wallstreet thought gamestop was going to fail, so they bascially bet against the company's price. reddit was like haha fuck you, and started hoarding stocks en masse. the fact that they didnt sell off the stocks drove the price up, and so wallstreet is losing fuck tons of money

And now wall street wants the trading of stocks to be paused and litigation passed to stop this again. The same people claiming they love a free market, whining when it bites them.

"no, it's only a bad thing when the poor people maniplate the markets, not when we do it!"

how do they bet against the company's price? And what's a hedgefund?

honestly i did not pay attention when we went over this in accounting 130

They "borrow" stocks from other people that they can sell. Then make a contract to buy it from those they borrowed it from at a certain date at whatever the price is at that time. They bet the price would go down and they would make money, but hoarders are making the opposite happen.

An investor borrows a stock, sells the stock, and then buys the stock back to return it to the lender.... so say I borrow the stock and sell it for $50, if it goes down to $30, I pay back the $30 + interest to lender, then pocket the difference. If a bubble forms, where a stocks price gets insanely high, and it looks like it's going to crash, short selling is one way to go.

They think only they can manipulate the stock market. I love it.

So what's short selling?

Short selling is the term for everything funkmasterrex said: borrow and sell high, buy back cheap, give the stock back.

Ahaaa

a hedge fund is just people pooling their capital and doing stuff like this, usually high-risk/high-reward "investments". It's hard to call it an investment when there is mass manipulation and the stock can get sold and bought a couple thousand times a day by computers due to the smallest of fluctuations.