{"id":284,"date":"2025-02-25T14:54:33","date_gmt":"2025-02-25T14:54:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/engadget.vip\/?p=284"},"modified":"2025-03-05T14:49:35","modified_gmt":"2025-03-05T14:49:35","slug":"diamond-hands-offers-a-good-if-narrow-portrait-of-the-gamestop-stock-squeeze","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/?p=284","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Diamond Hands\u2019 offers a good, if narrow portrait of the GameStop stock squeeze"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In early 2021, a group of retail investors realized that GameStop shares had been recklessly over-shorted by major investors. Big funds, certain that the retailer was about to collapse, had shorted 140 percent of the company\u2019s entire public shareholding. Individuals, who co-ordinated their efforts via a subreddit called r\/WallStreetBets, knew that they could exploit this vulnerability. They bought up all of the outstanding GameStop stock and drove up the price, forcing the big funds to pay over the odds to avoid losing a fortune when their bet spectacularly backfired.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s this story that is outlined, more or less, in MSNBC\u2019s new documentary, Diamond Hands: The Legend of WallStreetBets<\/em>, which debuted at SXSW 2022. It tells the story from the perspective of some of the individuals who signed up early and held on to their stake. Some used the squeeze to make a fortune, while others came away with a more modest, but still fantastic, profit. The decision to focus on these personal stories makes for an engaging tale at the human level, albeit one that\u2019s very one-sided.<\/p>\n

The film\u2019s general thesis is that the short squeeze took place mostly thanks to the internet and what it has enabled. Without Reddit to coordinate the trades and Robinhood acting, at least at first<\/em>, as a way around the stuffed-shirt brokerages, none of this would have happened. There is a suggestion that people were motivated to get into investing as a consequence of the stimulus checks. Which I don\u2019t agree with, mostly because people weren\u2019t sinking thousands of dollars into GameStop if all they had was a spare $600 to their name.<\/p>\n

It also affords, as far as I\u2019m concerned, a surprising amount of time to talk about the broken social contract most millennials feel five sentences from Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, who became the internet\u2019s most hated figure when his app chose to Keith Gill who, as Roaring Kitty, was at the heart of the effort to craft the initial short squeeze.<\/p>\n

There is one annoyance that it\u2019s worth being aware of is the film\u2019s decision to create a visual style that apes the language of Reddit memes. Lots of gaudy iconography, remixes of old viral videos and the sort of amateur kitsch awfulness you see a lot online. It reminded me of an experiment Charlie Brooker did on the excesses of youth TV. He piled a bunch of teenagers into a screening room and told them to signal when they got bored while they watched a bunch of clips from screechy, in-your-face teen TV shows. What held them in rapt attention, however, was a sequence from an Adam Curtis documentary, with its slow narration and lack of any visual pizzazz. The point being that just because a subject deals with kitschy, out-there imagery from the internet, you don’t need to jazz up the visuals to make your story entertaining.<\/p>\n

Diamond Hands: The Legend of WallStreetBets<\/em> premieres on MSNBC on April 10th at 10pm ET.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In early 2021, a group of retail investors realized that GameStop shares had been recklessly over-shorted by major investors. Big funds, certain that the retailer was about to collapse, had shorted 140 percent of the company\u2019s entire public shareholding. Individuals, who co-ordinated their efforts via a subreddit called r\/WallStreetBets, knew that they could exploit this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":285,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[146,130,414,416,415,417,411,418],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=284"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1255,"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284\/revisions\/1255"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}