Caveat Emptor – Are You A WSB ‘Useful Idiot’?

While high-fives and smily-faces abound on the interwebs over the destruction wrought on numerous hedge funds amid the short- and gamma-squeezes in GME and the rest of the heavily-shorted names, some are at least taking a moment to pause and reflect on other possibilities about how this all ends…

Via ‘The_Law_of_Pizza’:

I don’t work on the trading Floor, but I’m an attorney who services a variety of financial institutions, including broker/dealers.

This isn’t the exciting, hilarious answer you want, but a lot of people had no idea it was even happening until the past 48 hours, and even now, it’s mostly just a funny news article about some internet trolls making a bubble.

This is a big deal to the shorting community, but to the other 99% of the financial world, nobody gives a shit.

As much as young people on the internet like to imagine this as an epic, David vs Goliath, Wall Street vs Main Street showdown for the history books; from a bird’s eye view its actually just a brief dumpster fire where a couple hedge funds lost their shirts betting on one little small cap stock. It has happened before, and it will happen again.

In 6 months, nobody will remember or care, except that (maybe) it will become more difficult for retail investors to trade options.

And not because the greedy hedge fund oligarchs forced the SEC to crack down on retail investors.

But rather because, when this is all said and done, there is going to be a black hole where most of these retail investors’ brokerage accounts used to be, and the SEC and brokerage community will be lambasted for failing to protect unsophisticated investors from a bubble.

I have been monitoring the WSB threads, and while the WSB veterans know that they’re making a suicide charge for the memes, they have brought thousands of naive, new investors with them – who predominantly think that they’re going to somehow come out on top, not realizing that they’re cannon fodder for the more savvy WSB users to exit with gains.

Redditors never seem to stop and think about why the WSB guys know so much about derivatives trading.

Or how they seem to know how to access and read from a Bloomberg Terminal.

Or why there are so many users there that can seemingly drop tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on complicated meme plays.

How do you think that WSB knew that GME was open to a short squeeze and a gamma squeeze play?

WSB’s power users are younger finance bros. It’s 30-something investment bankers and portfolio managers memeing with each other a. cosplaying as “autists.”

If you didn’t know what a gamma squeeze was 48 hours ago, you are their exit strategy and the down payment on their next Porsche.

Caveat Emptor indeed.