One member of the infamous group turned their $50,000 Call options into a goldmine worth $13 million. On the other side, some of the option buyers of GameStop became multi-millionaires overnight. Some reports said short sellers in GameStop were sitting on year-to-date losses of more than $5 billion as on Wednesday. According to some reports, it was not in a position to honour the delivery of shares it had shorted.Ĭitron Research also took a heavy beating, as its short bets on GameStop were running a marked-to-market loss of nearly $2 billion. Late Monday, Wall Street Journal reported that Citadel and Point72 will bail out Melvin Capital by investing $2.75 billion in the hedge fund, after it booked nosebleeding losses in its short positions on GameStop. Other members of WallStreetBets bought the stock and its Call options in a show of solidarity and chanted YOLO - you only live once - as a mantra in their attempt to stage an audacious rebellion act against Wall Street. They truly believe that we, the average retail investors, do not know anything about finances or the market (which may be true), and we're just gambling our money away,” posted a WallStreetBets member with the pseudonym BenAffleks. “Hedge fund managers live in the past, and continue to look down upon the retail investors. At the high point of the day on Monday, shares of GameStop, which was sleep-walking to bankruptcy, had logged an eye-popping 779 per cent gain for January thus far. What started as an ‘idiotic enthusiasm’ (a term used by one Reddit member of the group) turned Wall Street upside down and left some of the biggest investing minds scratching their heads. They need to buy the stock to honour the delivery of the scrip. They pumped up the stock high enough to trigger a mind-boggling short squeeze.Ī short squeeze is an event where the stock price moves up rapidly, forcing the traders who have taken short positions in it to cover their positions by buying the stock in order to cut losses.
Enter the zero-commission trading app-wielding retail traders, which are part of a social media group on Reddit, called WallStreetBets, which at last count had more than 2 million members.įew members of the Reddit community made a clarion call: they will take ‘GameStop to the moon’ by betting against the Wall Street hedge fund and other short sellers of GameStop.