Reddit Trading Group WallStreetBets Goes Private: Where Will Retail Traders Go Now?

Reddit group r/WallStreetBets (WSB) has closed its doors and is now a private-only community. 

What Happened: Only users who moderators have approved will be able to view the page and take part in discussions.

Why This Matters: WallStreetBets is the group that initiated the mega GameStop Corp GME short squeeze at the end of January. They managed to drive the price of GameStop to over $400 while causing massive damage to hedge funds that shorted it, such as Melvin Capital.

WSB stood together while brokerages like Robinhood (which recently filed for an IPO) banned buying “meme stocks” and driving fear in the market. Coining the phrase “Diamond Hands,” the group has managed to rally together all retail traders who took up trading during last year’s lockdown.

More recently, the group had pushed AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc AMC to over $70 in the middle of June.

Before this shutdown, WallStreetBets had over 10 million members.

What’s Next: Previous members of WallStreetBets will need a new place to go to discourse various trading ideas. One platform that could take advantage of the recent influx of homeless traders is Discord.

Discord is a platform that many traders have already joined, and many trading groups already exist, such as Atlas Trading and StockVIP, both with over 200,000 members.

Discord has gotten multiple offers for their platform, including a $10 billion bid from Microsoft Corp MSFT.