(fluorescent sign buzzing)
(frenetic electronic music)
(intense orchestral music)
- [Announcer] The stock market is in turmoil today.
- This GameStop situation is the craziest
I think I've ever seen.
- I want to talk about GameStop.
- GameStop. - GameStop.
- GameStop!
- GameStop. - GameStop.
- This crazy GameStop stock market story.
- I was like, oh my God,
we actually can use shares as our weapons
against Wall Street,
so hit 'em where it hurts
and take their money away from them.
- It's interesting, isn't it?
- Everyone is talking about GameStop.
- It's absolute insanity.
Even looking back, it doesn't even make sense.
- It is the story that doesn't seem to die.
- [Male Speaker] Literally, I think the entire world is talking about it.
(speaking in foreign language)
- It was like an out of body experience.
(speaking in foreign language)
I can't really explain it.
- [Announcer] Wall Street
has been turned upside down this week.
- [Announcer] Shaken by thousands of small time investors
taking on the big guys.
- At one point,
I'm just like there might be a financial crisis developing.
- It's like the villagers storming the castle.
- [Male Speaker] Frenzied buying,
the likes of which we have never seen.
- GameStop! - I'll be quite honest,
that whole week was just a complete blur.
- GameStop at the center of this pretty extraordinary
David and Goliath story where individual investors
are short squeezing some pretty massive hedge funds.
- [Male Speaker] We have the most amazing
short squeeze going on.
- [Male Speaker] It seems to be the short squeeze of all short squeezes.
- [Announcer] Forcing those Wall Street giants
to lose billions.
- Oh, that's terrible, those poor hedge fund managers.
Now might be a good time to invest
in whoever manufacturers the world's tiniest violins.
- I was like, these guys are wrong.
It's kind of weird saying that, right?
Like, hey, these multi-billion dollar hedge funds are wrong.
This is gonna be the biggest short squeeze in history.
- That's pretty game-changing.
My friends created a revolution from their research.
- Let's go, go!
Let's go, you know what I mean?
- People are coming to us saying, hey,
you're the reason I held on.
Your research is what led me to this opportunity.
- [Male Speaker] Joining as the original participants
in the GameStop trade.
- What's going on, everybody?
Hopefully, you can all hear me all right.
I've never done one of these before.
We had the vision to see what was going to happen
before it happened.
- What was it about it that made you believe
that there was a growth story there that no one else saw?
- I've been in the thing for years.
I've lived it, I've watched the company's evolution.
- Rod, you've been in GameStop
waiting for this moment since 2017.
- It sure felt like I was wrong for a long time.
- To me, it just represented an opportunity
to prove to everybody that I was right and they were wrong.
(intense orchestral music)
(cow mooing)
- I grew up in Mukwonago, Wisconsin.
It's very rural, a lot of land.
- Justin Dopierala.
(audience applauding)
- I was the first one of my family to graduate from college.
At one point, I contacted several financial firms
and no one would even give me an internship.
So I decided that, you know what?
I'm just gonna do it myself.
I'm gonna go out on my own.
I became DOMO Capital Management.
A lot of my clients were just every day blue collar people,
nurses, truck drivers, electricians.
(sparks crackling)
(pensive electronic music)
GameStop came up on my screens in 2018,
and it was clear to me that the market
had this huge misperception about GameStop.
- GameStop plunging after hours
after a disappointing quarter.
- GameStop, yes, you heard me right, GameStop,
that store that you haven't been to in like a decade.
- Yeah, GameStop,
you know that money losing video game store?
- For years, this stock has been absolutely hated
because the whole industry is moving online.
- It's a dog shit company, okay?
It's shocking that they haven't filed
for bankruptcy protection yet.
- So in May of 2019,
I wrote an article, GameStop, time to use the Konami Code,
a famous cheat that most gamers know from Contra.
- [Male Speaker] Up, up, down, down,
left, right, left, right, B, A, start.
30 lives.
- I was really the first one to come out
and have a strong conviction in GameStop.
- Investing, it's a combination of engineering,
and I would say, art,
even though that sounds a little bit too pretentious.
Originally, I'm from Russia.
Russia is not a country
where there was a lot of opportunity.
And just generally speaking, of course,
it is way better here.
I'm not a financial professional.
My profession is really I'm a software architect,
but a few years ago,
I got really interested in investing.
- So let's examine the structure of American capitalism.
- Investing has several different layers to it, if you will.
- The first rule of investment is don't lose.
And the second rule of investment
is don't forget the first rule.
- [Dmitriy] Frequently, people rely on their emotions.
- Which is terrible news
for the company's only stockholder, Homer Simpson.
- Oh!
- But you have to be dispassionate
if you are to make money, of course.
You don't want to become emotionally attached.
You have to be interested in what you're doing,
not just in it to make money.
You have to really care.
That makes you a better investor.
And one of my investments was GameStop.
- If you have GameStop stock, sell it now.
- You know, every once in a while,
I'll just poke my head in there, check it out,
be like, yeah, yeah, this still looks like shit.
- If you hate GameStop,
well, you can just feel free to give this video a like,
share with your friends.
- People were just roasting the company.
Hey, GameStop is tanking.
Nobody goes to GameStop.
Who goes to GameStop?
(pensive orchestral music)
I was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
So my mom and my dad are both Syrian.
One thing that my father told me all the time was,
hey, you're never gonna live a comfortable life
doing a 9:00 to 5:00, doing an office job.
You need to learn how to manage your money.
When I was around 15,
my father passed away and I thought about life.
And I realized he was prepping me to take care of my family.
So my mom has absolutely no idea
that I drove up to Alabama last night.
I'm about to surprise the hell out of her.
(speaking in foreign language)
Don't say that.
I started getting into misunderstood,
underappreciated type companies
that could potentially make a comeback.
Yo, when somebody tells you not to do something,
you do it.
So I started getting into GameStop
and I started writing about it on StockTwits.
- It's like Twitter for financial markets exclusively.
- I was GMEshortsqueeze.
I have a little logo with a green arrow.
This whole GameStop story
started on Seeking Alpha and StockTwits.
I have a data visualization background
and my philosophy is a picture can say 1,000 words.
If you can put a small graphic that gives insights,
that can inspire people to do more research.
- [Male Speaker] Screw this shit, man.
GameStop frickin' sucks.
Don't go there.
(pensive orchestral music)
- I wanted a sanity check.
I wanted to understand, what was I missing?
I was a self-confessed GameStop fanatic by then.
I was reading every bit of content I could scrape
anywhere across the internet.
- I first came across Rod
when he reached out to me through my website.
He wasn't looking to invest with DOMO Capital,
but he just wanted to talk about GameStop.
- Exactly.
He had an intake form on his website.
I said, I've read a lot of your stories about GameStop.
I'm an investor
and I would love to have a discussion with you.
- Rod and I would exchange texts.
We've never met in person.
For me personally, Rod Alzmann was always Uberkikz.
- That was my AOL instant messenger name from fifth grade.
I made it up because I played soccer
and 11 was my favorite number.
And I've just used that as kind of my username ever since.
My job is in competitive intelligence corporate strategy.
At lunch at work for years,
we'd be talking about stocks,
and GameStop, for me, was always the largest position.
- They are the world's greatest optimists, I guess.
- Yes.
Or they know something we don't.
- My coworkers, they were like,
"Why are you doing this to yourself, Rod?
Why are you still in GameStop?"
- [Female Speaker] Internet trolls are people
lurking in cyberspace who launch attacks.
- They're these losers who don't have a job
and they're in the basement of their parents' house.
- [Male Speaker] They feed off of negative reactions.
- The majority of the trolls would post,
this is Blockbuster.
- GameStop is a brick and mortar video game retailer
at a time when people increasingly download their games
off the internet.
- [Announcer] A lot of people are buying their video games online
instead of going into the stores.
- Brick and mortar stores have been under pressure
for some time.
- In a few weeks, stores like this
will simply be a memory of Americana.
- [Announcer] The company filed for bankruptcy
six months ago.
- Blockbuster.
- [Male Speaker] Is GameStop the next Blockbuster?
- This is the next Blockbuster.
They're going out of business.
- GameStop, it's a company of the past.
- Are they Blockbuster two?
Hell yes.
They're Blockbuster two, man,
the much deadlier sequel.
(merchandise crashing)
- Hey, this is irrelevant because the PS5
and the Xbox series X are coming out next year.
