Excerpts from the Washington Post $GME piece:

1/ “Until last week, the quintessentially absurd bubble was the Dutch tulip mania. In Holland in the 17th century, investors bid the price of simple tulip bulbs up to ridiculous heights. It was the purest of idiotic fantasies.”

2/ “Last week, a similar fantasy reared its head: the idea that GameStop, an ailing retailer whose shares had slumped from $57 to $4 since 2013, should suddenly trade at $350. The speculators have no evidence that this makes any sense: Indeed, they disdain evidence.”

3/ “GameStop’s price-to-earnings ratio is infinite, because the company earns nothing. Its prospects are grim, because it is mainly a brick-and-mortar vendor of video games, a product best sold digitally. But the speculators don’t care. They believe.”

4/“Markets are usually stabilized by rational investors: If the crazies drive stocks to absurd heights, thoughtful people take the other side of the trade. After the subprime bubble popped, the minority that called out the excess became heroes. There was even a movie about them.”

5/ “The GameStop speculators are not merely in a frenzy about one stock. Their goal is to destroy the traders who link stock prices to fair value. They are not just acting within the system; they want to overthrow the system.”

6/ “To suggest a political analogy, they are not just blindly devoted to their candidate; they deny the legitimacy of the opposition party.
It’s as though a rabble gripped by conspiracy theories were to attack the rules of democracy itself. The name “GameStop” is apt.”

7/ “They have gone after short-seller Andrew Left, hacking into his social media accounts, sharing his personal information online, ordering dozens of pizzas to be delivered to his home in the middle of the night, and texting his children with threatening and profane language.”

8/ “Hedge funders and short sellers are out to get rich. They are certainly not angels. But there is a difference between trading based on evidence and research, and trading based on conspiracy theories and mob tactics.”

9/ “Over the past week, it’s been tempting to celebrate the colorful rebels — they represent the democratization of finance, the revenge against the fat cats. Now it is time to remember that truth

You’ve been warned. $GME