KUALA LUMPUR (Jan 30): Last Thursday evening, certain retail investors created a new forum dubbed "BursaBets", on social aggregator Reddit, for like-minded individuals to discuss stock trading on Bursa Malaysia anonymously.

Their immediate target is to buy up rubber glove stocks the next morning, to inflict losses on short-sellers. At the time of writing, at least 7,300 retailers have joined the BursaBets forum.

Elsewhere, a Telegram chat group emerged for investors to discuss ganging up against short-sellers of Top Glove Corp Bhd. It now has close to 40,000 members.

Then, a spoof of the faceoff between the two groups based on Avengers Assemble went viral on Friday morning. The video shows retail investors teaming up as superheroes in the final battle against Thanos, who represents the short-sellers and a prominent foreign fund.

Clearly, these retail investors were inspired by the 5.5 million-member “WallStreetBets” chat room in the US, whose discussions had fuelled the epic GameStop short-squeeze rally.

Shares of New York-listed GameStop Corp jumped more than five times within three trading days as Reddit-obsessed traders pushed the stock from US$65 on Jan 22 to US$347 on Jan 27.

With the help of social media, these small-time investors successfully coordinated a massive short squeeze on at least two hedge funds that had bet that the shares of the Texas-based video game retailer would fall.

Among the casualties were Citron Capital and Melvin Capital Management — the short-sellers who retreated last Wednesday with heavy losses.

While the whole GameStop phenomenon is not likely to happen in Malaysia — given the fact that short-selling in Malaysia is regulated — the underlying Robinhood effect seems to have spread to our shores, thanks to the role of social media.

But what exactly can we learn from this? Is this merely a mob mania or will things change drastically making it a revolution of sorts for the ecosystem?

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