- So let's talk about our next console.
- The biggest risk was that the new consoles
wouldn't have disk drives.
- [Male Speaker] You know, very few people are going
and buying video games in malls anymore.
- If you ask any 10 to 15 year old,
they're downloading games, right?
They're not going to these stores.
- If everything goes all digital,
why the hell would I ever go into a GameStop?
- [Justin] I had a thesis.
I didn't think the new consoles would be digital only.
- [Dmitriy] And Justin was correct.
- I was digging into the financials
and all I got was made fun of, all right?
I'm telling you, it's not over.
- Even if they were to go bankrupt immediately,
there was more money there
than what the stock was selling for.
- The price had gotten down below $4.
It just made no sense.
And if we're specifically talking about video games,
they are who you think of.
Clearly, this brand is not dead.
It's vibrant.
And this cycle is about to reinvigorate it.
- It's like when you're playing Texas Hold'em,
you know if you have a certain hand
and you know you have a lot of outs.
And with GameStop, there was so many outs.
- Investing is almost like a game.
It's like a game
where you are competing against other people
whom you don't know.
I was really interested who those people are
on the other side of my trade.
- There aren't too many jobs, professions,
or even inventions that would make someone a billionaire,
but hedge funds created by industry pioneers
such as Steven A. Cohen did just that.
- [Announcer] Cohen was actually the inspiration
for the fictitional character Bobby Axelrod
on the Showtime drama, "Billions."
- I am a monster.
- It's been a big month for Citadel's Ken Griffin
in real estate,
the hedge fund manager purchasing
the most expensive home ever sold in the U.S.
- [Announcer] Hedge funds
use sophisticated investment techniques
that enable them to make money when the markets are rising
and falling.
- The stock market's just a rigged game
where the top 1% make out like bandits
and regular people get hurt.
- Justin mentioned that some hedge funds
were heavily short GameStop.
- [Male Speaker] Hedge fund managers bet money
that a specific stock will decline in value.
That's called short selling.
- [Female Speaker] The trader bets
that has stock price will go down.
And when it does, they make money.
But if it goes up, they lose a lot of money.
- [Male Speaker] There are those big institutions
and hedge funds that love to short stocks,
in other words, to bet on their price collapsing.
- Short sellers crash companies and profit from that.
- They go, uh-oh, that company's not doing well,
so I'm gonna make it do worse.
- It's the joy and revelment of seeing somebody else fail.
- [Male Speaker] These are nasty, ruthless motherfuckers
who will stop at nothing to make a buck.
- Wall Street's been manipulating the market for years.
This isn't new news.
Like, it's been going on.
They're gonna hurt the little guy
because that's what always happens,
they go after the little guy.
I was staying at a job that I was only staying at
because of financial security.
And it was eating my soul alive.
I always had a passion for being in the music industry.
My parents were so against the music business
because it wasn't their traditional lifestyle
that they had planned for me.
Straight away, I'd be like this demon child.
And then I finally just had a breaking point,
so I left my job.
I actually got a tattoo the day before I quit
saying come as you are, which is my favorite,
one of my favorite Nirvana lyrics.
And it's my favorite band of all time
to remind me that I wasn't gonna back out
of going into his office and quitting.
I had no idea when I was gonna work next,
but I ultimately knew that it was the right decision.
I was in a lot of debt,
but I took all of my savings
and put it into the stock market,
and just kind of hoped for the best.
- So I've always been like a casual investor,
nothing serious.
I wanted to invest in what I knew, which was gaming.
(cart whooshing) - Hee hee!
- My first job was a game tester.
- A, A!
- I can fix you?
- [Child] Yes!
- I didn't know that.
But then I took a position as a game master,
which was basically the god of the world in EverQuest.
(thunder clapping)
When you work in the video game industry,
unfortunately, it doesn't pay great.
Ouch!
So I ended up moving away from it.
I made it a new year's resolution,
I said, I'm gonna start a YouTube channel.
I'm doing this.
What's going on, guys?
Welcome to another episode of Smash JT,
- Smash! - JT.
- Thank you so much for watching.
And as always, you stay smashing.
You stay smashing.
GameStop was hated among gamers, like hated.
- Every time I go into GameStop,
I'm like, who's buying any of this shit?
I'm betting against this horrible company.
- Hell, even I trashed it sometimes.
There are typos on the website.
Yikes.
But I saw a tweet from GameStop.
- There are a few GameStops,
particularly up in Tulsa, Oklahoma,
where they are starting to change things around.
- It got my brain running wild, like whoa,
what could happen to this company
that's been beaten into the dirt?
I bought stock in GameStop.
So my initial investment in GameStop
was wholly based off of, oh, they're trying.
Maybe, I'm crazy.
Maybe, I have completely lost my mind,
or maybe I'm just onto something here.
I saw so much potential, so much possibility,
and then some might say the world started ending
a month later.
- Scientists in China are trying to determine
if a new virus strain is responsible for pneumonia outbreak
in the city of Wuhan.
- [Announcer] The CDC says the mysterious coronavirus.
- Coronavirus. - Coronavirus.
- The nation's retailers are going to be absolutely hammered
by the coronavirus.
- COVID hit and things changed quite a bit.
- With millions of Americans under lockdown right now,
some cabin fever is starting to set in.
- Yeah, I thought you liked me.
I never said I liked you.
- I think (indistinct) into Spider song.
- We're done with that song.
We are basically stuck at home.
It's like Groundhog Day,
but at least GameStop was exciting.
- [Rod] No social life.
I was gaining weight.
- The kids became virtual and they're home every day.
- [Announcer] The coronavirus pandemic, as you know,
is dramatically changing our everyday lives.
- Right about now, for many, it means working from home.
That is the new normal.
- I was working at a tiny kitchen table as my work set up
with my girlfriend working six feet away from me
in this little living room space
where we're both doing our jobs.
- I had been living by myself for a month and a half.
I wasn't working.
I felt like I didn't have a purpose in life.
So I went to New Jersey for the summer
to be with my parents.
I surprised them.
I was drunk shopping
and I got delivered to the wrong location.
My dad thought I was the Amazon delivery driver at first.
- It should be delivered.
She got her luggage.
I just said my daughter's on the thing inside.
- I would wake up, I would do yoga,
and then I would start learning
how to trade in the stock market.
It was a lot of Googling.
Very basic.
- [Announcer] The weapon of choice for these new traders
are platforms like Robinhood.
- It feels like monopoly money sometimes.
It feels like it's not real money.
Five clicks and I buy a stock.
- The Robinhood revolution.
They used a terrific app
and commission free trading to attract 70 million investors.
♪ Hallelujah ♪
- Back in the day, you had a call your broker.
- (indistinct) Cola at eight and a quarter.
- Now, times have changed.
- Today, we're lucky to be joined by Vlad Tenev,
who's the co-CEO of Robinhood.
We're proud of the fact
that we've enabled so many younger investors
and first time investors to have access to the markets.
- Joining us now is Davey Day Trader himself.
- Sports are gone, so I've moved to day trading.
- Barstool Sports Founder, Dave Portnoy,
took to the Robinhood app and started a revolution.
- From like where my parents are from,
it's a very conservative people.
So investing, risking money isn't really a thing
that you're taught to do.
You're taught hard work
to get to where you want to be in life.
You know, I'm a college student,
so right now, I don't have money saved up.
So I decided, okay,
what's a good company to park my money for a year
that I know can at least double or triple?
I saw the name GameStop
and it automatically got my attention.
(screaming)
Was I getting ripped off from GameStop sometimes?
Yeah.
- Say you have a game worth $50,
well, we can take that off your hands right now
and give you $6 in store credit.
- [Rigo] But I love GameStop,
and that's why I bought the stock.
- [Female Speaker] GameStop, which sells video games
and consoles is not doing well.
- GameStop had certain things going
which made it appear
as it was doing worse than it really was doing.
- It's game over for hundreds of GameStop locations.
- Closing hundreds of stores.
- That's pretty sad.
- [Justin] It was publicized as this negative thing.
- At some point, you're gonna be like,
how are they still in business?
- And it was so funny
because we wanted GameStop to close stores.
- You don't need to have these stores all over one another.
They had over 6,000 stores.
- And there's just no need to have stores on every corner.
- [Male Speaker] May be game over for major retailer GameStop.
