The Trolls of Wall Street by Nathaniel Popper

Author:Nathaniel Popper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

The GameStop Gang

“Who the HELL can talk about a single stock for 5 hours straight?!”

The day after Thanksgiving, on that American bacchanal of consumerism known as Black Friday, a post appeared on WallStreetBets with a short video filmed in the parking lot of a nondescript strip mall. A middle-aged guy came out of a GameStop store carrying a big white box containing a PlayStation 5, the newly released video game console from Sony. As he walked across the parking lot, the person holding the camera ran at the customer and pushed him to the ground, knocking the box out of his arms. An accomplice of the cameraman, a young blond man in sweatpants and a red headband, swooped in from behind and, laughing, snatched up the PlayStation box and ran away at full speed, repeatedly spitting out the word PlayStation with deranged joy as he raced off.

The cackling of the thief made it a particularly sordid scene to watch. But in the inimitable style of WallStreetBets, the video, which had first appeared on Twitter, was pulled into a post and described amorally as a trading signal, and a very bullish one, for the store that sold the PlayStation 5—GameStop, or GME, as the company was known in the stock market. The title and only words in the Reddit post put the thesis simply: “PS5 robbery outside of Gamestop, BULLISH long GME.”

GameStop was in some ways an odd stock for the subreddit, which had tended to go for futuristic technology companies like Tesla and Virgin Galactic. GameStop was more like a remnant of the past, and it was getting eaten alive by tech companies such as Amazon. Since the era of the original Nintendos and Segas, GameStop had fallen on hard times. The video-game industry was booming, but much of the growth was coming from digital downloads and iPhone games, which didn’t require going to a store. The surviving GameStops were somewhat notorious for their stained carpets and musty smell. The video of the robbery captured the seedy feel of the outlets, which were often a few doors down from liquor stores and check-cashing depots. As digital game downloads became more popular, many people assumed GameStop would go the way of Blockbuster, which had filed for bankruptcy after its physical videotapes lost out to the digital offerings on Netflix.

But on Black Friday, GameStop seemed to be getting an unlikely bump due to those new video-game consoles from Sony that had just been released and that were selling like hotcakes. Sony had decided to include a slot for a game disk in the new PlayStations, which suggested that GameStop’s physical stores might not be dead yet. Everyone on WallStreetBets seemed to be aware of all these dynamics, thanks to the video-game-loving tendencies of the guys who hung out on the subreddit. Now they aimed their memes and their Robinhood accounts squarely at GameStop.

“Get in asap, we’re going to Pluto,” one longtime member wrote under the title “GME Gang Gang Gang Gang.” The post showed a picture of a portfolio with $225,000 of call options on GameStop.

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