Oops, meant to include this in my comment to you
@Detroitgator.
It's a "$17 stock" because... you f***ing a-holes shorted it 140% of the total existing stocks.
That's what outrageous. They're literally trying to say its worth whatever they say it is, and working overtime to prohibit any other buyers from offering contradictory opinions with their own dollars.
Nothing in existence has tangible value. The entire principle of a market is that a thing is worth what a person will pay for it. Do I think it's preposterous people buy a Beanie baby with a mispelled tag for $100,000? I sure do, but because someone will pay 100k for it, that's what it's worth.
It doesn't matter why someone wants the stock. If they want it, the price goes higher. That's it. GameStop is worth whatever people will pay for it. End of story.
Maybe I want to buy 100 shares and print out my certificate of ownership and hang it on some wall in my garage with an altar to the almighty God of Videogames and derive catharsis and pleasure from my symbolic ownership of a small piece of His Divine Body.
Melvin's CEO bought the most expensive house in America. 100 million dollars. For a place he almost certainly barely ever sees.
Is that a completely idiotic thing to do? Is that bunch of drywall and plaster that he won't even habitate worth $100 million dollars?
I sure don't think so. He could have built a hospital or a school or a giant lake to store all his tears in, but he bought what he wanted, because he wanted it, because he had a bunch of paper that someone else agreed was worth his overpriced house.
What, am I not allowed, if I have the money, to buy a failing business and restore it, regardless of whether or not it will thrive? Its their money. There's no immutable truth to the value of a business. The entire marketplace floats on faith. Faith tomorrow will be better than today. Faith that a business will build cooler things tomorrow than they do today. No one has any clue for real. Certainly not these aholes with supercomputers and Ivy-lead quantheads.
Because if they did know better, they wouldn't have gotten f***ed with their pants down by a message board.
A chess grandmaster never loses a game to an idiot. It just doesn't happen, in a pure vaccuum. There's no factor of luck involved. The master is magnitudes better than the idiot and there's no moves the idiot can make that the master will be unable to see coming and unable to combat.
But Melvin did get crushed. By a guy with a laptop posting his thesis on WSB. So Melvin's not a grandmaster. They just make their own luck by owning the gameboard and pretending like its all because of how clever they are.
If a bunch of idiots with phones and a couple bucks can upend the entire system by exploiting a catastrophically stupid series of bets by billion dollar companies with potentially infinite losses, then maybe they don't have any clue what any company is really worth either.
Remember these are the same idiots who shorted Tesla for years. And the cars are still cool, the spaceships still go vroom, and the owner is the world's richest man.
So maybe, just maybe, these people are just as stupid as everyone else, but with a lot more money in one bank account to be stupid with.
