Top Documentary#8 - Eat the Rich: The Games Stop Story

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If you enjoyed the movie ‘The Big Short’, about the US financial and housing crash of 2008, then this documentary about the rise and fall of Game Stop, a retail video games company, will be well worth two hours of your time. As a non America I had not heard of Games Stop but that’s really the point of the journey here as we see how Wall Street and big business can be caught off guard by a new breed of investors that don’t know the rules. They made a movie of this real life saga called ‘Dumb Money’. Basically millions of online gamer and geeky types who hang around places like Redditt and YouTube are the new breed of stocks and shares investors. As they sometimes act as a mob as stocks are hyped by online influencers and they pile in on it and things can get rather volatile. A new app called Robinhood was the place where many were taking financial advice on investing in various shares, not always from experts. Roaring Kitty, one of those online guys with a huge following, started talking up a stock called Games Stop. People looked into and said why not and bought a small block of cheap shares, a company that really was bottoming out with old technology like physical games discs etc. The buying of the penny stocks saw the stocks rise unexpectedly. It’s unclear why this company should be a star of the future but a million or so investors whack up the share price and so catch the eye of Wall Street. They can’t understand why this crumbling company stock is rising so fast and begin to short it, buying a future position where they think the stock is pretty worthless and will fall, which it does due to the pure volume of money they throw at it to undermine it. But the online guys are smart and some of them expected this to happen and had also bought a short position, meaning the positions were getting bigger and bigger, investment wise. It creates a crisis as huge investment forms get over exposed to Game Stop and begin to creak as all those small investors lose their money and the big banks and investors see their credit line squeezed trying to hold their positions and credit lines. At one point it looks like Wall Street’s biggest company that deal with this type of transaction may well collapse and cause yet another 2008 as they are over-exposed in the year of 2020. The documentary twists nicely as its revealed Robinhood may not be quite as geeky and independent as they say and really Wall Street skulduggery was at play here, until the whole thing got out of control. It really exposes yet again more of those dodgy Wall Street systems and how the new breed of online solo investors can gang up and swarm the big boys to cause chaos. With colourful characters and an intelligent narration its enthralling and eye opening stuff and you certainly learn new things here on how fragile the system really is as greed goes to light-speed. The days of Maddoff scams have moved on and boiler room scams are online and raging, crypto currencies the next to cause chaos one day in the near future. If you are smart or inquisitive then this is for you.