I was trying hard to find a way to write an explanation of the crazy stock market thing that happened with Game Stop and hedge funds and Reddit.  But the reality is I don’t really understand how it worked.  Corporate Finance was a class I hated when I took it.  It’s really complicated and somehow the Reddit people caused the hedge fund people to lose a lot of money.  The hedge fund people were trying to make money by betting on the failure of Game Stop.  And the Reddit people ganged up on the hedge fund people and drove the price of the stock up by buying a lot of it, which made the hedge fund people lose a lot of money because Game Stop stock went up instead of down.  I don’t really understand the details of it beyond that.  But it seems like the hedge fund people were mean to Game Stop because they were rooting for the stock to fail.  And the Reddit people were mean to the hedge fund people because they orchestrated this attack to cause the hedge funds to fail.  Who wins?  Only the 10 year old kid who sold his shares of Game Stock when the price was really high.

The whole story makes me worry a little bit.  My retirement savings is mostly in stock investments.  It’s frightening that this sort of planned attack can work.  Are my savings (and the savings of nearly all Americans saving for retirement) at risk?  Will something like this happen again?  Why are investors betting on failure?  Why can’t we all just get along?

As the weird year that is 2021 continues, I guess we just have to buckle our seatbelts and hope for the best.  I wonder what February will bring?  Yes….it’s really only early February….