A couple of weeks ago we explained here how people on Reddit (R/WallStreetBets) realized they could short squeeze those who bet against (shorted) GameStop - effectively making corporate hedge funds like Wallstreet and Citadel lose millions of dollars. This is the same incident where Robinhood, a platform for retail investors to trade, shut down the trading of public stock thus attempting to manipulate the market. There were also reports of Robinhood reloading some shorts before shutting down trading.
WallStreetBets is back for round two. GME (GameStop) opening 180% higher on Thursday after more than doubling on Wednesday. On Thursday, the stock opened at roughly $170, up from a closing price of $92 on Wednesday, before calming down to around $147 in afternoon trading.
On Wednesday, investor Ryan Cohen, who's a major shareholder of GameStop, founder of Chewy.com and is also one of the reasons this short squeeze was possible (three main reasons Redditors realized they could drive up price: new console gen, new investors, GameStop signed a deal with Microsoft), tweeted a picture of a McDonald's ice-cream cone with the caption being purely a frog emoji. Some people believed that this was a cryptic message that Cohen would fix GameStop's business, the same way McDonald's fixed their ice-cream machines.
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