No doubt there are many winners and losers in the ongoing war between retail traders who have been pumping stocks such as GameStop, AMC Entertainment, and others, and the institutional short sellers who have been losing billions after betting against those same stocks.
But perhaps the biggest winner of all is the website where so much of the action is happening.
Reddit, which hosts the popular WallStreetBets forum that gave birth to this week’s trading frenzy, has been enjoying explosive growth in new users. On Tuesday alone, it saw 176,000 installs from Apple’s App Store and the Google Play store around the world, according to data from Sensor Tower. That’s up 26% from the previous week. In the United States, installs were up 19% on Tuesday to 68,000, Sensor Tower says.
According to App Annie, Reddit was No. 2 among free iPhone apps in the United States on Wednesday, while trading app Robinhood was No. 1.
WallStreetBets has ballooned to 4.5 million members as of Thursday morning, more than double its membership from a week ago. And the phenomenon is showing no signs of petering out. GameStop shares were up another 35% in pre-market trading on Thursday.
Since the start of this year, the stock has jumped almost 2,000%.
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