Hacker Cinema
Dumb Money
2023 · Film · 105 min
Directed by Craig Gillespie
Vlogger Keith Gill sinks his life savings into GameStop stock and posts about it. When social media starts blowing up, so do his life and the lives of everyone following him. As a stock tip becomes a movement, everyone gets rich—until the billionaires fight back, and both sides find their worlds turned upside down.
1 negative1 mixed2 neutralfrom 4 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
Shareholders of large corporations, are, in my opinion, a "parasitic class".
I believe buying shares in early stage companies improves the world, since it helps new technology and new efficiencies form.
But at some point, after the IPO, it just becomes endless "extraction of rents", and it is what leads to "enshittification" (to invoke Cory Doctorow's term) of everything. At best, it is a zero-sum game, where hedge funds take everyone's money (see the movie Dumb Money about GameStop short squeeze). And of course, there is even regulatory capture, with 2020 bailouts by the Fed exceeding its mandate to bail out the stock markets.
It would be great if future IPOs would be replaced with ICOs, where the shareholders would actually be bought out by utility token holders. If you need a metaphor or example, imagine "Disney Dollars" being used to buy out shareholders of Disney, Inc. The Disney Dollars are actually bought by customers of Disney World, Disneyland or Disney online platforms, who pay for actual things, and they get paid out to people working in Disney World, Disneyland, or on Disney IP. The people who visit Disney World or work there actually care about things like paid health insurance, or the quality of the local water, etc. It's more democratic. But the shareholders don't. They'd be glad to fire everyone and replace them with Westworld-like robots if it increased profits and dividends.
If cities had their own currency, then they wouldn't go bankrupt like Detroit did. Once upon a time it was Motor City, but then all the factories got automated and the money for cars went to shareholders around the country. It gutted the economy of the city. That's what happens with shareholders of large concerns that have "made it" and went IPO.
If you're talking about Dumb Money then I'm sorry that's just a bad movie. There's no 'rigged game' there's no 'heroic retail vs Big Bad Wall Street', and the vast majority of individuals who FOMOed in lost money and/or were left with heavy bags.
And to top everything off it could potentially (maybe already has) create a whole bunch of suckers who repeatedly get fleeced because they believe in conspiracy theories instead of repeated explanations of how the market works.
I watched Dumb Money (2023) last night and it starts this same way. It was completely unnecessary, was done in a confusing way, and this plot device didn't add anything to enhance the excitement of the story. A completely linear plot would have been just fine, especially since everyone knows the story gets more interesting (even from the trailer alone). In fact, the interesting part of the story that most people don't know is the beginning... how it all started before it was exciting.
It was still an entertaining movie, so I wouldn't let this one poor choice deter anyone.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231002042814/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/01/opinion/dumb-money-movie-gamestop-stock.html
"Retail investors have a well-established track record of destroying their own wealth. Studies have shown that individual traders somehow have the opposite of skill — they manage to do worse than they would by picking stocks at random."
These finance guys don't understand what's really happening. The retail investors are high stakes gambling on purpose trying to get instantly rich because some guy on whatever telegram, discord or whatever is bragging how he got rich gambling on some ridiculous asteroid mining futures stock. No amounts of 'but look at this data...' will ever change their mind. No amount of telling them that low latency trading outfits like Citadel receive these retail order books in real time and then buy/sell the stock to retail traders making a profit, literally sniping their trades, will make them change their mind either.
Nobody wants to invest anymore in something that returns modestly in 30+ years they want to be rich now then run some YouTube/TikTok channel how you too can become rich like they did gambling.