- That was a big disconnect because on its face,
if a company's shuttering stores,
that's a bad thing.
And it wasn't in GameStop's case.
- I was like, hey, how can I turn this into a graphic
so other people will understand what store closings mean.
So I went, I scraped all the locations for GameStop,
and you're seeing more GameStops out there
than fast food companies.
It doesn't make sense.
There doesn't need to be that many GameStops.
- You're seeing investors flee
because they're concerned
if you don't have people in your stores,
you don't have cash coming into the registers.
Your short-term outlook could get very ugly.
- There was not a good thing
to be seen online about GameStop.
- Smash JT, you're so full of shit.
- God!
- [Male Speaker] This guy is a madman. He is a crazed lunatic.
We've seen his videos
of him walking around doing his stupid GameStop videos.
- That's what I've been saying about GameStop
since I started covering them.
- [Male Speaker] Troll JT.
- I will always be a gamer.
- What a fuckin' weirdo.
(laughing)
- I remember thinking
if I didn't make a YouTube video on this,
I would probably sell out right now.
I don't mean to be turning this channel
into like a GameStop-centric channel.
Damn it, I believe in this company.
I believe in the turnaround.
And we don't know the extent of this COVID thing.
We don't know how bad it's gonna be.
I finally feel like GameStop is onto something here.
I need to find someone
to reinforce my feelings on this company.
So I started looking online,
but most weren't covering it in a positive light
except Roaring Kitty.
- Hey, what's up, everybody?
Welcome to Roaring Kitty.
This channel revolves around live streams
where I share my daily routine of tracking stocks,
performing investment research,
and a whole bunch of boring stuff like that.
- It's this dude with a headband,
has a beer in his hand,
and he's like GameStop, guys, GameStop.
Cheers.
- Oh, JT Smash, JT Smash.
Shout out to JT Smash.
JT, terrific, terrific video that you uploaded on GameStop.
- So I was just like, man, finally,
someone as crazy as me.
- We would all join Monday, Wednesday,
Friday night at 7:00 p.m. Eastern.
- His streams would be like six, seven, eight hours.
- I mean, there was like 10, 15, 20 people.
- Justin, cheers, cheers, cheers.
Great week for GameStop indeed.
- I was like, no way!
He's like, Justin.
He's like, hey, cheers.
- So this is DOMO Capital Management's website here.
You want to check this out.
And then you can see,
look at the returns of a long ass time too.
Dmitriy had some solid articles out there too.
There was a whole bunch of them.
- He was like, oh, cheers, Dmitriy!
- Cheers to all y'all.
- This is Dmitriy.
- Cheers, cheers!
Cheers!
Cheers, everybody.
Cheers, cheers, cheers.
Cheers, everybody.
We gotta have fun with it here.
- Roaring Kitty would shout me out.
- Jenn says, catching up on the comments
are gonna be rough today.
I know, I gotta keep going, I gotta keep going. My bad, my bad.
- And frankly, this obsession with cats was kind of funny.
(cat meowing)
- I had explained my mom and dad about,
hey, we're talking about GameStop.
My dad thought he was crazy.
- Let me just dip,
just one dip, just one quick dip.
- Roaring Kitty's stream almost was like a support group
and it was just like a place where we'd go and just like vent to each other.
- This is sick.
We've got the usual crew on a Friday,
on an exciting, fun Friday night.
- [Rod] People just hung out, you know?
- I made every single stream.
I planned my night around it.
It was crazy.
- 'Cause I want people to share.
We're doing research,
we're doing research collectively here.
- Well, you can't really go out on a Monday,
Wednesday, or Friday night anymore,
so I'm stuck inside.
Let me jump on the Roaring Kitty stream
and talk about GameStop.
What else is there to do?
- This is my thesis.
You're welcome to tear it to shreds.
Feel free.
I encourage you to, please.
- You know, it's like cotton candy.
We have this thesis, this cotton candy stick,
and then we would just all add to it.
- We're all drinking from the punchbowl
in the cult of this is GameStop.
We're all crazy.
We all know it,
but we're all accepting that because maybe we're not.
- Oh jeez.
Shift command T to open up a tab you just closed.
(rhythmic drumming music) (cats meowing)
- Roaring Kitty had this extensive "Star Wars-esque" intro
where he said, don't take me for financial advice.
And that fascinated me
because this guy was streaming to like 10 people.
- I'm taking a video of you.
- [Female Speaker] Joseph Fonicello!
- I grew up in a small town in Connecticut.
- [Female Speaker] Joseph.
- My parents owned a farm.
- Joe's parents are very, very traditional.
Think 1920's farmer.
- Still to this day,
if my parents have to read their emails,
I gotta help them out.
- Joe's dad is the type of guy who gets mad
if a package comes in with Joe's name on it.
Like, why are you ordering things on the internet?
- [Joe] When I was in middle-school, I bought Bitcoin. - Bitcoin.
- And that was kind of my first investment.
- [Announcer] Digital money called Bitcoin.
- The kid bought Bitcoin when he was 12 or 13 years old.
I mean, and he still has it.
- And then when I turned 18,
I decided to divert from crypto a bit
into the real stock market.
- So, we have this van.
- It's become our home.
We took the opportunity COVID granted us to travel.
Let me just put my mask on.
We figured, what are we gonna do,
stay locked in our homes doing Zoom calls?
No, we can do Zoom with a hotspot.
And it wasn't until Abbe and I lived on the road in the van
when I started to think of Reddit
more as a place for investment opportunities.
- [Male Speaker] Now, if you've never heard of reddit.com,
it was nicknamed the front page of the internet.
- There came this point in our trip
where he was just totally absorbed in something,
like, absolutely non-stop.
Well, he had just discovered the GameStop thesis
on Wall Street Bets.
♪ Diamond Hands ♪
(upbeat electronic music)
- I would go to Wall Street Bets
to look at funny memes and videos.
(upbeat electronic music)
- The community is largely guys.
(upbeat electronic music)
Everybody's very broey.
It feels like it's a frat house.
- [Male Speaker] Most stocks that are in an uptrend
go like this.
- The Wall Street bets community
calls themselves degenerates.
- Hello, my fellow degenerates.
- [Male Speaker] The price is wrong, bitch.
- [Male Speaker] Stonks.
- It's like a casino, Wall Street Bets.
Guys are saying, hey, you guys,
I think this stock can like double, triple.
Buy some call options on this.
- They're options, but really not worth talking about today.
The important point is that-- - You can make a lot of money and get rich quick.
- [Male Speaker] High risk, high reward.
- You're in for a wild ride.
Very volatile, big highs, big lows.
- When Wall Street Bets really became mainstream,
you saw a shift from the word autist to ape.
- [Male Speaker] If you think you might be autistic enough to hang out with us,
head on over to Wall Street Bets on Reddit.
- 'Cause they felt like they were like autistic kids
living in their basements of their parents' house, you know,
eating chicken tendies and making stupid decisions,
investing in stupid stocks.
- [Male Speaker] The infamous Wall Street Bets user
who posted a live screen recording
showing him lose $50,000 in just a few minutes.
- People just spewing memes, and gifs,
and I like to shitpost personally,
so it was a nice platform for me to just do that.
- [Jenn] The Wall Street Bets lingo is diamond hands.
You hold it, you don't let go.
- Diamond hands means that you never sell a stock,
even if it goes down.
- [Male Speaker] I live in a car
and I'm diamond hands to the moon.
- Paper hands means that you sell when a stock goes down.
You've got tendies.
That means profits.
(laughing)
YOLO means that you're gonna risk money
and there's a good chance it's not gonna come back.
- Wall Street Bets hated GameStop.
- [Male Speaker] I was banned from Wall Street Bets.
- [Farris] I got banned from posting on Wall Street Bets.
I haven't been blocked by anyone
other than Wall Street Bets.
- Farris tried to post on Wall Street Bets
and got laughed at,
wasn't allowed to post about GameStop because,
you know, it's GameStop.
It's going bankrupt, of course.
- They weren't allowing any posts on GameStop,
which is funny
because they were allowing people to roast GameStop.
- People were only following GameStop
because DeepFuckingValue, the Reddit user,
posted his position.
- He YOLO'd his life savings, it seemed like,
into calls on GameStop.
- [Male Speaker] YOLO, you only live once.
- Everyone on Wall Street Bets
thought DeepFuckingValue was crazy.
