This past week, a stock market insurgence, the likes of which has never been seen before, occurred suddenly and fueled a growing predicament for Wall Street investors. GameStop, American Multi-Cinema and Blackberry have been the main targets for small investors in an attempt to turn a profit given the opportunity arisen. GameStop specifically skyrocketed from a mere $4.00 a share to nearly $380.00 a share overnight, about a 1500% increase, and all this is credited to a small investing group that goes by the name of “Wallstreetbets.”

Wall Street has long been “shorting” stocks — meaning they would buy shares of companies they deemed failing, and when the prices fell low enough, they would rebuy more shares, hand those to the investors and profit the difference. This apparently did not sit well with many of the Wallstreetbets members, a group of investors on a social platform used for communication known as Reddit. These investors then took their frustration to the social media site and rallied thousands of people to buy GameStop stock in order to boost the price of shares.

Even business magnate Elon Musk got involved by tweeting about the situation, saying “Gamestonk!!”, a reference to Wallstreetbets, which only surged the movement further and excited more followers. The resulting problem of this market chaos seems to be the aftermath of the situation, where high-level investors are now demanding restrictions on these stocks. It is estimated that those who held GameStop stock before the takeover are projected to lose a lump sum of nearly $19 billion, which has driven apps such as RobinHood to restrict the public from purchasing over 50 different companies’ stocks.

Short-sellers and Hedge Funds are at the forefront of demanding these restrictions, but the public sees it as fair-game in the open market now that they have found a way to make a profit of their own. The longer the smaller investors hold their stock, the more money the short-sellers are projected to lose, but now even that method is being questioned as the prices of these stocks have dropped significantly within the last few days because of these new restrictions, cutting the value almost in half for GameStop, AMC and Blackberry.

“The restrictions on the stocks are uncalled-for; it is sending a message that these platforms are more lenient in helping towards helping the rich rather than allowing anyone to continue to profit off these stocks,” junior Diego Moran said

The people are still hopeful and are urging others to hold their share of stocks and continue to look for new ones to hopefully replicate their earlier success. However, they face major obstacles as Wall Street is also remaining persistent in limiting their ability to do so. This appears to only be the beginning of this new trend within stocks, how far the people are willing to go to turn a profit has still yet to be seen.