Diamond Hands: The Legend of WallStreetBets (2022 |United States | 89 minutes | Drea Cooper)
My most striking reaction while watching the crisply-packaged incredible true story of that time when an army of Reddit-affiliated retail traders rallied to cause seemingly worthless GameStop stock price to rocket to the moon was that all of this happened just a little over a year ago. I suppose that time flows differently in a pandemic. The burst of trading pitting little internet “apes” against over-leveraged hedge funds captivated the media somewhere between the insurrection on the Capitol and the rollout of the first vaccines, before hot vax summer and the revenge of the omicron. So, something like a million years ago, yet a remarkably quick turnaround to get some of the key players on film and telling their stories of how amateur stock trading during a shutdown transformed their lives.
While Drea Cooper’s slickly produced and hyperactively paced documentary won’t give viewers the fundamentals of market capitalism or explain the nuances of options trading, it captures the mood of the past two years as it dives headfirst into a sea of internet memes. Casting the rise in retail (i.e., “normal people”) stock trading (“gambling”) to millennial frustrations that boiled over as the world’s economy collapsed in the early days of the pandemic, interviews captures the sense of #yolo as well as financial desperation that found ordinary people throwing their savings or stimulus checks against the wall of a volatile stock market. The worst that could happen is they’d lose a little cash, the best is that it could totally turn their lives around. It’s an attitude that made even more sense in lockdown.
The primary stage for the action was a then semi-obscure subreddit called WallStreetBets, where increasingly larger groups of idiots gathered to exchange ideas and research for asymmetric investments (those poised to crash spectacularly or multiply tens-to-hundred-fold on a short turnaround). The film brings all of the GIFs, memes, hype videos, and people-powered research to the big screen, conveying a sense of how this community with its self-effacing vernacular, always-on analysis, and freewheeling attitude was an attractive venue for people who suddenly had a lot of free time on their hands. (I confess that I spent a few heady days in February 2021 marveling and trying to decrypt it myself, to little financial avail).
As the timeline barrels toward the “big squeeze” that throttled the value of a failing video game chain by orders of magnitude over a matter of days, captivating everyone from financial pages to late night talk shows and minting basement millionaires, the film checks in with the ground-level investors and introduces the naysayers and villains. We get Interrotron-style facetime with Reddit heroes u/Jeffamazon and the videos of RoaringKitty, come to appreciate the market-shaking myth of Ryan Cohen and Elon Musk, and witness the adoration and abomination of RobinHood and its founders. We see how watching stocks can be addictive, how taking a million dollar windfall can suddenly feel like a failure to a cause, and how the vast forces of establishment wealth can rewrite the rules to suit its own needs. There are stark lessons amid the kaleidoscopic memes, although some of it may be impenetrable to those who weren’t there at the time. Still, as a scrapbook of a very weird corner of a very bizarre time, it’s a heck of a flashback and undoubtedly more accessible than the transcripts of the congressional hearings that followed.
Diamond Hands: The Legend of WallStreetBets premiered at SXSW Film 2022 in the Documentary Spotlight section. Be sure to check out all the SXSW 2022 Sunbreak Coverage