- Everyone made fun of him.
- People were saying, he's an idiot
and he's gonna lose all his money.
- My dad had been trying to get me
to go see a financial advisor for years,
and it's his financial advisor,
so he's like telling me to sell
because GameStop's business model sucks
and he doesn't like the company.
And I was like, no, no, no.
You're not gonna want to listen
to why I think that GameStop's a good investment,
but like I'm only here
because my dad told me I had to be here to meet you,
and so we're just gonna leave it at that,
but I'm not selling my GameStop shares.
- I definitely second guessed myself plenty,
but I think we were very, very thoughtful
in how we approached it.
- I think if you take the best of amateur investors,
that content could be way better than what you see
with Wall Street research analyst reports.
- No one person can do all of the research,
so everybody in my group had something to offer.
We weren't just alone wolf investing in the stock market,
like how normal Wall Street is.
We were all in it together.
- Yeah, GameStop definitely became an obsession.
As I invested in GameStop, I frequented the stores often.
- Why are we at GameStop?
- I would go and buy Chipotle
and I'd sit in the GameStop parking lot.
You guys ready to go to GameStop?
- Yeah. - Yeah.
- I was probably sitting the GameStop parking lot
at least once a week.
(sneezing) God bless you.
- I went to GameStop all the time when I was a kid.
And I understood despite all the good memories,
why it ended up being a hated company.
- [Male Speaker] It is miserable to shop at GameStop.
- It's a horrible customer experience.
So I thought to myself, if they redeem themselves,
there could be tremendous reward potential here.
- I was like, okay,
this is starting to get really interesting.
They were trying to make changes
so that they could build their company back up again.
- The video game business is booming
as Americans spend more time at home.
- Gaming interest has skyrocketed
as a result of the pandemic.
- The gaming industry is flourishing.
- More people are gaming now than pre-pandemic.
- Yeah, that's right, and it's largely due to boredom.
- And still, I felt like the stock price was being subdued.
I can't help but think
that there's some sort of higher power intervening,
saying, keep this price down low.
- There was a very actively involved campaign
on behalf of those who were short the stock
to hammer the price,
bots spamming negative messages and negative sentiment.
- If you start seeing that over, and over,
and over, and over again,
it makes you think there's someone
that has a vested interest in forgetting GameStop.
- [Male Speaker] Here's what makes the hedge fund managers
different from you.
They have a lot more power than you.
They control the game.
- [Male Speaker] Like Maplelane Capital.
- [Announcer] D1 now manages over $20 billion.
- [Female Speaker] Gabe Plotkin formed his own firm,
Melvin Capital Management.
- [Male Speaker] Gabe Plotkin,
who manages billions of dollars of assets,
he was the top trader for Steve Cohen's fund.
- [Female Speaker] What does Gabe know
that the rest of Wall Street doesn't?
- I think overall in society,
there is this thought that hedge funds
have some kind of special insight
or better knowledge and understanding.
I was not necessarily of that view,
but I wanted to know what they were thinking.
Why are they shorting GameStop?
(upbeat whimsical music)
- Great short sellers don't deal in gray areas.
They deal in black and white.
I never shorted a stock
that I wasn't certain was going to zero.
- Tom Barton has a reputation
and a history of selling stocks short.
- It's a lot of math,
a lot of adding and a lot of subtracting.
- It was a really good time to be a short seller, the '80s.
It was a really good time.
(people yelling)
We would short stocks to make a living
because it's a better place to put your money.
- [Male Speaker] Hedge funds gang up
and literally will short a stock out of business.
- Two and eights sold, two times at six.
- Well, GameStop I'd heard about because I'm a Dallas guy,
it's a Dallas company.
- [Announcer] A touchdown, Dallas!
- You gotta be a man to play in my league.
- When somebody calls me and tells me (indistinct) nothing
and the short position's outrageous,
two lights go on.
- At this point, I would say GameStop is over.
- There was no chance it was gonna go bankrupt.
Zero.
- GameStop is super,
it's so nice to be there.
- I wouldn't be shorting this in a million years.
- It was good seeing
that there was a professional short seller out there
that's saying that these short sellers are dumb.
- Frankly, I was short Tesla for a little bit.
- [Male Speaker] Tesla's wild ride
has left many of the analyst community in the dust.
- [Dmitriy] So I know what it's like to be on the other side of it.
- If you bet against Tesla, you shorted.
A lot of people have done that and lost their shirts.
- Tesla has listed quote limited edition short shorts
for sale on its website,
mocking short sellers.
- [Male Speaker] You guys remember what happened at Tesla, the short shorts?
- You learn your best lessons the hard way.
And those are the lessons you really absorb
when it hurts.
- People sometimes get carried away with our stock,
you know?
- I still believe that Tesla is structurally unprofitable.
The lesson was, you can be right in the underlying issue,
but be wrong in the ultimate outcome.
- I just can't believe this fricking stock.
It's insane.
- But the more local sort of lesson is don't short stocks.
- This is a nightmare for short sellers.
This morning, we got news that Ryan Cohen of chewy.com
has a 12.9% stake in the company now.
- This guy, Ryan Cohen, chewy.com founder,
he just bought a lot of shares of GameStop.
What is happening?
- When Ryan Cohen popped up in late August,
that was fate.
- I am joined now by the founder
and former CEO of Chewy, Ryan Cohen.
Ryan, thanks so much for being with us.
- Thank you for having me.
- Honestly, I didn't know who he was.
- I didn't know who he was at first.
- Well, I didn't know that much about him.
- The phenomenally successful online pet food retailer.
- I'm figuring out what's next
and maybe I'll start another business. Who knows?
- I think I had a weapon that nobody else had
because I worked for Chewy.
- I love shopping for my pets at chewy.com
because I know I'll be saving money.
- Once customers shop at Chewy,
they continue shopping at Chewy
and they tell all their friends and family
about this incredible experience.
- Chewy is really a perfection of taking something local
and making it successful in e-commerce.
- [Female Speaker] Consumers spend a lot of money
on their pets.
- The business model of GameStop is very similar to Chewy.
Gaming is just as a memorable type experience
as having a pet, in my opinion.
I was like, all right, this is Chewification at GameStop.
Ryan is getting ready to turn GameStop
into the Chewy of gaming.
Boom, we got something.
GameStop could be the next big stock.
- You know, anybody could sell physical things.
- Thanks for calling GameStop
where we buy and sell used games.
This is Steven, how may I help you?
- There's nothing unique about GameStop.
- Thank you for calling GameStop where we buy and sell used games.
- The unique thing has to be the way that the customer walks away from that interaction.
- At the end of the day,
we just happen to sell pet products.
I think we would've been successful,
frankly, in any category.
- Something big's going on a GameStop.
Their stock price absolutely exploded.
It's on fire quite literally.
So Ryan Cohen, Ryan Cohen, this is the guy.
He's kind of attractive.
This guy is going to make a change at GameStop.
- Now, if you buy the stock here,
you're betting that Ryan Cohen's plan
will be wildly successful,
which seems like a stretch
given that we don't even know what the plan is yet.
- Ryan Cohen and I connected
and we ended up having a one-on-one Zoom meeting.
He literally just peppered me with questions.
What do you see in GameStop?
What about this?
Isn't this a concern?
So you could just see that
he's just looking to confirm his thesis.
- At first, I thought he was acquiring GameStop
maybe because he thought it was undervalued,
but then he kept accumulating more and more
and it was getting more and more interesting.
- News flash to all these GameStop investors,
GameStop is not Chewy.
They do not serve products to adorable,
cute puppies and cats.
Wake up, GameStop investors. This is absurd.
- When Ryan Cohen became part of GameStop,
the stock was insanely over shorted.
- Right now, an astounding 144% of the GameStop shares
have been sold short.
- Honestly, I've never seen that.
And I picked up the phone
and called all my short-selling buddies.
I said, you ever seen this?
They go, no, we've never seen this.
We've never seen 100% of these so-called
outstanding shares short.
Never seen it.
It was spring loaded to go up.
And that's when I looked at it and I said,
oh, this is gonna be a real problem
for these guys that are short.
This is gonna be a major short squeeze.
- What's known as a short squeeze.
- Short squeeze is a term
that sounds really hard to understand,
but it's not that complicated.
It's basically when a share price of a certain stock
skyrockets very fast
and it causes the people who were betting
that that stock will go down in price tons of losses.
- I kept on at GMEshortsqueeze because I knew the story.
- And I'm like, that guy feels so strong about it,
he named himself GMEshortsqueeze.
- Hey, I gotta say,
you know I've been kind of like,
is that squeeze gonna happen?
Is this squeeze coming?
But today, I mean,
I think most people would agree
that felt a little bit squeezy today, right?
- [Dmitriy] I frankly thought that the probability
of the real short squeeze was very low.
- GameStop, I don't know.
We just gotta to see what happens,
but it would be nice if it goes up really quickly.
- Wait, if this is true, then this is true.
And if that's true,
then it's gonna set off this chain of events
where this firestorm of buying will just happen
and shoot this thing to the moon.
- That always had me motivated
and like excited for the future.
Like, oh man, something cool might happen here.
- The allure of a short squeeze
was kind of just a cherry on top.
It gave GameStop sex appeal.
- Joe sends out a tweet,
literally saying the squeeze is coming next week,
trust me, mark my word.
- Wall Street Bets picked it up
and you start seeing all this crazy short squeeze rhetoric.
- The last article I wrote, I concluded it as following,
almost anything is possible except bankruptcy.
Even bond holders currently ascribe zero chance
of GameStop going bankrupt by 2023.
The short seller thesis is dead.
GameStop is not Blockbuster.
Get your popcorn ready.
This story isn't over yet.
- [Male Speaker] Holy shit.
GameStop's website just crashed
'cause everybody's trying to order the PS5.
The stock is gonna skyrocket tomorrow.
- GameStop just did all of their pre-sales
for the PlayStation 5 and the new Xbox.
And Rod is like, send me your order numbers.
- I placed a bunch of orders on GameStop.com
and I was looking at my order numbers,
and I'm like,
this really looks like it's just going up sequentially.
- So if you place an order,
and then someone places an order right after you,
their order number's one higher.
And you could use that to analyze,
well, how many sales did GameStop get today?
- All of a sudden,
everyone just started providing Rod
with all these order numbers.
- They are all out of PlayStation 5's already.
It goes to show you the demand.
- It tells me the brand's not dead
and it tells me there's still a rabid consumer base
that wants their products.
- I personally bought a lot more GameStop products
just to see what the order number was.
- I went into GameStop today to pick up some more boxes.
- I never go to GameStop.
- Who shops there anymore?
- They're dead.
There's no one shopping there.
- I'm just like, that's complete bullshit
because people are Googling it.
- [Justin] Farris had discovered
the number one search on Google was GameStop.
(laughing)
- Ryan Cohen sent an insane letter to the company.
- The guy clearly has a vision now in this letter.
- It highlights what he wants to do with the company.
He was basically doing all the things
I feel like we've been talking about
in this Roaring Kitty chat.
- He actually might be thinking
about taking over the company himself.
- That's something, huh?
- The kids are gonna lose it
when they open these gifts from GameStop.
(upbeat electronic music)
- Breaking freaking news,
Microsoft has entered a multi-year strategic partnership
with GameStop.
What?
- The Microsoft deal came out
and that's something that Justin uncovered.
- Justin did some serious due diligence here
trying to pick apart what the hell they meant
in this press release,
kind of tearing it to shreds.
- I was able to confirm it was a revenue share agreement.
I put that out as a tweet.
- That means that GameStop
is gonna be getting a huge chunk of money.
- If they signed up for Game Pass through GameStop,
does that mean that you got a cut?
Yeah, that's what it means.
- It's basically pure profit to GameStop.
- This is a major multi-year deal.
- [Male Speaker] DOMO Capital Management President,
Justin Dopierala.
- Just look at this.
Justin, 300 likes, 61 quote tweets.
He's a celebrity.
- There's some times I have some reaction
when good news comes out, like, yeah!
- We got a famous person on the stream here tonight,
so props to Justin,
Justin getting the word out right.
- [Jenn] Everyone on Wall Street Bets
started going crazy for GameStop.
- On my desk right now
is perhaps the best thing I've seen in the last six months.
- And wanted to be a part of it.
- It's called GameStop.
- Things started blowing up on Reddit.
- Hey, everyone's talking about GameStop.
Should we buy?
- This stock could run to $50, $100, or even to the moon.
(monkey vocalizing)
- Now that people started seeing
the Chewification of gaming,
my graphics started popping up on Wall Street Bets
and going viral.
People would start mentioning rhetoric
and content in the same way that I would phrase it.
It was too much of a coincidence.
And it was my graphic in someone else's Reddit article.
- Have you heard of GameStop?
- [Male Speaker] GameStop surges 44%.
- [Male Speaker] Their stock did kind of go up quite a bit.
- GameStop ascended to meme stock status
after the brilliant, amazing, incredible Ryan Cohen,
the co-founder of Chewy,
bought a big chunk of stock
and joined the board of directors.
- Today, they announced Ryan Cohen
is going to be a board member.
- Hey, finally, guys, you finally woke up.
I've been posting about this for a year.
You guys blocked me.
- I was really struggling financially
because I wasn't selling like I needed to sell
to pay off debt, and I didn't.
it was more than just a share.
It was more than just money.
I also needed to get a job
and that was also stressing me out.
But then Christmas Eve in 2020,
I found out that I had breast cancer.
I wasn't even on health insurance at the time
because I was unemployed.
It wasn't an expense that I had planned for, obviously.
Like, no one plans to have breast cancer.
I ended up crying every single day,
not knowing how I'm going to afford chemotherapy,
like a lifesaving, a lifesaving treatment.
I was using GameStop to distract myself
from this really dark time.
All day, it was like,
I was going to doctor's appointments
and I was checking the GameStop stock chart
at my doctor's appointments.
Is this price going up?
Like, is it time to sell?
Should I wait, should I hold, should I buy more,
or like, just see what's gonna happen?
And then like also,
like making all these life changing decisions.
It was like an emotion I couldn't even process.
I'm getting a lot of messages today
about GameStop share price going to $20.
I've been in this company since the beginning.
I don't know what's gonna happen next,
but I'm not selling.
- Meanwhile, the stock,
it was just kind of hovering around like 24, $22.
♪ DeepFuckingValue ♪
♪ Goddamn Deep Motherfucking Value ♪
- On Christmas,
DeepFuckingValue shared his portfolio like he always does,
but stamped into it was a picture of Roaring Kitty.
- Surprise.
- It was him saying that he was DeepFuckingValue
without him explicitly saying that he was DeepFuckingValue.
- This was a true YOLO for me.
- Whoa, whoa, whoa.
This is insane.
This is nutty.
- When I was building this position last year,
we had nowhere close to a million dollars.
- All of this adoration I had for Roaring Kitty,
when I found out that he was DeepFuckingValue,
that just intensified everything.
You know, we started looking up to him
like this Messiah or something.
(engine roaring)
♪ DeepFuckingValue ♪
♪ Is coming to make some tendies ♪
♪ Not selling GME 'til we finish this short squeeze ♪
♪ Woohoo! ♪
♪ DeepFuckingValue ♪
♪ Is holding on to them calls ♪
♪ He's got diamond hands and he's got big brass balls ♪
(upbeat rock music)
- [Male Speaker] His channel just blew up.
- [Jenn] There were thousands of people in the stream.
I mean, it was crazy.
(upbeat rock music)
We couldn't have an intellectual conversation
because it was just getting blown up
with like rocket emojis.
- It just king of destroyed the community
that had been built up.
- I just messaged on there one day and was like,
hey, like, anyone from the previous people here?
And then Jenn reached out to me like, hey, Rigo.
- We created our own like side chat,
so I started to know the people behind the username.
♪ Don't understand how the last card is played ♪
♪ But somehow, a vital connection is made ♪
- Now, if you check out Reddit,
there's a fricking cult on there.
It's hilarious.
- [Dmitriy] There was a lot of enthusiasm.
- I could get used to that.
- They were believing
that the short squeeze was almost inevitable.
- Do you want to see what a short squeeze looks like?
(explosion blasting) ♪ A connection is made ♪
- When Melvin Capital got found out
that they were shorting this to the point that they did,
Reddit saw that happening,
and they said, whoa, whoa, whoa, we can stop this.
- My friends were starting to be like,
oh, well, maybe she had a point.
And this is where my dad was like,
oh, maybe you're not crazy.
