Guerrillas in the stock market

This well-written, well-researched book chronicles the entry of droves of new, tech-savvy, retail traders into financial markets over the past few years, and how that has changed the trading landscape. Though it is US-centric, readers will note resonances with India and other large markets.

- DEVANGSHU DATTA

Nathaniel Popper delves into the sociological underpinnings of this shift in trading dynamics, which started well before the pandemic but accelerated dramatically through the lockdown period. The focus is on the huge groups of retail traders who discuss trades on Reddit, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), and Discord game servers. These traders take massive crowd-sourced positions in “meme stocks”—the stocks that they fancy, research, and turn into memes. Their trades have supercharged the prices of AMD, Tesla, Hertz, American Airlines and GameStop, and bankrupted multiple hedge funds who have taken the opposite side.