New MBTA Orange Line train derails in work zone at Wellington Station
Updated: 2:51 PM EDT Mar 16, 2021
One of the MBTA’s new Orange Line trains derailed Tuesday morning in a work zone at Wellington Station in Medford.According to officials, the train was going at a slow rate of speed and was crossing over to the southbound track at 11:40 a.m. when it derailed.About 100 passengers were on board at the time. The MBTA said there were no injuries. While crews worked to return the train to the rails, inspect the tracks and check equipment, shuttle buses were called in to replace the train service between Oak Grove and Community College, officials said. That was later reduced to the stretch between Oak Grove and Sullivan Square.Several units from the Medford Fire Department also responded to the scene. Wellington was where the MBTA tested the newest Orange Line trains, some of which have entered service.
MEDFORD, Mass. —
One of the MBTA’s new Orange Line trains derailed Tuesday morning in a work zone at Wellington Station in Medford.
According to officials, the train was going at a slow rate of speed and was crossing over to the southbound track at 11:40 a.m. when it derailed.
About 100 passengers were on board at the time. The MBTA said there were no injuries.
While crews worked to return the train to the rails, inspect the tracks and check equipment, shuttle buses were called in to replace the train service between Oak Grove and Community College, officials said. That was later reduced to the stretch between Oak Grove and Sullivan Square.
Several units from the Medford Fire Department also responded to the scene.
Wellington was where the MBTA tested the newest Orange Line trains, some of which have entered service.
Notice that there is a nice linear relationship between the angular position of the wheel and the horizontal position? The slope of this line is 0.006 meters per degree. If you had a wheel with a bigger radius, it would move a greater distance for each rotation—so it seems clear that this slope has something to do with the radius of the wheel. Let’s write this as the following expression.
Illustration: Rhett Allain
In this equation, s is the distance the center of the wheel moves. The radius is r and the angular position is θ. That just leaves k—this is just a proportionality constant. Since s vs. θ is a linear function, kr must be the slope of that line. I already know the value of this slope and I can measure the radius of the wheel to be 0.342 meters. With that, I have a k value of 0.0175439 with units of 1/degree.
Big deal, right? No, it is. Check this out. What happens if you multiply the value of k by 180 degrees? For my value of k, I get 3.15789. Yes, that is indeed VERY close to the value of pi = 3.1415…(at least that’s the first 5 digits of pi). This k is a way to convert from angular units of degrees to a better unit to measure angles—we call this new unit the radian. If the wheel angle is measured in radians, k is equal to 1 and you get the following lovely relationship.
Illustration: Rhett Allain
This equation has two things that are important. First, there’s technically a pi in there since the angle is in radians (yay for Pi Day). Second, this is how a train stays on the track. Seriously.
The Girl On The Train cast: Parineeti Chopra, Avinash Tiwary, Aditi Rao Hydari, Kirti Kulhari, Tota Roy Chowdhury The Girl On The Train director: Ribhu Dasgupta The Girl On The Train rating: Two stars.
Mira Kapoor is a girl, on a train. She’s a lush. Armed with a hip flask, into which deep inroads are frequently made. Thick kohl-smudged eyes, slurred tongue, fogged brain. She takes the same train, back and forth from London to the suburbs, everyday. Everyday, she passes her former home, which falls along the tracks, in which lives a pretty woman Mira envies. And then one day, that woman goes missing. A body is found in the woods. And questions abound.
This latest edition of ‘The Girl On The Train’ comes after Hollywood version of the same name in which Emily Blunt plays the alcoholic stalker with a dark past, which in turn was based on Paula Hawkins’ bestselling novel. The use of the ‘girl’ in the title may have been used to remind you of ‘Gone Girl’, in which Gillian Flynn gave us a hot take on the sexual, sensual girl who uses her wiles to buy her way out of trouble. (It also launched an endless array of thrillers with ‘girl’ in the title.) Hawkins’ girl wasn’t as sharp as Flynn’s, but there was something beguiling about the way she let us into her head, even though the film had too much going on– too many characters, too much sloshing of vodka, too many red herrings. It was Blunt’s performance, even if it wasn’t her best, which carried the film through.
