I wouldn't call it a conspiracy theory or call this out as an example of Occam's razor.
> Collectively they can, and did, cause this.. no need to invent other actors to explain it.
The thing is, people imagine this requires a lot of capital to pull off. How did WSB get so many people to invest so much into GME as to hit a hedge fund so hard? Do so many people really have that much money just to throw away? There is a need to explain this, and inventing other big actors does explain this much better for people.
As I noted in a similar thread a couple days ago..
When all of this started last fall, the price was bouncing between $5-10. Therefore, with as little as $500 (aka less than a stimulus check), you get 50-100 shares. Even as recently as ~3 weeks ago, it was $20-25/share. It cost more to buy in but still within reach for all but the smallest investors.
And that's not considering the options side.
As of the 19th (aka 12 days ago), you could still buy $35 calls for $12 with a Feb 19th expiration. That $1200 is worth upwards of $12-15k now.
Now multiply any of those by a couple hundred thousand investors, some with much more to put in.. and we still haven't touched the medium, let alone the BIG players.
number of shares shouldn't matter much though. especially now that all these brokerages offer fractional shares. I guess it does matter a little more for options since those lots are bigger and fixed.
I mean the WSB user count has grown from 2.2m on Monday to now 7.5m. If 5 million of those users all bought $100 worth of GME that's half a billion, if they bought $1000, that's 5 billion.
On average I don't think $100 is that crazy. Most haven't YOLO-ed anything. While many YOLO-ed for 1-2 shares, there are many who have YOLO-ed for thousands to tens of thousands of dollars.
I'll also add that tons of people I know who have never traded in the markets woke up Tuesday and Wednesday and decided to buy a single share for the lulz. I'm fairly convinced 70% of the volume may have been due to retail.
Over 700 million shares were traded last week, so even if every WSB user bought 10 shares, that wouldn't account for close to a majority of the activity.
Volume is meaningless, as the same share might be traded back and forth several times, e.g HFT or order flow buyers flipping stocks within microseconds.
Would HFT traders flip a stock 10 times among each other just to fulfill a single Redditor's buy order? (Honest question, I don't know enough about standard HFT practices to confidently guess.)
Reddit users would be an amount of the capital in the GME situation, but far from the majority.
There's a huge amount of other hedge funds who actually control the vast majority of the capital screwing over Melvin at the moment. This whole scenario is hedge funds making money off of other hedge funds and a bunch of retail investors making a small amount but risking huge amounts when GME inevitably collapses.
> Collectively they can, and did, cause this.. no need to invent other actors to explain it.
The thing is, people imagine this requires a lot of capital to pull off. How did WSB get so many people to invest so much into GME as to hit a hedge fund so hard? Do so many people really have that much money just to throw away? There is a need to explain this, and inventing other big actors does explain this much better for people.