Now a bunch of Dumb Money dickheads in a chatroom are fiddling with the knobs, and they have to fork over $400/share for a piece of shit stock they bet was going to go down to $10. They thought there were rules to this game and they had paid a bunch of math majors to generate equations and models quantifying the risk. The hedge funds are, understandably, freaking the fuck out. GameStop, BlockBuster, Bed Bath & Beyond, AMC… it’s like some kids remembered their favorite places in the mall 20… - Mike Murphy Murphy) They're already making plans to do the same thing to Bed Bath & Beyond, which is getting murdered by Amazon, and AMC, which is getting murdered because who the hell is going to pay to sit next to a bunch of strangers for two straight hours? There is no one on earth who thinks GameStop is worth $451/share! Some people are making a short term bet that the stock will continue to go up and they'll be able to find someone else to sell it to, some people are in it for the LULZ, and some people are having a great old time in quarantine fucking with a hedge fund. But if a hundred thousand kids do it, you get this. Now if one kid on Robinhood decides to bet that GameStop, which was trading at $18.84 on New Year's Eve, will be above $100 on January 25, no one cares. a reservation to buy the stock at an agreed upon price at a later date. They also placed their own bets in the form of options, i.e.

They started hyping the stock and buying up shares. But let's not get distracted here.) Thanks to technology and platforms like E-Trade and Robinhood, the Dumb Money can now do almost everything the big guys can do - they can buy and sell stocks in cheap, frictionless transactions without going through a broker, they can short stocks with a couple of mouse clicks, and they can talk about it on social media in ways that move the market without having to get themselves booked on CNBC.Ī bunch of Dumb Money got together on a Reddit forum called r/WallStreetBets, and they decided GameStop was GOOD. (Yes, there were also institutional investors betting that GameStop would go up. the individual investors, whose traditional role is to be the rube on the other side of that short transaction. So they borrowed A LOT of shares - 71.2 million, to be exact, even though the company only has 69.7 million shares outstanding.Įnter the 'Dumb Money,' i.e. There's nothing illegal about it, but let's not sugar coat it: These are sophisticated investors making a bet that someone dumber than they are will pay more than the stock is worth. The hedge funds shorted the stock, meaning they borrowed shares from a broker to sell in the short term, with the express intention of buying them back when the stock goes down and pocketing the profit. rich guys who get paid by other rich guys to hold their money and invest it in ways that are riskier than your average mutual fund, bet that GameStop stock would continue to go down as we all stayed home and let the internet bring the amusement to us. Have you been to the mall lately? No? Well, therein lies the problem, we mean the OPPORTUNITY! Hedge funds, i.e. You probably know GameStop as that grotty video game store in the basement of the mall. Rich people are taking a bath, and we can't have that!

Hey, capitalism is great, but let's not get carried away here.

Robinhood just shut down trading in the stock, because Joseph Farris’s cartoons are sure to make any golfer laugh.Let's talk about GameStop. It’s been said that real golfers don’t cry. Milne had it right, and Farris’s cartoons get to the heart of the game’s wonderful contradiction: over the course of eighteen holes, golf has the capacity to bring great joy and drive you crazy.įarris treats us to the sight of a blissfully happily newlywed with “Just Married” emblazoned on the back of his golf cart of an archaeologist who discovers a hieroglyph featuring an annoyed-looking pharaoh breaking a golf club over his knee and a TV-watching husband who rebuffs his naked wife’s amorous advances in no uncertain terms: “Not now, I’m watching Tiger Woods.” Milne had it right, and Farris’s cartoons get to the heart of the game’s wonderful contradiction: over the course of eighteen holes, golf has the capacity to bring great joy an In his illustrious career as a cartoonist for the New Yorker and other publications, Joseph Farris has created dozens of hilarious cartoons about “the best game in the world at which to be bad.”Ī.A. In his illustrious career as a cartoonist for the New Yorker and other publications, Joseph Farris has created dozens of hilarious cartoons about “the best game in the world at which to be bad.” A.A.

A stupid game