Okay so I've seen this all over the place the last few days, I need someone to explain it to me. I don't understand the stock market at all, but from what I can gather a bunch of dudes on a subreddit decided to buy Gamestop stock...and that's a problem for like a hedge fund company that bet Gamestop stock wouldn't go up?
Pretty much. It's kind of financial trolling.
It's funny, but you have to bear in mind eventually the stock in GameStop will crash and a lot of these Reddit guys will lose money. I hope they're ready for that.
The other thing is that the hedge funds will win in the end. These funds are huge, and a brief embarrassment on a short that is a tiny fraction of their business won't really hurt them much. And bear in mind other major financial traders will have made money buying into the craze, and they'll cash out before the crash. And they'll all learn from this too: they'll learn to keep an eye on Reddit, Facebook, wherever to spot these trends in case anyone every tries it again. Or, because they will be exactly the sort of petty, get-one-over-the-other-guy pricks you'd assume, I wouldn't be surprised if it will become of their armoury to screw each other over.