From gaming to art to literature Reddit has something for everyone apparently that includes blowing up the economy. It all happens on r/wallstreetbets, a subreddit that focuses on trading and selling stocks. Featuring many rocket ship emojis and proclaiming that they are going to the moon, users bought large shares of Gamestop(GME), AMC theaters, and Nokia(NOK).

Lead by a user going by the name u/Deep******Value who bought 50,000 shares of GME and paid $754,991 as of Feb 1st, 2021 his stocks are worth $35,794,744.47. A preposterous number all created by Redditors putting their money into ¨Meme stocks¨. That’s only 1 person, the subreddit has over 8,270,000 users and is still growing, gaining a large user base after the GME fiasco began.

This is not just about making money to the users through this goes to some it is a matter of revenge. With memories of rich investors laughing at people on the street demonstrating in front of wall street after the 2008 market crash, they are determined to get revenge on those investors. With titles in all caps saying to hold, many users are in it for the long haul.

You might think that the person who orchestrated this fiasco must be an economic genius. However, there is no mastermind behind this, it’s just a group of people throwing their money at the stocks just for the heck of it. However, this has blown to a bigger scale than anybody thought it would get to and many large time investors are taking notice.

Robinhood, one of the major and most popular places to buy and sell stock, has limited and even prohibited users to and sell GME and other ¨meme stocks¨ that users are pumping up. This comes after many professional investors were outraged at the Redditors causing big hedge funds to lose billions.

Economics is long and very complex so I recommend you do more research if you want to find out more but the short story is this: Large hedge funds tried to squeeze the market by pouring money into the stocks and then selling those stocks triggering what’s called a short squeeze.

However, Redditors didn’t sell and instead caused the stocks to skyrocket making some large hedge funds lose millions and a select few billions. With the whole situation not looking like it’s going to end soon many are wondering just how high they can get GME up to. Many are praising the group for bringing the power of economics back to the people.

This shows how powerful social media is in our current day and age and if brought together the people can do anything. I look forward to seeing just how high game stock can go up and see just how much money the hedge funds lose.