Reddit Inc.'s stock-trading enthusiasts made it a household name by backing companies that Wall Street wouldn’t. For Reddit’s own initial public offering, a group of them are about to flip the script.
In the days after the social-media company filed for an IPO, thousands of members of the WallStreetBets forum — which boasts around 15 million users and helped popularize meme stocks like GameStop Corp. — voted to boost a forum post about shorting the company, a sharp reversal of their typically bullish ways. Their avowed reasons varied from the company’s lack of profitability to competitive concerns, and mostly centered on spite.
(paywalled on Bloomberg website)
Well they can buy puts without margin accounts, since those have a cap on the losses, which would also get more valuable if the stock price decreases. While technically a side bet, the options sellers often want to remain neutral in their risk with respect to movements of the underlying stocks, so buying options may influence stock price as well because of the downstream effects the options seller may undertake.
The expanded leverage of short term calls, though not directly buying the stock, may have been one thing that helped explode the GameStop share prices, as options sellers had to buy more shares to limit the losses on calls they had sold as the price increased (a gamma squeeze).