Reddit is sending AMC, GameStop stock to the moon. Here's how

At one point, the Reddit users from the forum r/WallStreetBets sent the stock up more than 14,300% (you read that right), though it's gone through wild fluctuations. They've spread their strategy to struggling movie chain AMC, and tech company BlackBerry, too. In their wake, these online market players have upended Wall Street. It's not just big-time investors losing billions of dollars though. There's endless memes, app trading disasters and weird internet lingo (like calling stocks "stonks").

It's a crazy story, complete with cameos by Tesla CEO Elon Musk and CNBC financial commentator and former hedge fund manager Jim Cramer. There's even Michael Burry, one of the subjects of the book and movie https://www.amazon.com/Big-Short-Inside-Doomsday-Machine/dp/0393338827?tag=cnet-buy-button-20&ascsubtag=bbd02433-529e-4f93-9148-a1b8be0cbaa2%7Cf15b6610-64d6-11eb-b613-77992fd48a20%7Cdtp%7Cu s" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" data-omitnoreferrer="" data-component="leadsTracker" data-leads-tracker-options="{"numNodes":1,"trackingData":{"asid":"","assetguid":"bbd02433-529e-4f93-9148-a1b8be0cbaa2","contype":"review","destUrl":"https:\/\/assoc-redirect.amazon.com\/g\/r\/https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Big-Short-Inside-Doomsday-Machine\/dp\/0393338827?tag=cnet-buy-button-20&ascsubtag=bbd02433-529e-4f93-9148-a1b8be0cbaa2%7C___VIEW_GUID___%7Cdtp%7Cus","devicetype":"desktop","ctype":"cpc","leadcpc":"","ltype":"manual","merid":"","merchantName":"","pagetype":"","pid":"","rsid":"cbsicnetglobalsite","siteid":"1","topic":"","ttag":"","viewguid":"","event":"","_destCat":"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Big-Short-Inside-Doomsday-Machine\/dp\/0393338827?tag=cnet-buy-button-20&ascsubtag=fd16d4fc-e741-4308-9151-2244ef99f4a3%7Caeebe890-610c-11eb-a54b-2733f9322269%7Cdtp%7Cus"}}" data-shortcode="reddit-is-sending-amc-gamestop-stock-stonk-to-the-moon-heres-how">The Big Short, who happens to be a prominent investor in GameStop. 

Even Silicon Valley found a way to get in the middle of this mess. It's wild.

Now playing: What does GameStop's skyrocketing stock have to do with...

 10:15

Despite the move being characterized as "insane" and a "Ponzi scheme," GameStop's stock has become the theater for a war between Wall Street and internet traders. Nearly everyone nearly all of them expecting it to fail. The questions are when, and who will be on the losing end when it does.

"We're seeing a phenomenon that I have never seen," Jim Cramer, a Wall Street commentator on CNBC and a former hedge fund manager, said during a segment as GameStock's stock began rocketing up. And GameStop could be just the start. "It's insane."

It all started last week, when posters on the Reddit stock trading chat community r/WallStreetBets pushed up shares in the struggling game retailer. With much of Wall Street betting against GameStop's success, r/WallStreetBets investors believed they could force a market rally by creating demand where there had been little before.

As a result, GameStop stock jumped more than 822%, from $17.25 per share at the beginning of the year to a high of $159.18 on Jan. 25. The next day, it dropped by nearly half, only to rise back up. And then Elon Musk tweeted about it to his 43 million followers (using that weird internet vocabulary, of course), and the price jumped 40%. 

Later that week, the stock jumped even higher, to $483 per share, before halving again. Amid all the chaos, the stock market temporarily halted GameStop share trading more than a dozen times some days because share price moves were wildly swinging by large amounts. 

https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/reddit-is-sending-amc-gamestop-stock-stonk-to-the-moon-heres-how/