“Eat the Rich” – review and story behind the Netflix mini-series
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The great boom in the shares of the chain of stores with accessories for players has turned many young investors into millionaires. And it all started when a group of rebels wanted to get to the bottom of Wall Street funds.
“What are they about? Are they attacking a person like me who wants to help people make money in the stock market? They want to destroy capitalism in this way?” asks the famous TV presenter Jim Cramer in the prologue to the mini-series " Eat the Rich". He means young "degenerates" from the Reddit forum who "targeted" him and flooded the web with mockery, malicious videos and memes . These are the same "degenerates" who caused a great boom in the run-down chain of gaming accessories stores GameStop.
Eat the Rich: The GameStop Saga is a Netflix mini-series produced by Emmy and Academy Award winners Dan Cogan and Liz Garbus and directed by Theo Love. It tells the story of the madness on GameStop shares that took place in the second half of 2020 and in the first half of 2021.
They wanted to punish hedge funds
The series in a neat, dynamic, but wordy form presents the story of madness on the shares of GameStop and the whole surrounding related to it. Let us remind you that in mid-2020, only USD 1 was paid for one share of the financially troubled chain of stores with accessories for players, while in January 2021 it was already USD 120!
Burry made quite a lot of money from this rally. Young investors from the Reddit forum - WallStreetBets also earned a lot . However, this GameStop stock buying frenzy was less about making money and more about ... to annoy someone.
Wall Street hedge funds became the target of the young rebels . They had large short positions - for the decline in the value of GameStop . This did not please the young people who created the WallStreetBets forum.
GameStop rally was also the appearance of Ryan Cohen, the founder of the Chewy.com portal, in the company's shareholding structure. It was then that the fashion for investing in this company began to be started by investors hiding under nicknames DeepFuckingValue or Roaring Kitty.
A fairly large part of the third episode deals with the suspension of trading on GameStop shares by a very popular broker called Robinhood . It was not visible from Poland, but Robinhood "earned" a lot with this move and it is included in the discussed mini-series.
GameStop's quotations against the Nasdaq 100 - 3 years
Source: TradingView
A video about stock market madness
Is it worth watching this mini-series? Certainly, its authors neatly told the whole story, and also perfectly captured the atmosphere of madness that prevailed from mid-2020 to mid-2021 on the stock exchanges. Many young investors simply listened to investment celebrities and did what they recommended. And it worked, and gave money, but only for a while.
A nice variety to the series are mini-interviews with small investors who earned a lot of money on GameStop . For example, a young man named JeffAmazon made $8 million out of $25,000. Stories like this show that anything is possible in the stock market.
What bothers me is the form that comes close to the convention of a music video. Yes, today even documentaries must have the right rhythm and dynamics - because that's what the young viewer is used to. However, the fast pace of the music video - even in the case of a documentary about the events of Wall Street - is tiring if it is stretched over almost 2 hours of material (that's how long 3 episodes last).
Beyond that, the show focused on the emotional and social side of the story, and less on the investment background and the "meta" (theoretical) side. There were no conversations with people from hedge funds, and from the GameStop company itself . There was also no deepening of the subject, talks with scientists - and an exact explanation of why the youngsters from WallStreetBets were interested in hedge funds? This issue has been raised but not elaborated on.
To sum up, if an investor is really bored during the weekend, he can go ahead and watch it. However, the mini-series “ Eat the Rich : The GameStop Saga” is not a must-have item.
