Certainly, but in this case, someone has used that vibe, energy and tactics for something much less destructive (to anyone that matters). IMHO that feeding frenzy is most likely apolitical, like any other tool it can be used for good or bad purposes?
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It’s the feeding frenzies themselves that can be scary. Until the other day, I’d never even heard of WSB, then it suddenly blows up into national news.
Then again, I only visit Reddit in private mode when searching for something or when an interesting thread gets pointed out. But even if I was a Reddit regular, it’s likely I’d not have heard of it until it blew up.
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Well it can seem like that once you get into the weeds of the various levels of abstraction that get stuck on top but as the graphic shows, at heart it is fairly straightforward.
If it helps make it more concrete, imagine you think you have good reason to know that the price of, I dunno, chickpeas is about to drop. Let’s say it’s currently $10/tonne.
You know a guy who has a bunch of chickpeas which he’s not using at the moment but will want later.
You borrow a tonne of chickpeas from him on the basis that you’ll give him back a tonne of chickpeas plus $1 in a week’s time.
You sell the chickpeas for $10. And wait and hope that the price does fall. It does! Yay. You buy chickpeas at $5 a tonne.
You hand over a tonne of chickpeas and a dollar to your buddy at the end of the week and pocket your $4 profit. (And wait for the tax man).
The abstractions come in when people realise that you don’t actually need to physically shift chickpeas from A to B in this process or even actually transfer legal ownership, or, etc., etc…
Well, they have options on a number of bootstraps but those haven’t hit their trigger points yet.
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I can tell you that I hang out there, and my vibe, energy and tactics are elevated just like the over 50k I’ve made so far this year because of trades I’ve made, thanks in large part to wsb.
The wsb people want to make money. Lots that have donate regularly to awesome causes. Don’t fall for the external narrative.
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As you probably know, that’s exactly where futures trades and similar derivatives originated: farmers and buyers trying to reduce uncertainties by “locking in” the sales of future crops. 
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There are browser addons that put up a warning flag about anyone with a history of posting on those subreddits (among others). I wasn’t seeing much when I had a quick look, probably fewer warnings than on some of the gaming subreddits.
I’m still going to be cautious around this, while there are some left wing people involved the majority don’t feel like they are left. Soc-Libs and angry lower case libertarians, maybe.
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I expect there are margin calls. When you borrow $100 worth of stock you have to put up some collateral just like any loan. If the stock goes up, the brokerage is going to tell you to put up more collateral.
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This, plus there is a cost involved in borrowing the shares. This is usually small, but with such a large demand for shorting this share, the price of borrowing them has risen. This, combined with the fact that the /r/wallstreetbets crowd are telling their brokers not to allow their shares to be lent for shorting means that there’s an ongoing cost for the hedge fund to stay short, beyond the cost of margin, which means that the longer this goes on, the more cash they’ll bleed.
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What an excellent video. I learned a great deal. Thanks for the link, Paul_S
I bought some shares of AMC, and then I emailed their investor relations team to say that I, as a new shareholder, would like to see them give stock to their employees who can’t make ends meet due to the COVID crisis.
Pissing match aside, if we own these companies, we ought to be able to force them to be good. People are just ignoring the fact that owning these shares comes with some agency and ability to affect change, beyond screwing the hedgefunds.
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