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Comment by nr2x | Hacker News Reader

The issue here is the motivations have diverged from what is in the extant model of the market. There is no economics textbook that accounts for market participants buying stocks to watch them crash as a form of entertainment, which is true for a non-trivial subset of people holding GME right now. So if you need to model the market you now have to account for a very non-rational force, which is a big deal as it won't go away. If everybody who crowd-funded Bernie Sanders figures out they can punish a publicly-traded company who just laid off a few thousand workers, shit will get weird.

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This. I've been reading a lot of WSB posts lately and the main sentiment doesn't seem to be "let's get rich" but "let's make them bleed". Many people don't care about losing that money too much and the whole situation is probably funny and entertaining.

Exactly my thinking. Buying inflated shares is an extremely efficient protest of the lack of regulation.

This time last year I was sleeping on floors, trudging through the snow to knock on doors in New Hampshire in hopes of producing thoughtful political dialogue. Unfortunately I don't think that had nearly as much impact as a few hundred bucks of meme stonks.

This is Lulzsec 2021, I'm all for it!

> There is no economics textbook that accounts for market participants buying stocks to watch them crash as a form of entertainment

Sure there is. Monetary policy. Cost of money is too low.

> ...So if you need to model the market you now have to account for a very non-rational force, which is a big deal as it won't go away...

Rational or non-rational force is irrelevant, as long as it brings liquidity onto the market.

The democratization of the market we all witnessed in the past decades injects more liquidity into the good old zero-sum play. In a somber way, it's a "savings squeeze" strategy.

> If everybody who crowd-funded Bernie Sanders figures out they can punish a publicly-traded company who just laid off a few thousand workers, shit will get weird

Not sure what you mean by this + how $GME relates to Bernie and his supporters?

If you can't get regulators to hit companies that you think are bad actors, you can get a bunch of Robinhood traders to do some street justice on their share prices.

EDIT: If there were real money to be made doing this, it would already be happening. But people being willing to throw around significant capital and probably lose it, just for the satisfaction of hurting someone else, is interesting.

Somebody on /WSB called it a "RAGE HOLD".

> There is no economics textbook that accounts for market participants buying stocks to watch them crash as a form of entertainment, which is true for a non-trivial subset of people holding GME right now.

same modulo motivation holds for the irrational and allegedly illegal shorts these people are claiming to be calling out ...

Not really, they still want to profit, I figured the money I spent on GME was a 100% loss just for lulz.

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