A Million Hobby Traders Just Glimpsed What Racism Feels Like
Outsmarted by savvy internet users, investment institutions rewrote the rules to maintain the status quo
Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com.
“This is some bullshit!” I said aloud to no one, as I watched a red dial draw circles on my iPhone screen before being replaced by a “Connection Error” message. It was Thursday morning, just after the stock market had opened for trading, and I’d lost count of how many times I’d attempted to purchase shares of stock in AMC Entertainment — yes, the struggling movie theater franchise — via Cash App, only for the requests to conk out. I knew these weren’t mere technical difficulties. There was some foul shit going on.
As of the start of this week, AMC had become one of a handful of publicly traded entities known as “meme stocks” — holdings that have attracted the attention of hobby investors who congregate on platforms like Reddit and Discord. These companies typically have a cheap share price and low market value, making them attractive buys and prime for big profits. (And in many cases, major institutional investors had “shorted” the companies, betting major figures that their prices would fall over time.)…
