The harder it is to find a stock to cover the short, the more expensive it will get, until momentum shifts.Д¬anada's BlackBerry is one of many stocks to have seen recent runs in its share price, based almost solely on retail investor enthusiasm. That, in turn, forces short sellers to fuel the price rise against their will by making them buy at ever-higher prices to cover their bets. If enough buyers buy into a company and refuse to sell, the theory goes, that will drive the price of the shares higher. While many members of the subredditВ of DIY investorsВ genuinely think GameStop's core business of selling video games is a promising one, a small number of them saw an added reason to buy in because they caught wind of aВ growing short interest in the stock. The short sellers' best-laid plans for GameStopВ started to go off the railsВ a few months ago, when some members of a prominent Reddit community called WallStreetBetsВ saw an opportunity to make some moneyВ and teach Wall Street a lesson in the process. That's known as a short squeeze, and what we're seeing right now may be the most dramatic one in history. But when the stock goes up, short sellers have to buy into a rising market, which adds to the buying pressure, which pushes prices up even more in a vicious cycle for the short. They hit almost $400 on WednesdayВ for no good reason other than being caught in the middle of an epic battle between a couple of million onlineВ Davids who share stock tips on profanity-riddled message boardsВ and the bespoke-suited stuffyВ Goliaths of Wall Street investment funds.Дuration 0:46 An animated explanation of how people make money from stocks losing value 0:46ДЄs long as the price goes down, short sellers make money. In the early days of COVID-19, the company's shares were changing hands at around $4В US a share. Then the pandemic hit, exacerbated those problemsВ and sent the stock down to multi-year lows. Like many retailers, its business has been under pressure for several years now, because ofВ a shift away from physical stores and toward online selling, which GameStop currently does very little of. GameStop is a retail chain with about 5,000 locations across North America which, as its name suggests, sells video games and game-related accessories. The sentence above makes little sense at first blush, but it is nonetheless an apt description of the saga currently underway surrounding shares in GameStop. retail chain that hasn't made any money in yearsВ have risen by 1,000 per cent inВ less than two weeks, wiping out billions of dollars from two Wall Street investment fundsВ in the process.

Reddit the big short