So here is a simple thread explaining the GameStop controversy. First we must understand that shares mean ownership of a company. People buy and sell shares in the financial market.

So if I buy 100 shares from apple, I am now a part owner of apple but I own a very very tiny part of the company. Prices of shares are determined like prices of other products. Demand and supply,

Now you should also know that people like you and I don’t really buy shares because we want to own apple and be making decisions in the company. Mostly we gamble with shares. That is, we buy shares in the hopes that the price will rise so we can sell and make a profit.

So if I spend 100 naira on shares and my shares appreciate to say 200 naira, I can sell it to someone else and make a 100 naira gain. Simple. But we need to know how demand and supply pulls the price of shares and how it sends panic in the financial market.

People don’t just invest 100 naira in shares. They invest huge sums of money and they watch the prices of their investment carefully like a gambler watches livescore. No body wants to lose his investment.

If the company is likely to do well and turn in a profit, most people will want to buy the company shares and those that have the shares will not really want to sell. So the higher demand will cause the price to go up.

Oh I forgot. Share owners actually get dividends (profit from the company) but that’s a story for another day.
Back to our buying and selling shares lesson. If the company is looking like it’s going to fail, share owners will be looking to sell.

People don’t really want to buy the shares of a company that is failing and so the price will go down because supply is exceeding demand. It’s like your everyday product. Now it gets a little complicated when you introduce a set of people called short sellers.

These people are simply bad belle. Your village people. They bet that a company’s share price will go down. So basically, as a company is failing, they are making money. How do they do this you might ask? It’s simple. By borrowing shares.

Mr Badbelle will borrow shares from X and sell it to Y. Mr Badbelle can borrow shares worth 100 naira from X (he borrows so he doesn’t pay) and sell to Y who pays Mr Badbelle the 100 naira. So Mr badbelle has made 100 naira but is owning X shares.

Once the prices of the shares go down to say 50 naira, Mr Badbelle will now buy back the shares for 50 naira and return it back to X. So therefore, Badbelle has made 50 naira from the misfortune of a company.

But there is a possibility that the share price will go up to say 200 naira, this means Mr badbelle will lose 100 naira because he has to buy back the shares for more money than he sold it to return it to Mr X. And that is exactly what happened with GameStop.

GameStop is a dying video game company because honestly, those who play video games no longer go to stores to buy them. They download them online. So basically, this company’s future is not very bright. It shows in its share prices as they have been falling for a while.

Then comes the Badbelle short sellers gambling on the misfortune of the innocent company. Note that short sellers are usually big and influential people and corporations. So they borrow huge amount of shares and sell it.

What this does is that we that are watching share price like livescore will notice that this big person has sold this huge amount of shares. That means something must be wrong with this company. We’ll rush and start selling ours too. The more we sell, the more the prices fall.

So basically, these people are betting on the shares to fall and are ALSO causing it to fall. It’s like Salah betting that Liverpool will lose and then going on to score an own goal. A self fulfilling prophesy.

They also tend to badmouth the company and because they are huge and influential, people listen to them, panic and sell their shares. Imagine Elon Musk tweeting that we should sell a company’s shares? So many people will rush and do it and it’ll crash the share prices.

And note that as this company’s shares are falling, they are gaining. And that’s what they did to GameStop. And the poor company’s shares continued to drop and drop because these people will borrow and sell huge amount of shares sending panic to the market.

GameStop shares had dropped to as low as 3 dollars and these greedy assholes were not still satisfied. They were still betting on the prices to go down even more until some bunch of losers on Reddit noticed this. I don’t know if it’s love for the video game store...

hatred for the short sellers or a combination of both. They decided to buy lots of GameStop shares knowing that once they start buying, the price will go up and so they started. As they bought shares, the price started to rise.

Now remember those badbelle people had borrowed shares? Now the real owners of the shares started coming back like, oga where my shares (because of course they had noticed that the shares are now doing well).

Badbelle people that have sold the shares will now have to go and buy these shares back to return and notice, the more they buy the higher the price goes. And remember they need the price to fall because that’s how they will make their money?

But now they themselves buying the shares back are causing the prices to rise. so basically they are signing their own death warrant and they don’t have a choice. They have to buy the shares at a much bigger price than they sold it for and return them to their owner.

This year alone, Bad belle shortsellers have lost over 5 billion dollars from GameStop shares. Tears

Simply because some jobless people on Reddit ganged up to buy the shares of a dying video game company so that the price will rise.

Now the short sellers are not small children. They are big people in Wall Street and huge corporations and they own the media and the narrative. So basically, they are pushing for more regulation so people can’t gang up like this to make them lose money

End.