Gaming Wall St

The stock market is an enigma,

deceptively complex but also simple.

It's a parallel universe...

a mirror version of the real world,

where you can invest in the future.

If you predict the future correctly, you make money.

If you fail, you can lose it.

In the markets,

you can buy and sell small pieces of a company,

the future of a country,

anything but the price of onions.

Everything is up for grabs.

It's like a casino,

but what people do in the stock market

actually changes how the world runs.

And when bad players break the rules of the game,

when they cheat the market with the push of a button,

it hurts people in the real world.

There are real consequences.

The stock market is the people that use it.

It is alive,

a living, breathing, hungry organism

that nobody can stop.

Nobody can shut it down for long.

It's woven into the fabric of reality...

The food you eat, the house you live in,

all of it.

The powerful firms on Wall Street

still dominate that world

and set the rules in their favor,

but they're no longer alone.

There's been an uprising

by a bunch of people from the Internet who said,

"Let's take these motherfuckers down."

Go ahead, dude.

Tell them the fucking story that you want to tell 'em.

Put it all out there.

They are trying to pull off

an actual transfer of wealth from Wall Street...

- That's right. - To Main Street.

- Let's get these hedge-fund monsters before they get us!

- People on Reddit, on subreddit WallStreetBets,

began to realize they could make more money

and screw over major heavy hitters on Wall Street.

This alone caused the stock to soar

by nearly 50% in a single day.

- Oh, my God, it's making money.

It's turning around. It's starting to happen.

- They're populated by younger readers

who are planning, plotting to blow up the shorts!

- If it only costs you a couple hundred dollars to take down

a multibillion-dollar hedge-fund company,

that's the best investment you ever made.

- We do right now have some statements from Robinhood

and Interactive Brokers

about restricting trading on some names.

How is that legal?

- Why did Robinhood restrict the buying

but not the selling of GameStop?

- You're Wall Street's bitch, man.

- There are certainly very valid questions

about market manipulation.

- Wall Street has been making money out of thin air.

- Just, like, kind of straight-up fraud, right?

Wall Street's gonna make

them money for making bad bets?

- Really turned into kind of an "us versus them" mentality.

- Pretty extraordinary David and Goliath story.

But this time David has

a lot of his friends with him.

- Kaspar, can you say something?

Hello, my name is Kaspar.

I've always kind of been a little bit of a troll, I guess.

Class clown and always trying to, like, get into jokes.

If you're gonna be working with guys on social media,

I feel like you can't take yourself

super seriously, right?

I met Austin about six years ago on a random forum.

I don't know how we found Matt. We met him on Craigslist.

- I saw a Craigslist ad. - Yeah.

- I was working at a porn company.

Yeah.

I always root for the underdog, always, my whole life,

whether it's a basketball team,

a football team, or a bunch of guys

on the Internet going against the hedge funds.

Investments were never

a primary source of income for me.

The investments were just gambles

that I was willing to take on things that I believed in,

so I'm always kind of looking for opportunities.

You know, I put my money where my mouth is

and put it in the stuff that I believe in.

- I've always had an interest in the stock market.

As soon as I turned 18, I bought stock...

and became a retail investor.

Back then, you had to pay commission to buy anything,

so it kind of really didn't make sense 'cause I was broke.

I only had, like, $50, and I spent $8

just to buy $50 worth of stuff, you know?

But I was so infatuated with the stock market.

I just love the idea

of, you know, putting my money into something

that could grow my money.

It wasn't until probably about a year ago

that I started really diving into how the stock market

could be used in such fascinating and unique ways,

more than just buying and holding long term.

I share everything with my wife, you know.

She's, like, my best friend at this point, you know?

- It's definitely a partnership,

'cause we have the same views when it comes to investing.

He'll tell me like, "Oh, I think about A, B, and C.

What do you think?"

And, honestly, we just kind of give each other, like,

an input on certain investments

and how we see it.

- A lot of people, they look at the stock market

as either something you just put your money in

and forget about or gambling, you know...

which a lot of people nowadays, it is like gambling,

especially on WallStreetBets.

- Okay. What is WallStreetBets?

It's a board on the popular Internet forum Reddit

where people talk about investments and stocks

as if they're in a fucking mosh pit.

It's capitalism unleashed.

It's lunatics not just running the asylum,

but buying and selling it.

- WallStreetBets is a casino, basically.

You have a lot of people losing money,

and you have some people making a lot of money.

Everyone's always doing crazy shit.

- Well, you know, everybody on there is crazy.

It's kind of the Wild West on there, you know?

Aah!

- Someone'll make a post about some random stock

no one ever heard about,

and then you'll see someone say, "Oh, okay.

I'm all-in. I just bought $50,000 worth."

I would always sit on the sidelines and laugh

'cause I felt like these people were madmen.

- Just hit 250, and I'm drunk, and I've got a green crayon.

- The funniest thing to me on WallStreetBets

was what they call "loss porn."

You just post how much money you've lost.

This is not, like, what people would consider normal,

but then you post it on WallStreetBets,

and everyone's like, "Hey, man, good job, man."

- I voiced my concern about unsophisticated investors.

It's really like

they think we're dumb.

They call us stupid.

- So let's not call it investing.

It's gambling.

- You just have money, but that doesn't make you smarter.

- And then sometimes it paid off, you know.

Some people would throw in $50,000,

and it'd turn into a million, and you're like,

"Whoa, what the hell?"

Well, there's one guy...

That's where the pee martini comes from.

He was sure this one stock

was gonna get to at least 1,000,

and if it didn't by the end of the week,

he was gonna drink his own piss.

- I don't give a shit if you guys don't believe me.

Ugh.

- The thing about the kids on WallStreetBets

is that they are so enthusiastic.

- It almost feels like an echo chamber.

Like, "Well, shit, everyone thinks

that this is a great idea, so, like, I should do it."

- He had truckloads of gourds delivered to his house?

- Yeah. - That really happened?

- There is something very magical about it.

It makes you not be so uptight about money.

If you lose all your money, at the end of the day,

it's not everything, you know.

- That is so crazy. - Yeah.

- And I think it's just a bunch of risk-takers

that all want some type of a freedom,

or they want to gamble.

Yeah, I think it's just another form of...

of being a degenerate.

- Oh, do you have puts on CC? I like that idea.

I like that idea a lot, dude. Dogs.

- I never have. - Dogs is looking good.

- Dude, what's crazy is, if it goes down and you add...

You're rich.

And then it goes up.

I'm from Alabama.

I mean, you think about horses

and farms, right, and some college football,

not necessarily trading.

I never really had, like, an employee mindset.

I got fired from, like, seven jobs

for basically looking at my stocks all day.

They were like, "You're not doing any work,

"and you're losing money on stocks all day.