Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: Memes Can Be Good for Business

Opendoor

One theory of meme stocks is what you might call “technical.” This theory is: If a lot of people on social media decide to buy the same stock, it will go up. If it goes up, the people who bought it will make money. Therefore, they should buy it, to make money. There are flaws in this theory (eventually you run out of buyers), and more complex variations on it (short squeezes, gamma squeezes, etc.), but the important point here is that this theory is essentially self-referential. You buy meme stocks for the meme; you make ...