Some blanker have already shorten this parody at 111, but thanks to your intro "excuse" I accept its shortcomings in full, just like you say it's an awesome title swap and idea, I'm investing 555.

It wouldn't be an official Edmund Fitzgerald parody if I didn't at least comment. This is the beginning of a great idea, and I encourage you to keep going, and repost it when you've got all 14 stanzas. You appear to have the talent.

There's nothing wrong with making money honestly, and I for one applaud the "little guys" for taking action against the Goliath of the hedge funds crowd. Enough of this "I can make money any way I can but don't you dare try to crash my party" philosophy. To be sure, a trio of 5's from me were proudly given!

Sincere thanks to all who've stopped to comment. I'm not fully convinced that a bunch of privateers joined together to manipulate the market is inherently any more ethical than when it's done by a hedge fund, but the poetic justice of this event was so sweetly delicious as to be fattening. Patrick - thanks much for your encouragement, but I'm not sure this fleeting news oddity merits a full replication of the original song's length. I believe I've been faithful to the rhyme scheme and used enough of it to have paid sufficient homage to the OS since this is a light-hearted joke, not a documentary.

I think there's a huge difference between a bunch of privateers joining together to buy shares and a hedge fund selling *lots* of shares they don't own in order to drive down the price and make a profit buying them back again. If it weren't for the latter, then then the former wouldn't have happened: the "privateer" reaction was just that, a reaction.

Hedge fund manipulation of share prices by selling stock they don't own is the driving force - I reckon this is a good sort of "market forces" answer to what is a zero-sum game from hedge funds, in that they don't create any wealth with these tactics, all they do is take it from other investors, and them getting shafted by their own gambling habit is simply wonderful.

Loved the parody, btw, just a shame it was so short :-)

Thank you, Phil. What I tried to convey in my comment was that many folks tried to find something heroic in the actions of the robinhoodniks when in reality it was little more than a pump-and-dump operation. Hardly noble. The only 'good' thing was how so many bottom feeding hedge fund speculators got shafted when the stock price skyrocketed; but there were also a lot of little guys who lost a packet when the shares they bought at high prices inevitably crashed. Some paid a hefty price for the privilege of 'putting it to the man.' It's positively Shakespearean though that at the end, everybody's dead. Sorry the piece was short but I started it when the story first broke and got distracted from finishing. Now the news cycle has moved on and I have little motivation to invest the effort to protract something that's no longer current. Besides, my best joke from this episode is in the title; it wasn't gonna get funnier telling it over and over again.

This whole stock manipulation doesn't meet my definition of "investing". Game Stop didn't get a dime for its operations. It's more like investing in "equine sequence derivatives" at the track. Like any Ponzi scheme, only the ones who bailed early made anything. The rest were screwed.