The trouble with Parineeti Chopra’s Mira is that you never completely buy her. As the girl with unresolved trauma trying to put behind her broken marriage, the actor looks just right. A lot of thought has gone into the unmade hair, the smeared kajal, the blood-shot eyes. But she isn’t written with enough depth. We have no idea who Mira is, before and after she meets with the smart Shekhar (Avinash Tiwary), who wins her over before the first song is out. Yes, there are songs in the film. A Bollywood adaptation of a murder mystery without ‘naach-gaana’, in 2021? Perish the thought. It’s also why the film is two hours long.
The overstated writing lets down the plot, which in any case is filled with apparently unrelated characters popping in and out: a very take-charge type of police woman (Kriti Kulhari) is assigned to the case, a mysterious photographer creeps about the same woods where the body is found; a spot of blackmail is in the air; an over-friendly shrink (Roy Chowdhury) shows up briefly, as does a desi mobster. The characters come, and before we can clock them, they go. And Nusrat (Aditi Rao Hydari), the lovely-looking woman who sets everything into motion, could just as easily have been a wraith, so insubstantial is she.
It’s only after a good hour has passed that the overwrought Chopra settles down, to dig a little deeper into her role, and deliver moments when you can see the girl’s pain, even if fleeting. And then the film swings right back to its choppy contrivances, with a hard-to-swallow climax. Somewhere in the film, Mira is spotted at Paddington station, and you flash back to the near perfect Agatha Christie whodunit ‘4.50 From Paddington’, which is also about a crime being witnessed from a train compartment. Now that’s writing. Here, you can see the dialogue coming a mile off. At one point, Chopra’s character says ‘mujhe apna past nahin badalna’, and you know, before she opens her mouth, that she will say, ‘I want to change my present’.
And this one, even better, again from Chopra: “main usko kabhi nahin bataa paayi ki woh main nahin, mera wound tha (I could never tell him that it wasn’t me, it was my wound)”. You don’t say.
Colorado State University researchers Jason Stock and Tom Cavey have published a paper on an AI system that rewards dogs for doing tricks.
The computer science grad students trained image classification networks to determine whether a dog is sitting, standing, or lying down. If a dog responds to a command by adopting the correct posture, the machine dispenses a treat.
The students used an Nvidia Jetson edge AI platform for real-time trick recognition and treats. Stock and Cavey see their prototype system as a dog trainer’s aid — it handles the treats — or a way to school dogs on better behavior at home.
“We’ve demonstrated the potential for a future product to come out of this,” Stock said in a statement.
Fetching dog training data
Above: This system can discern dog tricks.
Image Credit: Nvidia
The researchers needed dog images that exhibited the three specified postures. They found the Stanford Dogs datasets, with more than 20,000 images of various sizes depicting dogs in many positions. The images required preprocessing so they wrote a program to help quickly label them.
In an email to VentureBeat, Nvidia said, “It doesn’t yet work remotely; it’s currently for in-person. But that would be an easy setup to make it a remote system. You might think of it as a system, or IP, to license for devices like the Furbo. The researchers see many possible applications but haven’t committed to anything yet.”
To refine the model, the researchers applied features of dogs from ImageNet to enable transfer learning. Next, they applied post-training and optimization techniques to boost speed and reduce model size.
For optimizations, they tapped into Nvidia’s Jetpack software development kit on Jetson, which is a lightweight AI platform for drones and other systems. It offers an easy way to get things up and running quickly and to access the TensorRT and cuDNN libraries, Stock said. Nvidia TensorRT optimization libraries offered “significant improvements in speed,” he added.
Tapping into the university’s computing system, Stock trained the model overnight on two 24GB Nvidia RTX 6000 graphics processing units (GPUs).
Deployed models on Henry
The researchers tested their models on Henry, Cavey’s Australian Shepherd. The model achieved accuracy of up to 92% in tests and demonstrated an ability to make split-second inference at nearly 40 frames per second.
Using the Jetson Nano, the system makes real-time decisions about dog behaviors and reinforces positive actions with a treat, transmitting a signal to release a reward.
“We looked at Raspberry Pi and Coral, but neither was adequate, and the choice was obvious for us to use Jetson Nano,” Cavey said.
Explainable AI helps provide transparency about the makeup of neural networks. It’s becoming more common in the financial services industry as a way to understand fintech models. Stock and Cavey included model interpretation in their paper to provide explainable AI for the pet industry.
They do this with images of the videos that show the posture analysis. One set of images relies on GradCAM — a common technique for displaying where a convolutional neural network model is focused. Another set of images explains the model by tapping into Integrated Gradients, which helps analyze pixels.
