A bunch of people stuck at home went down the list of stocks looking at them and found that gamestop's stock was shorted 130%(as in more shares than that exist) and spread it to reddit, where more studied it and found that investors were purposely screwing with the stock to make money on shorting it, and then decided to screw those investors.
Shorting is where you borrow someone else's shares and sell them immediately, then buy them back at a low price later to return to them. When you do this and then the stock rises, the brokerage companies(etc) will start pushing for you to return their shares unless you can convince them to wait longer. So when the price started going up, they wanted their shares back, the investors/companies/shorters didn't have the money to do that, needed a bail out, then proceeded to SHORT IT AGAIN.
A bunch of people stuck at home went down the list of stocks looking at them and found that gamestop's stock was shorted 130%(as in more shares than that exist) and spread it to reddit, where more studied it and found that investors were purposely screwing with the stock to make money on shorting it, and then decided to screw those investors.
Shorting is where you borrow someone else's shares and sell them immediately, then buy them back at a low price later to return to them. When you do this and then the stock rises, the brokerage companies(etc) will start pushing for you to return their shares unless you can convince them to wait longer. So when the price started going up, they wanted their shares back, the investors/companies/shorters didn't have the money to do that, needed a bail out, then proceeded to SHORT IT AGAIN.
I think that's how it goes.