Reddit vs. Wall Street: the latest in the GameStop saga

“Apes together strong” is one of the mottoes of Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets community. Now, members of the financial subreddit are making good on one of their favorite memes by donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to charities supporting gorillas in the wild.

The most prominent recipient of the redditors’ generosity is the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, whose president and CEO Tara Stoinski describes it as “the world’s largest and longest running organization that is fully dedicated to gorilla conservation.”

GameStop stock (GME) soared in value on Wednesday, peaking at $348.50 per share. Then, in an event that’s definitely not cause for concern, minutes later it lost fully half its value by plummeting to $172, Bloomberg reports. Yes, “stonks” are back, and GameStop is once again in the crosshairs of online amateur investors.

Wednesday’s drama ultimately ended with the price settling back down to $265 per share, but it’s hard to not feel déjà vu. It seems like it was only yesterday when everyone was watching in a mixture of shock, amusement, and general concern as GME crested $483 per share. The rise and fall doesn’t quite compare, but the losses for anyone who sold during Wednesday’s dip in price are likely huge.

A cybersecurity firm found that bots were promoting GameStop stock on social media before and after the stock’s frenzied rise last month, Reuters reported. Massachusetts-based PiiQ Media says social media bots promoted Dogecoin, GameStop, and other “meme” stocks in posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. The firm estimated that tens of thousands of bots participated, but it’s still unclear how much influence they had or didn’t have on the rise and fall of GME and other stocks.

Shares in GME skyrocketed in January as Reddit users on r/wallstreetbets rallied around the stock in an attempt to squeeze hedge funds that had bet against the video game company. PiiQ told Reuters it detected “patterns of artificial behavior” in GameStop-related posts just before the January 28th chaos through February 18th.

GameStop is up... again, by a lot. Before market close on Wednesday, the video game retailer’s shares started to soar, and GME just closed at $91.71 — up nearly 104 percent for the day.

It’s the highest the stock has been since it fell back down to Earth at the beginning of the month following the unprecedented, Reddit-fueled rally that sent it as high as $483 a share. Over the course of the afternoon, trading on the stock was halted twice.

GameStop CFO Jim Bell has resigned, and will be leaving the video game retailer for good on March 26th. That’s just over a month from now. GameStop also announced a “succession plan,” just in case it can’t immediately find anyone suitable to accelerate a mall-based video game retailer’s transformation into the post-pandemic future. We can only speculate on the reasons for his departure, but let’s just come out and say what everyone is thinking: STONKS!

It’s not like he had a falling-out with the company: “Mr. Bell’s resignation was not because of any disagreement with the Company on any matter relating to the Company’s operations, policies or practices, including accounting principles and practices,” writes GameStop in this SEC filing.

Weeks after Reddit community r/WallStreetBets shitposted GameStop stock up to more than $400 a share, the House Financial Services Committee pulled all of the major players in for questioning on Thursday. 

The hearing featured:

“Roaring Kitty,” also known as u/DeepFuckingValue on Reddit and Keith Patrick Gill in real life, is now the target of a lawsuit (which you can view below) that claims he manipulated the market to increase GameStop’s stock price.

The lawsuit claims that he created a “fake persona” of an investment newbie, while actually having several financial certifications and working for an insurance company. That company, Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company, is also named as a defendant, with the case saying that it should’ve prevented Gill from talking about the stock.

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, Robinhood co-CEO Vlad Tenev, and Keith Gill (aka Roaring Kitty) are all on the witness list for an upcoming hearing before the House Financial Services Committee, according to a release from Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D-CA). The hearing, to be conducted virtually, will probe the recent volatility in shares of GameStop following a rally fueled by a group of day traders active on the r/WallStreetBets Reddit board.

Over a two-week period that began last month, GameStop’s stock (GME) skyrocketed by 500 percent, hitting a high of $483 on January 28th. Several government entities are now looking into whether there was market manipulation involved, and whether Robinhood and other brokerages that temporarily restricted trading of GME were in compliance with federal regulations.

