WallStreetBets Against Wall Street: The Role of Reddit in the GameStop Short Squeeze

Abstract

By January 2021, the stock of GameStop (GME) was heavily shorted by institutional investors but an unprecedented retail campaign for pushing-up its stock price culminated in a short squeeze by the end of January 2021. Adapting recent innovations in text analysis in finance and on microblogging platforms, we present evidence that both the tone and the volume of discussions on the subreddit r/wallstreetbets had significant predictive associations with the GME return, volatility and put-call ratio.