Gloating over Pyrrhic Victories

It will be a long time until the smoke clears enough to tell exactly who the winners were in the GameStop bubble, but it's not too early to spot some clear losers in this hybrid short squeeze/pump-and-dump. The Goliath of the story, Melvin Capital, lost tremendous amounts of money, but many, perhaps most, of the small investors swept up in the storm seem to have badly mistimed the spike and in some cases misunderstood the whole point of engineering a short squeeze was to sell on the peak.

As discussed previously, most small investors who followed the WallStreetBets mantra of go big and hold firm when the stock starts to dive appear to have taken horrible losses, which makes this latest development all the more bizarre and yet perfectly in keeping with the GameStop saga.

The spot that aired during the big game ran for only five seconds, consisting simply of a message paying tribute to the users involved in the GameStop stock frenzy.

Several users from the subreddit r/WallStreetBets helped rally shares of GameStop and other companies such as AMC this year, burning hedge funds who were trying to short sell the stock.

"Wow, this actually worked," reads the title of the ad, which broke into what looked like a car commercial with what resembled a post on Reddit's website.

"One thing we learned from our communities last week is that underdogs can accomplish just about anything when they come together around a common idea," reads an excerpt of the Reddit message. "Who knows, maybe you'll be the reason finance textbooks have to add a chapter on 'tends.' Maybe you'll help r/SuperbOwl teach the world about the majesty of owls."

If you want to watch for yourself, Reddit posted the ad on its Twitter account.