Okay, screenwriters, directors, authors, and production companies — we get it. You have some experience telling stories about Wall Street, the video game industry, or social networks, and you see some mighty big dollar signs in the true tale of how Reddit managed to drive an ailing video game retailer’s stocks to completely ridiculous highs through sheer power of will plus a David versus Goliath narrative that probably doesn’t hold up under close examination.

So you’re making movies — five of them — and two shows. Why not? It’s not like any one person has the rights to a news event like this!

You could have been forgiven for missing Reddit’s Super Bowl ad tonight — it was only five seconds long. The ad mostly consisted of a text message that would’ve been pretty difficult to read in the moment, claiming that the company spent its “entire marketing budget on five seconds of airtime.”

“One thing we learned from our communities last week is that underdogs can accomplish anything when they come together around a common idea,” Reddit says by way of explanation, in a clear nod to the GameStop stocks saga that was driven by posters on the r/WallStreetBets subreddit. “Who knows, maybe you’ll be the reason finance textbooks have to add a chapter on ‘tendies.’”

Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets has grown significantly due to the community’s role in driving up the stock prices of companies like GameStop, AMC, and Nokia, and the whole saga has garnered so much attention that there are currently many movies and a TV show in the works. But that increased attention has also put strain on the r/WallStreetBets community itself, forcing Reddit to step in to help sort things out.

The trouble started Wednesday night, according to The New York Times, as some r/WallStreetBets moderators talked with each other about trying to get a movie deal. On Thursday morning, “the WallStreetBets moderators who were considering the film deal began booting out other moderators who had questioned them for secretly trying to profit from the forum’s success,” reports The New York Times. A highly upvoted r/WallStreetBets post called the situation “a coup,” saying the moderators the community “know and love” were being tossed out.

Robinhood has finally lifted all the restrictions on WallStreetBets-fueled stocks like GameStop and AMC, according to a report on Friday from Reuters. The company currently lists no limits on its support document entitled “Changes due to ongoing market volatility,” whereas last week, there were 50-plus companies included on the list.

Robinhood’s decision to restrict buying certain stocks caused a firestorm of controversy, leading to harsh condemnations from major public figures and politicians and the app being review-bombed on both Android and iOS. For its part, Robinhood said it wasn’t shutting trades down on a matter of principle or due to any shady deals with hedge funds, but because it simply didn’t have enough cash to meet its regulatory requirements.

When GameStop’s stock price fell by over 50 percent on Tuesday, closing at $90, we weren’t sure if it was going to pick back up or keep going down. It seems we now have our answer, as GME is down another 41 percent, closing today at just $53.50.

That's less than the stock sold for the week before it took off on a wild rollercoaster ride induced by Reddit retail investors and an unprecedented social media frenzy. So it seems like we’re not so much in a dip, but on the long, slow ride back to the beginning.

It hasn’t been a good day for WallStreetBets, as GameStop’s stock has plummeted today. AMC, the community’s other bet, dropped as well. But unlike previous dips, the stocks don’t appear to be rallying. Prices stayed low for the entire trading day, something that hasn’t happened since WallStreetBets became a household name one week ago.

When the market closed today, the price of GameStop was $90 even, an 81 percent drop from GameStop’s peak at $483, and a 58 percent drop from its price of $218 on Friday evening. AMC is down too, closing today at $7.82, which is a 61 percent drop from its peak at $19.88.

It looks like we’ll be spoiled for choice when it comes to movies about the WallStreetBets / GameStop saga: Deadline is reporting that both MGM and Netflix have plans to make one, before the dust has even settled (via Kotaku and Polygon). If you weren't paying attention to the stock-spikes, short squeezes, and diamond hands that were going on last week, we have an explainer that should get you caught up on the big picture.

MGM’s version of the movie is set to based as a book that hasn’t yet been written. The author of that book is Ben Mezrich, who wrote The Accidental Billionaires, which was the basis for David Fincher’s 2010 movie The Social Network. Mezrich was apparently inspired by Fincher’s title, as he’s calling his new book The Antisocial Network.

Investment app Robinhood has plummeted back down to a one-star rating on Google Play, thanks to a flood of thousands of new negative reviews.

The latest low rating comes just days after Google salvaged the app’s rating by removing nearly 100,000 reviews, following a flood of negative ratings after the Robinhood blocked purchases of popular stocks from Reddit’s /r/WallStreetBets like GameStop or AMC last week. Google confirmed to The Verge at the time that it was actively removing negative reviews on the app.

