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Comment by plaidfuji | Hacker News Reader

The current candidates being floated by WSB are Nokia, AMC, Ericsson and Blackberry. Even though Virgin Galactic is second on this list, my impression of the WSB crowd is that they look for companies that are both high-short-interest and some nostalgic notion of being “worthy of saving”... Virgin would probably not fit their MO given the high-profile billionaire owner...

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Nokia and Ericsson are not highly shorted. Nokia short ratio is less than 1%. I have no idea why WSB picked them. Also, both companies' market cap is greater than 20B so it's not easy to manipulate the stock price to the GME levels.

It's more likely that WSB did not pick NOK, they have been battling infiltration and spamming from hedge funds since last week -- the hedge funds have been trying to shift the focus of the subreddit to any other ticker that they could. The original suggested tickers are: BB, AMC, and NOK.

I won't get into it too much but the first 2 (BB and AMC) have had some material good news lately (AMC got 900M in funding together and bankruptcy is likely off the table, so that warrants a fundamental pop), but the last one is the obvious trap -- NOK has not had any super significant good news lately, and is not highly shorted. It might gamma squeeze, but I think that it's a trap to push retail into so they can actually dump it, so much so that I bought puts on NOK that I was up on (but suffered a bit from IV crush).

I know HN is just getting to this story, but WSB has been dealing with this for the last like... ~2/3 weeks.

and of course WSB is not a cabal, just a message board

They look for cheap calls, that’s about it. It’s standard buy low sell high stuff.

That’s why I don’t get why they are being made out to be some kind of evil geniuses/idiots.

It’s very standard stuff.

That makes total sense.

They convinced themselves that Nokia and Ericsson are doing big things with 5G.

There is some thought that Bots are pumping NOK on WSB... who knows

> and some nostalgic notion of being “worthy of saving”

This is the biggest aspect I don't understand. People _hate_ Gamestop, the store. But to hear them talk about it on WSB, it's like they were best friends the entire time.

I'm curious how Chamath Palihapitiya's involvement in Virgin Galactic might come into play here.

Why does the WSB ethic permit the existence of Richard Branson? Shouldn't a UK public school billionaire descendant from violent colonial oppressors earn a spot up against the wall?

“Papa Elon” isn’t exactly praising the working class. WSB has less of a problem with Billionaires than they do Wall Street.

Yeah, WSB hates bankers, has nothing against founder-owners.

I mean, even hating bankers seems to be basically brand new. The culture of WSB has radically changed very very recently.

that's what puzzles me. All these founder-owners basically took (literal) truckloads of fresh money printed for "keeping the economy running" and swapped it for shares in their extremely overvalued companies. Doesn't sound a lot better than bankers and crucially doesn't work without bankers?

I actually don't even know what you're referring to, but I'm quite confident that it's untrue that "all" founder-owners did it, or that it's anywhere near as nefarious as you're positing.

you may be drastically overestimating the leftist ideals of the WSB set.

No, Branson is a founder that is playing a positive sum game. He grows the pie and pushes things forward. That's also why they like Elon.

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