Member Reviews

This is a short look at day trading surrounding the GameStop and Robinhood fiasco. It does a good job of explaining the facts and motivations. It made me despair a little for the generation heading into adulthood now.

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The author Sheelah Kolhatkar presents the "Meme Stock" moment of 2020. Endgame perfectly gathers all the information of the event/moment and presents it in a to-the-point way that makes everything that happened easy to understand. Sheelah's experience as a former hedge-fund analyst and staff writer for the New Yorker shine through in the quality of coverage and the way the information is laid out in an easy to follow way. I remember watching all of the GameStop "Meme Stock" stuff happen on Reddit and once things were said and done the only angle I didn't understand was the way the investing app Robinhood played a part in the fallout. Sheelah covers not only the creation of Robinhood, but also it's structure and ultimately its role in the "Meme Stock" moment.

If you enjoy historical events that involve finance, the economy, or wall street, you'll definitely enjoy this quick read.

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Maybe you remember the headlines about GameStop in 2021—small-time investors going big on a struggling company in an effort to screw over big companies who were banking on GameStop going under (and, of course, in an effort to make some money of their own). Maybe you were one of those small-time investors.

In "Endgame", Kolhatkar tracks the rise and fall of GameStop's stocks over those weeks, told partially from the lens of some small-time investors hoping to make it big. Less book than long-form essay, it is, to be perfectly honest, a stressful read—let's just say that I'm not cut out for the world of investing. It's probably helpful to go in with a bit of information about investing, and the GameStop chaos of 2021, but Kolhatkar does her best to break it down into terms that are accessible to lay readers.

Risk and profit and loss—that's what I think of with investing; but here there's also the 99 percent and Reddit and, you know, intentional chaos. Fascinating and weird.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing this long-form article through NetGalley.

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The 2008 financial crisis left investment banks and other professional investors with the upper hand, thanks to bailouts and stock trading advantages. However, it also spawned a new generation of small-scale retail investors determined to topple the giants by leveraging social media platforms to connect, exchange ideas, endorse stocks, and reap the benefits—Robin Hood-style. But could the meme-driven short squeeze truly triumph in a rigged arena? This concise, definitive account of a bold Wall Street coup reveals a battle for survival against a corrupt system—conceived in Vegas, supported by hedge funds, and crafted by Silicon Valley—which cost ordinary people more than they ever wagered.

Clocking in at under 50 pages, this brief read packs a punch. One could undoubtedly pen an entire book on this subject. Still, Kolhatkar masterfully distills complex concepts into an accessible narrative for readers with little to no knowledge of the stock market. Although I would have appreciated a deeper exploration of the topic, this concise overview efficiently lays out the facts, making for an enlightening and engaging read. Thanks to NetGalley and Amazon Original Stories for the e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

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5★
“Becoming familiar with the details of a company’s financial performance taught him to see through the hype of the financial press and view the swings in the market according to shadow activity you could perceive only if reading between the lines.”

He is Keith Gill, the man who introduces us to the wonders of stock market manipulation. He wanted to make serious money, and knew a salaried job wasn’t going to do the trick.

“…the path to becoming rich was to make smart but aggressive investments in the stock market, the way professionals did. Given the small amount of capital he had to play with, it would require taking risks, putting almost everything he had into an idea he was confident in.”

He came into the job market in 2009, just after the huge 2008 global financial collapse, which was unfortunate timing. So he figured he’d put his accounting skills to work on his own behalf. There were more and easier ways for individuals to invest online without needing a big broker, which gave small investors a chance to dip a toe in and test the water.

He watched what the big investors were doing and noticed some particular activity which interested him. GME (GameStop), was a video-game retailer that had made a lot of bad decisions, and one big investor had shown an interest. Gill was a game-player himself and it piqued his interest.

The author fills in Gill’s family background and family situation, and then moves on to 2021 and Jeffrey McShane. He is another interested investor, a man who has trained all his life to become an astronaut – the science, the engineering research, the dedication.

They and many others are having conversations on Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, you-name-it. There are so many virtual spaces now to share information, that they are a magnet for people who love this sort of thing.

“Doctored photos, video clips, digital collages, and what you might call raw punning—all together known as ‘memes’—are a big part of the landscape.

One of the most popular places for this ongoing conversation is the subreddit message board on Reddit, then called r/wallstreetbets. During the next few months, this emerging new digital language became increasingly powerful, with internet meme wars dominating many investing conversations as well as political ones.”

https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/

I know a lot of this went over my head, but anyone that could get the gist of this over to the likes of me has earned my admiration. She also includes a good example of what short-selling is. Although that’s something I do understand, I will quote her here.

“Short selling can be explained through a hypothetical example. Let’s say your friend has a 2019 Tesla Model 3, and you ask to borrow it. But instead of driving it, you sell it to someone else for $65,000. Then you wait, because you believe that Tesla is going to introduce a new version of the Model 3, which will drive the price of the 2019 down; once the 2022 comes out, the 2019 Model 3 price drops to $55,000. You buy one for that price and then give the car to your friend, having made a $10,000 profit in the process.

With real short selling, a stock is borrowed by calling the stock loan department of a brokerage firm, which finds the shares from someone who owns them. The investor then sells the shares in the market, with the hope that the value will decline, at which point they can buy them back and repay the stock that was borrowed. It’s a technique that’s typically available only to professional investors because it’s risky: if the stock price goes up instead of down, the short seller loses the amount of the gain, which theoretically could be limitless.”

It's a fascinating look at the explosion of interest and how individuals comparing notes are discovering anomalies where Big Business seems to be using some dodgy shortcuts with short selling. It’s a bit like the person accepting payment for 50 car orders when they know there are only 30 cars coming in. [Disclaimer: I suggested that, not the author, and what would I know?]

I’ve now read through some of the memes and cartoons and jokes on wallstreetbets, and I can see how enthusiasts would get caught up.

From the “Epilogue-ish”

“McShane compared it to an ongoing, open-source computer-programming project, where people from all over the world contribute searches for signs of conspiracy and anomalies and build on what others have done. “It’s an anticorruption movement,” he said. “It is the sword of the people. And it is attacking Wall Street. It is slicing and dicing. It is sending petitions. It is voting. It is very powerful. And I think it’s only growing more powerful. And I think it’s the beginning, quite honestly, of the future of the market.”

I think of the whole thing as Revenge of the Nerds – the power of a collective of individuals – the sting of a swarm of bees - that may finally catch some of the Big Guys cheating.

I can’t vouch for the accuracy (of course), but I loved it. Thanks to NetGalley and Amazon Original Stories for this one.

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This was an interesting read about the GameStop stock and other meme stock frenzy which led to the controversial decision by Robinhood to disable the 'Buy' button on certain stocks. Overall, this is a good, quick overview on the situation a few years ago.

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While I knew a lot of this already this was still a good quick read that I would recommend to anyone interested on the subject of what happened a few years ago now.

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