Retelling reddit’s revolution
"Dumb Money", Hollywood's take on the GameStop meme-stock frenzy in 2021, set for a limited release this Friday, is an ambitious attempt to recreate a big-screen version of the dramatic saga that unfolded almost exclusively on phones around the world.
The movie focuses on Keith Gill, better known by his reddit name Roaring Kitty, who — thanks to an original $53k position in ailing retailer GameStop — inadvertently became the face of a grassroots movement that pitted a group of amateur traders against some of the biggest names on Wall Street.
Trading Frenzy
Our initial coverage at the time focused mostly on the stock price, (short version: it went up a bit, then a lot, and then fell) but looking back, it’s hard to overstate how unprecedented the actual sums involved were.
During “peak GameStop” at the end of Jan 2021, more than $30bn of the stock changed hands in a single day. For context, the combined daily trading volume of JPMorgan, ExxonMobil and Walmart — 3 of the biggest companies in the world — has never gone above $15bn on any single day since 2021. Even Apple, the most valuable company in the world, only saw ~$16bn worth of shares change hands yesterday after it announced a brand-new iPhone.
As with so many things, the originals are the best, and no matter how many headlines call certain companies the “next meme stock”, nothing has come close to recreating that lightning in a bottle.
