This is essentially a one-off: some people got pissed that hedge funds were shorting GameStop and started a campaign to completely undermine all that short-selling. There will be other companies out there being shorted, but even if similar campaigns could be mounted, the little guys involved don't have the kind of deep pockets to undermine the entire stock market. Plus, by now a lot of people have paid a lot of money for the stock, money which they won't get back. At 10 am on January 28, the stock was at $469.42. An hour and a half later, at 11:30 am, it was at $132.00. I'm not sure how many people bought at that top price, and I'm sure few of them sold at that low price, but you get the idea. I certainly do not know enough about that company to offer any kind of guess as to what its stock should be worth.
Here's the real thing to understand about the stock market. Trying to time it is a fool's game. Buying good mutual funds or stocks and holding on to them is a far, far better strategy. Remember all the hype about day-trading a decade or so back? How all kinds of little guys were buying and selling multiple stocks multiple times during the course of the day? Most of them were spectacularly unsuccessful, and day trading seems to have largely disappeared.
It seems to me that what's going on with this stock is people trying to time the market on this stock, trying to both hurt the hedge funds and make some kind of a point about how terrible it is to short a stock. I don't have a lot of respect for hedge funds, but I also don't have the many millions of dollars needed to invest in one.
Anyway, I will just repeat that I don't think this is repeatable. Certainly not on a scale that would ultimately change the stock market in any meaningful way.
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