In January, stock traders on Reddit orchestrated a historic short squeeze for the stock of the video game merchandiser GameStop. The resulting run-up in the stock built massive paper fortunes and cost some of the hedge funds who shorted it billions of dollars. Members of Reddit’s WallStreetBets message board claimed their point was to take down the short sellers they saw as villains in the financial markets, while bringing thousands of other do-it-yourself investors along for the ride.

The truth is murkier. At its peak, GameStop soared from a 52-week low of $2.57 per share in the spring of 2020 to a peak of $483 per share in late January 2021.

The populist narrative took a new twist when, amid the high volumes, Robinhood and other do-it-yourself, commission-free trading apps began to restrict or forbid trading in GameStop and similarly traded stocks. Major retail brokerages like Schwab followed suit. Many of the WallStreetBets traders felt like something was amiss.

The squeeze began to unravel when GameStop fell back down under $49 a share by the second week of February. Subsequent attempts to squeeze short sellers in other securities, like shares of cinema operator AMC or silver in both its physical and ETF forms, fell flat. Nonetheless, billions of dollars in losses were inflicted upon firms like Citron Research and Melvin Capital.

“We still don’t know what the composition of these thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands of investors really are,” says Andrew Beer, a managing member of Dynamic Beta Investments, a liquid-alts manager running hedge fund replication strategies. “We do see a very vocal minority or subset of them, like we’ve seen in a lot of things in this country, calling this a revolt. The loudest, angriest person on social media tends to attract the most attention. I suspect that the vast majority of people who did this were just trying to make money.”

There’s a possibility that, rather than a populist uprising, the GameStop frenzy was old-fashioned market manipulation, but that truth is obscured by the relative anonymity of communities like WallStreetBets. A regulator review of trading data will help make clear where the craze started.

Most financial experts show little sympathy for short sellers caught in the squeeze—it can be hard to like the headstrong attitudes of many hedge fund traders and analysts (though the cocky, testosterone-fueled gamesmanship of many WallStreetBets traders might seem little different). Still, the idea that the GameStop short squeeze was a revolt of the small investor against elite hedge fund traders was enough to persuade thousands of additional investors to open long positions in the stock, and that enriched the earliest investors in the trade. Many traders who opened early long positions and won paper fortunes were still encouraging their peers to buy the stock as it soared past $450 per share.

The picture of populist revolt changes upon closer inspection. The WallStreetBets and other social media trading communities are often full of overwhelmingly young, male and white participants. The atmosphere in the communities is full of bravado and braggarts, the same as it might be in the high-stakes room of a casino.

And in fact, many of the WallStreetBets members, including some of the instigators of the GameStop short squeeze, appear to be quite sophisticated, though the relative anonymity of internet communities makes it difficult to tell where messages are really coming from.

“There are plenty of people on WallStreetBets with access to Bloomberg terminals and who are trading multi-million-dollar portfolios, and you can see that expertise reflected in a lot of the due diligence threads,” says J.P. Lee, a product manager at investment company VanEck. “For another thing, this GameStop trade was a matter of discussion all the way back in June and July of last year. While it hit the media in a huge way over the past few weeks [in late January and early February 2021], it was known on WallStreetBets for months and months, if not years.”

In the aftermath of the squeeze, it appears there were hedge funds and other professional investors on both sides of the trade. Whoever they were, they were able to find publicly disclosed information about major short positions and exploit them for their financial gain.

In fact, traditional financial publications had been writing about WallStreetBets since the latter half of 2019, if not earlier, where the GameStop frenzy had its origins in posts by Reddit user “DeepF**kingValue” and YouTuber “Roaring Kitty.” Both names turned out to belong to Keith Patrick Gill, a former financial advisor and MassMutual marketing staffer holding CFA marks.

Bob Cortright is the CEO of fintech firm DriveWealth, which provides the fractional share trading technology that underpins several Robinhood-like do-it-yourself retail platforms. He argues that most of the later investors into the trade, the ones who caused GameStop’s price to peak, were motivated by the populist story. “Among a small group of investors, this absolutely was a populist revolt,” Cortright says. “The profits were less important than the moral aspects. There was a sense of ‘Just go get the man.’ Inequality has been a problem for a long time. This was a way to get back at it.”

These investors were likely more willing to incur some losses to make a political point, he notes.

Robinhood makes most of its money by selling order flow to major trading firms, like Citadel Securities, that act as market-makers in the trades posted on Robinhood’s platform. As it turns out, Citadel’s subsidiary Citadel LLC this year tried to bail out one prominent GameStop short seller, Melvin Capital, after the short squeeze cost it billions of dollars.

Some Robinhood customers caught up in the WallStreetBets frenzy cried foul, claiming that Robinhood was restricting trading to help Citadel. Those complaints culminated in lawsuits against the digital trading platform and protesters showing up at Robinhood’s Menlo Park, Calif., offices and the New York Stock Exchange in late January.

“Citadel wasn’t the bad guy. That narrative isn’t real,” says VanEck’s Lee. “They had a short position through their buyout of Melvin, but they made so much more money out of the trading going on in options and they’re making hundreds of millions of dollars on the volume of trade alone. They’re making the market, they’re paying Robinhood and others for order flow. They really don’t care if something goes up or down. They’re making enough money because people are trading.”

Both the wild swing in GameStop’s price and the restriction of trading by platforms like Robinhood have caught the eyes of the Securities and Exchange Commission and prominent politicians like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Ted Cruz and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

However, Robinhood’s action to limit trading in GameStop and other stocks promoted by WallStreetBets does not appear motivated by the Citadel Securities connection. Instead, Robinhood’s hand was forced by a capital call from its regulators requiring higher margin rates on certain trades.

When Robinhood lacked the cash on hand to meet these capital requirements, it was forced to throttle trading in stocks like GameStop promoted by WallStreetBets. “They didn’t have the money,” says Lee. “They were only able to put up $1.7 billion of that $3 billion margin call, so to account for the remaining $1.3 billion, they shut trading off on those names. It’s much more complicated and much more nuanced than the prevailing narrative.”

So what should advisors make of the GameStop craze?

It could be a symptom of greater changes in financial markets, says Brent Weiss, founder and chief evangelist of Facet Wealth, a tech-driven RIA. Weiss called on advisors to recognize three concurrent trends driving young and mass-affluent investors. One is decentralization, demonstrated by the rise of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. The next is democratization, best seen in the rise of Robinhood and other commission-free, simplified, do-it-yourself trading apps. And the last is distribution, emblematized by online trading communities like WallStreetBets.

“I think it’s wrong to say that do-it-yourself is the next big thing, just as it’s wrong to say to advisors that we have to tell our clients ‘no’ to all of this,” says Weiss. “Clients are now calling me for financial jam sessions. They don’t always want holistic financial planning all the time. They have a couple ideas, they want to talk them out and riff on them. This is an opportunity for us.”

Advisors will have to deal with more clients who want to take chances with a portion of their money, who want to be more hands-on with their financial lives, and who are able to access more sophisticated tools, Weiss says.

Cortright describes it as an opportunity to reach more potential clients with valuable financial literacy help. “Most of these people will grow out of it; they need to save for the future,” says Cortright. “Over time, they’ll get educated, they’ll get older, they’ll have needs like saving for retirement, and through those needs, they’ll see the importance of a well-balanced portfolio and planning.

“But this is exciting to them,” he adds.