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Comment by woah | Hacker News Reader

The idiotic takes on this GME situation are beyond belief. What did people think was going to happen? GME goes to a million and everyone becomes a millionaire?

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> What did people think was going to happen?

That brokerages would remain neutral and allow buy and sell orders of listed stocks like they do on other days. It's totally fair to acknowledge a sudden and unpublished rule change at the market open that foreseeably led to big price swings.

At a minimum, the SEC needs to step in and describe the exact circumstances when brokerages are allowed to unilaterally halt sales of securities. Markets where people don't understand the rules are worse than casinos.

I don't know where you got this-- I saw a lot of people who were investing not even for a profit but simply 'to be a part of a movement'. Yes I'm sure there are plenty of naive fools in the mix, it still is the stock market after all. But the complaint here isn't that a bunch of misinformed people thought they'd be millionaires-- it's that a bunch of people made a conscious decision to invest and now brokerages are manipulating the markets. Ironically some of them justify it as being BECAUSE 'retail investors don't know what they're doing'. There's a lot of condescension towards retail traders, which is weird when 12 years ago the 'smart' institutional investors and hedge funds managed to crash the global economy. Looking at the whole picture, I don't see why it's so ridiculous that people get a piece of the action when the majority are acknowledging they might not make any money at all on this

Hey, it worked for Bitcoin. I never expected that. I thought Bitcoin was overpriced at US$20.

I think the Bitcoin example was exactly what the investors were thinking. A stock that magically always goes up and everybody gets rich.

With a real stock, somebody has to be left holding the bag at the end. (Probably with BitCoin as well, but that's a separate discussion.)

My understanding was that, with the short squeeze, for a certain number of those stocks the buyer would be the hedge funds. But it seems like at this point there must be way more stocks that the buyers have bought than the hedge funds have shorted, no?

I mean, that's exactly what's been happening with Tesla for months.

Do you believe that the Tesla buyers are trying to manipulate the market, and have no expectation that the company itself is valuable?

Do you believe that GameStop buyers think that the company is as doomed as the short-sellers did? The origin for this whole thing was a DD post that argued that it was a value stock that was over-shorted. And there were institutional investors and analysts like Michael Burry who also saw this happening.

I don't know if they thought it was doomed, but I highly doubt a single one of the buyers think it's worth $500+ a share. That's not why they're buying it.

Unless there's some other scheme that I'm unaware of, I think Tesla buyers do think it's worth that much, though they may be wrong about that.

I doubt that a majority of Tesla buyers realistically think the company is worth as much as most of the rest of the auto industry. In both cases you have overvalued meme stocks, it's just with GameStop there's an ideological/activism motivation.

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