Dumb Money: Unpicking the GameStop saga
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 12 October 2023
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Shares in GameStop, the video game store, experienced a dramatic rise in early in 2021. The stock had captured the imagination of many individual investors who heard about it on social media platforms such as TikTok and Reddit.
Some investors made a lot of money, while some hedge funds, who had bet against the stock, lost billions. Eventually, though, GameStop shares crashed back to earth and many investors lost the lot.
The story has been dramatised by Hollywood in ‘Dumb Money’, currently screening in cinemas.
Vivienne Nunis sits down with the film’s director Craig Gillespie and financial journalist Matt Levine to investigate what the GameStop saga teaches us about the power of social media when it comes to influencing the movements of the stock market.
(Picture: Paul Dano as Keith Gill in 'Dumb Money'. Credit: Sony Pictures)
Presented and produced by Vivienne Nunis
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From global current affairs to art, science and culture. |
| 0:05.1 | The documentary from the BBC World Service tells the world's stories. |
| 0:10.6 | Search for The Documentary, wherever you get your BBC podcasts. |
| 0:18.7 | Yeah. |
| 0:28.7 | Um, it's us versus... We need to talk about the game stop situation. |
| 0:33.3 | Welcome to Dumb Money, the film that tells the story of GameStop. |
| 0:38.7 | That's a brick and mortar video game store with thousands of outlets in shopping malls worldwide. |
| 0:42.1 | During the pandemic, it became the focus of a meme stock rally, |
| 0:46.2 | which meant lots of people bought in after hearing about it on social media. |
| 0:50.4 | As a result, the price went up and up. |
| 0:53.2 | Game stop, those shares not stopping. |
| 0:55.0 | No stop. It's only going to go up. When they hit, I'm going to buy you a mansion. |
| 0:58.0 | Let's drink to that. |
| 1:00.0 | Some hedge funds who'd bet against it lost billions. |
| 1:03.0 | How much did we lose today? |
| 1:04.0 | A billion. |
| 1:05.0 | And yesterday? |
| 1:07.0 | A billion. |
| 1:08.0 | While some individual investors, known as dumb money on Wall Street, made a ton of cash. |
| 1:14.6 | But others lost the lot. |
| 1:17.0 | Retail traders. |
| 1:18.2 | Always lose. |
... |
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