Did anyone cover "Eat the Rich: The Gamestop Saga"? Sorry if I missed it. It is a short docuseries about the Gamestop stock trading story. It explains what happened, why and who was behind it all. I found it to be a really interesting review of how a bunch of reddit users crushed some big hedge funds.
I don't pay much attention to the stock market anymore because I think hedge funds and big banks basically control the market with program trading. Little guys cannot keep up. It's not that we should not invest in the market. Money can still be made. But winning on individual stocks is so much more risky now.
In any case, it was actually a brilliant observation by one or more investors who noticed GameStop stock was being shorted to the tune of about 140%, meaning more GameStop shares were being shorted than there were shares outstanding - by far. By buying and holding the shares the short sellers were unable to find shares to buy to pay back their lenders unless they were paying premium prices for them. This drove the share prices up to more than 50 times their original value. As more and more people read about it, they started buy shares too. Some people made a lot of money but a lot of people lost everything they have because they found out paper profits don't mean much and knowing when to sell is as important as knowing when to buy. There is much more to the story including the Robinhood fiasco, which I think was criminal, but the series is definitely worth the watch.
There was a similar scenario in 2008-2009 with big banks, one in particular. People don't realize how short selling almost collapsed the economy in 2008.
