Day traders in a Reddit community are flexing their power on the market as they appear to be winning a fight with major short sellers such as Citron Research over Gamestop, a video game retailer, reported Bloomberg. The retailer deals primarily in physical game media (e.g. discs and cartridges) in an age when most people are downloading their games directly, and it is generally found in shopping malls, which have been struggling for years. Given these two facts, short sellers from venerable Wall Street firms began shorting the stock in the belief it was overvalued.

Reddit's r/WallStreetBets community, however, pushed back against that position under the belief that the new CEO could turn things around. Well, at least that's why some people thought it would be a good buy. Those trading on fundamentals seem to be outnumbered by those who are buying the stock simply because they have an emotional attachment to the company or, according to a Bloomberg opinion article, out of spite. Retail investors generally have an adversarial relationship with short sellers as the former want a stock to go up while the latter wants it to go down. Many on the Reddit forum seem to be trading not to make money for themselves but to make short sellers lose money, and not as part of some grand strategy but because they think it's fun to hurt the short sellers.

This has seemed to work. The short sellers who bet against the company (which is not expected to turn a profit until at least 2023) have lost more than $6 billion so far as they desperately try to tell people to look at the fundamentals, such as valuations, only to be met with literal "LOLs" from the Reddit community, where the traders have very different motivations. Andrew Left, a prominent short seller who has suffered major losses due to the trades, said he was astounded by their reasoning, which is mostly unmoored from the traditional reasons people trade a stock. Bloomberg believes this is evidence of a growing nihilism in the investment community, where the company itself doesn't really matter as much as the flow of capital in and out of it. Whether  a company is good is less important than how much money one can get from buying and selling its stock. When people are pouring into a company regardless of its merit, stock valuation and company health become decoupled.