Dumb Money (2023)

This is the story of Game Stop. It is on the one hand the story that almost always gets pulled off, which is hedge funds and the way they make it so they cannot lose, at the expense of others, and on hte other about the one time that did not happen. Keith Gill, aka Roaring Kitty, a relatively unknown personality on the Reddit channel wallstreetbets, who became massive when he orchestrated a short squeeze against GameStop. The simplest way to explain this is that major hedge funds make a fortune off the failure of companies, essentially betting that they will go under and profiting off job loss and financial ruin. When Gill convinced his followers, mostly young people, to buy GameStop stock, it skyrocketed many times over its initial low buy-in. Gill became a multi-millionaire on paper but held onto the stock, sending billionaires into a tizzy, leading to a day-trading company called RobinHood colluding with a hedge fund owner to stop stock trading. An open market relies on buying and selling, which means someone here cheated. It led to Congressional investigations, including implications that Gill himself had insider knowledge, because how could someone from the sector of investors that the fat cats call “dumb money” have lost them billions. Well every once in a while David beats Goliath, and then sometimes Goliath is unmasked as a cheater.