‘It’s about accountability’: This student invested £1,000 into Gamestop stocks

‘No one paid for 2008, so they’re paying for it now’

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Unless you’ve been living under a stock – sorry – rock for the last week, you’ll know all about the GameStop drama, and how a group of Redditors succeeded in fucking with Wall Street hedge funders. It’s a modern-day tale enough to inspire a tear in Marx’s eye, except he probably wouldn’t understand what GameStop was and he really wouldn’t know what was going on with the pony tailed, Mountain Dew drinking subculture of Reddit.

Not all Redditors have ponytails, though. Some of them are students at the University of Warwick, have been trading since August and sank £1k into the GameStop stock just the same. Myron Sakkas did just that.

“I invested around £1,000 on Wednesday into r/WallStreetBets [the subreddit] stocks that everyone was talking about. So it was GameStop, Blackberry, Express, Naked. Those are what I was holding on Wednesday and I finished the day off with 30 per cent returns, so it went up to £1,300. I’d closed all my positions and I closed on GameStop because I foresaw the restrictions that were coming in and obviously they were forcing a huge sell off – so I sold GameStop. I saw Express going down but I held Blackberry.

“Then all the restrictions came in, there was massive sell offs of these kind of stocks. I managed to get out at an okay time and I minimised my losses at £30. This is pretty good considering I’ve got a flatmate who lost £400 and friends who lost a couple thousand.”

Myron wasn’t just jumping on the bandwagon. He believed in it too. “It was a meme. But it had a message,” he told The Tab. “At the start I saw it on Reddit and saw all my mates talking about it, seeing these people making 400 per cent returns on GameStop stock which just seemed indestructible. So I thought, ‘I can make money there’. But then I read up on the whole theory behind it, short squeeze, and holding these people accountable who had impacted literally millions of people’s lives. In the 2008 financial crash, no one was held accountable. Instead, they were bailed out. They were propped up by the US government. And this feels like the first time that, you know, the top one per cent have actually been affected in such a way. So I really respected the whole message behind it.”

This is why it was so frustrating when platforms removed these stocks. They were interfering in a market that has been “free”, but clearly, it’s only free up to a point. “This is about accountability,” Myron said. “And this is why it’s so infuriating that they impose the restrictions when we were playing them at, you know, at their own game. Even if it is largely watered down what we’re doing compared to what Wall Street has done, especially with the more mortgage crisis.

“That’s what was so great about it – everyone was saying ‘either we go to the moon together or we fall as one.'”

Myron continued: “It’s unparalleled levels of market manipulation against their own customers to protect hedge funds to protect the millionaires to protect billionaires. So it was unreal to me that they would do that and that’s what made me so angry. And they said it was to mitigate risk for their clients. What I was seeing was that we had all these institutions turn against normal people and force a sell-off, and lose so many people money. They only like the capitalist market when they can manipulate it for their benefit.

“It’s insane to me. And you know when AOC and Ted Cruz agree on a topic, it’s really 100 per cent overstepped the line.”

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