Keith himself is soon worth $22 million.īut has perception become reality? Is GameStop, as a corporation, really worth more than it was? That’s the eternal question of the market, even as the GameStop phenomenon gets fueled into an armchair insurrection.Ī commercial movie needs a hero, and “Dumb Money,” which is defter, more fun, and less labored than “The Big Short” (it doesn’t keep chewing on its exposition), has a shaggy hero, of sorts, in Keith, the basement stock analyst who, for a few months, kicked off a movement, democratizing the top-down world of stock trading. Everyone who invested in it, led by Keith, is a winner. It was selling at $3.85, but within weeks it’s selling at $20, at $60, at $100, finally shooting up to $348. That’s what a short squeeze is: The stock takes off like a rocket. But once people start to buy the stock, all the short selling that’s gone on - the undervaluing - acts like oxygen feeding a fire. He turns buying the stock into an act of fighting back against a system that’s stacked against ordinary people. Keith positions Gamestop as the “people’s” stock, the one that the greedheads didn’t want you to believe in.
Of course, what’s really feeding the enthusiasm is the fact that the hedge funds are short selling it. And against all odds, the stock starts to rise. But Keith, with his flaky, shiny-eyed, so-out-there-it’s-in social-media presence, wins a handful of converts over to his mania. The most powerful American hedge funds have spent years betting against GameStop, short selling the stock, making money off the promise of its failure. It’s a relic-in-the-making, like Blockbuster Video a generation before. It’s losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year. “Dumb Money” is set during the first two months of 2021, when GameStop’s best days would seem to have been long behind it. And it’s due to his conviction that something starts to happen. He’s invested $53,000 of his own money - his family’s savings - in GameStop. But in the world of stock tips, he’s got so much belief that he has amassed a small following. Sounding like Jim Cramer crossed with a grunge version of Christian Slater in “Pump Up the Volume,” Keith looks like a loser hooked on a deranged obsession. Calling himself Roaring Kitty, he broadcasts out of his basement while nursing a beer, wearing a shirt bedecked with gaudy cat photos and a mock-samurai bandana wrapped around his forehead.Īgainst a projected backdrop of his financial portfolio, he jabbers on about his stock-market obsession - his fervent belief in GameStop, the brick-and-mortar video-game outlet he grew up with. In his spare time, he posts freewheeling video rambles on wallstreetbets, a chat division of Reddit, and on YouTube. Keith, by contrast, is a long-haired Middle American nerd who lives in Brockton, MA, with his wife (Shailene Woodley) and infant daughter and works for the Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company. The Wall Street badasses of the ’80s wanted to be cool.
But he may be nearly as caught up in illusions as they are. Keith, unlike the Wall Street players, actually is trying to fight the system. Keith Gill ( Paul Dano), the central figure in Craig Gillespie’s smart, light-fingered, brashly entertaining finance-world docudrama “ Dumb Money,” is an amateur stock trader who also sees himself as a rebel. But it felt good to them to think of themselves that way. A lot of the young men who became stock traders in the 1980s saw themselves as rebels: the new swingers of greed.
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