In the opening months of 2021, when the world was still in the throws of the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of amateur investors on a social media platform made billions on the US stock market, nearly bankrupting huge investment firms in the process.
Two years later, Hollywood has got their hands on the David v Goliath story and turned it into a feature film called Dumb Money.
Based on the non-fiction book The Antisocial Network by Ben Mezrich and starring Paul Dano as the unofficial leader of the movement, Dumb Money will attempt to dramatise the already dramatic events of the 2021 GameStop short squeeze.
Here's what you need to know before you see the film.
First up, what is GameStop?
GameStop is a chain of bricks-and-mortar video game stores in the US.
GameStop is the parent company of the Australian equivalent, EB Games.
Like EB Games, GameStop is mostly seen in suburban shopping centres across the US.
OK, so, what happened with GameStop stocks?
Before mid-July 2020, GameStop stocks weren't really anything to write home about. They were trading at about $US4.
But then something strange happened. GameStop stock began to rise.
By October 2020, it was at $US12 and by December, it was $US18.
By the end of January 2021, GameStop stock had risen to $US347.51 — a monthly surge of 1,915 per cent.
Why did this happen?
At first, Wall Street was baffled at why a usually unattractive stock like GameStop would soar so high.
It quickly became clear that the surge in demand for GameStop stock had been driven by an enthusiastic bunch of individual investors, many of whom hung out on the subreddit r/WallStreetBets.
WallStreetBets is a place where users post their stock holdings and talk about their trades.
At the start of 2020, a WallStreetBets member going by the name of DeepF**kingValue — who we now know is US financial analyst Keith Gill — posted on the subreddit that he had invested $US50,000 into GameStop stock.
Undeterred by those saying he was foolish, Gill stuck to his guns and his investment grew.
By the end of January 2021, his $US50,000 investment was worth $US47 million.
Gill led the way for a legion of WallStreetBet users to buy GameStop stock.
Loading...But that's not all
The online resistance led by Gill didn't just cause a near-defunct stock to resurrect, it also caused a lot of rich people to lose a lot of money.
It's got to do with something called short selling.
When you buy shares in a company, you're usually betting that it will become more profitable over time. So you're going "long" on the stock.
But if you believe that a company's shares will tank — like the shares of a video game retailer — you can borrow shares at their current price and sell them to others, even though you don't own them.
If your bet was right and the share price falls, you buy them back from the market for less than you sold them for.
Then you return the shares to the original owner and pocket the profit.
But if your "shorted" shares increase in price, then short sellers have to scramble to buy the shares back in order to be able to return the shares to their original owner.
This can lead to increased demand for the stock, lower supply, and its price to soar.
This is called a short squeeze.
This is what happened with GameStop.
Redditors found out that some big Wall Street hedge funds were making a quick buck off failing GameStop shares, so they banded together and bought a bunch of stock to drive up value — and teach the hedge fund traders a lesson.
Shorting shares in GameStop cost hedge funds a total of $US12.5 billion over January 2021, according to financial analytics firm Ortex.
How true to life will Dumb Money be?
It's hard to say for sure, but many of the characters in Dumb Money are based on their real-life counterparts.
Keith Gill, aka DeepF***ingValue, aka the man credited with igniting Redditors against Wall Street, will be played by Paul Dano.
Pete Davidson will play Kevin Gill, Keith's real-life brother, and Shailene Woodley plays Caroline Gill, Keith's wife.
The film also features a number of real-life Wall Street personalities who lost huge amounts of money.
Seth Rogan will play Gabe Plotkin, whose Melvin Capital lost billions during the GameStop short squeeze.
Once one of Wall Street's most successful hedge funds, Melvin Capital never fully bounced back from 2021's losses and shuttered operations in May of 2022.
Vincent D'Onofrio plays billionaire investor Steve Cohen.
Cohen's Point 72 hedge fund injected millions into Melvin Capital to help it survive the GameStop short squeeze. When Redditors found out, they targeted Cohen to the point he deleted his X (formally Twitter) account.
Nick Offerman will play Kenneth Griffin, whose hedge fund, Citadel LLC, along with Point 72, invested $US2.75 billion into Melvin Capital in January 2021.
In August of 2021, Griffin announced plans to redeem $US500 million of that investment from Melvin Capital.
Sebastian Stan and Rushi Kota play Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt, the current CEO and former co-CEO of investment and trading app Robinhood.
Many Reddit traders used the platform to buy and sell GameStop stock, with the company accused of shutting down GameStop stock buying to tank the inflated stock price.
ABC/Reuters