Stock trading app Robinhood is facing dozens of lawsuits after the company restricted several stocks popular on the r/WallStreetBets subreddit. At least 30 parties across 10 states have sued the company in federal court, many seeking class action status. They allege that Robinhood users lost millions of dollars because they were unable to buy or sell stock during the freeze, and that the company chose to “manipulate the market” to help other financial institutions.

Robinhood, which bills itself as a democratizing force in the stock market, helped facilitate an unprecedented boom around a handful of “meme stocks” last month. But on January 28th, it infuriated users by freezing trades on several of these stocks. That included GameStop ($GME) as well as AMC ($AMC), BlackBerry ($BB), Bed Bath & Beyond ($BBBY), and Nokia ($NOK). The company defended the move in a blog post, calling it a “risk-management decision” undertaken in the face of “extraordinary circumstances.” The company denied reports that it had sold some users’ shares without permission.

Robinhood only wants users to have a limited number of shares of companies like GameStop, and that number keeps getting smaller and smaller. On Thursday, the company halted users’ ability to buy stocks that were associated with r/WallStreetBets, including GameStop, AMC, and Nokia, but the company promised that users would be able to buy limited quantities on Friday. Today, it released a shifting support document that details just how limited things are — and to slightly paraphrase Lando, the deal’s getting worse all the time.

When trading opened earlier today, users were limited to owning five shares of GameStop in aggregate, meaning they could only own up to five — if they already had three GameStop stocks, they could only buy two more — but even that restriction hasn’t lasted. Soon, the number of shares you could buy in GME dropped to two and then finally down to a single share. That’s right: you couldn’t buy more than one.

Robinhood has started restricting trading in cryptocurrencies this morning, just as the price of joke cryptocurrency Dogecoin has soared more than 300 percent in 24 hours. CNBC reports that Robinhood users started noticing instant deposits for cryptocurrencies were no longer working on Friday morning, and the company has confirmed it has put restrictions in place.

“Due to extraordinary market conditions, we’ve temporarily turned off Instant buying power for crypto,” says a Robinhood spokesperson in a statement to CNBC. “Customers can still use settled funds to buy crypto. We’ll keep monitoring market conditions and communicating with our customers.”

Jon Stewart has just joined Twitter, and is now the proud owner of a verified account. And, of course, his first tweet was about the redditors on r/WallStreetBets and their stonks.

While it may be the first time he’s made an appearance on Twitter, Stewart is already fitting right in — with a profile picture that’s not actually of him, but a dog.

No, Robinhood tells The Verge, it didn’t sell off full shares of GameStop, AMC, and other buzzy stocks without permission from its traders.

That contradicts the stories of twelve people who spoke with The Verge, saying that the app unexpectedly sold off their holdings in some of these companies. Quite a number of Robinhood users expressed their surprise on social media today that the app was selling off their stakes, and we tracked down a dozen of them. These traders didn’t believe they had prompted the sales, and they said they weren’t aware of anything on their account that would have automatically triggered them.

Google is actively removing negative reviews of the Robinhood app from the Google Play Store, the company confirmed to The Verge. After some disgruntled Robinhood users organized campaigns to give the app a one-star review on Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store — and succeeded in review-bombing it all the way down to a one-star rating — the company has now deleted enough reviews to bring it back up to nearly four stars.

Robinhood came under intense scrutiny on Thursday, after the stock trading app announced it would block purchases of GameStop, AMC, and other stocks made popular by the r/WallStreetBets subreddit, and some users have already replaced their deleted one-star reviews with new ones to make their anger heard.

Robinhood has announced that, beginning on Friday, January 29th, it will allow “limited buys” on restricted stocks, potentially signaling the end of a brutal day-long hold on GameStop, AMC, BlackBerry, Nokia, and other stocks.

“Starting tomorrow, we plan to allow limited buys of these securities,” the company said in a blog post. “We’ll continue to monitor the situation and may make adjustments as needed.” The company’s statement does not elaborate on how limited purchases will be for GameStop and the other restricted stocks.