Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on basement television.
No one would ever mistake me for knowing anything much about money. My wife handles the bills because if it were up to me, I’d be late on a bunch of them. Everyone has their talents and mine don’t lie in that area. Because of this, movies like The Big Short tend to go a little over my head. I have to pay a lot of attention to keep up with financial stories because it’s just…beyond me. That makes me kind of the target market for a movie like Dumb Money because I am very much named in the title.
This movie is based on the story of GameStop. More specifically, this is about the GameStop stock explosion that happened during the pandemic. According to the film, and I honestly don’t know how much of this is actually real, a guy named Keith Gill (Paul Dano) noticed that some major investors were shorting GameStop, including hedge fund managers who put significant money into shorting the stock. As I understand it, shorting is basically a bet that the stock will tank—a future promise to buy the stock created by “selling” the stock now. If you “sell” the stock at $10 and it drops to $5, you’ve just made $5 per share. If you think the company is going under—and GameStop certainly looked like it was going to—you sell for whatever the price is and buy it for essentially zero. So Keith decided that the stock was undervalued and started telling people on the Wall Street Bets subreddit on Reddit.
