If you’ve been paying any attention to the Robin Hood (the real one, not the app) movie that is playing out under the GME ticker in the last week or so, you seem to have been asking yourself: if a bunch of Redditors can catch a GED, a distraction will hamper the path of the stock market and bring hedge fund managers down in a few days. many tweets and upvoting, what else can they accomplish? Could they, perhaps, change the financial world in a way that far exceeds the market potential of GameStop? Let’s go back. if you which is not on paying attention to Reddit’s post on Wall Street, here’s what happened soon: short-term traders on the subreddit r / wallstreetbets have hobbyed to stockpile some select companies buy, creating a phenomenon now known as meme stocks. . In the past few weeks, meme stocks have gone from being an internet within a joke to reaching headlines around the world while subreddit users were come together to buy stocks in the sick video game vendor GameStop, knowing that many hedge funds had shortened GME. The idea was to be inflate the value of the stock of GameStop to such an extent that these hedge funds would suffer a major blow and would have to sell at a higher price to mitigate the damage. And it worked amazingly well – for a while. GameStop stock value rose by a whopping 1,600% before coming back down.
Related: Rally oil prices are a headache for airlines
But while the GameStop rally did not survive (though cut short to some extent by a trade freeze introduced by the popular amateur trading app Robinhood), the story still captures the public’s imagination. There’s every grip of the David-versus-Goliath empowerment story that you can’t help but love. And it raises all sorts of essential questions about the volatile and volatile nature of the stock market and financial instruments that have never been faster in a time when so many people are unemployed and struggling to meet when the stock market continues to rise, and rise, and rise. In the United States only, 8 million people have fallen below the poverty line from the summer at the same time that the “A high stock market has created a club of centibillionaires. ”
So it’s no surprise that many of those watching the s / r / wallstreetbets saga want to know what’s to come, and whether the next target could be something a little more influential than a source the video game going out of business at a location near you. Already, Redditors have focused their attention on AMC and then on something a little more visible by pushing up the value for money. Already, the wild exchanges seen in the case of GameStop and, to a lesser extent, AMC are going off. Although reinvestment investors managed to cut the price of money by 11.5 per cent to reach an all-time high in eight years, the rising power and the horrors of it did not last. the earlier stock meme. Related: Canadian Oil and Gas Applications Surrender 468%
This is not to say, however, that something like GameStop could not happen again, and happen any longer – and many people hope that this is the case. This week one such person wrote into Christ’s environmental news media to ask if stock meme campaigners could use the power for good to promote clean energy stocks. It’s a good question, especially when you consider that there are so many Redditors bullish on clean energy stocks. The answerAs you might expect, there are 1,300 words of “it’s complicated.” For one thing, unlike Gamestop or AMC, most renewable energy companies are not shortened. In fact, they are doing well on their own. And then there’s the fact that Wall Street isn’t real life – GameStop has proven that quite well. Investing in climate initiatives and increasing the value of BlackRock’s clean energy ETF is not the same as advancing clean energy initiatives. “I’m not arguing that money doesn’t matter;” Christ’s Clayton Aldern wrote to the green stock questioner, “instead, Reddit may not save the day on climate change by taking over a guerrilla of the New York Stock Exchange trading floor. A new green contract (whatever form it may take) comes with a higher price tag than, you know, a Bed & Beyond Bed market cap. ”
But, by all means, consumers of r / wallstreetbets would do well to keep buying into renewable energy stocks. Even if their actions are not a means of combating climate change, they certainly will make money for them. And the old adage is true that we are, to some extent, voting with our dollar. Buying into clean energy en masse and making renewables the new meme stocks could send a strong and timely message to the wider market.
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com
More top readings from Oilprice.com: