·        The “Gamestop” story has been big international news and has certainly grabbed the attention of many souls who ordinarily wouldn’t care 2 dimes about equity markets.

·        And it appears as if there is no middle ground here, you are either on the side of the little guy who gets his advice from Reddit, or there is a small group who are routing for the “professionals.”

·        It’s easy to see why this story has garnered such interest, because it’s a tale as old as the good book, more specifically Samuel. There we find the story of David and Goliath. And it’s been repeated many times over.

·         Big guy vs. little guy, and just sometimes the little guy wins, who hasn’t cheered for Erin Brokovich.

·        And so here we had a very public story of the (many) little guys taking on the giant establishment. And for a while the little guys were doing swimmingly, squeezing the hedge funds out of the leveraged short positions that they had built up, causing some to lose billions of USD in a short space of time, and the rowdy spectators cheered from the sidelines.

·        The thing is though,  it seems that the little guys who arrived late at the party may be the ultimate victims here because at some point there were no more buyers of a stock that was hopelessly overvalued by any sane measurement, and the people that were buying at close to 500usd a share were suddenly left hopelessly exposed.

·        Now if those buyers were hedge funds, then this classic story has ended in favour of the preferred narrative.

·        I suspect however that the last buyers were indeed David(s), except his sling was well off the mark.

·        There are so many lessons to be learned that it is highly likely that this story becomes a classic case study to fill the textbooks of economics and trading courses in the future.

·        By the way, if you don’t know, Gamestop's share price has fallen back to below 100usd a share, well down from its recent highs of close to 500, but also significantly above its recent lows.

·        The power of the crowd is a lesson that we should all take to heart. The power of social media is another.

·        It doesn’t really matter if the news is real or not, if enough people believe it, it “becomes” real. It is why influencers get paid absolute fortunes to spend their time on Instaface and TikTok or youflix, or whatever other social space can reach the crowd.

·        It’s the same reason that you wanted Oprah to mention your book on her show. Except now you want someone with millions of followers to punt or retweet you, and the road to fame and fortune is that much shorter.

·        The challenge is that we haven’t yet worked out how to sift the lunatics from the experts. The same power of the crowd allowed the U.S Capitol to be invaded earlier this year. The crazies in that group believed the BS that they were exposed to on social media- and felt well within their rights to invade the U.S seat of Government.

·        In the ’70s, a psychologist by the name of Milgram devised a fascinating experiment that tested the power of influence. If you do not know about it you can watch it on youtube or read about it on Wikipedia by typing in “Milgrams experiment”.

·        We had better figure out a way to ensure the truth survives. There are far too many lunatics out there, finding an army of followers to do their bidding. If you are not wise, you may find yourself holding Gamestop shares at close to 500 USD, or perhaps something even more damaging.

·        It’s the same reason there are so many Man United supporters!!!!