Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. I'm Manuel Salagossa. Coming up,

Hoodies Unite, the amateur stock traders aiming to beat Wall Street billionaires at their own game.

What are their chances? I am very excited to see what happens next. I mean, like, that's part of

what's interesting about this, right? And I think that part of what's fueling this is pandemic boredom.

A global gang of small investors has been buying up shares in a struggling American company called GameStop.

It's been framed as a tale of David versus Goliath, a populist revolt on share markets.

But is it really?

I think the reality is that Wall Street is making even more money right now off of this.

That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC.

So my name's Alex Patton.

I live in Kingston upon Thames in London.

I would say I'm a fairly normal amateur investor

and that it's just something I do from time to time ever since, you know, this sort of home

trading became popular with the pandemic. Alex there may be Anglo-American, but he's as far away

from a big Wall Street investor as you can get.

He trades in his spare time when he's not at his day job in cyber security.

Honestly, I'd never traded a stock in my life before the pandemic.

But over the past year, Alex has started checking out a chat on the online community site, Reddit.

Specifically a Reddit thread called Wall Street Betts,

where people like him discuss stock investments.

And it's on that thread that Alex first heard about an American company called GameStop.

It's a struggling bricks-and-water video game retailer,

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