In the last 6 months WallStreetBets, a Reddit group that has over 10.5 million members has greatly impacted the stock market. These retail traders use this vastly known Reddit forum to spoil short-selling attempts by big hedge funds, and have caused these companies billions of dollars in profits. WallStreetBets call these stocks “meme stocks” and they have become so infamous and dangerous to most hedge fund that most of these companies now track Reddit forums to prevent themselves from taking huge losses.
According to a report published in Bloomberg, “Chinese billionaire, Wang Jianlin made more than $675 million from a meme stock rally, spurred by users on WallStreetBets forum, earlier this year.” Based off data that Insider Monkey collected from 800 different hedge funds these are some of the biggest “meme stocks” that retail traders have been pushing for on the notorious Reddit forum.
Some of the safer stock positions include Tesla (TSLA), Apple (AAPL), Shopify (SHOP) and Palantir Technologies Inc (PLTR). Generally speaking, these stocks are good long-term investments and get overlooked during the meme stock chaos.
In the beginning of the year, according to the Wall Street Journal a well-know hedge fund: Melvin Capital Management lost over $6 billion dollars due to a meme stock, and year to date, they are still down close to 50%. This number shows but a mere portion of the total losses that hedge funds have taken at the expense of these meme stocks.
