2021 was the year of the meme stock. People who'd never invested before jumped into the

market headfirst. And a lot of companies benefited, GameStop, Bed Bath and Beyond, BlackBerry,

but one company stood out for the longevity of its rise and for the fervor of its fans,

AMC, the movie theater chain, and the new investors who embraced the company adopted and nicknamed

for themselves, the Apes. The name is a reference to the planet of the Apes movies about a band of

primates that overthrows mankind. One of those self-proclaimed ape investors was David Dumas.

Tell me about your shirt. David is an operations manager at a moving company. He lives in Colorado,

in an 1100 square foot home with his wife, three daughters, and a lot of pets.

David got into investing early this year, and it was an exciting time to jump in. Everything seemed

to be going up, including AMC. How much money did you put into AMC in the beginning? $2600 is what I

have in the AMC, the way that I did that was just through tips and the stimulus. Did you think that

this investment might give you enough money that you could pay off your mortgage? Absolutely, this

was this investment was going to get my foot in the door. Absolutely. That's how it made me feel. I

was so convicted in this thing too that I knew that this was going to be what's going to help me

secure my family's future at the financial security part of it. I figured that millions of us

going to be wrong. That was the whole thing. It was a gamble though, but again, I knew it was a

gamble, but I was excited about it. And that gamble seemed to pay off. As millions of investors

like David jumped in, AMC stock shot up from $2 at the start of the year to $20 in a matter of

weeks. In June, it shot up even more to $60, then to $70. David says that at one point, he was

looking at over $10,000 in his investment account, more money than he'd ever seen in one place in his

life. But he didn't sell. Because for David and a lot of other apes, AMC had become about more

than just the money. It was about reclaiming the markets for regular people. I joined AMC in the

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