This is not Financial Advice

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In November 2020, I worked as a hotel cook in Whale Cove, Nunavut, a community of just less than 500 people. Prior to this, I had been rotting at home through the lockdown in Winnipeg after being laid off from my job at Earls. My uncle, who worked for a northern hotel chain offered me a short term contract as the sole cook at the hotel. I’d be there for five weeks.

I had just learned how to make a Caesar salad at Earls a few weeks before, so clearly I was more than qualified. The day I arrived, the community went into lockdown because of COVID. It was a relief for me; I was in way over my head. I hoped I could enjoy the culture of the Inuit, but instead, I was trapped in my room for any hours I wasn’t cooking for the other five staff staying at the hotel. The weather was frigid, reaching temperatures of almost -50C every day. The only sunlight was between 10 am and 1 pm, and the wind coming off Hudson Bay rendered any jacket useless. It was miserable. The Wi-Fi was terrible, and TikTok was my only working app.

Just before I left Winnipeg, I had opened a TFSA, thinking I could become a day trader. (The fact I thought I could day trade in a TFSA shows how little I knew). Ending up in Whale Cove and wanting to become a day trader was born purely out of boredom, but making some extra money was better than playing Fortnite with my buddies all day. In Whale Cove, I spent hours a day scrolling day trader pages, and by the time my contract was up, I thought I was Warren Buffet.

When I arrived back in Winnipeg just before Christmas, lockdown was still in effect. The $6000 I had earned in Whale Cove was burning a hole in my pocket. I was dead set on flipping it day trading. I found a subreddit called r/wallstreetbets just before GameStop stock soared from a measly $3/share to over $450/share in just a matter of weeks. There was so much buzz and money being thrown at it by people on the subreddit, it was impossible not to look further.

GameStop is a brick-and-mortar video game retailer, similar to a store like Blockbuster. Keith Gill, also known as RoaringKitty, or u/DeepFuckingValue (depending on which platform you’re on) was the first person to post about GameStop stock on r/wallstreetbets. In August 2019, he started posting YOLO updates (Yes, YOLO means You Only Live Once, but in this context it refers particularly to investing a large amount of money into a single asset in hopes of turning a large profit). Gill’s initial investment was $50,000. His overall investment theory revolved around excessive naked short-selling in the company. 

Investors use short selling when they believe a stock is overvalued and its price will decrease soon. 

Dr. Adrian Fernandez, an economist at University College Dublin, explained it to me over email like this:

“Imagine you believe the price of the iPhone 16 will fall next month because of rumours that Apple may release the iPhone 17 sooner than expected. Although you don’t own an iPhone 16 to sell, let’s say your best friend agrees to lend you hers for a month while she’s on a spiritual retreat. You can sell her iPhone 16 now, then buy it back a month later to return to her. If your prediction is correct, you’ll sell the iPhone 16 today at a high price and repurchase it at a lower price, securing a profit.”

Short sellers only earn a profit when the price of the stock decreases. Naked shorting, on the other hand, is an illegal practice where short sellers have not actually borrowed the stock and are selling shares that don’t exist. 

Let’s say you sold the iPhone 16, which you borrowed from your best friend, to Joe. Now you go and borrow the same iPhone 16 from Joe and say you will return it later that month. You go and sell the iPhone 16 again to Sally. Now the same iPhone is owed to three people; your best friend, Joe, and Sally. It’s a couple days before your best friend gets home so you go and buy back the phone from Sally, so you can return it to Joe. Getting it back from Sally is no problem, you buy it back for less than you sold it for and secure a profit. When you return it to Joe, he decides he doesn’t want to sell it again even though you have to give it back to your best friend in a couple of days. Your best friend is going to be really upset if she doesn’t get her phone back so now you have to pay whatever price Joe sets. 

Gill’s theory is just like the problem with the iPhones. There are more shares of GameStop owned by investors than should exist. Dr. Fernandez explains the over-borrowing would lead to a “short squeeze — which occurs when investors who have shorted a stock are forced to buy it back at rising prices, which they initially bet would fall.”

For a year and a half, Gill was mocked in his post’s comments by other redditors who told him he was making a huge mistake. 

In his YOLO update post from Christmas 2019, u/firenance replied, “You’re a special kind of special,” and u/avgazn247 said, “You f*****g r****d everyone told you to sell when you were up 121k. I hope you get out of this in one piece.”

r/wallstreetbets is just as much a gambling forum as it is an investment forum. Most users are making extremely risky investments with the goal of getting rich quickly. 

The sentiment among users on the subreddit quickly changed when the stock price started moving upwards in the latter part of 2020. People invested in GameStop started calling themselves “The Apes” — a self-deprecating name insinuating the idea they are stupid monkeys unable to make logical investments. Gill’s theory spread faster than gossip in high school across the subreddit, with the daily discussion threads about GameStop reaching over 65,000 comments in 24 hours .