The researchers said it was important to create a trustworthy and ethical component of the AI system for trainers and general users. Otherwise, there’s no way to explain the methodology, should it come into question.
“We can explain what our model is doing, and that might be helpful to certain stakeholders — otherwise how can you back up what your model is really learning?” Cavey said.
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GameStop shares are on an epic roller coaster that’s pushed them to the stratosphere. But for how long?
Getty Images
Many of today’s adults spent their youths in GameStop stores. They bought and sold consoles and games. They lined up for launches. Now some of those people have become rich buying the company’s stock and encouraging their friends on Reddit to buy it too. GameStop’s shares rocketed higher than ever expected in the past couple weeks, and all because activity between social media investors began pushing it up. Wall Street had bet heavily that the company would fail, but as the price kept going up, investors were forced to reset their wagers. That led the stock to rocket up, and then swing wildly.
Jaime Rogozinski, the apparent founder of the Reddit community at the heart of all this, told The Wall Street Journal it’s like “a train wreck happening in real time.” Keith Gill, the trader in the Reddit community who helped kick off the battle, told the paper he “didn’t expect this.”
On Thursday alone, GameStop’s stock hit all-time highs of $492.02 per share, only to drop by more than half a minute later. It closed trading on Friday at $325.
GameStop itself hasn’t fundamentally changed in the past month. It’s still a struggling retailer facing an uncertain future against the rising tide of online shopping. But its stock has shot up as much as 1,800% — that’s not a typo — since the beginning of the year. This dynamic’s led Wall Street investors who bet against the company’s future to lose billions of dollars, and the excitement is driving the hype even further.
Now playing: Watch this:
What does GameStop’s skyrocketing stock have to do with…
10:15
Over the past week, the financial world watched in shock as GameStop stock rose to unthinkable levels. Even Elon Musk tweeted about it, pointing his 43 million followers to a link of the Reddit community investing in GameStop, called r/WallStreetBets.
By the close of regular trading Wednesday afternoon, the stock was $347.51 per share, up from from historic lows of around $3.30 per share in the summer of 2019. And then in after-hours trading, it dropped by more than 37%, only to rise again. Thursday saw even more dramatic moves, with the stock jumping up to $492.02 before dropping nearly 60% to close at $197.44. Then, in after-hours trading, it rose back up to $311.99.
Meanwhile, stock market trading apps appeared to either stop or impose restrictions on GameStop share purchasing for at least part of the day.
The popular stock trading app Robinhood drew particular attention for what appeared to be the among the most restrictive new rules. People had been raising concerns about Robinhood for a while, saying it “gamified” stock trading to a potentially dangerous degree. Now it’s being accused of outright market manipulation, including through at least one class action lawsuit filed already. Robinhood, for its part, said Friday that market rules effectively forced it to put those restrictions in place.
Read more:GameStop’s stock spike fueled by slang from Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets community. Here’s what it means
If you subscribe to only one CNET newsletter, this is it. Get editors’ top picks of the day’s most interesting reviews, news stories and videos.
“We’re seeing a phenomenon that I have never seen,” Jim Cramer, a Wall Street commentator on CNBC and a former hedge fund manager, said during a segment Monday. And GameStop could be just the start. “It’s insane.”
This may seem like an oddball story about Wall Street investors being overrun by excited social media users. For some, it’s been fun to watch those investors get taken to the cleaners by a bunch of people posting rocket emojis, saying GameStop shares will go “to the moon.”
Reddit users are betting they can take GameStop shares “to the moon.”
Getty Images
But for some on Wall Street, it’s the latest sign of how social media can upend everyday life. Twitter has changed the worlds of news and politics. YouTube and Instagram have transformed the fashion, beauty and entertainment industries. Now Reddit is taking on Wall Street.
These worlds have overlapped as well. Fans of Korean pop groups, known as K-pop stans, post floods of tweets about their favorite stars to overwhelm racist hashtags on Twitter. And TikTokers banded together in attempts to confuse President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign.
Now emboldened Reddit communities are talking about taking on other companies that Wall Street is broadly betting against. The Reddit crowd is already attempting to push up BlackBerry, the once-popular handset maker that now focuses primarily on selling business software. And Redditors are also targeting the struggling movie chain AMC, pushing its stock from hovering around $2 per share to more than $8 in after-hours trading. By Wednesday afternoon it closed at $19.90 per share before dropping to $12.75. On Thursday, it fell even further, to $8.63 per share.
