this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2024
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

It's called shorting. At a high level you're basically betting on the stock going down (which is the opposite of buying a stock where you want it to go up). Normally you can only lose the amount of money you put in with stocks, but for shorting you may lose an "unlimited" amount of money depending on how high the price goes up (it's dependent on how much the stock goes up, but no stock goes up forever).

Shorting is a big part of the GME spike. Large trading firms were shorting the shit out of gamestop and so when WSB bought stocks en masse it lead to almost bankruptcy for some companies.

Not financial advice for obvious reasons