Retail traders on Reddit's r/wallstreetbets had a simple buy-and-hold strategy for an overleveraged short position on GameStop held by Melvin Capital — until Wall Street shut it down.This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
Unemployment skyrocketed, families' houses were foreclosed on, pensions were decimated, and the middle class was suddenly forced to scrape by just to feed their families. To add insult to injury, the federal government awarded these same banks $700 billion dollars of taxpayer money because they were"too big to fail."
None of what I was witnessing made any sense to me, so I decided to dedicate the next four years of my life to studying money. Additionally, I became disillusioned with institutional finance because of direct contact with some of the people intimately involved in it. I remember thinking that a particular adjunct professor whose day job was as a regional bank president could also do very well selling snake oil. Of course I met plenty of honest, hard working people during my time in school, but there was a distinctly distasteful aspect of what I was seeing overall.
Millions of regular working Americans across all demographics found some solace in learning that they could potentially take on and beat Wall Street at their own game. What started as a bunch of motley internet retail traders YOLO-ing calls on a meme stock, became de facto class warfare. Melvin Capital became Wall Street in effigy. The common man, battered by years of exploitation and told to simply suck it up, had finally pinned their bully.
One of these days I’ll see one of these articles click on it and be able to read without paying for it.