Highly-Upvoted WallStreetBets Post Speculated On Amazon-Affirm Partnership 2 Weeks Before Official Announcement

A highly upvoted post on Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum seems to have predicted Amazon.com Inc.’s AMZN partnership with buy-now-pay-later service Affirm Holdings Inc. AFRM two weeks prior to the announcement of the deal.

What Happened: The post titled “$AMZN is up to something with $AFRM” was posted by a Reddit user with the handle RossPG on Aug. 15. The post had 95% upvotes.

The Reddit post noted that "something very strange” happened on August 12, as the URL amazon.com/affirm redirected to a link instead of leading to an error message.

The link to which the URL redirected had a specific node ID that would not have been set up if “something wasn’t brewing,” the post noted.

The Reddit user also cited other evidence as indicating a potential partnership between Amazon and Affirm. These include the recent addition of the word “option” on the Amazon.com e-commerce website’s checkout page under “monthly payments” and a change in Google search results for “Amazon Affirm.”

See Also: How Affirm's Amazon Partnership Could Launch Stock Into High Orbit

Why It Matters: Shares of Affirm surged more than 40% after the deal with Amazon.com was announced last Friday.

The WSB forum, which has 10.8 million members, is best known for rallies in heavily shorted stocks such as GameStop Corp. GME and AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. AMC this year.

A Reddit post in January that appeared to anticipate Tesla Inc.’s TSLA investment in Bitcoin BTC/USD five weeks prior to the company’s announcement had similarly generated high interest and was picked up by major media outlets at that time.   

However, the Reddit user behind the post later disclosed that he created the “trollpost” when he was high on LSD.

Price Action: Amazon.com’s shares closed 1.4% higher in Tuesday’s trading at $3,470.79, while Affirm Holdings’ shares closed almost 3.3% lower at $96.34.

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