A growing number of people are saying that the bottom-up revolution inspired by Reddit's Wall Street Bets subreddit discussion group is the next generation of Occupy Wall Street, on steroids.
$GME is 2021 equivalent of #OccupyWallStreet 🤣🤣 https://t.co/Bs7RuWKH9F at https://t.co/Bs7RuWKH9F
— Ikram Haq (@ikramhaq_) January 26, 2021By my mind, the Occupy Wall Street of 2011 was phenomenally successful, changing the way we think about wealth inequality, particuarly the idea of the 99%. But this resurrection or re-awakening of Occupy Wall Street 2.0 has serious teeth, literally threatening the entire stock market.
WallStreetBets Is Occupy Wall Street With Teeth https://t.co/cScBQFMXOv via @YouTube at https://t.co/cScBQFMXOv
— spotsonmyarm (@spotsonmyarm) January 31, 2021It's being estimated that the cost to big time Hedge funds are could be $70 or $80 billion, so far, and that was with major interventions by the biggest stock trading companies, on Thursday, which stopped trading of the highly shorted stocks Reddit's WallStreetBets targeted.
A Yahoo Finance article, How the tale of Reddit, GameStop, Robinhood is really about 5 big trends suggested,
"These newly-empowered investors insisted they were sending short sellers, hedge funds and Wall Street writ large, a message. They were tired of being on the wrong end of the proverbial investment stick. In other words this wasn't just investing, it was about torches and pitchforks."It makes me think of Occupy Wall Street, in this case instead of protesting corporate greed, they were given the tools to participate in it," says Doug Boneparth, president of wealth management firm, Bone Fide Wealth. These investors had figured out a Wall Street pain point: Ganging up on short sellers.
And this group made war on shorts who had positions in other companies too such as AMC (AMC), BlackBerry (BB), Nokia (NOK), and Bed Bath & Beyond (BBBY)."
You can do a search at Yahoo Finance for "most shorted stocks" and you'll see a list of them and there are many other resources where you can find that information.
Clearly, the big players have invested tens, maybe even hundreds of millions in short selling. But when a hedge fund has a position of, say, $100 million, not a big amount for a Hedge fund with ten or more billion in assets, and then our new Occupy Wall Street 2.0 army raises the value of that stock by 4000%, then the hedge fund is looking at exposure of four billion dollars. And shorts have expiration dates, so these hedge funds have to buy the stock at the hugely increased rate to cover their shorts. And there are thousands of hedge funds.
The Yahoo Finance article continues,
Retail investors used to always be wrong," says veteran Wall Street institutional trader Tiger Williams. "Not any more. Now you got 50 million of them all tied together and they really matter."If nothing else, this week showed that populism, heretofore manifested in politics has come to Wall Street. The folks on WSB are the financial cousins of Trump and Bernie supporters. They are sick and tired of a system they consider rigged against them. Understandable, because while hedge fund managers and investors racked up double digit gains, ordinary investors lost their jobs. Or as I heard of one Wall Streeter telling it: "2020 was bad for humans, but it was great for finance." Guess who's taking their revenge?"
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) 1.0 was an incredibly important phenomenon that irreversibly changed the world. Occupy Wall Street 2.0, with impact that will likely go into the hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars will be even bigger. If you are a populist and you've been seeing the deep state, i.e., the biggest most powerful financial entities, corporations and billionaires as the enemy, as the threat to democracy, then OWS 2.0 is a an exciting, hopeful phenomenon, and we need to explore how this will change the balance in many systems-- economic, financial, political, corporate, even ecological.
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