In early 2021, a gaggle of retail traders realized that GameStop shares had been recklessly over-shorted by main traders. Big funds, sure that the retailer was about to break down, had shorted 140 % of the corporate’s total public shareholding. Individuals, who co-ordinated their efforts through a subreddit known as r/WallStreetBets, knew that they might exploit this vulnerability. They purchased up all the excellent GameStop inventory and drove up the value, forcing the large funds to pay over the percentages to keep away from dropping a fortune when their wager spectacularly backfired.
It’s this story that’s outlined, roughly, in MSNBC’s new documentary, Diamond Hands: The Legend of WallStreetBets, which debuted at SXSW 2022. It tells the story from the angle of among the people who signed up early and held on to their stake. Some used the squeeze to make a fortune, whereas others got here away with a extra modest, however nonetheless unbelievable, revenue. The determination to concentrate on these private tales makes for an interesting story on the human degree, albeit one which’s very one-sided.
The movie’s basic thesis is that the brief squeeze befell principally because of the web and what it has enabled. Without Reddit to coordinate the trades and Robinhood appearing, a minimum of at first, as a method across the stuffed-shirt brokerages, none of this is able to have occurred. There is a suggestion that folks have been motivated to get into investing as a consequence of the stimulus checks. Which I don’t agree with, principally as a result of folks weren’t sinking hundreds of {dollars} into GameStop if all they’d was a spare $600 to their title.
It additionally affords, so far as I’m involved, a shocking period of time to speak in regards to the damaged social contract most millennials really feel hurt by. As ineffective because the time period is, since “millennial” means anybody aged 26 to 41, it’s bizarre to see MSNBC permitting these below 50 to speak about their plight. Perhaps this marks a brand new and refreshing change as individuals who have lived by way of the final twenty years of utter turmoil at the moment are deemed respectable sufficient to seem on the information.
The different noticeable factor is the dearth of professional commentary from the same old varieties of Very Serious Men in Finance. The large cash fund-types that misplaced their shirts on GameStop selected to not seem within the movie, and so their story isn’t advised right here. Similarly, you get about 5 sentences from Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, who turned the web’s most hated determine when his app selected to limit buying and selling on the platform, doubtlessly prematurely ending the GameStop squeeze. The inequitable display time makes the documentary’s protection of among the main gamers pretty cruel. Given Robinhood’s launch coincided with SXSW in 2015, it’s attention-grabbing to observe almost 90 minutes of individuals saying that the app screwed them over on the identical competition seven years later. We additionally do not get to talk to Keith Gill who, as Roaring Kitty, was on the coronary heart of the hassle to craft the preliminary brief squeeze.
There is one annoyance that it’s price being conscious of is the movie’s determination to create a visible type that apes the language of Reddit memes. Lots of gaudy iconography, remixes of previous viral movies and the form of beginner kitsch awfulness you see loads on-line. It jogged my memory of an experiment Charlie Brooker did on the excesses of youth TV. He piled a bunch of teenagers into a screening room and advised them to sign after they obtained bored whereas they watched a bunch of clips from screechy, in-your-face teen TV reveals. What held them in rapt consideration, nonetheless, was a sequence from an Adam Curtis documentary, with its sluggish narration and lack of any visible pizzazz. The level being that simply because a topic offers with kitschy, out-there imagery from the web, you need not jazz up the visuals to make your story entertaining.
Diamond Hands: The Legend of WallStreetBets premieres on MSNBC on April tenth at 10pm ET.
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