Gorillas, elephants, pangolins and sea turtles have been handed a lifeline by amateur investors who played the stock market at its own game.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent helping endangered animals by users of a Reddit trading tips community, giving conservation organisations across the world a much-needed financial boost during a difficult year.
The money came from users of the WallStreetBets subreddit, who earlier this year bought small volumes of shares in the retailer GameStop en masse. This inflated the company’s share price, raising value for themselves and deliberately withholding it from professional investors such as hedge funds and big Wall Street firms that had hoped to profit from its failure.
Many of those small investors have spent their gains on animal conservation.