Monday night, and I’m still a bit buzzed from an earlier solo celebration.

Today was… huge. Simply HUGE. If I were the kind of guy who wears a hat, I’d tip it to the fine madmen of r/wallstreetbets. What they’ve accomplished is difficult to adequately describe. Earlier today, Melvin Capital (the hedge fund that had shorted Gamestop) had to be bailed out with a $2.75 billion infusion. Not million – billion. With a B. That was the only way Melvin would’ve avoided a margin call due to its remarkably bad decision to overshort that stock. At one point earlier this year, 138% of Gamestop’s outstanding shares had been shorted. If that doesn’t quite make sense (138% being more than 100% existing shares), that’s just the sort of funny math that happens when greedy people get carried away.

Earlier today, the stock went all the way to $159 before dropping to $61 (more shorting) and ending the day at $76, with $88 in the afterhours trading. That is huge, y’all. Not only did it close up for the day, not only did it set off multiple trading halts due to sheer volume, but much more importantly – the army of Reddit managed to defeat a multi-billion hedge fund. There’s still a ton of VIPs shorting the hell out of this stock, and I can’t even imagine what will happen later this week.

I joined the party too. Last night, I analyzed the daily movement pattern to see around what time each day the concentrated shorting begins. (I am, after all, a financial analyst.) Earlier today, I liquidated some of my top-performing stocks (45% gain is a fine ride) and moved that money into Gamestop, timing it almost perfectly. For posterity’s sake, my average price was $77.90. And now we wait… The stock’s fundamentals, even aside from the short-squeezing potential, are quite good – and video games will become an even bigger industry later this decade. The talking heads on CNBC were absolutely losing it today, while Jim Cramer – ever the opportunist – jumped on the r/wallstreetbets bandwagon. Heh.

What I did today, jumping on that bandwagon, wasn’t very different from plain old gambling, but there are two caveats. First, I put only a small percentage of my portfolio toward this. And secondly, this is the first real excitement I’ve felt in many months… Amplified by the fact that a whole lot of other people my age, in my general situation (locked in and with nothing to do) are in the same boat and sharing the same messages of enthusiasm and “eat the rich” with one another on Reddit… That’s not a bad stand-in for a real-life community, eh. My money will settle on Wednesday, and I’ll be able to sell my stock (or hold it until Friday?..) at that point. There might be yet another celebratory bottle of champagne in my future.

I’m still trying to understand what sort of subconscious bias had led me to ignore the r/wallstreetbets community… I knew they existed – I just never bothered to look at what they were actually talking about. My exposure to them had consisted of memes and funny cherrypicked screenshots people shared on Twitter. Had I wanted to, it would’ve taken just 20 seconds to see what all the chatter was about. Then maybe I wouldn’t have missed that opportunity to get in at a cheaper price last week. Ahh well, no regrets. I’ll just have to make sure not to believe random hearsay and not to underestimate (or even worse, ignore) future communities I encounter, online or in reality. This cognitive glitch is something I hadn’t even been aware of, and I feel like it’ll save me a lot of trouble down the road. (And maybe get me even more opportunities, money-wise or not.)

In covid news, the pharmaceutical giant Merck stopped its development of two covid vaccines: they produced a weaker immune response than other vaccines did. The immune response was also weaker than in people who had beaten covid on their own. There goes that, I suppose. As far as I know, that’s the first big player that folded – the rest are still developing theirs. Dr Fauci said earlier that the Johnson&Johnson vaccine approval could be just a few weeks away… February will be an interesting month.

And now, off to enjoy the sweet victorious dreams in the aftermath of helping my 2 million new friends drive a hedge fund to the brink of collapse. Today was a good day. Good night, y’all.