Reddit Warns That r/WallStreetBets Could Wreak Havoc on Its Stock Price

return2ozma@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 722 points –
Reddit Warns That r/WallStreetBets Could Wreak Havoc on Its Stock Price
gizmodo.com
107

I used to fucking hate that sub in my feed, but god bless those cappy swine

My sentiments exactly. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, as annoying as they can be. Now that I'm not using reddit I wish them the best of luck wreaking havoc.

πŸ’ŽπŸ’ŽπŸ’ŽπŸš€πŸš€πŸš€ ~...................................................~ lol, couldn't resist

Apes together strong

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Edit: 🦍

Does form an interesting premise though for a collectivist tool of anticapitalist warfare.

Firms taking short positions are some of the most low down parts of the stock and trade system, so you could cost the parasites millions and billions by organizing mass buys of stock on firms with shorted stock, and the best part is that the folks holding shorted positions can lose infinitely, so basically enough people working together would be able to pull the equivalent of stringing the leaches up by their nutsack and then dragging them around by it on a gravel pathway by horseback

I mean its a midoff. And at that point fuck it crack a beer or tea or something

"Reddit Invokes The Streisand Effect to Openly Invite r/WallStreetBets to Wreak Havoc on Their Stock Price."

I think they’re trying to get the SEC to solve their problems for them. I wonder how careful the WSB/Stonkers can be.

Maybe I'm just dumb, but what could the SEC actually do?

Accuse them of stock market manipulation, which is exactly what the hedge fund guys do constantly. But since the Reddit kids aren’t hedged managers with $100millions, they’ll get sucked.

I feel like this is just Reddit asking for the sub to inflate the stock like they did GameStop.

Shorts apply downward pressure to the market price, so not sure how well thought out the plan is.

Somebody should go ahead and get a dedicated WSB instance going so that they can migrate easily after Reddit bans them. I want them contained because they are a toxic community, but I also want them to short the Reddit stock because it would be hilarious.

they are a toxic community,

Yeah. Being mostly comprised of Incel, conspiracy, Q / Trump shills who think they can predict the future better than their peers will do that to a community.

Looking at the real foundation of wsb and /u/deepfuckingvalue it's not hard to see why conspiracy theorists and the gullible jumped onboard.

The thing about gme was dfv was 10000% correct.

Yeah, and then everyone involved in GME left the sub. What remained was what remains today.

If you need to run back three years to find a single instance in which a guy was correct, I would not bet the bank on the next prediction being a big winner.

AMC, Best Buy, and Hertz all bled out like stuck pigs while these dorks were screaming and crying.

Yeah, thats because AMC took the value they gained from WSB shills, and used it to pay their bonuses instead of improving their business. GME is the only company that actually tried to do something with the windfall value they gained.

AMC took the value they gained from WSB shills, and used it to pay their bonuses

Which is why their firm was in the tank to begin with. And something DFV should (or, perhaps did) already know.

God it was glorious back before all these people though. Watching people gamble on their tuition or turn a $50k loan into -$300,000 of debt for memes was fucking hilarious.

Lol in the article it says ppls proposed shotlrting Reddit stock. I love some of those apes so much, they got great ideas.

I'm retard.

What actually happened to the gamestop thing. Did the government end up getting involved and shutting it down? There was some shady shit going on for a while.

How would reddit even tank the price? Shorting is just a way for them to lose money if they are wrong.

Short selling is used when you expect a stock to drop in price. You β€œborrow” a stock from someone and immediately sell it for the current price. You have an agreement to return the borrowed stock to them within [x] time. So let’s say you borrow the stock and sell it for a nice even $100.

But you’re expecting the stock price to drop significantly. So when it drops to $60, you’ve now made $40. Because you sold it for $100 and now you can buy it at $60 to return it to the lender. If the price has dropped, you make money because you keep the difference between your sale price and your purchase price.

The issue with this is that your potential for loss is technically unlimited. If the price never drops, you never make money. Or even worse, if it increases, you stand to lose money. And since there’s no price cap on stocks, you can theoretically lose an unlimited amount. Since you’re legally obligated to return that stock to the person you borrowed it from, you can be forced into buying the stock for exorbitant prices if it increases.

The GameStop thing was caused by something called a short squeeze. Basically, a bunch of people expected the stock to drop, so they were all shorting it. Someone realized this, posted about it, and people started buying up all the available stock and refusing to sell. Now all of those people who had sold the stock and were hoping to buy it back cheap found that there was nobody to buy it from.

