 Good evening, everyone. Welcome to dedicated financial literacy. Welcome back to the channel. Want to tell everyone, please hit the subscribe button. Thumbs up if you like the content. Not telling you, not trying to force you to do it. But a lot of things going on. I wanted to just have a little chat. I just wanted to have a little chat about what's going on with the stock market right now. As everybody knows, this group on Reddit, Wall Street Bets, YOLO. You only live once. YOLO. You only live once, baby. These young people are doing it. And just to kind of give you a little background of what's going on. The institutional investors, Wall Street, the big boys, many times they will short stocks, particularly with companies that are not doing well. Or, you know, if they see that, okay, this company is not producing or it's on its way down or it looks like it's heading toward bankruptcy. They'll say, hey, look, let's get them there faster. And just to give you a brief definition of what it really means to short a stock where a person will basically, they want the stock to go down. So they'll borrow from the brokerage firm. They'll borrow stocks. They'll borrow a thousand shares and promise to pay them back at a later time. Okay? Then what they'll do is sell those shares at the current price. Because remember, they're borrowing. They sell it at the current price. But here's what happens. Then what happens is, if the stock drops, it shorts, right? Say their stock is at $20 a share and it drops. Remember, they borrowed it. So they owe the brokerage what it costs at the current price. Say it was $20. But it drops to $5. Okay? At that point when it drops to $5, they buy the shares. They make up and they make up $15. They profit $15. The brokerage just wants their shares back. So they give the shares back and they keep the money. Does that make sense? I know that sounds a little confusing. They borrowed it. I'm borrowing money from you. Okay? I owe you $20. But then, or I owe you this material, whatever, I owe you this material. I borrowed the material for $20. But you just want the material. But then I go and I sell it. But when it drops in value, I pick it up at that price and I give you what I owe you and I keep the rest of the money. That's basically what happens with shorting. Okay? Well, that's what the institutional investors are doing. That's what they do. And Reddit, this small group of young people, they said, hey, this is not right what they're doing to GameStop. They're shorting it. And the thing about it, they found out that, you know, fundamentally, they weren't out of the game. GameStop had a chance to survive and resurrect. And so they had a group that said, you know what? We're going to change this. We're not going to let GameStop die. And what they did was they bought shares and it started shooting up. When it started shooting up, guess what happened to the shorters? The shorts, they lost money because they borrowed it at $10, but it went up to 40. 50. Let me tell you what happened with GameStop. In one week, that stock increased 750%. Can you imagine what happened to the short? They're not even talking about it. I heard today that possibly two firms went under as a result. Billions and dollars were lost. And then they got AMC, BlackBerry, cost. They're just looking. They're looking now for where shorts, where the institutional investors are shorting stock. And they are going after them. So that's kind of where we're at. But I want to give you a little background of why this is happening. I've heard, you know, if you go on the Reddit site and read some of the stories, the background, you got to remember when the 2008, the 2008 housing crisis happened. Many of the kids now that are in this Reddit group were around eight, seven, six years old, eight years old, nine years old. Many of them, their families lost their homes. You've heard stories of kids, families in cars losing everything and living out of the car. Stories where a father was so devastated for his family, because the house, they had a fixed mortgage, but after five years, I believe it became an adjustable mortgage. And the way it flipped, and the houses were under water, they owed more than they could afford. In many homes, many families were affected. Heard of a story where a man, his family, they lost everything. And the day that they were moving out, he went and bought a gun, sat in the garage, stuck a gun in his mouth and blew his brains out. And can you imagine a child in the bedroom hearing the gunshots to run down there and see his dad dead? Now, I'm a component of, hey, you never get a give up. I tell my son this, he's three years old. I always tell him if he falls down, I say, get up and don't give up. I drill that in him. So I believe in that. But some people, I mean, you got to remember, these people were devastated. And what makes it bad, really bad, is our government, instead of bailing out the people, bailed out the banks, bailed out Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Borg and all the banks, Wells Fargo. Look at all the craziness that Wells Fargo, Wells Fargo did to their customers. And these kids are mad. They're angry. They're hurt. They're bitter. And they're going after them, whether it's right or not. But here's