For Wall Street Bets, we built a serverless "Stonks" checker API.
A while ago, a merry bunch on Reddit at the subreddit r/WallStreetsBets (WSB) took on Wall Street. Ironically, through an app called Robinhood.
You had to be in there and in the know at the right time to benefit from the situation. That’s why we built a serverless API to keep track of all the hot and trending stock chats on WSB, that will notify you when the next GME is about to blow up. In this article, we’re showing you step by step how we deployed, tested, and monitored it.
The idea behind that action was to “short squeeze” the stock. The GameStop stock was expected to fall so that people would short-sell it. Short selling in a nutshell: borrow a stock, sell it, wait until it falls, and then repurchase it and give it back to the person you borrowed it from. The squeezing part now is where WSB came in. They bought the GameStop stock in masses, inflating the price. Now, the people who short-sold would have to buy it back at a much higher price and, in turn, lose money, or at least not make a profit.
In short, lend some stock, sell it for $10 because you hope to repurchase it for $8, but in the end, it rises to $15, and you have a problem.
