Tuesday April 20th 2021 | 20:00 – 21:15 | Facebook and Youtube |
In the week of January 11th 2021, the stock market was hit by an unprecedented force. Institutional stock traders, also known as hedge funds, had predicted that the stock price of the American video game retailer GameStop would sink. However, on the social media app Reddit, a group of amateur investors decided to band together to stop the hedge funds from profiting from the decline of their beloved GameStop. In the subreddit known as r/wallstreetbets posts started flying in, urging users to buy as much stock in GameStop as possible. The army of Reddit users responded and the GameStop stock rose an astonishing 1587% within the span of a week. This had the effect that the hedge funds lost billions of dollars and a few lucky Redditors earned hundreds of thousands of dollars. We invite you to join our talk on this matter on the 20th of April 2021 to learn how this happened, why it matters to us and how social media made this possible.
We will discuss this with Maurizio Montone, a tenure-track assistant professor of finance at Utrecht University and Rufus Kain, Editor of media and youth culture for the Dutch newspaper Trouw.
Check out the following links on April 20th at 20:00:
https://www.facebook.com/utrechtsib/
https://www.youtube.com/user/SIBUtrecht/