It has been called everything from "the French Revolution of finance" to the "David and Goliath" of Wall Street.

A struggling video games retailer from Texas, called GameStop, has become the subject of a remarkable battle between billionaire hedge funds and ordinary retail investors.

The hedge funds placed major bets on the demise of GameStop, a bricks-and-mortar shop struggling in the digital era.

So far, so normal.

A group of individual investors, sharing tips on the platform Reddit, then threw a spanner in the works by rallying together to buy shares in GameStop and send its share price soaring – to the multi-billion-dollar detriment of the hedge funds.

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"Normally in the past, it was the sophisticated hedge fund and institutional investors who did that," says Santosh Rao of Manhattan Venture Partners, "but in this case it was the small guy, the retail core, which is a rising force in the investment population.

"They have new technology. He or she is much smarter than before. And they can group together, they can talk together … and before you know it, it's a huge force, they can really move the market," adds Rao.

The craze has since spread to a host of legacy companies, with investors piling into unfashionable stocks such as Nokia and BlackBerry.

This is a hunter-becoming-the-hunted situation. In financial jargon, the hedge fund bets are called "shorting" and when things go awry, it's called a "short-squeeze."

CGTN's John Terrett described "shorting" as: "I say to my friend: can I borrow your stock? He says yes. I take control of it. I sell it, along with others. The price goes down. When the price goes down, I use my own money to buy the stock, all the time hoping the price will go back up. When it does go back up, I sell the stock, give the money back to my friend and pocket the difference."

Crucially, when things go wrong and a short squeeze happens, the losses are theoretically unlimited.

In the case of GameStop, the hedge funds were then ironically forced to buy shares in the video games company in order to limit their losses, thereby sending the GameStop share price even higher.

Rao says: "At a technical level, this is nothing uncommon, nothing illegal … but there was a socio-economic twist to it.

"It was the small guy – it was a sense that the retail investor has been shut out of this whole thing, the whole party, the fear of missing out. They all want to be a part of it. And they can be now," explains Rao.

This question of hedge funds and individuals both being allowed a seat at the table was thrown into doubt midweek when some investment platforms, such as Robinhood, announced they were restricting the small guys from dealing in companies like GameStop.

These investment platforms appear to have now reversed their decision, with Wall Street set for an extremely volatile finale to the trading week.

It's hardly easing fears that a wider market bubble is about to pop.

"I think everyone's going to be more cognizant of the competition [when shorting], of the players in the room, and the regulations on the edges will be tightened," says Rao. 

"In the meantime, there are going to be plenty of millionaires, and then a lot of people who are going to lose money," he warns.