Netflix tip of the day: Eat The Rich: The GameStop Saga

Today a Netflix tip that is quite out of my comfort zone. Normally I stick to true crime, bad romcoms, or bloody thrillers, but I never really get excited about stocks and markets. Until this documentary, Eat The Rich: The GameStop Saga. My interest in this was piqued some time ago because I am a terribly fanatic Redditor. I can really spend hours on that app and even though I've been on it for more than seven years now, I still come across the weirdest subreddits and the most interesting (and most bizarre) topics.

If you also regularly browse Reddit, you might already have an idea of what this documentary is about, but if not, let me explain: GameStop is a retailer of second-hand video games. This company was on the brink of collapse in January 2021 and that did not go unnoticed. From various angles, different hedge funds came into play — which is quite common in America in such situations — to extract some profit from this failing company. This is called ‘short selling’, where they assume that the company's stock price will plummet.

And that's where Reddit and its users come into play, because they were not having any of it: rich companies getting richer at the expense of someone else (in this case, the company GameStop). So what did they come up with: we will rise up against those big, rich men on Wall Street. Tens of thousands of Redditors gathered and massively bought shares in GameStop, causing its stock price to soar. And that was bad news for those hedge funds, which literally lost millions (‘short squeeze’ it’s called). The big names lost money, but the shares of the smaller investors, on the other hand, rose enormously, and they made a profit.

This was obviously a gigantic event on Reddit and the memes were in abundance. It was a kind of sense of community over the fact that they had taught those big men on Wall Street a lesson. It sounds like quite a technical story, but believe me: this docuseries is really incredibly interesting. Additionally, there are a lot of memes that come by and that is always good news. Just keep your attention on it, otherwise, you might lose track.