And my mom was like,
should we invest in GameStop?
No longer was I this crazy person.
- Yo, a bunch of people online just realized
if they buy a bunch of stock that hedge funds are shorting,
they can actually force the hedge fund's position
and take a bunch of their money.
Isn't that cool?
- Oh, we're bad people.
I hear that all the time.
- The worst of the worst, the worst of the worst.
- First of all, I'm not a short seller.
I'm an investor.
I'm an investor whose specialty happens to be short-selling.
- Andrew Left, you are shorting Tesla, I understand.
- I have a small short position, yes, I do.
So when people dislike short sellers,
it's just misinformed.
The short sellers come in
and give you another side of the story.
Short sellers actually help regulate the market.
(intense orchestral music)
When the stock in January hit 40,
it was at all time highs.
Next, let's move on to their business.
- Yes, let's move on to their business.
- Their business trajectory was at all time lows.
Traditionally, that would be a good time to short a stock.
- Andrew Left (indistinct)
I was gonna have these five reasons
of why GameStop was a horrible investment.
I thought, oh, maybe he's discovered something.
- Justin,
I mean, when he spoke, we listened, you know?
- Knowing Justin's reputation, I was getting scared.
I was like, oh, you know,
if this guy is thinking about selling,
why am I not thinking about selling?
- I was getting really scared.
- It was constant monitoring.
And you're like, oh man, this could tank any day.
- I play the ball, not the man.
I looked at the business itself
and it wasn't making the progress they would have desired.
- There we go,
Andrew Left live on the Power Hour.
- Andrew is brilliant.
The difference between Andrew
and a lot of other short sellers
is that he generally gets on companies
that are really disasters.
- Please, sue me.
Let's go.
I will take your whole company from top-down.
- Most of my clients are not very wealthy.
They're just everyday people.
It wasn't worth the risk.
- Justin Dopierala gets on our group chat being like,
hey, guys, I just want to let you know
that I sold all of DOMO's shares in GameStop
a little bit above 40.
What?
Is this something that we should be doing?
Like, why are you selling?
- He's like,
maybe you should think about getting out of GameStop.
- I just didn't want to see anyone get burned.
- I thought about it multiple times to sell.
- [Male Speaker] I completely understand
where DOMO's coming from with this.
- I didn't intend to sell all the shares,
but as I started selling more and more,
there just was almost like a weight off my shoulders
and it just became evident to me
that this was the right thing to do.
- It's hard to buy things that everyone hates
and it's hard to sell things that everyone loves,
but you should buy them when people hate them
and you should sell when people love them.
- Okay, if you bought at four,
now, you're up almost 1,000%.
Amazing. You should sell, right?
No, not if it's worth a lot more than that.
You should be buying more actually.
Look, we need to put something together
as a counter to what Andrew puts out with Citron.
We compiled all of that industry information,
he made it all open source that people could access.
- We wanted the media to have a place they could turn to
and be like, well, GMEdd says differently.
I had seen Rod's postings for months
and I saw he was creating GMEdd.
- [Abbe] Rod sort of took Joe under his wing.
- Rod and I get along like Jesse Pinkman and Walter White.
He understands the financials
and I understand the social side of it.
- Rod is the cook, Joe is the peddler.
- $40,000.
- Hey, you said, raise the prices.
- It's really a great relationship they have.
(cheering)
- Yes!
- And they have a van.
- Nobody knows what the price should be precisely,
but we could at least paint a picture.
And I thought we painted a damn good one.
- And 69 was, you know.
- So, let's talk stocks, people.
I'm gonna put out a presentation today about my thesis,
five reasons why GameStop is going back to $20
and it's going there pretty fast.
- When Andrew makes a comment about something,
people take it pretty serious
because he's a very serious guy who does very serious work.
- Hey, this is Andrew Left at Citron Research
giving you five reasons why GameStop is going to 20.
- [Farris] His web stream died.
- And it kept doing the wheel of death.
- You have this big, bad boogeyman
that's gonna put out a research report this week.
Then he postpones it to the next week.
So obviously, you have all these people
that are scared of what he's gonna say.
And people are gonna sell beforehand.
- One, this is a failing mall-based retailer.
- Less than 10% Of the U.S. stores
are in traditional malls.
- Number two, numbers don't lie.
People lie.
- He's not saying anything that we don't know.
- Number three, valuations matter.
There were down 17% year over year.
I was just bringing out hard data,
which traditionally, stocks trade on.
- He didn't dive deep into GameStop's fundamentals.
- Number four,
there's no short squeeze that is happening as we speak.
- Everything that he said was complete bullshit.
- And last thing
is the company could be Blockbuster video
that never adapted to technology.
- It's Blockbuster 2.0.
I'm like, really, dude?
- I know who's long GameStop right now,
the people who are ordering pizzas to my house
or signing me up for Tinder.
In retrospect, I probably should not have done a video,
but maybe I thought at the time it is a bit of hubris.
Everyone started calling me a boomer, a loser, old man.
And I'm like, then I realized something's bigger here.
I didn't realize it was gonna become
some form of default religion or something.
- The stock was bubbling by that time,
it's just ready to explode.
(intense orchestral music)
- Whether you are in the stock market or not,
you have probably heard in the last 24 hours about GameStop.
(upbeat electronic music)
- GameStop is killing it!
- The game retailer GameStop
has set to continue their head-spinning ascent today.
- Whoa! - Whoa!
- (indistinct) $15,000!
- [Female Speaker] This involves a firm
called Melvin Capital.
- Melvin Capital. - Melvin Capital.
- The ploy to wipe out Gabe Plotkin's firm
surfaced on the subreddit forum known as Wall Street Bets.
- A bunch of crazy white boys on Reddit
have driven the price up to $123.
(upbeat electronic music)
- Yeah, I was maybe a little concerned
for the people that were still in it.
- Are you guys watching GameStop?
It just hit 200 a couple of minutes ago.
It's crazy!
- It was just GameStop day and night.
And while I'm preparing myself for chemo,
it was just too much going on.
- Huge blow,
Melvin suffering losses upwards of 30% in a year.
- I'm Tyrone and I'm here to fuck Melvin's Capital's wife, GameStop style.
- [Male Speaker] Cohen and Griffin of hedge fund fame
have come in and bailed out a hedge fund.
- [Male Speaker] Citadel's all over this thing.
- Citadel gave Melvin a $2.75 billion cash infusion.
(vehicle crashing)
- Mr. Griffin, let me tell you something,
there's only one Kenny G and it ain't you.
- [Male Speaker] Elon Musk jumping into the action,
tweeting gamestonk.
(sobbing)
- Fuck Wall Street.
- They go after the ones that are heavily shorted
in order to come up with the short squeeze.
- [Female Speaker] And it raised the price,
forcing these major hedge funds to lose a ton of dough.
(man yelling)
- [Female Speaker] Those betting against GameStop
lost $14.3 billion today alone.
- I was on a golf course.
I wasn't checking my emails or my messages.
And then I went home that day
and I'm like, oh my God.
- People lost their minds.
The interesting thing is there were other hedge funds
who were investing in GameStop.
- I think the hedge funds saw blood in the water.
- If you don't think a hedge fund would buy this stock at 70
thinking it was going to 350,
you're wrong.
Everyone would do it.
- There will be carnage, I can guarantee you.
- It was a little bit too crazy.
I started taking profits.
- I just thought, okay, I'm out.
- You want to take profits when you can.
- Keep moving, keep ahead!
- My wife,
I was like, babe, I don't know what to do.
She's like, don't look at me.
I don't know anything about it.
I was like, should I sell it?
She was like, I don't know.
(people cheering)
- I was just like, loving the chaos.
- My parents found out about GameStop
when the New York Times put out its cover story
with me in it.
- Joe's face is right there with Ryan Cohen,
Roaring Kitty, and Rod Alzmann.
- What was it about it that made you believe
that there was a growth story there
that no one else saw?
- It sure felt like I was wrong for a long time.
- This picture is just hilarious to me
because it was just something
I never even could have dreamed of.
- [Male Speaker] The Roaring Kitty on YouTube,
DFV on Reddit.
And of course, now we all know his name is Keith Gill.
- What?
- [Male Speaker] Melvin Capital is now out of the stock.
They've taken a rather huge loss.
- It was the perfect storm to destroy a hedge fund.
- [Male Speaker] This is the Citadel headquarter in Chicago,
the center of this GameStop drama.
