'Itâs not investing, itâs insanity: Wall Street vs Reddit
By Reuters
By Svea Herbst-Bayliss and Maiya Keidan
New York - On three hours of sleep a night and with no time to eat, one New York-based hedge fund manager overseeing billions in assets called last week the most stressful of his life.
"Nothing was making sense anymore," he said, as he watched the stock of GameStop Corp soar, while he bet it would fall.
Wednesday was the worst. Fueled by chatter on Reddit and other social media to take on Wall Street, investors used venues like online trading app Robinhood to bid up the brick-and-mortar retailer. GameStop surged 135%, on its way to gaining more than 1,500% in January without any change in its business outlook. Hedge funds scrambled. By this point trading had become so unpredictable across all sectors that funds were forced to dump their winning stocks to balance out their portfolios.