To the Moon! Analyzing the Community of “Degenerates” Engaged in the Surge of the GME Stock

In early 2021, the finance world was taken by storm by the dramatic price surge of the GameStop Corp. stock. This rise is being, at least in part, attributed to a group of Redditors belonging to the now-famous r/wallstreetbets (WSB) subreddit group. In this work, we set out to address if user activity on the WSB subreddit is associated with the trading volume of the GME stock. Leveraging a unique dataset containing more than 4.9 million WSB posts and comments, we assert that user activity is associated with the trading volume of the GameStop stock. We further show that posts have a significantly higher predictive power than comments and are especially helpful for predicting unusually high trading volume. Lastly, as recent events have shown, we believe that these findings have implications for retail and institutional investors, trading platforms, and policymakers, as these can have disruptive potential.