And quite a lot of Redditors suffered massive losses. There's not shortage of WSB posts with 7 figure losses. Overall it's pretty hard to assess whether on net "Wall Street" made or lost money to retail. Melvin certainly wasn't the only player here.

It's likely that other funds jumped in on the squeeze, and were much better in terms of timing their exit. Some funds may have shorted on the way back down, and made a killing.

But most importantly, intermediaries like HFTs, option market makers, internalizers, and stat arb funds made a killing. Almost entirely at the expense of retail flow. It's like a casino. Some win, some lose, but the house rake always wins.

But even if retail on net made money, it probably wasn't a benefit to society. 20 people losing their life savings so that /u/deepfuckingvalue can become a multimillionaire isn't exactly a heartwarming story.

Also laying blame on deepfuckingvalue seems ridiculous to me. He was basically the only one that invested in Gamestop as a value investment.. about a year ago. Everyone told him he was stupid but he kept with his plan. Then at some point a horde of crazies jumps on the train and now he is taking money from "20 people losing their life savings"? meh...

This whole topic reeks of simplifications, misguided blame and populism.

I do not think this is usually the case on WSB, where people regularly show off trading on margin several times larger than their total account size :)

Even without margin, it's not uncommon to see people freely admitting they put everything they have into a single position (and mods happily verify it).

Works(ed?) for Mass Mutual.

It is, because the open corruption of the stock market, the absolutely disgusting behavior of major players and especially the arcane rules (like T+2 settlement, made necessary by the US's fossilized banking infrastructure) became dragged into the spotlight.

Wall Street claimed to have learned their lesson after 2008ff? GME proved that they all haven't learned a single damn thing.

> 20 people losing their life savings so that /u/deepfuckingvalue can become a multimillionaire isn't exactly a heartwarming story.

It's called wallstreetbets for a reason. I'm sorry but people dumping their life savings into the stock markets on a crazy bet by anonymous Redditors, that's just... dumb. (On a side note, such cases are why basic financial education should be mandatory at schools!)

(Disclosure: sunk a couple hundred into AMC and NOK, planning on holding all of it until at least the pandemic ends)

Given that 6 million of the current 8.5 million WSB subscribers joined after GME popped, I think most retail investors probably lost money. At this point it's a minority who got in early and made a lot of money.