The big pull for The Apes was the theory there are more shares trading than should be in existence. Allegedly, large institutions were creating counterfeit shares to increase their profits. If investors continue to buy shares and hold/refuse to sell them, there would be no way for the big institutions to buy back the counterfeit shares they created. Theoretically, it would be impossible for all the shares to be bought back by institutions, and investors could set the share price to whatever they want. The Apes dubbed this strategy, the MOASS, or Mother of All Short Squeezes.

I stumbled across my first post about the short-squeeze in the second week of January 2021. The sentiment on r/wallstreetbets about GameStop was clear: Buy and hold, we can’t lose.

So, I did just that. I bought my first shares of GameStop. Before this, my biggest investment was $100. Within a couple of days of reading my first post, I bought roughly $2000 worth of GameStop shares. Over the next week, I dumped nearly all the money I had earned working in Nunavut and some other savings, and my investment in GameStop grew to $10,000. This was the most money I had seen at once in my entire life. I was not okay with losing any of it. The following week went like this: 

Green…Red…Green…Red…Lots of Green…A lot more Red

It was the most exciting week I had had since the world shut down. A couple of my friends also got into it. We set up a mini-trading floor in my friend Matteo’s basement. We were 18, and the money we were investing with would be soul-crushing to lose. We only felt sunlight when we worked up an appetite from gambling on GameStop and went upstairs to get the snacks Matteo’s mom bought for us. We watched the stock tickers on his flat-screen TV, yelling as they went up. It was awesome. I could not stop looking at my account. My thumb got sore from the number of times I hit the refresh button.

Then a week later, it became one of the worst weeks of my life. On January 28, the price was jumping $40/share in a single tick, and my TFSA growing exponentially with it. Then, a few large financial institutions and brokers who were losing money decided to make buying more GameStop shares impossible for their customers by disabling the action within accounts.

Game stopped.

As the price plummeted, so did my heart. I had never felt so much anxiety. Without grasping how detrimental the buy button being turned off was, I continued to buy more shares (only select brokers disabled buying). The momentum from people buying shares died, and by the weekend, I was down about $4000. My mind was numb, but I couldn’t stop pacing around my house. I wanted to accept my losses, move on, and start saving again. When Monday rolled around, I hit the sell button and almost threw up. I sold my entire investment at a $6700 loss. I was so ashamed. When my family asked about GameStop at dinner that night, I lied, only admitting to $2000 in losses. Over the next few days, I gave myself a few long, hard looks in the mirror, reevaluated my decisions, and decided it was time to double down on GameStop. 

I knew I had been cheated. My gut was telling me it wasn’t over — plus I was angry at how GameStop investors were being portrayed in the media.

Countless articles called us irresponsible and uneducated. Outlets said we are gamifying the market and putting the financial system in jeopardy. Now, the irresponsible part may be true. Throwing $10,000 into an investment I knew little about was irresponsible. I can own that. But even though I was irresponsible, the game was rigged so only the big institutions could win.

A few days after the buy button had been turned off, the CEO of Interactive Brokers said live on CNBC, “If brokers did not turn off the buy button, the price would have gone into the thousands.” The big institutions admitted they were losing and took their ball home so none of the other kids could play.

I was not the only person who felt cheated when the buy button was turned off. Thousands of angry comments filled posts, and the sentiment on Reddit quickly turned from trying to make money to sticking it to the man.

Those few weeks of February 2021 were an emotional whirlwind. I had gone from never feeling worse to having a renewed sense of hope and purpose. For me, investing in GameStop became more than just making money. I was reading stories from other redditors about how their families were affected by the 2008 financial crisis. They had lost their jobs, homes, and even family members because of the recession. Meanwhile, the banks and institutions responsible for crashing the economy received a $700 billion bailout. A lot of those people saw investing in GameStop as a way of getting even.

Throughout February 2021 , I was glued to the ticker. I’d be sitting at Earls where I had been re-hired when restaurants re-opened, with my phone propped up and the stocks app opened, watching it like my country was playing in the World Cup final. Then, one morning in March 2021, the price began to run again. I was sitting in my kitchen having a coffee and I saw green, lots of green. I called my stepdad over to look at the price skyrocket. I was buzzing.

The price quadrupled in an hour, and in just six weeks, I had regained all the money I lost. But I should have known it wouldn’t last — the price dropped from $330/share down to $70/share just as quickly as it went up. This time, I didn’t feel the anxiety. I was relieved because I felt the same thing happening twice meant the theory was true. Even with my scant experience in the stock market, I knew the price dropping that fast was unnatural. The drop felt like an act of desperation from whoever was losing money, and we had them on the ropes.

Everyone migrated from r/wallstreetbets and consolidated on the subreddit dedicated solely to GameStop, r/Superstonk. The movement to a new forum was called “The Great Ape Migration.” In just a few days, more than 150,000 people joined. The Apes saw it as the beginning of an online version of Occupy Wall Street.

A 2021 study from the CATO Institute found that people investing in GameStop were poorer, younger, and more culturally diverse than previous generations of investors because of new commission-free brokerages and no minimum account balance.

r/Superstonk became a hive-mind completely focused on uncovering everything involving GameStop. It’s also a place full of memes and nonsense. The subreddit has its own dialect, which to outsiders can appear like nonsense.

