In january, a group of people followed by one man, who told his followers to buy the shaires of Gamestop company and they did. The company is off-line retailer of computer games. Who want to buy a game if you can now dowload it on steam or in internet google play or appstore and play? That's why big investing fonds sold short shaires of the company pushing the price of the company down. The interesting thing that you can sold more shares of the company that really exists, that's lead to the situation when the shares oversold.
That fact noticed some people in social media and decided to play with it. They united to buy shares that in this situation can drive the price up many times. The investing fonds lost over 3 billion dollares. But the buyes didn't all became rich because the shares you also need to sell to get profit. But some of them I guess sold the shares.
The story blown the mind of some trades and Media and become popular in discussios, but it's not the first time when it happened. We remember the dot.com boom and crisis of 2008 year. And There is a lot of examples of same fast moves on the prices for a lot of other shares, goods, or raw materials.
The stock market appeared in middle centures. But we will try to imagine a situation that certainly arose several thousand years ago. In the city where traders sold their agricultural products. And residents of the city and visitors buy them.
And then one day a man comes to town who promises to buy a lot of apples and announces it. The merchants believed and brought many apples the next day. The man himself did not appear at all. What merchants did? Yes, right at the end of the day trying to sell these all apples at any price in order to get rid of them. And this time the man with help of other buy the apples by low price.
Price manipulation and financial speculation have been around for a long time. And the cases when they blew consciousness of some layers of the population and even caused riots are also well known.
The state tried to interfere, but even in totalitarian regimes there are those who continue to manipulate prices and make money on it.
In free countries, the options for manipulating the market are huge. Usually, the more free the country, the more options for manipulation. And in middle ages appeared stocks and other types of markkets that only caused more manipulations.
Of course, you can establish such rules that it will not be profitable to manipulate and the people are calm. But then the world will lose beautiful stories about millionaires who went bankrupt on the stock exchange or a simple guy who suddenly became rich.
Also, the attractiveness of the very method of seemingly honest exchange money on something that only wrote or printed on paper is strongly needed by some countries.
So what is the result. The trading app has become the most popular downloadable telephone app. The market potentially attracts many inexperienced traders. Who are mostly losing money. And only one question remains - who benefits from it ...
S.S.