interesting to see what power they have and how they wield it. I also think velociraptors are pretty cool.

Are you personally or professionally affiliated with anyone who appeared in your article outside of interviewing them?

Nope, I had never spoken to either of them before.

My Biases I do not personally trust the moral integrity of Buzzfeed, due in part to what I would call “fluff journalism.” My first exposure to this story was through Buzzfeed and this article is a direct response. Additionally, I am NOT a member of r/WallStreetBets, nor do I know anyone who is. I also have a personal bias against Wall Street, as I believe they used the COVID-19 pandemic to make themselves richer, among several decades of grievances. I do loosely support capitalism despite the reform it desperately needs, I voted for Joe Biden, and I am registered as an independent (since I know that matters to some people). My upfront intent of this article is to factually report on the news, while using a biased or perceived biased source of information to tell the story from the opposite bias. In this case, I am telling the story in favor of the WSB, since I believe this type of “speak with your wallet” protest is beneficial and long overdue. The bias I believe the original article holds is a bias against the website Reddit, as the site has a reputation among some for being rude and immature. This article is sorted under ‘Tech,’ and not ‘Opinion,’ so calling out it’s bias is more than justified. I believe the original article’s title ‘An “Angry Mob” On Reddit Is Pushing Up GameStop's Stock Price And Pissing Off A Bunch Of Wall Street Firms’ is enough to demonstrate why I hold this view. Allegedly

Proof of Original Article’s Bias (and my explanations in bold) ‘But for many on WSB, the attitude is a mix of “eat the rich” and “get rich quick” (with some redditors saying that their investments are up millions of dollars), as well as a smug joy that their trolling has worked and the investing and media worlds were suddenly paying close attention to them.

Do I need to explain this one? Amber used the term ‘smug joy’ and the phrase ‘suddenly paying attention to them.’ This sort of language is very obviously painting a picture of these people as immature and attention seeking.

“A good way to check how many hedge fund managers there are in your building is to check the pavement outside,” one redditor posted on Tuesday. “It should be covered in blood.” This was not a post, it was a reply to a megathread. Arbitrary point to make, maybe, but language is powerful, and word minor word choice can still effect our perception of a talking point. I could not find this specific reply to find how many likes it had.

“Any man that dies holding GME will be greeted by the All-Father himself in Valhalla,” another wrote.’

This comment as of (as per ~4:00 Jan 27th, 2021) has 15 likes on a megathread with 15k likes total. Very selective choice of comment. Even more selective when Amber doesn’t mention the most important parts of said comment, which in full reads:

“Any man that dies holding GME will be greeted by the All-Father himself in Valhalla.

END SANCTIONS ON VENEZUELA, IRAN, and LEBANON!

UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE AND PERMANENT UBI NOW!”

This is neither “eat the rich” or “get rich quick” and completely recontextualizes the first line. Yet oddly, none of the political messages were mentioned. It’s odd that the only line of this that made it into the article was the silly one. And here I was thinking Buzzfeed had a reputation for being ‘too woke.’ I guess they took a nap on this one.

EDITOR’S NOTE The subreddit group r/WallStreetBets is currently closed temporarily as of publishing this article. Here is the official statement on the subreddit page:

“We are experiencing technical difficulties based on unprecedented scale as a result of the newfound interest in WSB. We are unable to ensure Reddit's content policy and the WSB rules are enforceable without a technology platform that can support automation of this enforcement. WSB will be back.”