That we’ll have something to fall back on.” It meant something else: that “I can not have this constant anxiety that I’m going to fail, that if I start to have more problems with my brain where I can’t work, that my kids will be okay. “Money to me isn’t an end-all, be-all,” he explains. He’d been diagnosed with a cyst on his brain. Then there’s Matt Kelly, a former military diver whose car had just been repossessed at the beginning of the pandemic. Deadass.”Īs I sit in on this quarter’s earnings calls, I think of her, and my stomach flips over. And with what she’s done with her portfolio, she tells the filmmakers, “I know I’m set for life. “So that’s all I do now, is crypto,” she says. She buys GameStop stock, holds it through the run, cashes out and goes straight into crypto.
Woods, who describes herself as having “an addictive personality.” When this all started, she had no savings account.
I’m happy for Chow, but it isn’t his experience that’s haunting me right now. In the documentary, he doesn’t describe himself as a master of the universe - just a small fish that made off with scraps. (A hedge fund made the exact same call.) He makes $8 million. I was like, ‘Okay, this is the top for sure,’” he says in Diamond Hands. “When Elon tweeted after hours, I remember texting my dad. I was like, ‘Okay, this is the top for sure.’”Ĭhow manages to call the top. (In the documentary, this post is charmingly read by his brother because he finds his own language “cringey.”) He buys into GameStop at $6 to $8 a share, spending $30,000. He calls the GameStonk play the October before it happened. Alvan Chow, u/JeffAmazon on Reddit, tells the documentary crew that his game is asymmetric betting: using a small amount of capital to make large returns. Not all of these users were unsophisticated. “Nothing against Charles Schwab, or any of the other ones, but they just looked like my father should be there, not me,” says Chris Garcia in the documentary. These investors yoloed into the market during the pandemic, often specifically using upstart service Robinhood. And one thing this documentary makes absolutely clear is that the narrative mattered most to the people who understood the least about the financial markets. I thought that narrative was bullshit at the time and said so, but narratives are powerful. The narrative around Gamestonk, if you recall, was that it was a populist uprising against Wall Street. (It will start streaming on Peacock on May 16th.) It’s timely, though perhaps not in the way its makers intended. There’s even a documentary coming out on May 15th on MSNBC, Diamond Hands: The Legend of WallStreetBets. Remember them? A small army of people got bored during the pandemic and started day trading. There are certainly institutional investors in all of these things, but the meme stocks were where the retail investors tended to congregate. Bitcoin’s and Ethereum’s prices tumbled by a little more than a quarter in the last month. Bed, Bath and Beyond is worth about half as much as it was a month ago. AMC also lost more than 40 percent of its value. GameStop fell more than 40 percent in the last month.