They increased their offer price. Still nobody to buy it from. They increased the offer again. Still nobody to buy it from. And as more shorts matured and more people were legally obligated to buy the stock, the more the price increased. It’s a simple supply and demand calculation: The demand was rapidly increasing as more people were legally obligated to return the stocks they had borrowed, and the supply had suddenly evaporated because people were outright refusing to sell. And this has a cascading effect, as people see the price spiking and refuse to sell because they expect it to continue to climb. This is where all the β€œto the moon” and rocket memes came from, because stock owners planned to hold until the price made it all the way to the moon.

Some vendors like Robinhood stopped allowing people to buy GameStop stock. The idea was that it would limit the shorters’ potential losses, by keeping the dwindling supply from being completely bought out. The hope was that once people were banned from buying more, they would begin to sell. But this only pissed a lot of people off, because it was a blatant attempt at manipulating the market. It was a blatant shield for the trust funds who had historically had a stranglehold on the markets. It was seen as the rich helping the rich, because that’s exactly what it was.

So where are we at currently?

Yeah, I remember watching all of this live, but that was years ago. Then wsb started posting nothing but tweets by some Cohen guy and that's where I lost all interest.

I'm kinda assuming the whole thing blew over and nobody had to face any consequences at all, because reality sucks, and because any win for the wsb folks would be repeated by them everywhere ad nauseam.

They increased their offer price. Still nobody to buy it from. They increased the offer again. Still nobody to buy it from. And as more shorts matured and more people were legally obligated to buy the stock, the more the price increased.

This is nonsense. The SEC already came out with a report confirming that the run up on GameStop wasn’t caused by shorts closing.

Hedge funds are short game stop. They are still short on GameStop. The real squeeze hasn’t happened yet. Whether it will or not is another debate.

I get all that I was there for that. But then lost interest. Wondered what happened after that.

Are people still holiding? There was talk that the government was going to allow people to settle their shorts for low prices or something. I guess people that made money was because of the bubble nature and memes of the whole thing, rather than any shorting factors.

But more importantly how does shorting hurt reddit?

There are still some who are diamond handing, unclear how many. There's a subreddit called gme_meltdown you can check out if you want a rundown on what's happening.

Shady shit did go down but a lot of money was moved from the wealthy to the not as wealthy. I don’t think the government did anything except interview a few of the major players.

Every once in a while you’ll see a fancy car with a license plate that references gme, mooning, or wsb.

The GME thing resulted in lots of people losing lots of money, whereas many of them were convinced they were going to become millionaires.

The "GME thing" resulted in a couple of hedge fund firms going belly up. So yes, you are correct that a lot of people lost a lot of money. A few people did become millionaires from the fiasco.

Sure, at the very beginning there was some action for those very few early enough to the party, but the vast majority of people who bought in to GME did so after this happened and have only lost money.

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Anything to get their IPO in the news. Ignore

Should I ignore, or should I enjoy the thought of Reddit's stock being tanked by its own users?

The guys organizing the ipo will become very very rich even if it tanks later. They sell for their price. Afterwards, it tanks.

They're already rich. You're not going to make them poorer either way.

On the other hand, it will make spez look like a big fool, which I will enjoy.

I'll take my schadenfreude where I can get it.

I bet theyre all gonna short Reddit.

Which is funny, because considering Reddit was trying to get users to buy in on their IPO, they probably thought they could weaponize the whole "diamond hands" meme again, and get everyone to shoot reddits "stonks" "to the moon!"

They've always been behind the curve, from the crypto that never launched to the NFT avatars to the streaming stuff to the IPO now being laughably belated.

The funny thing is if they do short it heavily, the big players will pump the stock. They literally can't lose.

WSB incels are essentially immune to a failed short.

Yeah, shorting theoristically has no ceiling on potential loss, but most of these retail kids don't have enough assets for a squeeze to really do anything.

Owing somebody a thousand dollars and owing someone a billion dollars are the same thing for them.

All markets are on the whim of the people, if tomorrow everyone decided Exon Mobile wasnt worth it and we're all selling the price would tank.

Its just bad luck for Reddit, everyone thinks Reddit isnt worth shit

I don’t know if it’s bad luck. They’ve made some decisions to remind us that it’s worthless.

Heck, if Apollo for Reddit still worked, I’d probably still use it daily.

If Apollo for Reddit still worked, I’d probably still be there too. But at the same time I’m pretty thankful that things happened the way they did because it really opened my eyes to how dissatisfied I was with corporate social media and I feel so much more engaged in my hobbies and their communities now on the fediverse.

It helps that I am already primarily interested in tech, web, and networking (with some retro gaming mixed in) so the fediverse was already a suitable replacement. I feel for people whose communities are dead here.

I make stuff and yeah the crafter communities are pretty dead here. The comments I do get feel more genuine though

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I prefer Reddit today. If Reddit suddenly disappears, I will simply switch to Lemmy full time. πŸ’€

So I really don't care what happens to Reddit.

