How social media rose a share price by 1,600%

When memes go mainstream.

Reddit is a community of 330,000,000 users. Majority of them being memers, trolls, and joke-artists; and a minority of intellectuals. This community has now officially moved out of defining what social media trends are to forming Stock Market shifts.

Reddit has a community called gamers; these are people who play video games as their life support. Gaming is everything for them, and supporting their fellow gamers is their duty. A company called GameStop- a gaming retail shop based in the U.S. caught this community's attention. Due to the increasing popularity of online buying and the pandemic, the company started to face significant losses in their market share. As the gamers support one and other, they came strong here.

Since March 2019 these Reddit users have been on a platform called r/WallStreetBets (an online shares discussion platform on Reddit)- where they started discussing the GameStop shares as a meme. However, this meme from 2019 has grown so strong that people actually started investing in GameStop shares.

People starting looking at the r/WallStreetBets forum and began to buy in on the joke; and now out of pure meme they have risen the GameStop share's value by 1,600% and in the past week, the GameStop share trade value has been higher than Google, Tesla, Apple and Microsoft. What started as a joke took GameStop's shares from $17 to $350 overnight.

However, it was just a meme- the GameStop share has already started falling in value. But, this is not good news for the majority of the investors out there. Investors focus on news, projections, stats and other mediums to make their decisions- but when a community raises a stock for 'fun' that deteriorates the whole investment practice itself.

What has happened now is that the Reddit Users liked this joke, but the professional users are not in on the joke. They have gone forward to restrict the trading of GameStop shares as the firm does not hold enough collateral and is probably going to go through a crisis situation as its shares' volatility rises. This has sparked a cry in the Reddit community, but is the decision made to ensure that trades happening based on the funds acquired by the GameStop trades do not collapse in the future.

This can mean that the future of investments will have to focus on social media trends- or it can mean that discussing shares on social media will be banned or limited. The future is unknown, but one thing is for sure that- Gamers Rose Up.