Monday, October 02, 2023

Dumb Money review

In Wall Street parlance, ‘dumb money’ is a catch-all term for individual and amateur traders, whose investments pale in comparison to the billions managed by hedge funds and capital investment groups. Rarely do the small fish trouble the sharks, but one such conflict occurred in 2020, when YouTuber Keith Gill (Paul Dano) told his small following about his investments in the videogame store GameStop, and the collective will of an online community briefly threatened to topple the hedge funds who had short-sold this stock. Craig Gillespie’s Dumb Money positions this as a classic David v Goliath tale, where those with nothing have an opportunity to strike at the hoarders of unimaginable wealth. Each time a character is introduced, an onscreen caption tells us their net worth, from Citadel CEO Ken Griffin (Nick Offerman), sitting on $29 billion, all the way down to debt-ridden student Harmony (Talia Ryder), $186k in the red.