It’s impossible to be an expert in all fields. It’s difficult to even be able to comprehend and logically explain most fields.
When we say “fields,” we mean things like political ideologies, epidemiology, effective altruism, and organic chemistry. In the interest of this blog post, we’re going to throw the U.S. stock market in this category as well.
“Blow-Out-The-Short-Sellers Game”?
Here’s the thing …
We’re guessing most of you have a vague idea of what happened back in January 2021 when there were some market rumblings around the GameStop stock (NYSE: GME). Depending on your mental filters when it comes to trending news, you might have heard a few different things.
- Terms like “hedge fund,” “short squeeze,” “trading platforms,” “meme stock,” and “restricted securities”
- Some rich guys lost a lot of money while a bunch everyday folks actually beat the market.
- GameStop is totally going out of business
Sound familiar? Maybe? IYKYK, right? If not, that’s ok!
The Beauty of ‘Dumb Money’
The good news is that the makers behind Dumb Money have created this dramedy so that you don’t even really have to know about or be interested in these things to understand it or catch on.
Dumb Money is based on the book, The Antisocial Movement by Ben Mezrich. The full name of the non-fiction work is actually The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees.
The reviews were mixed when the book came out in September of 2021 but fortunately, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer got their hands on the proposal early on. The film, which premiered this month at the Toronto Film Festival, was written by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo. It was directed by Craig Gillespie (Cruella, I, Tonya).
Paul Dano (There Will Be Blood, The Batman) plays YouTuber and Redditor Keith Gill (a.k.a. Roaring Kitty) who becomes the unlikely hero in a group of characters that make this whole saga engaging for people who have no idea how short squeezes work.
Perhaps this is the appeal to Dumb Money?
A Stacked Cast
The ensemble cast also features Shailene Woodley, Seth Rogen, Sebastian Stan, Pete Davidson, America Ferrera, Anthony Ramos, Nick Offerman, and Vincent D’Onofrio.
Most of these actors and actresses are character tropes that viewers will quickly associate with the early days of the pandemic. Dano and Davidson play brothers whose older sister has passed away, Ferrera is an essential worker trying to make ends meet, Ramos is a broke-ass GameStop employee. The others – Rogen, Offerman, Stan, and D’Onofrio – are part of the 1%.
The cast breathes life into this idea that there were the beginnings of a movement gaining ground among Americans who simply needed more and tried to get it themselves. In an interview with CNBC around the end of January 2021, Stephen Mathai-Davis, who runs the all-AI trading platform Q.ai had this to say,
“There is a movement to the decentralized online communities where people are learning from each other. There is a distrust of Wall Street. They are very well aware that Wall Street thinks they are ‘dumb money.’ In the community, no one talks about mutual funds, they talk about individual stocks and ETFs.”
Early reviews say that Dumb Money has a lot to explain but it’s done in a digestible way. It’s fun, it’s cool and it’s a lot like The Social Network and The Big Short but without the breaking of the fourth wall. It’s about the start of revolution, something most of us can relate to.
Dumb Money will be released nationwide on September 29, click here to get tickets!
