Movie Review : Dumb Money 2023

Based on the true story of the famous GameStop Short Squeeze of early 2021. The movie focuses on the story of the influencer Roaring Kitty, WallStreetBets and some of the Hedge Funds CEOs like Gabe Plotkin of Melvin Capital who is played by Seth Rogan in one of his less outrageous, but well played roles. Having lived through these real world events and followed developments in real time I think the story is very well told and I thoroughly enjoyed seeing it made into a movie.

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This movie was able to fill in a few of the gaps in my understanding of what went down. I don’t want to put any spoilers here in a review though so I will just say that if you’re interested in share markets and how regulators and big hedge funds operate then you will most definitely enjoy this movie. I highly recommend it.

Many people into the Crypto space will be familiar with the story because it was in 2021 when our last Bull Market in Crypto started to get steam. GameStop was only one of a few “Meme Stocks” that were pumped by Retail Investors around this time. This was also about the time that WallStreetSilver tried to similarly kick off a Retail Driven Short Squeeze on the silver markets. The movie stays focused on GameStop and some of the main players of that exchange because it was the most dramatic squeeze and it makes for good storytelling but it does miss a little bit of this broader context.

However the movie does touch on some underlying themes of the little people taking on big money via the markets and trying to punish them for their arrogance and bad behaviour. The movie title is clever and begs the question “Who is the Dumb Money?”. It’s pretty clear that the institutional players typically refer to the retail investors as Dumb Money, but are they really dumb? Or are the big Hedge Fund being dumb in this story? You decide.

For me the GameStop story is a great example of how new decentralised movements are starting to stand up and challenge the old guard. This conflict was just a skirmish, but it’s the sort of thing that we could see more of in future so it’s a really interesting modern story to understand why and how it happened. Check out the trailer below :-