The Reddit community’s actions have had such an impact that TD Ameritrade took the extraordinary step last week to limit share trading on Game Stop and AMC stocks, “out of an abundance of caution amid unprecedented market conditions.” Nasdaq as well warned that it will halt trading on stocks it thinks are being manipulated by social media.
Meantime, traffic to the Reddit community at the center of the drama, r/WallStreetBets, is breaking records. r/WallStreetBets counted 73 million page views for its discussion boards on Tuesday, according to a report by Mashable. Over the past week, it hit about 700 million page views. Reddit is already the 46th most popular site on the web, notching more than 78 million unique visitors in December, according to comScore. And on Wednesday, the Reddit’s mobile app tallied its biggest single day of downloads, industry watcher Apptopia said.
But when the memes stop and the excitement goes away, GameStop will go back to being that struggling video game retailer at a time when gaming is increasingly moving toward streaming and the idea of stepping into a physical store is still a nerve-wracking prospect during a pandemic. At that point, stock analysts say, whoever’s left holding shares will see their value evaporate.
“This is unnatural, insane and dangerous,” Michael Burry, a prominent GameStop investor and one of the subjects of the book and movie The Big Short, wrote in a now-deleted tweet. His roughly $17 million investment in the company has ballooned to $250 million as of Tuesday, Markets Insider reported.
Many gamers spent their childhoods going to GameStop.
Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Who listens?
Michael Pachter, a longtime video game industry analyst at Wedbush Securities, said he hasn’t even bothered to update his stock price expectations for GameStop since shares started going crazy last week. “Who’s listening?” he said in an interview last week. “Nobody cares what a sell-side analyst says right now.”
To him, there are reasonable explanations why people could be somewhat excited about GameStop. One of its newest board members, Ryan Cohen, helped turn Chewy into one of the largest online pet product sellers in the world, before selling it to PetSmart. GameStop’s also on a track to being profitable again.
But that doesn’t come close to explaining GameStop’s share price now. “It’s a Ponzi scheme,” Pachter said, referring to a form of fraud that appears to make money but in fact is only propped up by funding from new investors. “There is a point where it’ll go down.”
Many of the Reddit users buying up GameStop shares see this as a way to fight Wall Street greed.
Getty Images
He suspects that may happen after the company reports its quarterly results in March, at which point executives and investors on the board are allowed to sell their shares.
One thing analysts watching wonder is whether the Reddit investors will lose their millions whenever the stock eventually crashes back to earth. Rogozinski, the man who helped found the Reddit community, said their approach to investing as more like gambling than traditional analysis and strategy. Its members, who the community identifies as “degenerates,” often encourage one another to push all their funds into one stock, riding it up and down. Their posts are punctuated with phrases like “hold the line” and “diamond hands” (hold onto your stocks for a long time) and YOLO (you only live once).
He told the WSJ he never imagined the Reddit community would morph from its beginnings to what it’s become. “It’s a little like watching one of those horror films where you can see the bad guy slowly going up the stairs,” Rogozinski said.
Indeed, even Keith Gill, the community member who helped kickstart the initial battle over GameStop, told the Journal he was surprised by what it’d turned into.
“I thought this trade would be successful,” he said, “but I never expected what happened over the past week.”
In the meantime, the social media hype is continuing on Reddit, where users are declaring their intention to buy and hold more GameStop shares, all to send prices even higher.
“My mom told me it’s time to sell,” one Reddit user wrote on a post about GameStop’s stock moves. “Should I find a new mom?”
“Yes,” another user answered. “The answer is yes.”
Read more:Why GameStop, BlackBerry stocks suddenly jumped, thanks to Reddit
GameStop shareholders are watching piles of cash come in. But for how long?
Angela Lang/CNET
GameStop is one of those stores nearly every gamer has a story about. Many of today’s adults spent their childhoods in one of the stores, lining up for launches and buying or selling consoles and video games. Now some of those people have made a fortune buying the company’s stock and encouraging their friends on Reddit to buy it too. GameStop’s stock has rocketed higher than ever expected, and all because activity between social media investors began pushing it up. Wall Street had bet heavily that the price would fall, leading the stock to swing wildly. Jaime Rogozinski, the apparent founder of the Reddit community at the heart of all this, told The Wall Street Journal it’s like “a train wreck happening in real time.”
