For the past week, Reddit's r / WallStreetBets community has been the center of an epic war between major Wall Street investors and little social media know-it-alls. On Wednesday night, the community wavered from seeing the subreddit locked and hidden, only to be republished about an hour later. Meanwhile, the Discord chat app has completely banned WallStreetBets.
At the same time ghostly investors appeared to be losing GameStop and AMC stock, which the community had bought out to attract people to bet against the company's future.
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Then, as suddenly as it all began, the subreddit came back, a new Discord community was formed, and others bought into the stocks and sent AMC and GameStop prices up again.
OKAY.
If this is all confusing, don't feel bad. These quick and dramatic moves take place in the midst of one of the most dramatic weeks on Wall Street in years. At stake are millions of dollars made by retail investors working together on social media as they face Wall Street investors betting on GameStop and AMC stocks to fall. Instead, Wall Street investors reportedly suffered billions of dollars as stocks of the two companies rose.
As the drama of the Discord ban and the Reddit community lockdown unfolded, GameStop stock fell 32% after close of trading on Wednesday, to $ 218.32 per share, compared to $ 347.51 at close of trade. During the day they had more than doubled. AMC shares also fell, falling more than 40% to $ 11.90 per share after closing at $ 19.90. This stock was up more than 301% during the day.
Both stocks have bounced back a bit and the r / WallStreetBets community is back. If it would have taken you an hour and a half to see Pixar's new movie Soul, you would have missed it.
Although GameStop stocks have risen sharply in the past few days, analysts and experts say they are doing so because of quirks in the market and not because of the actual increased value to the struggling video game retailer. The same applies to the cinema chain AMC, which warned of bankruptcy late last year.
All of this wasn't the only bad news for the WallStreetBets community. The worst community members, who repeatedly violated Discord's rules, resulted in the group being banned from the platform, the chat app company said in a statement. "Today we decided to remove the server and its owner from Discord in order to continue allowing hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings," said Discord. The ban has nothing to do with talk of finance or stocks that took place among WallStreetBets users.
Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO who helped draw attention to the GameStop stock madness, tweeted his disappointment with Discord Wednesday.