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this smells like reddit getting desperate

Considering they're DMing certain Reddit users (their most active users, according to the DM) about being given a chance buy Reddit stock during the IPO (that's not strictly PR speak; they're actually setting aside some stock for their users), that's entirely possible.

They offered it to me. I've not been on reddit since the API issue kicked off.

Yeah, they sent it to me, too. For users, it's based on total karma. For mods, it's based on total mod actions taken.

Over 200K karma I read somewhere else

Well fuck, I had well over 200k karma. Why didn't I get a buy-in offer I could tell them to fuck off for?

I think it's to limit damage from subreddits like WSB. If a bunch of your most active users own stock, they will be slandering WSB and calling for the ban of the subreddit when they eventually want to short it.

Reddit has enough of the same half crazed energy Tumblr has that I suspect quite a few users even the most active site would fuck the site over for fun.

It's karma + mod actions.

More accurately, it's based on total karma OR total mod actions.

Yeah. I didn't mod anything but was very active, and I got emailed a 1st round invitation.

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I hope they short it into the sub-basement. I hate those twats, especially when I modded /r/amc, but I might just have to cheer for them if they can snowball the Reddit IPO. It would be spectacular.

Was about to comment basically the same thing. They are ableist morons who are poster children for the Dunning-Kruger effect with their YOLOing and HODLing and whatnot, but them fucking over spez would make my god damned decade and I'd raise a glass to those cunts.

I'm surprised (but not upset) that WSB hasn't set up a dedicated Lemmy server. Surely they must think they've grown big enough to not need reddit anymore.

they've probably got a dIsCOrD sErVEr

I mean, for wallstreetbets that's actually a good fit. It's not like they're creating a knowledge base, it's just an endless stream of memes - exactly what discord was designed for.

Why would they? They have a platform in Reddit, and that's a platform that people know. Lemmy is still fairly niche, so unless something happens like WSB getting deleted by the Reddit admins I don't see why they'd bother.

To expand? Gain influence down the road? Diversify?

To expand?

Like adding a deck chair to a mega-yacht.

Gain influence down the road?

Lemmy has no influence. The only thing it tries to influence is moving people to Linux, and that's been going poorly for the better part of two decades...

Diversify?

Without the two above, I don't see the benefit.

I remember something similar being said about reddit back in the day.

I used Reddit alongside Digg, and it was rarely ever as empty as Lemmy.

Many of the niche communities didn't exist, sure, but the big subs were at least 10x larger than the big communities here.

Oh no. Well anyways how is everyone's Friday going?

Sounds like the people who run Reddit haven't been paying attention to what the internet does to greedy people who start complaining

β€œCould”. I’m sure it’s a fucken certainty.

how do I trade to inflict maximum economic damage on reddit?

Don’t talk about it, but it, or post about it ever and it will go away

Spreading fake news. Imagine a never seen before tripartite alliance, for only one goal, of Reddit, 4Chan and Fediverse, working together and trying to tank Reddit Inc. It could be historical. I'd say we direct the grand final towards the EU courts, putting the final nail down.

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Put simply, the company warned potential investors that one of its subreddits, the infamous r/WallStreetBets, could make its stock price and volume extremely volatileβ€”and there’s little Reddit can do about it.

It’s entirely possible that the everyday people on r/WallStreetBets, a subreddit of 15 million retail investors who refer to themselves as β€œapes” and β€œdegenerates,” and other online forums could do the same thing with Reddit’s stock, the company stated.

The volatility could cause people to lose all or part of their investment, the company explained, if they are unable to sell their shares at or above the IPO price.

The long-term effect of movements like those propelled by r/WallStreetBets is already documented, with the takeaway being that surges of interest and heavy investment don’t necessarily bring success to companies over time.

Furthermore, shares purchased by users and moderators will not be subject to a lockup, the period after an IPO where insiders and early investors are banned from selling their stock to prevent the price from going down.

The top post on the subreddit on Friday morningβ€”β€œReddit lists WSB as a risk factor for its IPO πŸ˜β€β€”had thousands of comments as of the publication of this article.


The original article contains 542 words, the summary contains 198 words. Saved 63%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

almost you shouldn't place cheeky little bets on if a company will succeed or not. bet on sports like a normal person. shareholders ruin every single company

Nikola shorts profited from the company being a scam and being exposed. They did a useful service by driving the price down.

That movie dumb money was such good publicity for Reddit. And now they're probably gonna shut down the star sub-reddit.

hey, thanks Reddit for giving us a deadly weapon that I'll try to expand on myself witha singular Reddit account for a ""sting operation""

"Do not anger that community which embodies the resourcefulness, morals and insanity of 4chan"

– Sun Tzu (probably)