This isn't a meme stock. It's unfair to call it that. This arrived on peoples radars really late. r/WallStreetBets isn't some hidden corner of the internet, you can visit it right now. They're just as caught out as the rest of us.

My own company (https://feetr.io) started registering mentions of it a day after the IPO, but impressions (the term we use for the reach of posts) were never very high.

If we look at the extent of the push behind GME during Jan 2021, we can see that the entire internet was involved. There was memes all over the place, Reddit was flooded with it, there were billboards and sky writing, all of that sustained over how many weeks? Not once did it approach the market cap that we're seeing with HKD.

Internet retail investors just do not have the money to be able to do this.

I tried to short some shares of HKD this morning at Interactive Brokers, but the annualized borrow fee was about 1000% (really) and no shares were available for borrowing. You can make money by avoiding greatly overpriced stocks and investing in the rest of the market, but profiting directly by shorting requires speed and good risk management.