“Money in, money out,” is how Tobias Deml, creator of the new HBO Max documentary miniseries Gaming Wall Street, explains the common perception of the stock market while on Zoom with the Guardian. “It’s got to come from somewhere, right? But it’s all based on belief in the future. Money’s all belief. We believe in the government, borders, lots of things that aren’t materially real, but nonetheless exist in our shared imagination. The history of humanity is driven by these beliefs.”
Stocks are fake, is what he’s saying, as in not real – “fairy dust”, to borrow a term from Matthew McConaughey’s coke-huffing trader in The Wolf of Wall Street, one of the many pop culture figures that zips by in the rapid-fire torrent of memes frenetically edited into Gaming Wall St. Shares of a company are an intangible concept that nonetheless have physical, real-world consequences in their regular minting of princes and paupers. This alchemy has long been the sole purview of high-finance types, professionals who’d have us believe that their business school educations and sophisticated Bloomberg Terminals make them masters of financial systems too hopelessly complex for us knuckle-draggers to comprehend. But in an era when a degree’s worth of knowledge sits waiting on the internet, it was only a matter of time until some normal folks realized that everyone’s making it up as they go. “Anyone who claims to know everything about how the market works is lying to you,” Deml says.
The inevitable came to pass when Reddit users posting on the board r/wallstreetbets turned their plugged-in access and organization into power, an unprecedented episode on which Deml plants his focus. You may recall buzzing about GameStop last January, as the brick-and-mortar video game retailer’s lagging stock soared out of nowhere. Banded together for strength in numbers, the Redditors were pulling off a daring “short squeeze”, buying up shares of GME en masse to pump up the value before selling them back to big Wall Street firms who’d have to eat the difference. A high-risk, high-reward maneuver liable to fluctuate wildly over the course of a single day, it made millions for a select few and left many others in destitution. For better or worse, their stand blew up the toll booth barring ordinary folks from one of the fastest pathways to wealth. We are all day traders now.
Deml grew up on the outside of high finance looking in. His father has been an ESG investor for more than 30 years, evaluating the “environmental, social and governance” factor of each stock to weigh conscience against profitability in his buying. “I’ve watched my father be so knowledgable about all this stuff, and I always felt kind of dumb,” he says. “I didn’t understand his job, and didn’t think I could teach myself, and didn’t even know what questions to ask him. So I remained kind of oblivious to this world for my whole life, until the pandemic hit and I had all this spare time. That’s when I found r/wallstreetbets. Things that seemed scary and complicated to comprehend weren’t just easier to get, but funny and crazy and wild. I finally saw what fascinated my dad in all this.”
While finding his way around the no-fee investment app Robinhood, he became obsessed with big-fish frauds like Enron, and “how people deceive each other to make more money than they deserve to”. In the curious case of GameStop, he saw a David and Goliath narrative pitting a band of eccentric nerds against one-percenters perched comfortably in the highest halls of influence. His fascination wasn’t just in this unlikely uprising, however, but in its outrageous outcomes. Just as it seemed like the rabblerousers on r/wallstreetbets had the fatcats at Citadel Securities poised to take a big hit, Robinhood put the kibosh on the whole operation by halting all buying of GME and other so-called “meme stocks”. App users cried foul, and upon learning that Citadel Securities pays Robinhood for its order flow, directed those complaints into a class-action lawsuit on charges of market manipulation. The lawsuit was later dismissed and the SEC’s official report into the matter contained no evidence to support the claim.
As Deml puts it, how any of this is allowed to happen represents “a tough question with a layered answer”. Much of the documentary is devoted to explaining the arcane physics of the market and unpacking its jargon, often through slick animated visual aids and voiceover from Kieran Culkin (practically in character as Succession’s smarmy Roman Roy). For three and a half months straight, six or seven days a week, Deml and his producer Tessa Byford spent 14 to 16 hours on the “brutal” post-production process required to render these lessons layperson-friendly without losing their nuance.
“The big thing for me is that I didn’t want to dumb anything down,” Deml says. “There have been other documentaries about similar subjects before, where they’d equate short selling to borrowing a pen from somebody and then you have to give them their pen back, which don’t really teach you much of anything. Let’s stick with the real world, let’s stick with stocks, but use simple words. We had a dictionary to teach the audience, who we assume has a level of intelligence. The goal for me was to go from someone who has no knowledge of the stock market, and make them into someone who has knowledge that people working as brokers for decades still can’t see.”
Down to some pretty granular specifics, we come to learn how moneyed giants can work an odious practice called “naked short-selling” to their advantage. It boils down to firms selling stocks that may or may not exist in order to magic the money insiders call “free cheddar” out of thin air. It’s a dirty trick that gives an unfair edge to those already holding most of the capital, a loophole that most amateur traders can’t wriggle through. “Naked short-selling has diminished over the years as laws have gotten stricter, but it’s still hard to track in the first place,” Deml says. “When you don’t know someone’s doing something, how are you going to punish them for it?
If there’s anything to be learned from the GameStop affair, it’s that a leveling of the playing field is the only hope to start reshaping the landscape of America’s economy. The series begins as education and ends as activism, equipping the audience with knowhow and then urging the legislators to allow them an honest shot to use it. While Deml’s skeptical about whether the vampire squids of capitalism can ever be bested, he’s confident that the craftiness of smaller players on the margins will only continue growing.
“One thing I learned making this is that in the world of finance, the word ‘crime’ is very rare,” Deml says. “Bernie Madoff, he committed an outright crime, but everyone else does ‘violations’. For a lot of the firms, it’s a balancing of legal risk versus monetary risk. I can make free money, but I might risk the regulator getting on my radar. You can kill that one mechanism – you make a perfect world where anyone caught naked short-selling goes to jail, and no one does it – but someone will find the next scheme. At the end of the documentary, we say that Wall Street has already come up with its next con. It’ll just keep on metastasizing.”
Gaming Wall Street is now available on HBO Max with a UK date to be announced
This article was amended on 3 March. It was originally stated that Citadel was a major stakeholder in Robinhood which was inaccurate
