Spending time on the WSB board is like chugging a dozen espressos and going on a rollercoaster. Gabriel Plotkin, the founder of hedge fund Melvin Capital, which lost $19 billion dollars in the stunt This is when hedgies borrow shares and sell them in the hope that the price will drop so they can buy those shares back at a lower price, return them to the person they borrowed them off, and keep the change. Hedge funds, on the other hand, had bet heavily on the stock going down in a process known as short selling. WSB-heads started buying stock in GameStop, a beleaguered video game retailer whose stores have suffered from declining sales and unstable leadership. Their tagline is “like 4chan found a Bloomberg terminal”, referring to the terrifying anything-goes message board and the financial news service. The battleground this time around is a Reddit forum called Wall Street Bets, a raucous hub for casual traders to recommend deals and share memes. Is it the little guy, or is it just hedge fund goons with impressive degrees and the right tailor? Who deserves to win, in other words: David or Goliath? We are now witnessing the second act of Occupy, according to some observers, with the question about who in America is allowed to make money back on the agenda. The balcony at Cipriani 55, where Wall Street grandees sipped champagne during the Occupy protests Those memories of elitist mockery have not been forgotten, and so the havoc that has been unleashed onto the financial world this month with the GameStop fiasco is nothing less than delicious revenge a decade in the making. You can imagine their jabs: Get a load of these losers! Get a job, ya lousy degenerates! They pointed, laughed and took pictures of the great unwashed - it is one of the enduring scenes of that era: the clueless rich versus the furious rabble. Right there, up on the restaurant balcony, a group of suited financiers clutched their flutes of Perrier-Jouët Belle Époque Blanc de Blancs, and started jeering at the crowd. One September afternoon, they marched past Cipriani Club 55, which to the finance world is a swish joint that serves thirty-dollar salads and sautéed veal - but which to the demonstrators might as well have been the embassy for Hell. It was 2011, back in the fractious days of Occupy Wall Street, and thousands of protesters were roaring through Manhattan’s financial district to denounce the evils of the one percent.
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