Hi, I'm Dan Pramak and welcome to Axios Recap, sponsored by Amazon.

Today's Tuesday, January 26th.

America's up past 19 million vaccinations.

Merck has shut down its COVID-19 vaccines program, and we're focused on how Reddit users beat

Wall Street traders at their own game. Game Stop. You probably

know it as the retailer in your local mall or shopping plaza where people buy video games,

game consoles, and those little vinyl Funco figurines. But for Wall Street right now, GameStop

is ground zero in a battle between professional investors and amateurs who like to congregate on Reddit.

The basic background here is that a bunch of hedge fund managers basically believe GameStop is doomed

because more and more video games are being delivered to consumers via streaming, not through the sorts of physical discs sold at GameStop.

So they shorted the stock, and if that is confusing to you, just imagine it as the opposite of physical discs sold at GameStop. So they shorted the stock.

And if that is confusing to you, just imagine it as the opposite of a normal investment.

You usually buy a stock hoping it will go up, which is how you make money.

Shorts kind of buy a stock hoping it'll go down.

That's how they make money.

But what the shorts on GameStop didn't count on was Wall Street Betts, which is a

Reddit channel that describes itself as, quote, being like 4chan found a Bloomberg terminal.

On Wall Street bets, the users look for cheap stocks that have been heavily shorted. Then they

buy them, thus increasing the price. That hurts the shorts. and they seemingly do it in a coordinated fashion.

When the Reddit users began buying GameStop, it caused havoc. Just yesterday, GameStop shares

were halted by the New York Stock Exchange nine separate times because of outsized volatility,

as it at one point had tripled in price. Today, GameStop shares are up a modest 55% as of this taping,

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