Reddit’s /r/wallstreetbets astronomical rise (2024)

Wallstreetbets, the Reddit forum at the center of the GameStop stock rally that’s pitted retail investors against Wall Street, saw an explosive growth in new users in the past month.

More than 6.3 million users are subscribed to /r/wallstreetbets as of 5:30 p.m. Friday. About half of them joined since Wednesday, when the video game retailer’s stock closed at $347 per share, the highest closing price on the stock in company history.

[GameStop stock roars back after Robinhood lifts trading freeze]

As the investment forum grew, so did the potential impact of its loosely coordinated financial maneuvers. Frenzied trading, encouraged by /r/wallstreetbets, helped push GameStop’s valuation to about $22.7 billion on Friday, an 18-fold jump from a month ago, although it’s not clear if the forum is the main force behind the stock’s recent volatility.

[What you need to know about GameStop's stock price chaos]

On Wednesday and Thursday, users visited the forum 500 million times, according to traffic statistics provided to The Washington Post by a moderator. Joining Reddit and subscribing to /r/wallstreetbets is free, but users can read the page without an account.

“The average user join date of our 9-year-old forum is two days ago,” the moderator said in an email.

A month of diamond-handed growth

The /r/wallstreetbets subreddit started in 2012. At the beginning of January, it saw a steady stream of new subscribers — several thousand per day. But as word spread about purchasing GameStop stock, more people flocked to the site.

By Jan. 22, GameStop stock closed at $65 a share — up 245 percent since the beginning of the month. Another 100,000 users joined that weekend in anticipation of the markets reopening the following week. On Monday, the stock soared to $159 a share, before it dived to $76 at closing. Wallstreetbets gained an additional 147,000 subscribers as news coverage intensified.

The forum picked up nearly 300,000 new subscribers Tuesday as users discussed developments of GameStop’s stock and other company shares, including those from movie theater giant AMC Entertainment.

Tesla chief executive Elon Musk caught wind of the message board’s effort to buy GameStop shares, tweeting his support: “Gamestonk!!”

The stock closed at $147 a share.

The subreddit saw one of its biggest days of activity on Wednesday. More than 1 million users subscribed, leading to an avalanche of comments and forcing moderators to briefly close the forum for about an hour.

“We have grown to the kind of size we only dreamed of in the time it takes to get a bad nights sleep,” one moderator posted.

Meanwhile, stock exchanges, including Nasdaq, halted trades to quell the swings in the stocks’ prices. But, when trading resumed, the prices took off, shooting GameStop’s stock to $380 a share.

The trades also attracted the attention of the Biden administration, congressional representatives and federal regulators. Allison Herren Lee, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s acting chair, said in a statement that the commission was “actively monitoring” the situation.

On Thursday, the forum and others on social media erupted in anger as the popular investment app Robinhood restricted trading on GameStop and other similarly targeted stocks, like BlackBerry, Express and Nokia.

Nearly 2 million new users joined /r/wallstreetbets that day, and its numbers continue to grow.

About this story:

Daily subscriber estimates are from the end of each day. People iconography is from ProPublica’s WeePeople project.