DUMB MONEY

DUMB MONEY is a satire about a young stock investor on social media who set Wall Street aflame in 2021 by backing the stock price of the video game franchise GameStop, a phenomenon that caused some people to make a lot of money but caused some other people to lose a lot of money. Though it’s sometimes confusing because of the story’s complexity, DUMB MONEY does a good job comically showing moviegoers what happened, but the filmmakers add a constant flow of gratuitous “f” words and other obscenities and leave out some important details that would undermine the movie’s politically correct spin about Wall Street, which includes the addition of two lesbian college students who invested money and earned enough to pay off their college loan debt.

The story focuses on perhaps the main man behind the Game Stop stock phenomenon, Keith Gill, a stock investor and social media influencer in Massachusetts with a wife and young child. In 2019, Keith decides that the stock in the brick-and-mortar video game store, GameStop, is undervalued. So, he buys a $53,000 option on the company’s stock, which was priced at $5 at the time. Posing as “RoaringKitty” on Twitter and YouTube, Keith touts his buy and keeps promoting the stock on his podcast. The podcast also appears on a popular Reddit website for young non-professional investors called “WallStreetBets.” Keith’s username on the Reddit website is DFV. The first word is Deep, the third word is Value, and the middle word is an “f”

word, but the movie mostly uses the moniker “Roaring Kitty” for Keith, who often wears one of those knit cat hats that radical feminists started wearing in 2017 to mock President Trump.

Keith’s younger brother, Kevin, often mocks his brother for his crazy but highly informative podcast. His tune starts to change, however, when Keith’s GameStop position rises to $48 million on Jan. 21, 2021. Much of the reason for the increased price is because thousands of average Americans start following Keith’s podcast and invest in GameStop. The movie focuses on several of these investors, including a young nurse and single mother and two lesbian college students who hope they can pay off their student loans with the money they earn on Wall Street. Many of these small investors use a stock buying and financial services app called Robinhood, which offers commission-free stock trades.

Meanwhile, as the stock price of GameStop continues to climb, some large billion dollar hedge fund companies, who had been betting that the stock price would fall to below one or two dollars, started losing their shirts. The movie follows one of those companies, Melvin Capital, and its founder, Gabriel Plotkin. With his worried wife looking on in amazement, Gabriel’s company loses billions of dollars because of GameStop’s increasing stock price.

However, the day after Keith’s position in GameStop’s stock reaches $48 million, Robinhood totally halts all trading in GameStop (and other companies) on Jan. 28, and the stock price starts dropping. Robinhood restarts the trading for GameStop but adds certain restrictions on trading. Then, on Feb. 2, GameStop’s price plummets 60%, to less than $100 per share, after a high of $483 (some say more than $500).

This upsets many of Keith’s followers, who smell a rat. Will the ones holding onto GameStop stock regain the money they lost? Will Gabriel save his company? Will Keith be able to defend his actions to a Congressional committee in Washington, DC?

DUMB MONEY is sometimes confusing because of the story’s complexity. It also has too many characters. For example, the movie adds four side financial characters besides Keith and Gabriel. They include the two young men who founded Robinhood and two men who own separate hedge fund companies associated with both Gabriel and the two Robinhood founders. In addition, moviegoers have to keep track of the nurse, the two college lesbians, and a young man working as a cashier at a GameStop store in a mall during the COVID lockdowns in 2020 and 2021.

However, the filmmakers still manage to do a good job comically showing moviegoers what happened during the GameStop saga in 2021. It shows how Keith and thousands of non-professional investors following him helped increase GameStop’s stock price. Their activities managed to panic larger hedge fund managers like Gabriel who bet that the stock price would decline. In the end, though, Gabriel lost his shirt because he stubbornly refused to stop betting against GameStop, but so did investors like the nurse in the story, who stubbornly refused to sell her shares when the stock price was higher after her initial investment.

That said, the filmmakers behind DUMB MONEY put a politically correct leftist spin on the story. For example, they depict the GameStop story as a story of rich versus poor, a politics of envy. In reality, people like Keith Gill and the small investors who support small companies like

GameStop are part of a conservative, pro-capitalist movement to give individual people, not just large hedge funds, a seat at the table on Wall Street. They don’t want to blow up the system. They just want to stop firms like Marvin Capital from abusing the system and betting against small companies like GameStop that might be having a hard time staying successful.

The filmmakers’ interest in making a leftist argument against rich people and against large hedge funds leaves out some major details that might undermine their movie’s leftist messages.

For example, GameStop’s stock price didn’t just increase because of Keith Gill’s activities in 2020 and 2021, and because of all the smaller investors who started buying GameStop stock. For example, the stock price also increased significantly when Ryan Cohen, the former CEO of the popular pet food retailer Chewy, bought some GameStop stock in August 2020 and when Cohen was named GameStop’s new CEO in January 2021. Also, there are plenty of rich hedge fund managers and companies who don’t bet on stock prices declining. In fact, it has since became known that some hedge funds, such as Michael Burry’s Scion Asset Management, made a lot of money by buying GameStop stock at an opportune time, apparently because these hedge funds pay close attention to what’s being said on social media. Ironically, according to Forbes magazine, years ago Burry came under criticism because he made lots of money during the 2008 housing crisis by betting against the financial success of the mortgage industry, which drastically declined because of leftist, anti-capitalist policies supported by former Democrat Speaker of Congress Nancy Pelosi and former Democrat Congressman Barney Frank, chairman of the House banking committee at the time.

The political correctness in DUMB MONEY also includes homosexual references to the two lesbian investors in GameStop. The two women kiss in one or more scenes. Their homosexual behavior in their coed dorm clearly disgusts one of the women’s male dorm roommate, who gives them a scowl at one point and at another point leaves the room entirely. In another scene, some college party-goers challenges one of the women to put her hand down the other woman’s pants.

Finally, DUMB MONEY is filled with nearly constant foul language. The movie has an abundant number of “f” words, for example.

Ultimately, DUMB MONEY depicts a Romantic world where “innocent” people buck a corrupt system, in this case the American stock market controlled by super-rich people. This worldview distorts the conservative, free market history of the new phenomenon of stock trading through the internet and through smartphone apps. Social media sites like WallStreetBets and firms like Robinhood attract young investor and entrepreneurs, many of them conservative and libertarian males. So, it’s more like a free market Wild West rather than some new far left political movement trying to destroy the rich and establish a socialist utopia.