Amateur investors of WallStreetBets, the financial subreddit, have donated $300,000 to a noble cause. The recipient of the generous donation is the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, a charity supporting gorillas around the world.
The fund was established by American primatologist and environmentalist Dian Fossey. The charity tweeted that such considerable money “will go straight into our field programs, where 365 days a year we’re tracking, monitoring and studying wild gorillas and their habitat”. In gratitude, the fund posted the WallStreetBets’ motto on its website: “Apes together strong”. Amateur traders from the reddit financial community describe themselves as apes who click market orders at random, neglecting traditional investment practices and risk management. However, their aggressive trading strategy used to put professional investors on edge.
WallStreetBets traders rattled Wall Street in January when they rushed to buy up shares of GameStop, the American video game retailer, and of other companies which they considered undervalued. Through that short squeeze, amateur traders caused huge losses on short positions of professional market players in just a few days. The “apes” from WallStreetBets managed to inflate the GameStop stock by over 880%. Then, they shifted focus towards cannabis production companies. As a result, they pushed up the stock price of Tilray by 51%.
The latest move of freak investors was a gift to Daniel Gilbert, American billionaire entrepreneur and founder of mortgage company Rocket Cos. The retail traders from the forum piled up into heavily shorted Rocket Cos. shares against hedge funds with the opposite trade. This move swelled Gilbert’s net worth by $25 billion intraday and propelled him from No 19 to No 16 on the Bloomberg Billionaire Index of the world’s 500 richest people.
