BLURRED LINES

Chetan Chopra
2 min readJan 29, 2021

Populism is coming for Capitalism.

GameStop. Yes. The name you’ve probably heard by now has become a thing. So why is everyone talking about it?

The answer is their share price which has skyrocketed at a speed greater than the speed of a SpaceX. It has risen by a mammoth 8000% in last six months and majority of that in the past few days only.

Though the numbers of the company don’t really comply with this unrealistic surge. The sales are actually down by 22% Y-O-Y and EBITDA by a massive 66%.

So what happened? Did the market discount all this information. The answer is YES! Stock market is a place where you predict actions of other people and try to do the opposite in order to earn money.

This is exactly what a bunch of Reddit, Inc. folks did when they saw a Hegde Fund taking short positions (selling stocks) and came together to start buying and thereby increasing demand and hence the share price. They ripped the fund off that it is facing bankruptcy now.

It’s unprecedented. The fear of the big guys is vanishing and wealth inequality is decreasing all because of a thread on the Internet.

Markets work not on fundamentals of the company but on how well those fundamentals are perceived. And sometimes by just spotting an action and doing the opposite.

Is it a sign of things to come? Is populism going to take over capitalism and will the common man stand ground against the elite class? We shall see sooner than later.

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Chetan Chopra

Chetan is the male version of a drama queen and has been called a doofus umpteen times.