On Thursday alone, GameSpot’s stock hit all-time highs of $492.02 per share, only to drop by more than half a minute later. On Friday afternoon, it jumped up to $324.
GameStop itself hasn’t fundamentally changed much in the past month, but its stock has shot up as much as 1,800% — that’s not a typo — since the beginning of the year. This dynamic’s led Wall Street investors who bet against the company’s future to lose billions of dollars, and the excitement is driving the hype even further.
Now playing: Watch this:
What does GameStop’s skyrocketing stock have to do with…
10:15
Over the past week, the financial world watched in shock as GameStop stock rose to unthinkable levels. Even Elon Musk tweeted about it, pointing his 43 million followers to a link of the Reddit community investing in GameStop, called r/WallStreetBets.
By the close of regular trading Wednesday afternoon, the stock was $347.51 per share, up from from historic lows of around $3.30 per share in the summer of 2019. And then in after-hours trading, it dropped by more than 37%, only to rise again. Thursday saw even more dramatic moves, with the stock jumping up to $492.02 before dropping nearly 60% to close at $197.44. Then, in after-hours trading, it rose back up to $311.99.
Meanwhile, stock market trading app Robinhood appeared to stop GameStop purchasing for part of the day, while other companies imposed rules to limit some trades as well.
Read more:GameStop’s stock spike fueled by slang from Reddit’s WallStreetBets community. Here’s what it means
If you subscribe to only one CNET newsletter, this is it. Get editors’ top picks of the day’s most interesting reviews, news stories and videos.
“We’re seeing a phenomenon that I have never seen,” Jim Cramer, a Wall Street commentator on CNBC and a former hedge fund manager, said during a segment Monday. And GameStop could be just the start. “It’s insane.”
This may seem like an oddball story about Wall Street investors being overrun by excited social media users. For some, it’s been fun to watch those investors get taken to the cleaners by a bunch of people posting rocket emojis, saying GameStop shares will go “to the moon.”
Reddit users are betting they can take GameStop shares “to the moon.”
Getty Images
But for some on Wall Street, it’s the latest sign of how social media can upend everyday life. Twitter has changed the worlds of news and politics. YouTube and Instagram have transformed the fashion, beauty and entertainment industries. Now Reddit is taking on Wall Street.
These worlds have overlapped as well. Fans of Korean pop groups, known as K-pop stans, post floods of tweets about their favorite stars to overwhelm racist hashtags on Twitter. And TikTokers banded together in attempts to confuse President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign.
Now emboldened Reddit communities are talking about taking on other companies that Wall Street is broadly betting against. The Reddit crowd is already attempting to push up BlackBerry, the once-popular handset maker that now focuses primarily on selling business software. And Redditors are also targeting the struggling movie chain AMC, pushing its stock from hovering around $2 per share to more than $8 in after-hours trading. By Wednesday afternoon it closed at $19.90 per share before dropping to $12.75. On Thursday, it fell even further, to $8.63 per share.
The Reddit community’s actions have had such an impact that TD Ameritrade took the extraordinary step earlier this week to limit share trading on Game Stop and AMC stocks, “out of an abundance of caution amid unprecedented market conditions.” Nasdaq as well warned that it will halt trading on stocks it thinks are being manipulated by social media.
Meantime, traffic to the Reddit community at the center of the drama, WallStreetBets, is breaking records. WallStreetBets counted 73 million page views for its discussion boards on Tuesday, according to a report by Mashable. Over the past week, it hit about 700 million page views. Reddit is already the 46th most popular site on the web, notching more than 78 million unique visitors in December, according to comScore. And on Wednesday, the Reddit’s mobile app tallied its biggest single day of downloads, industry watcher Apptopia said.
But when the memes stop and the excitement goes away, GameStop will go back to being that struggling video game retailer at a time when gaming is increasingly moving toward streaming and the idea of stepping into a physical store is still a nerve-wracking prospect during a pandemic. At that point, stock analysts say, whoever’s left holding shares will see their value evaporate.
“This is unnatural, insane and dangerous,” Michael Burry, a prominent GameStop investor and one of the subjects of the book and movie The Big Short, wrote in a now-deleted tweet. His roughly $17 million investment in the company has ballooned to $250 million as of Tuesday, Markets Insider reported.
Many gamers spent their childhoods going to GameStop.
Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Who listens?
