"Shorting" stocks

• Learned of this term from the GameStop fiasco late January 2021.
• "To short" means to borrow stocks that are predicted to fall after the company's annual report, so they pay it back at a lower price.
• GameStop is an established American game retailer. Reading between the lines, I assume their business has been lackluster as people no longer "buy games" in physical stores anymore. Thus the annual report is bound to show loss and the stock price is bound to fall.
  • I know that stock price is affected—often artificially, usually very short term—by the company's annual reports. In BEI large players usually collect stocks of a profitable company before the annual report, then sell it when price rises upon annual report release.
• Shorting is commonly done by hedge funds (what are they exactly?) / "large players", ie. rich investors.
• People on message boards & forums mobilise to buy GameStop shares, making the stock price bizarrely inflated, and causing very large amount of loss to the "shorters".
• The GameStop incident has been likened to "Occupy Wall Street" where the small/working folks disrupt the elites.
  • 💭 My take: Might be a grain of truth in it. I definitely don't shed tears over elites losing money. But I'm by default wary of "social media hype" (a form of mob psych) and "buying stocks" in the same sentence. How many inexperienced "regular working persons" bought out of excitement at the wrong moment ie. just before the price plummets (which it eventually will)? Given how the society operates, it's bound to be easier for an ultra rich trader to recover from their losses—not so for a regular person.
• This is an(other) interesting phenomenon about the unprecedented, previously unthought of power of social media, for better or—to be precise, and/or—worse.

Interesting article: https://lawforbusiness.usc.edu/the-effects-of-the-gamestop-market-disruption/