Well, That Was Weird

Tendies. GameStop. Silver. SPACs. What. The. Hell. A sane person’s guide to a bonkers stonks market

- Pat Regnier

There’s been a rebellion in the stock market, in case you hadn’t noticed. The Battle of GameStop, the stampede of the meme stocks, and the rage against Robinhood were as transfixing as the bursting of the dot-com bubble—only this time the action was focused on a handful of companies associated with 1990s culture, and this time everything was going up. Thanks to traders talking it up on social media, the stock of GameStop Corp., the unprofitable mall retailer of video games, climbed as much as 1,745% from the start of the year. The AMC movie theater chain peaked at a gain of 839%; BlackBerry and Nokia, which once made very popular phones people strapped to their belts, spiked 279% and 68%, respectively; and Koss (headphone maker), Build-a-Bear Workshop (chain of stores that … you know what they do), Tootsie Roll Industries (yes, that Tootsie Roll), and, for some reason, silver all shot up.

The past two weeks broke a lot of people’s brains re: how Wall Street works. One money manager told Bloomberg News that GameStop was his “most-hated stock of all time.” Also, a lot of well-compensated hedge fund managers lost huge sums because they’d been betting on the stocks mentioned above falling. And the frenzy was all caused by an extremely online crowd that Doug Henwood, writing in the leftist publication Jacobin, wryly called “the wrong kind of people. They don’t live in Greenwich in houses with twenty-car garages.”