Let’s break down what’s happened so far in 2021.
In one month, we have had a political insurrection spurred on by the now-former president, a second impeachment trial for the same president and a Biden inauguration — and, let’s not forget, the ongoing pandemic.
Last week, a Wall Street revolution was added to that list.
How ironic it is that the cracks of an American institution and monument to capitalism became deeper and more defined thanks to a subreddit whose logo is an animated caricature of Donald Trump.
It’s fair to say that, until users on r/wallstreetbets collectively decided to mess with a bunch of hedge fund managers by manipulating GameStop stock prices through Robinhood, most average young Americans didn’t know a thing about the stock market.
All I knew was “buy low, sell high,” along with the occasional clip from “The Wolf of Wall Street” appearing on my Twitter feed.
Then amateur stock traders took the stock price of a failing video game retailer from about $70 to $350 in a matter of days. Thanks to this, hedge funds have lost nearly $5 billion, throwing the entire stock market into turmoil in the process.
Short selling — the exploitative practice of betting against a business’ success — was a foreign concept to me before this all happened, so when a group of Reddit users successfully played against the bets of some of America’s shadiest hedge fund managers, I was gleefully surprised.
Eventually, however, Robinhood — the most popular trading platform for retail traders — caught onto the operation and restricted outsider trading on GameStop and other at-risk stocks in order to protect the hedge fund managers from further inflation.
“Let the people trade,” the official Robinhood account Tweeted during the app’s initial rise to prominence in 2016.
What a way to announce your company’s mission when, five years later, you would only limit the people’s ability to trade. How ironic is it that an app named after Robin of Sherwood would attempt to rob the poor and give back to the rich?
For years, Wall Street bros have claimed poverty can easily be solved by poor people “investing wisely,” but when a grassroots collective decides to play the game and turn the tides in their favor, they’re the ones who get blamed for market manipulation rather than the hedge funds who’ve been doing the same thing for decades.
This has already been one of the most polarizing years in recent memory, but this betrayal of everyday users in favor of Wall Street leeches has united disparate groups, if only for a brief moment.
Billionaires like Mark Cuban and Elon Musk stood united with the common man in their disdain for Robinhood’s business practices.
Even politicians like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ted Cruz stood on the same ground to point out that Robinhood only suspended outsider trading to benefit the fat cats on Wall Street.
“This is unacceptable,” AOC Tweeted following Robinhood’s Jan. 28 decision. “We now need to know more about @RobinhoodApp’s decision to block retail investors from purchasing stock while hedge funds are freely able to trade the stock as they see fit.”
Cruz responded in full agreement, despite being a marked political enemy of Ocasio-Cortez.
Now, it seems pressure from communities across the ideological spectrum has forced Robinhood to allow free trading on its app once more, albeit in a limited capacity. But Pandora’s box has already been opened. A revolution seems to have started in the annals of Reddit, waking people from all walks of life to the Wall Street game.
Even through this whole situation, I am still unsure about the exact intricacies of the stock market and its players. What I do know is that r/wallstreetbets and its users are the true “Robin Hoods” in this situation, squeezing hedge funds dry and allowing the common man to profit.
In the words of the Robinhood app itself, “Let the people trade.”
Domenic Purdy is a 19-year-old journalism sophomore from Prairieville.