On September 8th, 2019, user DeepFuckingValue posted a screenshot to Reddit’s wallstreetbets forum showing $100,000 worth of Gamestop stock purchased over the previous three months. One user replied “You could land a 747 between the spread on these. Possible no one will even buy these at the mid. Sell now.” Over the next 15 months, DeepFuckingValue was vindicated as his stock value first began to rise, then exploded in January 2021, during an epic short squeeze that caused the stock’s value to soar as over-leveraged short sellers were forced to buy back overpriced shares by expiring contracts.

By February, Gamestop’s stock value has plunged back below $100; while still vastly higher than the pre-squeeze valuation, the stock fell out of the news as well. The WallStreetBets community on Reddit, which is widely credited with driving the initial interest in the stock also slowly lost interest.

But not everyone had moved on. Some Redditors, still invested in Gamestop stock going “to the moon” joined new Reddit communities, centered around /r/Superstonk, that focused on hyping up the stock and convincing readers to invest large sums of money in a company that large swaths of investors consider highly overvalued. A new narrative emerged among this crowd: the shorts never closed, and January 2021 was merely a prelude to something much greater.

So, what happened? Are you missing out on a major money-making opportunity? Is this even something you should care about? I don’t know if I can answer these questions, but I can try. Read on for a view into the wild world of /r/SuperStonk.

Note: this next section relies heavily on an /r/SuperStonk post titled The GME Masters' Guide: A DD Campaign for Apes Levels 1-20 (The GME Story in 100 DDs, which is intended as an introduction to get new members excited about Gamestop but also works as an unofficial history of the post-squeeze Gamestop mania.

To start, let’s follow the journey of a single user: jn_ku is a well known poster in Gamestop circles who, in February 2021, wrote the following post: Gamestop Big Picture: Market Mechanics. I would recommend reading it; it’s a genuinely good look at the mechanics of a short squeeze like the one that spiked Gamestop’s price in January earlier this year. This post also includes a phrase, “Disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor”, that would eventually become part of the standard lexicon of Gamestop posters.

About a month later, after a series of updates, jn_ku has another post after a series of other updates titled “Gamestop MOASS: No Tinfoil Hat Required”. This is not the first time the term was used, but it’s an important one to know: MOASS stands for “mother of all short squeezes”, and describes a theoretical future short squeeze even bigger than January 2021. jn_ku’s theory as I understand it is:

• Gamestop’s “short interest” (percentage of outstanding shares being sold short) is high for structural reasons relating to the number of long term holders, like index funds, holding Gamestop shares
• Gamestop shareholders could recall their shares from the short sellers in order to be able to hold a vote of confidence in CEO Ryan Cohen
• This would force short sellers to buy back their loaned shares, triggering a short squeeze

In the comments, he makes a specific prediction (emphasis mine):

If you look at the thesis in the OP, the timeline for that MOASS scenario would be between late April at the soonest and probably early June at the latest. I base this timeline on share registration in 2020 being in April for a June shareholder annual meeting, though nothing has been actually officially announced for this year’s meeting, so the timeline may well be different in 2021.

Noteably, none of this happened. There was no vote of confidence in Gamestop’s CEO, and no second short squeeze. People were, of course, not dissuaded; they simply moved on to other theories. That’s a pattern that’s pretty common not just in Superstonk specifically but also in other internet conspiracy theory movements; I’m reminded of Louise Mensch’s numerous predictions in the early Trump days suggesting imminent arrests of Trump administration officials, and I’ve compared Superstonk to QAnon in the past as well.

This post history works as a symbol for the Gamestop community’s overall descent into madness. The first post is well written, and in some ways higher quality than reporting you were seeing in mainstream media about what was happening with Gamestop. But by the second post, jn_ku has become much more invested in selling a narrative about what’s happening to the stock instead of describing objective fact, and leans much more heavily on wild theorizing about upcoming events.

A common dynamic that makes these types of posts feel more plausible to readers is a blend of jargon and in-group language that’s basically incomprehensible, but that uses the right words to make it sound like the writer is tapping into a deep level of knowledge about the situation. Try reading this line from the post linked above:

In addition to the above, Gamestop’s market cap, being in the low single digit billions (edit: this is in reference to pre-squeeze valuation, as that would have been when the decisions regarding a campaign were being made–thanks to u/mongerdy for catching this), is in the perfect zone for being large enough to make the juice worth the squeeze, and a squeeze having enough impact on even the largest accounts that it can force covering, but simultaneously low enough that a few tactical whales can actually execute a squeeze campaign without needing access to Jay Powell’s infinite money printer as long as the float remains locked up in diamond hands.

This isn’t the worst example of this – if you know the terms being used, it’s not impossible to parse out what’s being said here. Over time in Superstonk, this starts to get worse though. A good example, also from The GME Master’s Guide is user luxowoman’s post “45 Millions Long Synthetic OTM Puts, the story of the REAL SI %".

