The most requested community in the past week: WallstreetBets
We've been following the situation, not wanting to release a WSB community without having their mods onboard. Well, we still don't have their mods on board. We talked to them in mid-2020, but never came to an agreement.
We hope that they don't get banned from Reddit (we'd pick up a good portion of that traffic, so don't do it, Steve.)
Having said that... the WSB Discord server just got banned (for hate, by the way), and it's very possible that the subreddit suffers the same fate...
Our unofficial WSB Win site:
https://wsbets.win/ or c/wsbets
We've had some well known WSB users reach out asking for us to set this up, and even some people who have been involved in the running of WSB, but to be very clear, this is NOT officially affiliated with the WSB subreddit (but we'll hand it over to them when they want it)
Update: WSB is NOT banned on Reddit. It's private, which is normally a decision by the moderators.
Of course a lot of people will be stuck with the losses. But the intent is that each person might lose a few hundred dollars, but the higher it gets, the more the shorters lose. Not all of them sold, some are just holding out hoping for the crash, but eventually they'll have to pay for those borrowed stocks at some point, and that's when they get royally screwed. The masses lose a bit in the end, but the real criminals lose a LOT. And it's clear there's a lot of people out there that are willing to lose a few hundred bucks to stick it to short sellers.
They want it to go as high as $5,000 a share, which would destroy these short sellers. Imagine buying millions of dollars worth of shares at $20 and it goes up to $5000 a share and you have to pay that difference. Even $300 a share is a massive loss, but $5,000 is even more devastating.
And it's pretty devastating already, because not all short sellers use their own money, but also borrowed money. Those require a maintenance requirement of 25%, and going below that makes you subject to a margin call, which effectively means they have to put more money in the higher the stock price gets. That alone can bankrupt hedge funds because they can reach a point where they literally have no way of fulfilling that maintenance requirement. They can liquidate their position and lose big, or try to weather the storm and hope it drops back down.
But short selling also has a specified time limit on the borrow, and when that time limit is up....oops, you're stuck having to pay what that stock is worth, and if you can't pay, well you essentially become liquidated and have to declare bankruptcy.
This is assuming that everyone who shorted an overvalued stock is bad. This is what we devolve to after letting the election get stolen, some bullshit about a video game retailer’s stock. I think its lame.
Short selling itself should technically be illegal, at least in the way it's typically used. You're borrowing stock in order to rob people of money. And a lot of people say that Gamestop's initial stock price was only soo low because of short selling, should have been 5x higher than what it was before this fiasco. Short selling also hurts companies. Its not just betting that a companies stock will drop, it's actively doing things to make it drop. Short selling destroys a companies available capital and puts a lot of people out of jobs. I really don't feel bad for short sellers.
I think that’s simplistic, short selling is used mainly to hedge positions and the number of people who can force a stock down after buying puts are vanishingly small. Even among those who can, there’s usually better ways to make money and if the pinch isn’t reflective of actual value, the stock will usually just go back up again because other people rightly view it as an opportunity to buy something that is undervalued. Also, people have been making fun of GameStop for decades, there was no conspiracy against a physical games retailer when games are all going digital.
Anyways, I think I’m done with this thing. We were promised a revolution and an end to corruption, what we got was betrayal and people teaming up with leftists to buy GameStop stock. It was fun to dream I guess.
It exposed illegal trading activity. Their bullshit almost destroyed the world economy in 2008 and they never stopped. It is the financial equivalent to what trump exposed in the political world.