Oh well I mean if the reddit author said it....
If you're arguing that it will stay high, you're saying that based on the fundamentals of the company GameStop should be a $20B company. Which is bonkers.
Your sarcastic “.. if the reddit author said it” totally misses the point. The point is not whether the reddit author is right only the reddit author is actually describing their honest strategy based on fundamentals.
Given the specificity of the strategy and the fact that it actually did turn out to be right it would seem like an extreme claim requiring extreme evidence to disagree or to presume some ulterior secret market manipulation motive.
Separately, I for one am not sure you are right to say $20B market cap of GameStop is crazy. I think it will drop yes, but not nearly as far as most people think. The change of board management for GME is quite a big signal of the large-scale ecommerce revamp they plan to execute, and that strategy was executed by the new board member previously at Chewy, so there is actual track record to believe this.
The valuation is high right now, sure, but I sincerely think it’s not crazy high. That’s why a lot of the WSBers and redditors are still refusing to sell. The plan absolutely was not a pump and dump, it was more like jumping on an airplane before it takes off - at least in their minds. Time will tell.
I’m saying the author of the article (the reddit post) approached valuing it based on fundamentals. That is the whole point of a short equity squeeze - a stock’s valuation is predicted by many (wrong folks) to fall, institutional money takes a large short position, but a few smart speculators see a valuation-based reason why the price will actually (truly, not artificially) go up, thus squeezing the short sellers. The strategy kicks in only at that point, when buying and holding (based on speculating more intelligently about the true valuation) leads to further gains because of the short sellers’ situation. The reddit author even says explicitly - this is not a pump and dump, the stock will stay high.
Sharing a smart analysis and offering others the chance to execute the same strategy is not manipulation. It’s just a smart strategy. This guy and others who saw the opportunity early, realized GME was both fundamentally undervalued and also had super high short interest, just out-smarted professional traders and they are mad, so resorting to backchannel politics to drum up claims of “manipulation.”