GameStop: The Meme-Stock Short Squeeze

In January 2021, a struggling video game retailer with emptying malls briefly became the most traded stock on Earth and forced multibillion-dollar hedge funds to beg for bailouts. GameStop had looked like a reasonable short: brick-and-mortar gaming was dying, and funds like Melvin Capital had sold millions of borrowed shares. Then a Reddit community noticed short interest had exceeded 100 percent of the float, retail traders piled in through Robinhood, and the stock ran from around $20 toward nearly $500 in days.

This case sharpens how a coordinated story can detach price from value, in both directions, longer than seems rational, and how dangerous it is to mistake one for the other. The fundamentals never changed; the narrative did. Open the app to find where your own business is riding a narrative tailwind, and what the math underneath would look like if the story stopped working tomorrow.