[imagesource: Guardian Design]

When a group of Redditors in the r/WallStreetBets subreddit, run by someone with the handle ‘DeepFuckingValue’, managed to elevate the stock value of a slowly dying company, GameStop, Wall Street didn’t quite know how to handle it.

The Redditors bought huge numbers of GameStop stock, trading at low prices, and then kept buying more as the prices rose, forcing something called a “short squeeze”, and elevating the price.

While in the end, things levelled out and the stock price has since dropped, for a while there we were looking at one of the biggest wealth transfers from the elite financial ruling class to the amateur stock-trading middle and middle-upper classes, in recent history.

Some hedge funds, who bet against GameStop, were crushed by the movement.

It shook things up, and the after-effects are starting to show.

Wall Street is now keeping very close tabs on WallStreetBets, with hedge funds, investment bankers, and other institutional investors, as CNN puts it, “desperate to find the next GameStop – before it’s too late”.

Enter Thinknum Alternative Data, who spotted an opportunity and quickly developed a tool, Reddit Mentions.

The tool provides a “ranking of the most-mentioned stocks on WallStreetBets as well as the Stocks subreddit”, by tracking the number of times NYSE and NASDAQ tickers are mentioned in the top 100 posts on r/WallStreetBets and r/Stocks in real-time.

“The inbound inquiries from people asking about the dataset has been insane. I’ve never seen anything like it,” Justin Zhen, Thinknum’s co-founder and president, told CNN Business.

“Everyone is saying, ‘I need to track Reddit.’ It’s become one of the most important drivers of market movement,” Zhen said.

As of Tuesday evening, the top mentioned stocks were GameStop, AMC, and BlackBerry (BB):

Image: CNN

If you’re keen to get in on the tracking game, you can head on over to the Reddit Mentions tool and create an account.

This new interest in Reddit is indicative of how Wall Street is adapting to the attack on its values and inner-workings and ensuring that it remains in control.

Welcome to capitalism.

[source:cnn]