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Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

WSB reminds me of the heyday of LulzSec. As questionable as LulzSec / anon’s hacking was, it was also exciting to watch in real-time (10 years ago!)

Of course they were caught and of course they turned out to be regular nobodies. Everything is normal and banal in the end.

If WSB doesn’t turn out to be a regular ole pump and dump then I’d be very surprised. The only thing that’s weird about it is that not even the current cohort of pumpers realise that’s what they are doing.

Could it be that the original pumpers have closed out already leaving behind a crowd of meme spewing parrots that collective display malicious sentience while individually being regular joes?

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It's not a pump and dump. It's a short squeeze. It's nothing new. It's the plot of the 80s movie "Trading Places."

A hedge fund bought short position futures contracts for 120% of the available stock on the market. That's the underlying reason the price is going up: because they're forced to somehow buy more than 100% of the available Game Stop stock because they agreed to sell it to the people on the other end of those contracts for a set strike price.

no the pump and dump part means that WSB arguably exists as a kind of ion cannon like Anon used to be, where if you can convince a sizable number of community members to commit to a proposed course of action, you can create a reflexive effect that you can harness to your advantage. creating a stock price event, on purpose, using a community like WSB, and profiting, by exiting the trade is a "pump" and "dump."

it is ancillary that a short squeeze might be an attendant and inciting event. you could do this with any stock as long as the supply is limited compared to the demand created by the manipulation of trader sentiment. the short squeeze just amplifies the effect

It's disingenuous and factually incorrect to compare WSB with a DDOS takedown crew running a tool against scientology.org.

WSB is legally sharing trading information and making informed investing decisions based on public information. What happened with Game Stop is completely predicated on large investors, who should have known better, buying positions that exposed them to an infinite amount of risk.

The short squeeze is the reason this is happening and not "ancillary." The hedge fund took these positions because they thought they were a form a free money. A better analogy would be "The Producers." The audience just walked out of "Spring Time for Hitler" for intermission and they're humming the songs and laughing.

Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.

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