[Ads-l] meme stock

ADSGarson O'Toole adsgarsonotoole at GMAIL.COM
Wed Jan 27 11:14:22 UTC 2021


The term "meme stock" refers to a stock that is undergoing rapid price
fluctuation because a group of investors on a communication forum are
encouraging one another to purchase the stock or to purchase options
on the stock. This is not a full definition.

The current meme stock is GameStop which is one of the most heavily
shorted stocks on Wall Street. That is one of the reasons it was
targeted. The result has been a spectacular short squeeze as the price
has rocketed upward. Business insider asserts that "GameStop
short-sellers lost $1.6 billion in a single day".

The author Surowieck notes that the manipulation might be viewed as an
"internet-mediated version of the 'bull raids' that were
characteristic of the stock market in the early 20th century".

Article title: The GameStop Fiasco Proves We’re in a ‘Meme Stock’ Bubble
Article subtitle: What the new dynamic between Redditors and Wall
Street reveals about the stock market in 2021
Author: James Surowieck
Date: January 26, 2021

[Begin excerpt]
It isn’t GameStop’s precipitous rise, impressive as that’s been, that
has everyone fascinated. Instead, it’s what fueling that rise:
concentrated buying by thousands upon thousands of small individual
investors who are using sites like Reddit and Robinhood to drive up
what are now being called “meme stocks.”
[End excerpt]

[Begin excerpt]
Instead, what meme stocks all have in common is that they start off
with a cheap stock price and a relatively low market cap, and they’re
heavily shorted, meaning that hedge-fund managers are betting that
these stocks are going to fall. (GameStop, for instance, was and still
is one of the most heavily shorted stocks on Wall Street.)
[End excerpt]

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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