The post describes how short sellers can create synthetic longs for a stock by writing call options for the shares they’ve sold short . . . are you still following? Because I’m not. And I suspect a lot of readers aren’t either – there’s a reason that calling someone a “smooth brained ape” in Superstonk isn’t considered an insult.

As I understand it, the current theory in Superstonk is that hedge funds have created “synthetic shares” that create the appearance of having closed their short positions, concealing the fact that they’re still deeply invested in shorting Gamestop stock. Some future event will trigger an increase in interest in the stock and cause the price to spike as high as $1 million per share, making it by far the most valuable company ever.

Trying to track down the exact origin of this theory is really hard, because there’s no single post where it originated or user it can be tracked down to. jn_ku’s post about the MOASS is the earliest use I can find of the term, but he clearly didn’t create it. The “story of the REAL SI %” post is one of the more complete descriptions of the “synthetic shares” idea I’ve found, but again I’m not actually clear if it’s the origin. This simultaneously works to impress new users with the amount of knowledge embedded in the community while making it next to impossible to actually debunk or address specific ideas because it’s so difficult to find their origin.

What exactly will trigger the MOASS is up to users to speculate, but a common theory relates to a partnership between Gamestop and a crypto company called Loopring. The partnership is more or less confirmed, but ideas abound about what exactly it will entail.

• A likely option would be an NFT marketplace, similar to existing marketplaces like OpenSea, which fits with Gamestop registering the nft.gamestop.com domain.
• A less likely but plausible result is Gamestop trying to build a digital used game stored with a blockchain backend. I’m not sure anyone has really thought out how that would work or how it would integrate with actual digital retailers like Steam, but it’s more plausible than the next option.
• Some theorize that Gamestop is somehow going to shift all trading of their stock to a blockchain based platform, which will involve issuing a token to every Gamestop share owner, somehow leading to a huge payout for retail investors currently holding those stocks. Even among the typically incredulous Superstonk members, this is not a universally accepted theory.

A common thread here is that, like with finance, there aren’t a lot of people in Superstonk who really understand crypto or are thinking hard about the mechanics of how it works. Someone said, one time, that Gamestop might somehow issue a dividend to shareholders via a new crypto platform and it simply became part of the lexicon of the forum, with people disagreeing about if it will happen but nobody really interested in talking about the dividend itself.

It’s probably also worth noting a universal truth that applies here: where you can find scams and get rich quick schemes, crypto will inevitably show up as well.

So, are you missing out on a major money-making opportunity? Maybe. But probably not a mother-of-all-short-squeezes situation. Most of the theories about how Gamestop is going to change the world and massively explode in value are pretty much totally made up, and by conventional indicators there’s no reason to think anything like the mother of all short squeezes is actually going to happen.

There will of course always be signs something is imminent; just last week, Superstonk blew up with reports that some financial data apps were showing Gamestop short interest at over 100%, a legitimate sign of a possible short squeeze. But errors happen with these sites, and soon the figures were corrected and returned to a normal amount. I worry that the most invested users are never going to find any reason to walk away from the theory because of the psychological dynamics of this slow drip of new information. A similar dynamic, described in HBO’s Q: Into the Storm documentary is key to other internet conspiracy movements: you don’t have to get every prediction right, you just need people to sometimes get a flash of reality.

I’m not entirely clear how concerned we should be as a society for the Superstonkers. You see claims periodically about people driving themselves into destitution waiting for the MOASS, but I doubt that’s particularly common. Similarly, some users have posted screenshots showing themselves direct-registering tens of thousands of dollars in shares (which Superstonk members believe keeps their shares from being used in illicit shorting schemes), but it’s not apparent that’s a typical experience, or how many of those posts are even real. In my informal survey of the subreddit, registering a single $200 share is much more common – assuming that represents someone’s entire Gamestop investment, that’s a much less worrying amount.

It is a little concerning to see major accounts like YouTuber Andrew Rea of Binging with Babbish plugging Gamestop as an investment. I’d rather not see more people thrown down the Superstonk rabbit hole if it ends up losing them money, even if it’s not a huge amount at stake. The level of personal vitriol directed at hedge fund employees combined with rhetoric about jailing people also makes me a little worried for the safety of some of the people involved; Superstonk is not a violent subreddit, but it only takes one person.

In conclusion, this is not likely a very consequential movement, but it is a weird and kind of interesting one. Superstonkers are not likely to become the world’s largest gang of new millionaires, but they are likely to continue to make Gamestop’s stock behave weirdly. Mainstream reporting is going to continue to understate just how weird they are, and they are going to get things right sometimes, like how Gamestop is definitely doing something with NFTs. If you made it this far, thanks for reading and don’t forget to buy, hold, and DRS.