They're the biggest market maker
and hedge fund in the world.
- So when Citadel got involved,
I called my brother who worked in the financial world.
He's like, dude, Citadel's getting involved?
Whoa, Citadel like runs the world, man.
That doesn't bode well for the future of GameStop.
- GameStop shares tanking today.
- GameStop shares have been tumbling
as a growing number of firms move to halt trading.
- The action is so wild that TD Ameritrade
and Robinhood have restricted trading of these stocks.
- [Female Speaker] Forcing GameStop's shares to drop
like a ton of bricks.
- The stocks just plummeted.
- Now, if you can only sell stocks,
those stocks only go down.
- They said, well, the crazies can't buy it anymore.
Well, the only reason it's up is because of the crazies.
- I am beyond frustrated.
My portfolio is getting absolutely obliterated today.
- [Female Speaker] A class action complaint was just filed
in the Southern District of New York against Robinhood.
- Why?
Why?
Explain why you had to do it
if it wasn't to protect the big hedge funds.
- They sell information they gather from their customers
to the hedge funds who use it for their advantage,
and most customers don't even know.
- Robinhood trades are not free.
When you pay for order flow,
you're probably charging your customers more
and pretending to be free.
- Citadel is actually Robinhood's biggest customer.
So when Citadel tells Robinhood to stop trades on GameStop,
Robinhood's gonna listen.
- And that looks like a stinky conflict
that you didn't come out straight on from the start.
- [Male Speaker] This is a (beeping) crime
what Robinhood app is doing.
Do not sell, hold the line.
(beeping)
- [Female Speaker] Somewhat allegedly threw dog feces
at the front door.
- [Male Speaker] One investor chartered a plane
to fly a banner over the company's headquarters saying,
suck my nuts, Robinhood.
- I don't think there's anything nefarious
behind the scenes as you hear people say,
oh, 'cause Ken Griffin owns a piece of Robinhood.
No, I don't believe any of that.
- There's a lot to unpack
with what happened with Robinhood
because that has led to a lot of conspiracy theories.
- It's just a little bit too convenient
that you got Melvin Capital losing billions of dollars,
Citadel backing them.
And then two days later,
Robinhood stopping people from buying it.
If that's what's happening,
they all are in bed with each other, which is scary.
- But there will never be any proof, right?
'Cause no one's gonna own up to a hedge fund
colluding with another company.
- I don't think that's what happened.
I think what happened is they just got stretched.
- Tenev effectively argued
that if he didn't take any action,
the company would have likely faced a liquidity issue.
- I don't believe it was nefarious,
but the fact that it was so poorly communicated
to the public really fed into this narrative
that this was all some sort of big collusion
by these hedge funds that were losing money.
And when they were losing the game,
they were able to just shut the game off.
- [Male Speaker] And it's gone!
- And it has kind of fostered this whole ape movement.
- What do we make of this,
what do we make of the apes?
- [Rod] The apes have Robinhood accounts
and their form of sticking it to the man
is buying more of the stocks
that they were not allowed to buy.
- It's hard to tell how high it would have gone
if they didn't implement these restrictions.
Who knows if there is a practical limit?
- Robinhood's decision and what they did
absolutely transferred wealth from the small retail investor
into the hands of the big hedge funds
that were short GameStop.
- When you have AOC and Donald Trump Jr.
both on the same side of an issue,
you know something's dramatically wrong.
- It is the warning bell that we have a stock market
that is subject to manipulation.
- There are people buying digital assets that have no value
just to make a joke about it on Twitter.
- The 99% to 1% meme.
- What's a meme?
- I'm so sorry.
- Meme stocks are generating so much buzz
that institutional investors
and financial institutions are now generating watch lists.
AMC, Blackberry has moved for some reason, and Dogecoin.
- Which is a cryptocurrency
that was originally started off as a joke
and it is up over 800%.
The cryptocurrency equivalent of GameStop.
- The trading frenzy around GameStop
is the focus on Capitol Hill today.
- This hearing is entitled GameStopped:
Who Wins and Loses when Short Sellers,
Social Media, and Retail Investors Collide.
I want to know how each of the witnesses here today
contributed to the historic trading events.
Mr. Plotkin.
Mr. Plotkin?
- I was muted. I apologize, I do.
- [Maxine] Thank you.
- There are laws governing shorting stock,
and of course, we always follow them.
We have been short GameStop
since Melvin's inception six years earlier
because we believed
and still believe that its business model
is being overtaken by digital downloads
through the internet.
In addition.
- In addition, I am a robot.
- Mr. Vlad Tenev.
- Thank you for the invitation to speak about Robinhood
and the millions of people we serve.
The financial system should be built to work for everyone,
not just a select few,
but only half of U.S. households participate in.
- [Maxine] Mr. Tenev,
I would like you to use your limited time
to talk directly to what happened January 28.
- Certainly.
- A lot of attention on Vlad Tenev.
He seems to be getting most of the airtime here
and most of the questions are being fielded to him.
- Mr. Tenev,
isn't it true that there was a liquidity problem?
Could you just answer yes or no?
- We always felt comfortable with our liquidity.
- [Maxine] Please answer yes or no.
- We always felt comfortable--
- I don't have time.
I just need a yes or no answer.
- I think that, thank you for the question.
It's an important question.
- Yes or no!
Yes or no!
- Mr. Griffin, if I could just ask you the first question,
how many people are in the room with you?
If you can just count
how many people are in the room with you.
- There are five people, including myself,
in this room, sir.
- Awesome.
- Mr. Gill, my first question for you
is how many people are in the room with you right now?
- Zero, congressmen.
- So proud of Roaring Kitty.
- Roaring Kitty was great.
- Roaring Kitty was the most wholesome face
GameStop could have asked for.
- Mr. Gill, you are now recognized for five minutes--
- There we go!
- To present your oral testimony.
- The guy we all came here for.
- A few things I am not.
I am not a cat, I am not an institutional investor.
- I love that he started by saying, I am not a cat.
- My favorite line of the day was from Roaring Kitty.
And he said, I am not a cat.
- There was a reference to a Zoom call
where somebody in court was looking like a cat
with a filter.
- I'm here live.
I'm not a cat.
- As for me, I liked the stock.
- He liked the stock.
- I would be the first to acknowledge
that investing in stocks and options is incredibly risky.
And it's so important for people
to do their own thorough research before investing.
- He was more professional than these billionaires.
- Yes, yes or no?
Yes or no, Lizzie, are you gonna do this?
- There's an actually more complicated answer--
- Yes or no?!
- It's a more complicated answer than that.
- Yes or no, yes or no!
- Are you a cat, Joe? Are you a cat?
- So yes or no, are you buying the stock?
- For me personally, yes.
- He is literally moving the needle right now
like straight up.
It's crazy.
- Roaring Kitty, Keith Gill,
made it publicly known
that he doubled down his position that day.
- [Male Speaker] The congresspeople all thought
this was over.
I knew it wasn't over.
That was just the first inning.
- The battle between GameStop investors
and the short sellers is raging on.
And this week, the short sellers are losing again.
- We can't have anyone freak out out there, okay?!
We've gotta keep our composure!
We've gone too far!
There's too much to lose!
♪ We want the stock ♪
♪ Yes, we want the stock ♪
♪ We want GameStop ♪
- Actually, we've got it right here,
the original OGs, right?
Look at us.
Roaring Kitty had made this poster
using "Avengers: Endgame."
He photoshopped all the OG's photos into the characters.
And so it turns out that it ended up being his endgame.
- Keith Gill, otherwise known as Roaring Kitty
and another name online,
he did increase his stake in the company
by out to 50,000 shares.
He's now up to 200,000 shares of GameStop,
and that is valued at 33 million dollars now.
- DeepFuckingValue makes his final post.
- He likes the stock.
- Cheers, everyone.
- Ryan Cohen tweeted out fist bump after his final post.
- I have not heard from Roaring kitty since the squeeze
and I don't know anyone who has.
- He does post cat pictures on Twitter.
- I'd love to talk about other prospective investments,
and see what he's thinking about markets,
and just shoot the shit with my friend again.
(upbeat electronic music)
(rocket exploding)
- Wall Street Bets never stopped talking about GameStop.
After the squeeze, people are like,
oh, there's gonna be another squeeze.
I want to see the price keep going up.
