Reddit Retail Revolt As Investment War Ignites
What a crazy first month of 2021 it was. We’ll quickly go over a few highlights before hitting you with our usual rundown of this week’s most important trading events.
GameStop caught in the cross-fire
In case you missed it, last week was a fire-cracker!
Wall Street investors have never had a lot of love for video game retailer, GameStop. For years it’s been one of the most heavily bet-against stocks on the market.
Yet, more recently, a gang of Reddit users from a board called r/WallStreetBets have been buying up shares, slowly pushing up GameStop’s value and making Wall Street’s big bets look very silly indeed.
As more Redditors jumped on the bandwagon, GameStop’s value soared and Wall Street’s bad bets started to cost investors billions of dollars.
GME stock jumped from 18.84 USD on New Year’s Eve to 347.51 USD just 3 weeks later. A ridiculously impressive rise of 1,744.53%.
GME, 6 months
Source: Google
These forum users have almost single-handedly, and quite emphatically, stalled Wall Street, creating a real-life drama that’s trumped big-time investors.
We say almost single-handedly because they had a bit of celebrity help, too.
Enter Elon.
Musk electrifies the situation
Things were already pretty highly-charged, but the world’s richest man decided to send a few shockwaves himself.
Source: Twitter
Musk has been having quite a bit of fun on Twitter lately. Earlier in January, he ambiguously tweeted the words “use signal”. Musk was referring to Signal, the encrypted messaging service and app, a potential alternative to WhatsApp.
However, some not-so-savvy investors jumped on his words and invested a LOT of cash in Signal Advance, an obscure technology component manufacturing company, completely unrelated to either Musk or the Signal app that he was referring to.
At its peak, the wrong company’s stock had soared a mind-boggling 6,350%. Wow.
Source: Google
He did it again on Friday, too. Mysteriously adding “#Bitcoin” to his Twitter bio, sending the King of Cryptocurrencies flying almost 17%. Quite impressive for a single word in a man’s Twitter bio, even if that man is the richest in the world.
Source: Coinmarketcap
This new kind of gang-trading has been a bit of a theme for a while now. 2020 shocked us in many ways[1] but day traders buying up things that they weren’t supposed to and upsetting the traditional status quo, was definitely a highlight.
It’ll be interesting to see how long this trend continues. As for Elon, what next?
What’s going on this week?
There’s a bit of something for everyone, this week. We highly recommend keeping an eye on the following events.
Monday 1st February
● USD — Markit Manufacturing PMI Final (JAN) + ISM Manufacturing PMI (JAN)
Tuesday 2nd February
● AUD — RBA Interest Rate Decision
● EUR — GDP Growth Rate QoQ + YoY Flash (Q4)
● NZD — Employment Change QoQ (Q4) + Unemployment Rate (Q4)
Wednesday 3rd February
● EUR — Core Inflation Rate YoY Flash (JAN)
Thursday 4th February
● GBP — Bank of England Interest Rate Decision
Friday 5th February
● CAD — Balance of Trade (DEC) + Employment Change (JAN) + Unemployment Rate (JAN)
● USD — Non Farm Payrolls (JAN) + Unemployment Rate (JAN)
Here at Contentworks we closely follow market movements and prep content that we think your traders would love to read. Let’s get you started right here.
Speak soon,
The Contentworks team
Link to 2020 review post.
