I've been watching the market for years. Pump & dumps happen. They are usually over in a few hours max. Sometimes much quicker. This has been going on for days (the majority of the week) and shows no signs of stopping. In fact tomorrow could be the most volatile day yet.
I'm not sure what is making you think all of the RH users were suckers, many of them have made quite a bit off of this. I don't personally use RH currently (although I have in the past). Ideally the bag holder in this situation would be those covering their short positions. But there is no doubt some will get burned. It's far from over though and there has been plenty of opportunity to cash out. In fact it's way up in aftermarket again this evening.
> This has been going on for days (the majority of the week) and shows no signs of stopping.
It seems that the reddit community has been expecting this for quite a while, though maybe they didn't expect it to get noticed outside of wallstreetbets.
I can't speak for the original commenter, but the completely nonsensical claims I've been constantly seeing over the past few days are what's making me think the bulk of them will end up being suckers.
A friend was telling me a few hours ago that she's exiting once GME hits $5000 - yes, five thousand dollars, I specifically checked that was what she meant. She (and a few other friends who didn't name dollar amounts) have been misled about what a short squeeze is, and believe there's some specific future event called "the short squeeze" where they're guaranteed to make money if they're holding GME when it happens.
Stock market is a 0 sum game. Someone is going to pay in the end. It’s not the hedge fund, they already covered to the tune of $2 billion and someone has pocketed that money and it’s not retail investors.
I think the reality with the stock market seems to be that eventually the tax payer is left with the bags whether they owned any stocks themselves or not.
This isn’t always true though. If I buy an equity for 10$ and sell it to you for 11$ who then sells it for 13$ none of us have lost money. Only panic sells and crashes are zero sum in the way you are imagining.
I'm not sure what is making you think all of the RH users were suckers, many of them have made quite a bit off of this. I don't personally use RH currently (although I have in the past). Ideally the bag holder in this situation would be those covering their short positions. But there is no doubt some will get burned. It's far from over though and there has been plenty of opportunity to cash out. In fact it's way up in aftermarket again this evening.