Michael Pachter, a longtime video game industry analyst at Wedbush Securities, said earlier this week he hasn’t even bothered to update his stock price expectations for GameStop since shares started going crazy last week. “Who’s listening?” he said. “Nobody cares what a sell-side analyst says right now.”
To him, there are reasonable explanations why people could be somewhat excited about GameStop. One of its newest board members, Ryan Cohen, helped turn Chewy into one of the largest online pet product sellers in the world, before selling it to PetSmart. GameStop’s also on a track to being profitable again.
But that doesn’t come close to explaining GameStop’s share price now. “It’s a Ponzi scheme,” Pachter said, referring to a form of fraud that appears to make money but in fact is only propped up by funding from new investors. “There is a point where it’ll go down.”
He suspects that may happen after the company reports its quarterly results in March, at which point executives and investors on the board are allowed to sell their shares.
One thing analysts watching wonder is whether the Reddit investors will lose their millions whenever the stock eventually crashes back to earth. Rogozinski, the man who helped found the Reddit community, said their approach to investing as more like gambling than traditional analysis and strategy. Its members, who the community identifies as “degenerates,” often encourage one another to push all their funds into one stock, riding it up and down. Their posts are punctuated with phrases like “hold the line” and “diamond hands” (hold onto your stocks for a long time) and YOLO (you only live once).
He told the WSJ he never imagined the Reddit community would morph from its beginnings to what it’s become. “It’s a little like watching one of those horror films where you can see the bad guy slowly going up the stairs,” Rogozinski said.
In the meantime, the social media hype is continuing on Reddit, where users are declaring their intention to buy and hold more GameStop shares, all to send prices even higher.
“My mom told me it’s time to sell,” one Reddit user wrote on a post about GameStop’s stock moves. “Should I find a new mom?”
“Yes,” another user answered. “The answer is yes.”
Read more:Why GameStop, BlackBerry stocks suddenly jumped, thanks to Reddit
GameStop shareholders are watching piles of cash come in. But for how long?
Angela Lang/CNET
GameStop is one of those stores nearly every gamer has a story about. Today’s young adults spent their childhoods in the company’s stores, buying and selling consoles and video games. Now some of those people have made a fortune buying the company’s stock and cheerleading their friends on Reddit to buy it too. All this activity between social media investors pushing the price up, and Wall Street betting the price down, has caused the stock to swing wildly. Jaime Rogozinski, the apparent founder of the Reddit community at the heart of all this, told the Wall Street Journal it’s like “a train wreck happening in real time.”
On Thursday alone, GameSpot’s stock hit all-time highs of $492.02 per share, only to drop by more than half a minute later. On Friday morning, it jumped up another 75% to $341.
Though GameStop itself hasn’t fundamentally changed much in the past month, its stock has shot up as much as 2,752% — that’s not a typo — since the beginning of the year. This dynamic’s led Wall Street investors who bet against the company’s future to lose billions of dollars, and the excitement is driving the hype even further.
Now playing: Watch this:
What does GameStop’s skyrocketing stock have to do with…
10:15
Over the past week, the financial world watched in shock as GameStop stock rose to unthinkable levels. Even Elon Musk tweeted about it, pointing his 43 million followers to a link of the Reddit community investing in GameStop, called r/WallStreetBets.
By the close of regular trading Wednesday afternoon, the stock was $347.51 per share, up from from historic lows of around $3.30 per share in the summer of 2019. And then in after-hours trading, it dropped by more than 37%, only to rise again. Thursday saw even more dramatic moves, with the stock jumping up to $492.02 before dropping nearly 60% to close at $197.44. Then, in after-hours trading, it rose back up to $311.99.
Meanwhile, stock market trading app Robinhood appeared to stop GameStop purchasing for part of the day, while other companies imposed rules to limit some trades as well.
Read more:GameStop’s stock spike fueled by slang from Reddit’s WallStreetBets community. Here’s what it means
If you subscribe to only one CNET newsletter, this is it. Get editors’ top picks of the day’s most interesting reviews, news stories and videos.
“We’re seeing a phenomenon that I have never seen,” Jim Cramer, a Wall Street commentator on CNBC and a former hedge fund manager, said during a segment Monday. And GameStop could be just the start. “It’s insane.”
This may seem like an oddball story about Wall Street investors being overrun by excited social media users. For some, it’s been fun to watch those investors get taken to the cleaners by a bunch of people posting rocket emojis, saying GameStop shares will go “to the moon.”
