This morning, my 100 stocks in AMC went from being worth $200 to being worth $2000. Nothing about AMC theater's business model or current financial situation improved. 1/11

The stock took off because a horde of individual investors on Reddit decided to troll investment firms by finding stocks they had shorted (bet against) and dumping $$ into those stocks, causing the firms to be squeezed out of their shorted positions and lose a lot of money. 2/11

I'm nowhere near qualified enough to talk about the technicalities, but I find it unsettling and weirdly spectacular that platforms like Reddit and Twitter can be used to channel a mob of people into ... weaponized economic populism? ... guerrilla stock warfare? 3/11

I get that it's popular to steal from the rich and give to the poor, so in some sense, peasants gaming the stock market to benefit feels justified. But as with all things, it's not that simple. 4/11

While some of this may have sprung up organically from "the people," I've seen some very not-peasant people (like Elon Musk) pushing for these kinds of moves, and it makes me dubious. It feels like smart people playing chess with less-smart people's money. 5/11

Many of these investors manage someone else's money. Pumping and dumping might hit the billionaire in the wallet, but you also might be cutting off a branch that has a lot of other vulnerable people sitting on it. 6/11

Put plainly: 7 hedge funds in particular have collectively seen $7.3 billion in paper wealth wiped out through their shorts on $GME. 7/11

Just a few of the LLP's affected:

--California Teachers' Retirement System
--Arizona State Retirement System
--Rhode Island Investment Commission
--Louisiana State Employees Retirement Trust
--New York State Common Retirement Fund

8/11

Sure, it's a bad idea to risk retirement money with a short, but that position was grounded in some reality (most Game Stops are closed, people are mostly buying games online, etc.) and it sucks to have it tanked for no other reason than to hurt your position. 9/11

In other words, the losses will certainly be felt by the super rich managing the funds, but there are most likely going to be a lot of people clearly *not* in that category that will bear the brunt of this. 10/11

I'm still doing a lot of reading and thinking about all of this — it's all wildly complex. I will say, though, that the more our financial systems work by profiting off someone losing something, the less I like that kind of world. 11/11