May 1, 2022
The Revolution That Wasn’t: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors
Spencer Jakab
With the ‘meme’ stock bubble imploding, we thought it was a good time to read this recent book on the topic. The author does a nice job explaining how (e.g., crowded shorts, retail call buying, gamma squeezes) a dying, profitless company like GameStop could catapult from stock market obscurity to the top of the Russell 2000 index at its peak. Some combination of COVID-19 stay-at-home orders, ‘free’ trading at the brokerage firm Robinhood, and the growing popularity of Reddit stock forums helped fuel this meme stock boom. We appreciate the author’s attempt to focus investors away from the casino-like atmosphere of early 2021 and more on low-cost, passive investing, but we think the book could have been significantly shorter. (bloomberg.com; tiered subscription)