Fundamentally, GameStop’s (GME) share price has skyrocketed not because the company’s stock value reflects future potential – regardless of what r/wallstreetbets will have you to believe – instead, they pursued an antagonistic feud with entities such as Melvin Capital and Citron Research, who are commonly bearish through their outlined intentions on social media to short certain stocks.
The conflict occurs as the bullish internet forum and their favourite stock picks are being hit by the Wall Street hedge funds – a villain in the wake their overt market manipulation.
r/wallstreetbets and what are deemed their honourable intentions to prevent Wall Street from devastating stock share prices, off the back of sending stocks like Palantir “to the moon”, increased GameStop’s share price from $17 at the beginning of the year to a high of $492.02 on the 28th of January.
Ultimately, the internet forum’s short squeeze was successful, forcing Melvin Capital, a $13 billion fund, to close their positions at huge loses, supposedly. However, there are accusations of Melvin Capital not having closed their positions and corroborating with CNBC in market manipulation.
One piece of evidence lies in GME’s short interest being egregiously high considering the largest short seller had declared their positions were covered. If this truly is a lie, there will certainly be an investigation by the SEC into any relationship between CNBC and Melvin Capital with the intention of manipulating stock prices.
Citron Research, a bearish short seller, also allegedly suffered huge losses, amounting to $3 billion.
But with accusations of manipulation being the basis of the conflict between Wall Street and r/wallstreetbets, the forum is actually manipulating the value of the company itself.
Pre-pandemic, GameStop generated $6.46 billion in 2019, yet was hard hit by the pandemic. As a video game retailer, Nasdaq estimates the company’s P/E ratio in 2021 is – 93.40. Is it currently worth a share price of $193.6? Most definitely not.
So, what does that mean? Ultimately, the millions of people, including celebrity billionaires and entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Justin Sun are manipulating the stocks themselves to drive up prices.
Yet accusations of market manipulation do not lie with just r/wallstreetbets and Wall Street itself – accusations of further market manipulation abetting Wall Street are directed towards Robinhood and other popular retail trading platforms, like eToro and Webull.
The retail trading app, amongst many others, prevented investors from buying GME and other popular stock picks belonging to the band of retail investors. This gives institutional investors and hedge funds the ability to save their shorts by driving the price down as retail investors’ only options are to sell. is this right? I personally am not sure!
Fox News has even made allegations that r/wallstreetbets is illegal and retail trading apps are merely attempting to prevent investigation in an odd defence of obvious market manipulation, when what is more likely is that retail trading apps like Robinhood are protecting Wall Street hedge funds from losing billions more.
With the global financial crash in 2008, caused by Wall Street and its insidious creation of CDOs and synthetic CDOs causing trillions of dollars belonging to ordinary people to disappear overnight, to many, r/wallstreetbets and allies’ efforts to save GME from being shorted into the ground is indeed vindicated and has been a long time coming. Be prepared for more of this, heavily market correlated funds will need to factor this into their outreach plans.