Reddit users are betting they can take GameStop shares “to the moon.”
Getty Images
But for some on Wall Street, it’s the latest sign of how social media can upend everyday life. Twitter has changed the worlds of news and politics. YouTube and Instagram have transformed the fashion, beauty and entertainment industries. Now Reddit is taking on Wall Street.
These worlds have overlapped as well. Fans of Korean pop groups, known as K-pop stans, post floods of tweets about their favorite stars to overwhelm racist hashtags on Twitter. And TikTokers banded together in attempts to confuse President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign.
Now emboldened Reddit communities are talking about taking on other companies that Wall Street is broadly betting against. The Reddit crowd is already attempting to push up BlackBerry, the once-popular handset maker that now focuses primarily on selling business software. And Redditors are also targeting the struggling movie chain AMC, pushing its stock from hovering around $2 per share to more than $8 in after-hours trading. By Wednesday afternoon it closed at $19.90 per share before dropping to $12.75. On Thursday, it fell even further, to $8.63 per share.
The Reddit community’s actions have had such an impact that TD Ameritrade took the extraordinary step earlier this week to limit share trading on Game Stop and AMC stocks, “out of an abundance of caution amid unprecedented market conditions.” Nasdaq as well warned that it will halt trading on stocks it thinks are being manipulated by social media.
Meantime, traffic to the Reddit community at the center of the drama, WallStreetBets, is breaking records. WallStreetBets counted 73 million page views for its discussion boards on Tuesday, according to a report by Mashable. Over the past week, it hit about 700 million page views. Reddit is already the 46th most popular site on the web, notching more than 78 million unique visitors in December, according to comScore. And on Wednesday, the Reddit’s mobile app tallied its biggest single day of downloads, industry watcher Apptopia said.
But when the memes stop and the excitement goes away, GameStop will go back to being that struggling video game retailer at a time when gaming is increasingly moving toward streaming and the idea of stepping into a physical store is still a nerve-wracking prospect during a pandemic. At that point, stock analysts say, whoever’s left holding shares will see their value evaporate.
“This is unnatural, insane and dangerous,” Michael Burry, a prominent GameStop investor and one of the subjects of the book and movie The Big Short, wrote in a now-deleted tweet. His roughly $17 million investment in the company has ballooned to $250 million as of Tuesday, Markets Insider reported.
Many gamers spent their childhoods going to GameStop.
Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Who listens?
Michael Pachter, a longtime video game industry analyst at Wedbush Securities, said earlier this week he hasn’t even bothered to update his stock price expectations for GameStop since shares started going crazy last week. “Who’s listening?” he said. “Nobody cares what a sell-side analyst says right now.”
To him, there are reasonable explanations why people could be somewhat excited about GameStop. One of its newest board members, Ryan Cohen, helped turn Chewy into one of the largest online pet product sellers in the world, before selling it to PetSmart. GameStop’s also on a track to being profitable again.
But that doesn’t come close to explaining GameStop’s share price now. “It’s a Ponzi scheme,” Pachter said, referring to a form of fraud that appears to make money but in fact is only propped up by funding from new investors. “There is a point where it’ll go down.”
He suspects that may happen after the company reports its quarterly results in March, at which point executives and investors on the board are allowed to sell their shares.
One thing analysts watching wonder is whether the Reddit investors will lose their millions whenever the stock eventually crashes back to earth. Rogozinski, the man who helped found the Reddit community, said their approach to investing as more like gambling than traditional analysis and strategy. Its members, who the community identifies as “degenerates,” often encourage one another to push all their funds into one stock, riding it up and down. Their posts are punctuated with phrases like “hold the line” and “diamond hands” (hold onto your stocks for a long time) and YOLO (you only live once).
He told the WSJ he never imagined the Reddit community would morph from its beginnings to what it’s become. “It’s a little like watching one of those horror films where you can see the bad guy slowly going up the stairs,” Rogozinski said.
In the meantime, the social media hype is continuing on Reddit, where users are declaring their intention to buy and hold more GameStop shares, all to send prices even higher.
“My mom told me it’s time to sell,” one Reddit user wrote on a post about GameStop’s stock moves. “Should I find a new mom?”
“Yes,” another user answered. “The answer is yes.”
Read more:Why GameStop, BlackBerry stocks suddenly jumped, thanks to Reddit