- Is that possible? Sure, it's possible.
Bad bet.
Could happen.
Not a great bet.
I thumb that one down.
- Now, some believe that all the juice
has not been squeezed,
but they use the term squoze.
Has the squeeze been squozed?
- My point when I say squeeze has been squozed is,
let's look at the data.
- Is the squeeze squozed?
- The squeeze has squozed.
- Is the squeezed squozed?
- It's turned into a gigantic cult almost online.
- Had the squeeze been squozed and the answer is no.
- The current data show massively reduced short interest.
What's funny is when I voice an opinion,
I am called out as a quote hedgie shill.
The big issue is the people
that are putting massive sums of their wealth,
money they've earned,
in the hopes of just making it rich,
and that's not investing.
- There are many reasons
why the squeeze has not been squozed yet.
- The game of squeeze hasn't happened.
It could be valued at $7 trillion. - Whew.
- What's unique about GameStop for me personally
is it evolved from a deep value and loved physical retailer
to a potential e-commerce growth story.
- To see GameStop run up to such incredible levels,
it makes you start to wonder what comes next.
- Let's put it this way.
If GameStop is successful at making a turnaround,
and the stock ends up having a valuation of $10 billion,
$7 billion,
let's call it double where it was,
that puts the stock significantly lower
than where it is today.
And that's with the successful turnaround.
- We'll know within the next year
if GameStop can be the next Chewy,
and I think it will be.
- Ryan Chewy.
- You've got it.
Yes.
You've gotta bet on him, right?
And you gotta bet on the Chewy.com model.
- People are basing daily trades
off of whether Ryan Cohen tweets or not.
- And what's funny about it is if you're a short seller,
you don't know what the hell like,
what does a poop emoji mean?
- Oh, so it's like a, what,
like some form of a Rosetta stone.
He's gonna put this out and that out,
and then it's gonna be the great plan, right?
It's Professor Plum with the wrench in the conservatory.
Oh, that's great!
The company is going to 500.
Whatever.
- It's a McDonald's ice cream cone.
- [Male Speaker] Just like that,
GameStop after hours absolutely fucking crushes it.
- Ryan Cohen voted in as chairman.
That's a big step for the company.
- They've been making a lot of hires
of technology oriented bets
ever since the agreement
between Ryan and the company was reached.
- His vision is to fire everybody
and bring in buddies from various websites.
- He's bringing in an all star cast of players
that don't need jobs.
These people are doing it for passion.
They don't need the money.
They do it because they want to win.
- This team is a dream team!
- And you just have to wonder,
what is he pitching these people
where they're leaving these high paying jobs
at some of the biggest firms in the world?
- They hired a few Amazon executives
and everyone thinks that's great,
to which I say,
if you want to find a company
that has some Amazon executives,
buy Amazon.
They have all Amazon executives.
- I am impressed, Paul, with the GameStop team.
I really am.
They're good.
- You always follow the man with a plan.
- We're going to bring back in GMEdd.com
co-proprietor Rod Alzmann
who's been a long time GameStop investor.
- From Rod's perspective, it's vindicated.
He's been screaming into the abyss for how long?
- A GameStop bull since 2017,
one of the originals.
- How's life in the fast lane these days?
- Life's been pretty crazy.
I'm not gonna lie.
- Happy birthday, by the way, if that balloon is for your birthday, Rod.
- Belatedly one day, thank you.
- Finally, we get to the point
where the actual reputable professional
covering the stock is agreeing with him.
- [Male Speaker] Jefferies analyst, Stephanie Wissink,
ups her price target for GameStop's stock to $175
late on Wednesday morning.
- It's pretty clear there's a very euphoric,
excited investor base.
- What's happening with GameStop
isn't just about this company
and it's not just about the stock market.
It's a much bigger reaction
to what is happening in our society as a whole.
Think populism comes to Wall Street.
- Occupy Wall Street!
- I was at Occupy Wall Street.
- And today, we are at the Reoccupy Wall Street event.
- So when this was happening again,
I was like, oh my God,
I cannot believe this is going on.
- This is class warfare.
I'm going to call this Occupy Wall Street 2.0.
- This is everything we had hoped for actually happening,
which is rare.
- Everyone who's participated in this in one way or another
isn't just gonna forget.
- That shit was historic.
(laughing)
(rocket exploding) - Five!
- Us, the StockTwits is seeking alpha OGs.
We were the original diamond hands.
We just diamond handed through all the chaos.
- AMC, GME, CBD.
- STD, ODB, Blackberry, raspberry, pump it, pump it!
- Everybody that came later
and they're diamond handing now,
they're just copycats, man.
They just picked up on our movement.
- GameStop is one of several stocks
at the center of this pretty extraordinary
David and Goliath story.
- The David versus Goliath brawl on Wall Street.
- [Female Speaker] It's like a David versus Goliath story.
- And David won.
- They played the game better than I played the game.
That's it.
This one particular stock.
♪ Pray help from above because ♪
- Individual day traders are cashing in tonight
after taking on big investment companies.
- One Reddit user even posting
that he paid off his student loan debt
thanks for the money he made off of GameStop.
- Robinhood is planning to list its shares next week.
In its IPO, the company is asking for market cap
as high as $35 billion.
- I mean, it's a very special moment for me
and for my co-founder.
- A lot of kids are investing now.
I think kids are gonna dress up as astronauts now
for Halloween because they want to go to the moon.
(rocket exploding)
- I do think this is a seminal moment.
I don't think we go back.
- It felt like almost the first time
that anybody was holding these folks accountable.
- Do you believe there could ever really be a free and fair market?
It's a good question.
- Rival movies about the GameStop stock market events
are being rushed into production.
Ooh, the minute we find out
which one Hollywood thinks is the most likely to succeed,
let's all buy tickets to the other one.
- You don't have to be a financial expert
to be a good investor, to be a good trader.
Anybody can analyze a company.
Nowadays, you can just go onto the internet
and start reading.
- I think if I see another GME,
I'll buy more and hold it longer.
That's everybody's dream mistake.
Oh, can I find the next one?
You know, probably not.
♪ More, more, more ♪
♪ With the rebel yell, more, more, more ♪
- [Male Speaker] We were all just sharing stories
about how this changed our lives.
- There's this one nurse who ended up calling me
and I'm like, hey, have you logged into your account at all?
She said, no, I'm terrified, I don't want to look.
I haven't looked at any of your emails.
So she logged in, she looked at her account,
and now, she's a millionaire.
That's why I do what I do.
- This is not just a one-time thing.
This isn't a snow leopard.
This is something where we're seeing more
and more of this happening.
- I think if you take the best amateur
and you toss them up on somewhere on Wall Street,
you won't tell the difference.
- What I underestimated was the size of the retail investor.
As of today,
Citron Research will no longer be publishing
short selling reports.
I mean, everywhere I went, people were like, hey, you're the GameStop guy.
I'm like, oh God.
All these years of work to be a GameStop guy.
We've actually become the establishment.
- I created an LLC called Kruza Capital
that I'm trading in full time,
but I'm still gonna work in the music business.
I mean, everything is pretty much on hold
until I'm done with chemotherapy.
- I'm a college student, I need money, I need to move out.
You know, I have to move out of the house.
Hey, you guys.
This is my new apartment.
GameStop just accelerated all that stuff for me.
I mean, a couple years ago,
I was a broke college student.
I don't think it's easy for the parents.
They act like it's okay, but I don't know,
I think they're crying inside.
- We're trying to think of a business we could start.
We're thinking we could build more vans and rent them out.
- I've always been driven to win.
I want to make money, I want to be self-sufficient.
I don't want to work for anybody else.
I want to be financially independent.
♪ She cried more, more, more ♪
- All of us who participated in this GameStop saga
learned quite a bit from that experience.
GameStop is something that I considered initially
a boring deep volume investment become this phenomenon.
- Truthfully, the first stock I ever bought in real life
was GameStop in like the mid 2000's.
- How often do you make big trades like this
or get so passionate about a trade?
Have you ever like created a website
and done this before in other?
- No.
- This will be a business school case study
at some point down the road.
- You're witnessing the French Revolution of finance.
- My father, I think he would be pretty proud, man.
I hope so.
(upbeat rock music)
I would love to have that conversation with him someday.
Who knows?
Hereafter.
(whimsical orchestral music)
(people cheering)
(whimsical orchestral music)