Dumb Money (film): This should have done a lot better than it did at the box office

This is another one of those films that I probably would never have heard of if it hadn't been for it randomly popping up on my Plex subscription whose content I have no control over.

It is about how a bunch of Reddit users and small individual investors pumped the price of GameStop and ended up wrecking havoc on large investment firms that were shorting the company's stock value.

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I think that most people can say that they really don't like the way that it seems though certain people in this world, especially the ultra-wealthy, get to do almost anything they want without any sort of repercussions. They are able to manipulate entire industries, politicians, and can screw hordes of people out of their retirements simply so they can have a couple billion more dollars in their own pockets.

Dumb Money addresses how thousands or perhaps millions of small investors, who were initially lead on by one streamer, decided to buy Game Stop stock as it was being shorted by massive investment firms. While I don't really understand how shorting works, it seems to be gambling on a company's failure. In that when that company or industry does fail, it makes a ton of money for the people who bet against the company or industry. However, if enough is put into this shorting, it can actually result in the expedited failure of that company or industry, which just kind of seems unfair.

Keith Gill (played excellently by Paul Dano in the film) is the person who originally got the proverbial ball rolling on Game Stop inside of reddit's WallStreetBets subreddit.

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Keith is just a lower middle-class dude who has a small family and a job that he doesn't particularly care for, just like so many other people out there. His true passion was doing livestreams and speculating about stock positions and he was the person who initially invested his entire life savings into Game Stop, believing that the company was undervalued and that the stock price was being driven down almost entirely by massive investment firms as well as the Covid pandemic.

At first he wasn't paid much attention to but he started to gain a bunch of traction particularly when an exchange called Robinhood was able to make investing so much more accessible to the average Joe.

When Melvin Capitol (the investment firm that is presented as the baddie in the film and presumably in real life as well) starts to see massive losses from regular people buying massive amounts of GameStop stock, things start getting really shady with the r/WallStreetBets suddenly being shut down, Robinhood suspending any purchases of GameStop stock and Keith getting fired from his job. This is all just how the rich control the world I suppose, but it was because of the media and these rather shady things that happened that inspired a Congressional investigation into all parties involved. Keith is also investigated but stated the truth which was that he was simply giving advice on the purchase of GameStop stock because he truly believed in it and the massive investment firms were the ones that were actually manipulating the markets.

For me, I don't think we needed Congress to get involved in order to know that this was the case but in the end I guess it was good that they did get involved.

The only reason why I am spoiling so much of the story here is because if you follow the news at all you probably knew most of what I have written above anyway, it was just kind of nice to see it presented in a dramatic fashion. In a way I feel like this film is a lot like Tetris in that we all kind of know what happened, but the film dives into the details a lot more and not only is it entertaining, but it is also quite informative.

Should I watch it?

You don't need to care about the actual event to enjoy this film but it is a really important part of history in terms of investing. Since this incident massive investment funds have stopped shorting things to the degree that they did in the past because the people, sometimes driven by nothing more than Reddit and memes, are actually able to counter any shorting that the fund managers do. The fact that there was a stock trading website/app called Robinhood involved in the whole this is pretty ironic and funny as well.

This is a mostly true story and I think that most people will really enjoy this story of the little guys emerging triumphant over the ultra-wealthy who think they are untouchable.

This movie ended up losing around $10 million at the box office and I find that surprising. I think it is doing quite well on streaming services though, so perhaps they can end up breaking even in the end. It is available for purchase at Google Play Movies, YouTube, Vudu, and Microsoft Store, the last being something that I didn't even know existed until right now.