the hypocrisy. The hypocrisy that I see is now, all of a sudden now, Congress is like, we got to do something. We got to do something about this. We need to get the SEC involved, regulators involved. Robin Hood basically shut down all these stocks this morning. They shut them down. And I think that backfired on them. This is just going to make these young people really angry. Got my wife's cup. Here's the thing that I've observed in checking this out. Number one, this is going to affect the fund managers, asset management, Wall Street, the financial big boys, so to speak. Because now they're going to be reluctant to short stocks. They're going to be looking over their shoulder. Where's Wall Street bets? Where's YOLO? YOLO meaning one of my friends texted me, what is YOLO? You deal with all these stock trading stuff. Russell, what is it? What is YOLO? Basically, it's an acronym. You only live once, they say. Here's the number two, what's scary. These young people, they're on a mission. Wall Street is motivated by greed and financial power controlling with finances. These kids, I read one of the posts on Reddit and one of the kids, several of them said, look, I don't care. His account went from like 150, 200,000 in one week to like 5 million. And he said, I don't care if I lose it all. I'm making a statement. We're making a statement. We want to talk to Wall Street because you didn't hear me when I was eight years old. You didn't hear me when my parents got a divorce when I woke up in the morning. You didn't hear when I woke up in the morning and my mother had left, left us. And I haven't seen her since. Number three, you know what is really concerning me? Who was our president at that time? Now, we could say that he inherited it. He inherited the issue. He inherited the great recession. But why haven't we heard from Barack Obama? Janet Yellen, she's on, she's part of the leadership of Biden. Wasn't she around? Wasn't she over monetary policy at that time? Why haven't we heard from them? They were behind supporting and bailing out the banks. That's why we have not heard from them. Maybe they're feeling a little guilty right now. Families suffered and you bailed out the banks. And look what's happening now. Here comes the government wanting to bail out Wall Street. Wanting to bail them out again. The hypocrisy. Do you know what I would like to see the SEC and the regulators and Congress do? I would like to see Congress and the Senate investigate themselves. Just this year, the pandemic, four senators were accused of insider trading. How is that possible? Well, the senators, the Congress, they have access to a lot of information concerning companies. Major companies. Fortune 500 companies. The Dow 30, Nasdaq 100. They are privy to a lot of information that's vital in whether a stock goes up or down prior to us getting it, the retailers, the retail investors. So think about that for a second. Here they are in a meeting and say, for example, ATT is involved in a merger and the SEC sends over documents to Congress or whoever, a regulator in, or they have friends over at the SEC. You know they know each other and they find out that AT&T is going to have a merger and it's been approved and they know about it before it goes public. How many times have our congressmen and congresswomen having prior information, prior knowledge went and got on the phone and called up Uncle Joe, Auntie Lane and said, you need to buy stock and get me some shares too. Let's find a way to get you the money. Here's another thing they can do. They know there's going to be bad news concerning a company. They're in some kind of, they're inside of some kind of intel meeting and they hear about it. They hear about it. And they know, oh boy, I got a lot of stock in that company. I've got to sell it while it's at a profit. So they go out and call husband or wife and say, sell all the stock. In a few days, information's coming out. That's going to be very damning and that stock is going to tank. But here's what they can also do. They can play options and purchase options, put options, buying a put option, meaning I'll make money on that stock going down. So not only do they sell the stock at a profit, they buy puts against the stock. So when it does, the information does come out. And the information comes out in the next few days. The negative information, they make money on the stock going down. So they double, they double their money. Do you see the hypocrisy? You didn't think about the families. Now, whether this is morally right, I'm not going to get all off into that. I'm not doing it. I'm not jumping in. I'm not doing that with the Reddit group. But I'm neither am I mad at them either. These kids were heavily, these families were heavily, now I wasn't, I wasn't, I didn't own a home at that time. And I had a pretty good job that was pretty stable. I wasn't laid off. I didn't feel the pain that most families do, but I feel it. And I was sitting here thinking, as I've been reading about all this stuff, and I'm like, wow. Nobody thought that these kids that were affected to that degree would one day grow up with retaliation on their mind. America does not forget when you hurt America. May that be a lesson to the 76 million that voted for our prime president.