Fellow r/WallStreetBets users recently started taking my advice – for very different reasons to those I had in mind
Just over a year ago, I published some thoughts on r/WallStreetBets (WSB), a Reddit forum that I like to check out every now and again. The post is called GameStop Investment Thesis. My idea was that the US retailer GameStop – a bricks-and-mortar shop that sells video games, consoles, Funko Pop! toys and other miscellanea to enthusiasts, or nerds, like myself – might be worth investing in. The business, I suggested, had a substantial amount of cash on its balance sheet, which could be translated into value, and generally had a bit more promise than met the eye.
I was wrong. In fact, in their classically abrasive way, one Redditor pointed this out at the time: “The only theory supporting your $GME long is about your mother’s alcohol consumption during pregnancy.” The Covid-19 pandemic proved doubly that investing in a high-street store probably wasn’t a good idea. But, just as a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can lead to a hurricane on the other side of the world, my thoughts may well have been the catalyst for what would this week become one of, if not the, largest “short squeezes” in history. My post has been cited in Bloomberg and the Verge as one of early signs of Reddit’s interest in the store. After the post, the investor Michael Burry – who was depicted in the book and film The Big Short – subsequently made it public that he was buying GameStop. The rest is history.
