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The market and the masses: From chaotic corners to social media (re)tail events

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2023

Kristian Bondo Hansen
Kristian Bondo Hansen*
Affiliation:
Copenhagen Business School Denmark
*
Corresponding author: Kristian Bondo Hansen, Department of Management, Society and Communication, Copenhagen Business School, Dalgas Have 15, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

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In this essay, I examine and discuss the relationship between the market and the masses in light of recent retail-driven surges in the stock prices of firms like GameStop and AMC. Using two historical snapshots, I draw out similarities and differences between the way the collective power and rationality (or lack thereof) of the masses was portrayed in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century market literature and in recent debates about retail investor inclusion and social media or social trading platform-driven market volatility. The main difference between the historical discourse and the present situation is that the new digital market-expanding technologies enable effective retail investor mobilization and thus, increase the retail swarms’ market-moving powers, which were previously less agile and forceful. However, eased and widened market access also transforms digital life into alternative data that is subjected to age-old strategies of market exploitation.

Keywords

Financial marketsretail investingmassesGameStop
Type
Essay
Information
Finance and Society , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , 2022 , pp. 67 - 77
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© 2022 The Author(s)

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