GameStop is simply a place to buy a video game in much of America. It’s been a battlefield on Wall Street, however, where swarms of smaller investors find themselves make an unprecedented stand against the 1%.

In loss, the funds representing the financial elite tend to walk away. The major bets they made that the stock of GameStop would collapse went wrong, leaving them facing collective losses of billions of dollars. On Wednesday, all the crazy activity drove GameStop’s stock as high as $380, up from $18 just a couple of weeks earlier.

The stunning takeover of power gives smaller-pocketed investors some affirmation, many of whom are urging each other on Reddit and are exchanging stocks for the first time due to free-trading software provided by brokerages. More investors on Wall Street are now left wondering whether the stock market is going to pop into a risky bubble when AMC Entertainment, Bed Bath & Beyond and other downtrodden stocks are unexpectedly surging as well. Earlier this week, the S&P 500 reached a new high, but it dropped on Wednesday.

Two betting companies that had made bets to drop the price of GameStop’s money-losing stock have effectively thrown in the towel. One, Citron Research, admitted in a YouTube video on Wednesday that it unwound the bulk of its bet and took “a loss, 100 percent” to do so. But Andrew Left, who runs Citron, said it didn’t change his opinion that the stock of GameStop will actually go down.

“We’re moving on,” said Left. For GameStop, little has improved but the stock price,” He also said he has “consumer respect,” which can run up stock prices far higher than where critics say they should be, at least for a while.”

Melvin Capital is also leaving GameStop, with CNBC being told by founder Gabe Plotkin that the hedge fund was suffering a huge loss. He dismissed reports that the hedge fund was going to collapse. The scale of the damages that Citron and Melvin have suffered is uncertain.

GameStop’s stock has been struggling for a long time previous to the recent blast. As purchases of video games are gradually moving online, the business has been losing money for years, and its shares plummeted for six consecutive years before rebounding in 2020.

This forced many experienced investors to make bets that the supply of GameStop would drop even further. In these bets, known as “short sales,” investors borrow a share and sell it in hopes of buying it back at a cheaper price later and pocketing the difference. GameStop is one of Wall Street’s busiest stocks.

But its shares started rising sharply earlier this month after the company’s board was replaced by a co-founder of Chewy, the online supplier of pet supplies. The theory is that when it relies more on digital purchases and closes brick-and-mortar stores, he will assist with the restructuring of the business. Its stock soared from less than $18 on Jan. 11, to $19.94. It looked like an enormous change for the stock at the moment.

Meanwhile, smaller investors exhorted each other online to keep the price of GameStop rolling higher.

The raucous conversations are full of sarcasm, self-deprecation and space ship emojis that reflect the expectation that the stock of GameStop would launch to the moon.

What’s the latest logical selling point (over 200? 500?) so I don’t have to watch this ticker every second until Friday/Monday?????? “In a Reddit thread Tuesday afternoon, one person wrote as GameStop soared. “I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I’M DOING,” noting that there were other things they wanted to do.

There is no overriding explanation why this cavalcade of smaller and first-time buyers has been drawn by GameStop, but there is a distinct dimension of retaliation in online communications against Wall Street.

One person posted on Reddit: “The same wealthy people who caused the market crash in 2007/08 are still in power and continue to manipulate the market to get even richer, we’re just taking back our fair share.”

Another person said, “Hey Mom, I can’t come over for dinner.” “I’m bankrupting the boys’ 10-figure hedge fund.”

The war has also produced huge financial losses for Wall Street players, who shortened the stock of GameStop, above personal attacks.

They had to buy shares to do so as GameStop’s profits rose and short sellers hurried to get out of their bets. That also further amplified the momentum, forming a feedback loop. According to S3 Partners, short sellers of GameStop were still down by more than $5 billion in 2021 as of Tuesday.

Most of Wall Street’s expertise remains sceptical that the portfolio of GameStop will hang on to its enormous gains. The firm is unlikely to start making significant enough gains anytime soon to support its $22.2 billion market value, analysts claim. The stock closed at $347.51 on Wednesday. BofA Global Research analysts increased their price target to $10 on Wednesday.

All the mania raises some doubt that consumers are taking unnecessary chances, and on Wednesday, reporters asked Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell whether the Fed’s drive to stabilise markets during the pandemic is helping to push stock prices too far.

Powell downplayed the position of low interest rates and pointed to the hopes of buyers for COVID-19 vaccinations as triggers for record stock markets and further support from Washington for the economy.

On Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission said that it had found all the uncertainty in the market, but it did not clearly name GameStop. The Agency has reported that it is “working with our fellow regulators to evaluate the situation and review the activities of market investors.”

The Reddit chat group later on Wednesday, where much of the GameStop stock drive, dubbed r/WallStreetBets, took place, was taken private, leaving it unavailable to outsiders. Any long-time users even took to Twitter to state that they could not use it anymore. A Reddit spokesperson stated that it was taken private by the group’s moderators, but gave no further comment.

Furthermore, a text and audio chat community also named r/WallStreetBets was shut down by the gamer-friendly site Discord for “continuing to allow hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings,” the organisation said in a release.

For historical purposes, Discord said it tracked that party, named a “server,” for “some time” because of persistent breaches of its laws, including hate speech, glorifying abuse and promoting disinformation, and sent numerous notices to its administrator.

“To be clear, due to financial fraud related to GameStop or other stocks, we did not ban this server,” Discord said. “We are monitoring this situation and we will cooperate with the authorities as appropriate in the event of allegations of illegal activity.”