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This is a post from u/LordTaylorian1973, titled “The Night Before Moass?” with my translations in brackets.

Twas the night before MOASS (Mother of All Short Squeezes) and all through the subs, not a bot was a stirring or even shill scrubs (someone who is paid to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the subreddit).

The Stonkings (GameStop stock) all shorted, with nary a care, our hopes are a soaring, cause Ryan’s (Ryan Cohen, GameStop CEO) in there.

Now Kenny’s (Ken Griffin, Citadel CEO, theorized main enemy) been flying to France and beyond (Redditors have been tracking his private jet). Maybe he’s looking for a place to abscond?

His money, he’s hiding. His tracks covered up. It just doesn’t matter, we all know what’s up.

The tendies (profits) are coming today or the next. The Hedgies r Fuk (Hedge Funds are screwed), their assholes are wrect. 

Now off to the Moon (GameStop investors taking the stock to astronomical heights), our wallets get fatter. GME all records will shatter.

And when we get there, what will we see? A bottle of beer and a Roaring Kitty (Keith Gill)

This post received 6.4k upvotes.

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I had nothing to do, I was only working at Earls part-time and wasn’t in school. I was obsessed with reading about GameStop. The research published by the redditors is incredible. My financial literacy skyrocketed, and the more I learned, the firmer I became in my resolution. I would not be selling. 

My friend, Tanner, was just as invested as I was. We hung out almost every day to talk GameStop: how we were going to spend our money, the trips we were going to go on, and how messed up the financial system was. We talked about the latest research published on r/Superstonk and within a few months, we were able to have meaningful conversations with our friends studying finance in university.

When I run into a fellow GameStop investor in the real world, I call it “finding an ape in the wild.”

The old head chef at Earls was as invested as I was, and when we’d fist bump at work, he’d say, “Ow! Those are some serious diamond hands” (Diamond hands is an expression to signify a high-risk tolerance or unwillingness to sell). Another time, I saw a guy working at Sargeant Sundae wearing a purple GameStop sweater with an ape sitting on the moon pictured on it, and struck up a conversation. We talked about GameStop for 20 minutes while he ignored the other customers. I am sure it’s the same experience for them to talk about it to someone in real life to feel like they aren’t crazy.

Finding an ape in the wild is refreshing. I don’t have to convince them of the theory. In the summer of 2021, I preached the gospel of GameStop to anyone who would listen. 

I was spending half of my paychecks buying more shares, and I tried to convince every one I knew to buy shares. The only problem was people didn’t believe me. Nothing like this has happened before, and I probably looked something like this:

I still believe GameStop is our chance to win. The MOASS can only happen if all investors collectively hold their shares and do not sell them back to the institutions. On r/Superstonk people like to say: “Apes Together Strong.”

When I spoke with local GameStop investor, Andrew Klassen, about his experience investing in the company in December 2024 it reaffirmed the beliefs I already had, and we aligned on almost everything. We both see GameStop as a one-time opportunity to shrink the wealth gap. He says he would rather see his shares become worthless than sell them without seeing large institutional change. We both want to see people punished for their financial crimes. The subreddit has a motto: No Cell, No Sell

GameStop investors are the first set of investors who have no sensitivity to price. During our conversation, he said, “It doesn’t matter if the price goes to $10,000, $100,000, or $1 million, I do not want to sell until the people playing with the financial system are given consequences,” and, “If you’re still in, I’m still in.” 

This is the general sentiment on the subreddit. I would rather see my entire investment go to $0 before selling a single share. I want to stick it to the man. I have full faith in everyone else who has been holding their shares for the past four years to do the same.

The sentiment is largely attached to Gill. In January 2021, he turned his original investment of $50,000 into $47 million. He was invited to a congressional hearing shortly after January 2021, where when asked if he would still invest in the company at $40/share after it had fallen hundreds of dollars, he replied with a firm “yes.” He held all his shares and saw his position swing tens of millions of dollars in a few days. Still he did not sell. In June 2024, he posted his first YOLO update since April 2021. He had not only held his shares the entire time but had grown his investment to a value of $580 million.

There was even a point when the price peaked and the subreddit believed he was worth $1 billion. Yet, he still has not sold. His commitment to his investment has given other investors the courage to continue buying and holding shares. 

The movement has also only grown, and through self-reporting, it’s estimated the members of the subreddit own at least 81 million shares of GameStop — a value of roughly $2.5 billion. There are currently more than a million members on r/Superstonk, with investors continuing to buy more shares.

Over the past four years, I have had push back from friends and family to sell my investment. My Omi frequently texts me when the price rises, saying, “It might be time to sell,” I only respond with the laughing reaction. In the last four years, I started university, dropped out of university, travelled to Europe and Africa, ran a marathon, started college, and am about to graduate this spring. GameStop is not a phase and I won’t be selling my shares anytime soon. 

People who have not experienced the subreddit, cannot comprehend the feeling of purpose that comes from being invested in GameStop. It’s not about making money; it’s about reforming a system that keeps the poor people poor and the rich people rich.

The game will not stop for The Apes until the MOASS.

TL:DR — Buy $GME