"Occupy Wall Street had the wrong approach," Jaime Rogozinkski, founder of the subreddit r/Wallstreetbets, recently tweeted.
Members in that forum, calling themselves "degenerates," bought up shares in GameStop (NYSE: GME). Their express goal? To squeeze hedge funds out of their short positions in GameStop, and to that end, the "degenerates" largely succeeded. GME's share price rocketed from $19 at the New Year to a high of $483 at the frenzy's peak.
According to S3 Research, these price hikes culminated in $19 billion in losses at some of Wall Street's most rarefied firms.
Under the maxim "never sell, never surrender," r/Wallstreetbets members have vowed to continue their campaign to hit hedge funds where it hurts. And in ways that would be inconceivable to those in the Occupy movement.
Like the Occupy movement, the Reddit Revolution was a long time in the making. Awash with time, money, and economic angst due to the pandemic, fresh "degenerates" poured into r/Wallstreetbets throughout last year. And by the start of 2021, the forum was the most active on Reddit. Over many months, posts circulated, claiming big wig investors had gotten greedy in their efforts to short GameStop.
Posts that lit the veritable powder keg that managed to blow shares of GME "to the moon." The Redditor Army took to their phones, using zero-cost trading platforms like Robinhood to pump up the struggling retailer's share price. These price hikes forced Hedge funds to close their short positions and buy back GME shares at a loss. Buybacks that caused the price of GME to rise higher and higher.
And the rest, they say, is history.
Some "degenerates" managed to pull in millions due to the trade. Still, they couched their gains in the language of wealth redistribution. "GME isn't about greed," one user said "it's about taking back what's ours, what we've already paid for," according to the Financial Times. Numerous threads on the forum reek with an air of leftist populism that characterized the Occupy movement over a decade ago.
But unlike the placards of the Occupy movement, money talks. And the losses Redditors managed to inflict on institutional investors are certainly talking. Citron Capital cited a loss of 100% due to the short squeeze. DI Capital cratered by 22% in January as it closed its short positions. But just as hedge fund managers were feeling the pain of their losses, trading platforms stepped in.
Robinhood cut off trading in GameStop, AMC (NYSE: AMC), Blackberry (NYSE: BB), among other so called mementum stocks. The move by Robinhood resulted in a rare moment of bipartisanship, as both sides of the aisle, and most notably Senator Elizabeth Warren, have called on the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate. Rumor has it that hedge funds are actively snooping through comments and forum posts on r/Wallstreetbets, hoping to where the Reddit army will strike next.
Regulators might clampdown. Hedge funds might successfully defend themselves against the "degenerates." But the spirit that spawned the movement, founded on generational imbalances of wealth and opportunity, will remain.
As one Reddit user put it, aggressive trading is what happens "when you cross an entire generation raised during a never-ending recession with an app that lets you gamble for a shot at never having to worry about rent money ever again."
It seems the "degenerates" aren't going anywhere.