Yes Walt - I've been discussing YOLO traders and various stocks for months.  Most of these investors are complete novices and simply jump on board anything that is moving without any regard for fundamentals/valuation.  It reminds me somewhat of the Dot.com  stocks of 1999/2000.  I term it a game of musical chairs which is all fine when the music is playing but when it stops many will be trapped without a chair.  Investing is a journey and what is transpiring in many names is more attuned to gambling.   The house (Vegas) wins a majority of time in the casinos and in the stock market knowledgeable and disciplined traders/investors will ultimately prevail.

Let the charts and some fundamental basis be your guide because eventually many of these YOLO traders will be taken to the woodshed.  Certain names to be mindful of reside in the EV, Solar, Cannabis, Alt Energy arenas.   The latest one that I discussed was EH around mid 20's and went to $80 within 8 days.   What is their business?  Flying Cars 

Walt, thanks for sharing that story. I think there is a long tradition of this kind of thing. Not exactly what you described, but plungers and punters have been around for more than a century. All you have to do is read the Jesse Livermore biography. “I began in the smaller bucket shops," Livermore said, "where the man who traded in twenty shares at a clip was suspected of being John W. Gates in disguise or J. P. Morgan traveling incognito.” 

Or this: "The markets in Livermore's day were murky, corrupt, and frequently manipulated, but he learned that even all of the Robber Barons working together to prop up a stock could not keep it up when it had to go down. He learned that the market moves by fits and starts, and that a trader who is right about the overall direction can still lose if his timing is off.... In the stock-mad Gay Nineties, the high-class end of the market was beyond the reach of the average investor. Most got their taste of market action in these quasi brokerages. Although some of the bucket shops were seedy holes in the wall, many tried to look respectable. Like legitimate brokerage firms, the bucket shops all had big boards where boys marked up the latest prices quotd by telegraph from the New York, Chicago, and sometimes even the foreign markets. Many had ticker tape machines. In some, the telegraph wires went no farther than the wall, and the ticker tape merely unwound from a box where the proprietor had placed a day's worth of phony market action the night before.... He made his money in bucket shops. He played bucket shops all over the East Coast, then moved on to Chicago, St. Louis, and even Denver, trading in disguise, under assumed names, because eventually most of the bucket shops in the country barred Jesse Livermore for the same reason that casinos bar card counters--he won."

What is different today, is that the plungers and punters trade on  the same market as everyone else, as your story makes clear.

PLTR lock up expiry is Jan last week. Let’s see what happens at that time