Bear in mind “stonks”? Bear in mind “hodl”? Bear in mind “to the moon”? Bear in mind an odd man with lengthy hair, a pink headband, and ironic cat T-shirts talking into his webcam concerning the inventory market to members of the Home Monetary Companies Committee in Congress? In case you are someway nostalgic for the time wherein these phrases and characters entered our nationwide lexicon, then Dumb Cash may be the film for you.
Dumb Cash performs out throughout the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, when many People had been shut indoors and far of the world appeared to have merely emptied out. As an alternative of partaking in giant communal gatherings, folks interacted on-line, on Zoom, and social media—and once they did enterprise into populated locations, they wore masks that made it exceptionally annoying and tough to speak with others. Dumb Cash is at its greatest as a low-key pandemic interval piece, capturing the quiet, lonely oddness and anxiousness of this period. Whereas it isn’t the movie’s major level, it really works greatest as a narrative about one of many many collective manias that took maintain throughout this era.
Particularly, it tells the principally true story of the collective furor across the Reddit discussion board WallStreetBets and a handful of inventory picks, most notably the mall-based online game retailer GameStop, which grew to become often called “meme shares” because of its recognition with small-time retail buyers who frequented crass, meme-heavy message boards.
A lot of this exercise was pushed by Keith Gill, a small-time investor with a penchant for cat imagery who glided by the web alias Roaring Kitty. Thanks partly to Gill’s movies selling the inventory, GameStop’s share value rocketed upwards. In consequence, Gill and others who purchased in early rapidly noticed the worth of their shares improve massively—no less than on paper. Furthermore, as these small-time buyers noticed their holdings improve in worth, giant funds that had shorted GameStop—successfully betting that it will drop in worth or fail—misplaced cash. As losses mounted, one giant fund, Melvin Capital, ultimately needed to shut down.
Dumb Cash tries to current this as a comparatively easy David and Goliath story, an underdog story about little-guy buyers who stick it to moneyed institutional buyers. A closing title card argues that due to Gill and the GameStop inventory drama, massive Wall Road corporations should now take note of “dumb cash”—the derogatory time period giant funding corporations use to dismiss small particular person buyers they see as much less savvy. Like The Large Quick earlier than it, the oft-expository film wades via the jargon and systematic complexity of the monetary market: There are explainer-y bits on quick squeezes and references to “fee for order movement,” a enterprise mannequin employed by Robinhood, the buying and selling app that powered a lot of the GameStop frenzy. But as knotty as all these market mechanisms might sound, Dumb Cash tells an primarily simplistic story about how the system is rigged to profit the wealthy and highly effective on the expense of the little man.
And the issue is that the true story is something however simplistic. Essentially, the big-money quick sellers the film presents as villains had been proper about GameStop: It is a troubled firm on the decline. Not solely was it hit arduous by the pandemic, which decimated in-person, mall-based retail, however it’s been beset by administration and management issues, and its enterprise mannequin is below exterior menace from the rise in digital online game downloads. The massive corporations shorting GameStop had been clearly attempting to generate income. They had been additionally offering significant market details about the corporate’s seemingly possibilities.
In the meantime, the film’s hero, Keith Gill, pushed the inventory onto less-savvy particular person buyers, lots of whom ended up shedding cash in the long run. Though we do not know precisely what has occurred to Gill since 2021 as he has receded from public life, once we final heard from him, the worth of his GameStop shares had risen to tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars}.
The purpose isn’t actually that Gill is a villain—he was enjoying the markets simply as everybody else was, and he seems to have come out as a winner. However lots of the little guys who participated in what the film casts as his revolution misplaced cash within the course of, betting on an organization that continues to be on shaky floor.
Dumb Cash doesn’t solely shrink back from displaying these losses; together with Gill, the movie follows a handful of fictionalized GameStop buyers, together with Jennifer, a nurse performed by America Ferrara, who turns into obsessive about Gill and GameStop inventory, buys in massive, and finally ends up shedding cash after failing to promote on the high. Nevertheless it indulges in an unconvincing heroes-and-villains triumphalism that actuality merely would not help.
Furthermore, the movie resolves in an odd showdown, wherein the foremost gamers within the GameStop finance farce all need to testify earlier than the Home Monetary Companies committee. Right here we see Democratic lawmakers portrayed as reformers preventing for the little man. It is value recalling, nonetheless, that on the time, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, presumably the Democratic celebration’s most outstanding coverage entrepreneur, was calling for federal regulators to step in to shut down the meme-stock maniacs this film lionizes. In the meantime, as a title card notes, the Securities and Change Fee investigated the GameStop episode and took no motion in opposition to the massive corporations concerned. Neither is it apparent what kind of regulatory intervention would even theoretically be warranted.
The true story of Dumb Cash isn’t that the little guys toppled the massive guys, or that the massive guys tried to rig the system and heroic federal lawmakers took them down a peg. It is {that a} bunch of stocks-obsessed weirdos on an web discussion board discovered what quantities to an exploitable loophole within the monetary system that may enable them to do one thing they noticed as each epic and humorous: wreck the steadiness sheet of a really giant funding agency by shopping for a nostalgia inventory related to video video games. A lot of them did it for cash, and some fortunate buyers even received massive. However lots of them did it, nicely, for the lulz—for sheer chaotic amusement, as a result of chaos is usually humorous, and since within the dreary depths of the pandemic, you needed to do one thing to go the time. Dumb Cash is a properly made, usually human, and affecting film, particularly if you do not know an excessive amount of concerning the real-life occasions it is primarily based on.
Nevertheless it largely misses the mischievous prankster’s sensibility that drove a lot of the GameStop frenzy, recasting it into one thing extra noble. It isn’t a foul film, precisely, however it’s too earnest, too in thrall to a simplistic ethical worldview. This can be a story about stonks, vulgar memes, and weird cat movies as a lot because it’s one about monetary system intricacies; frankly, it might have used much more lulz.
