Reddit investors took a different view from the short-sellers, however, and began buying up shares of the company that they believed were undervalued. Inside the WallStreetBets-Reddit phenomenon: Stock market meets internet fringe culture (The consensus on Wall Street seemed to be that GameStop would soon go the way of Blockbuster.) The group noticed that GameStop, the struggling brick-and-mortar video game retailer, was heavily shorted by hedge funds. Describing itself as if “4chan found a Bloomberg terminal,” the forum’s giddy nihilism, inscrutable language and acerbic memes have fueled a war on a perceived corrupted mainstream. The WallStreetBets community, which now boasts some 5 million followers, has been around since 2012. Posts on the WallStreetBets subreddit openly relish watching short-sellers lose billions of dollars. But working in an industry associated with the house-of-cards system that created the 2008 financial crisis, these giants are not exactly beloved. They are also the Wall Street elite upon whom millions of investors rely to make smart decisions to boost their portfolios. The Goliaths are mostly hedge funds who are shorting those stocks - in other words, big-shot investors placing bets that those shares will crash. Their mission has two main goals: Drive up stock prices to score profits for themselves, and at the same time, force the establishment investors to abandon bearish bets against struggling companies such as GameStop, AMC, Macy’s and several others. “They have seen the rich get extremely rich by taking advantage of cheap money, and they want to get their piece as well,” said Richard Fisher, the former president of the Dallas Federal Reserve.
The Davids, in this case, are the mostly young day traders who congregate on the Reddit page WallStreetBets - aka the Reddit army, or the Reddit mob, depending on your point of view.
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