You know an issue has truly gone viral when Netflix decides to make a film on it. That’s the latest development on the GameStop fiasco that emerged last week and hasn’t yet ended. GameStop, a video game retailer, struggled during the pandemic as the lockdown curbed shopping outdoors. As one of the most ‘shorted’ publicly traded companies, Wall Street investors started betting against it, ie that the company was doomed to fail. A few months ago, members of WallStreetBets, a stock market discussion group on the website Reddit, encouraged others to invest in the company and eventually Redditors bought in, driving the company’s stock price to rise by approximately 1,700 per cent last week — in turn, causing much financial misery to the Wall Street biggies who betted against it.

“What happened is nothing new; it’s the oldest form of cartelisation that takes place in markets. There have been many instances when people have ganged up against each other. The only thing that was new this time was that this was pulled off on Reddit by retail investors, which is a bit hard to digest,” says city-based financial market trainer Purv Shah. The incident generated interest and excitement even among those who would associate the word ‘hedge’ to nothing beyond, well, a hedgehog. And if you wish to delve deep into the matter, we invited Shah to suggest key market terminology you ought to know.