MemeStocks

Where InternetMemes meet CasinoCapitalism meets ConspiracyThinking

From https://twitter.com/FoldableHuman/status/1650599878932979714

The thing that makes the meme stock saga keenly fascinating isn't that it's people piling in on a bad stock based on questionable hype, that happens all the time, it's how it's persisted and grown based on complete mythology.

The Ape theory of market mechanics is that these companies, GameStop, Bed Bath Beyond, AMC, are otherwise normal, healthy companies that are being targeted for destruction by predatory hedge funds who use criminal naked short sales to drive the company out of business.

And yet in Bed Bath's 93 page bankruptcy petition, which includes 25 pages of "here's what went wrong," short sales, hedge funds, predatory securities trading, none of that gets even glanced at. Not even mentioned, let alone cited as a material influence on the company's decline.

Things that are mentioned:

• failure to adapt to changing shopping behaviours and consumer tastes
• out of date internal systems
• misplaced focus on private label goods
• alienating business partners
• reckless stock buyback
• pandemic

So, why don't they mention the Short Hedge Funds? Why isn't Ken Griffin and Citadel implicated in the financial ruin of Bed Bath & Beyond?

And that's the line of questioning that gets you the juiciest brainworms. Reality: because it's not relevant, even if Wall Street is criminal they didn't make BBB borrow billions to buy back stock, force them to keep their logistics on Windows NT, and they didn't make millennials resent big box retailers

Apes: because THEY would punish the leadership if they complained, and THEY planted news stories about how BBB was doing poorly and even if that was true it's unfair to an American institution (home goods retailer Bed Bath & Beyond) to say it out loud

It is a remarkably short trip into the swamp of conspiratorial nonsense, and once you're there, well, anything goes.

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