“Journalists, as they say, write the first draft of history, and the first draft is the only one that most of the public remembers, not the more nuanced, better-informed one that comes after the dust has cleared.”

This was one of the books that the library featured in Libby when I opened the app, and since I (and I suppose, almost everyone else) followed the GME squeeze as it happened, I was curious to read more about it. Especially since the subtitle says “Gamestop, Reddit, and the fleecing of small investors” – wasn’t this supposed to be the moment where small investors took on the hedge fun giants?

As it turns out, Jakab is looking at it from a slightly different point of view. The Gamestop short wasn’t just about small investors ‘sticking it to the man’, but also about how investing apps like Robinhood encourage people to trade dangerously and frequently (thus making them money) in a way that closely resembles gambling. And in gambling, it’s always the house that wins.

By using the months leading up to Gamestop as the focus of the book, Jakab manages to cover a fairly wide range of topics – how apps like Robinhood work and why they can offer free trades, investing “influencers” who may not actually know that much about investing, why people were angry, and why short-selling isn’t actually completely evil (it helped exposed Enron, so there’s that). Some things, like why people were angry and how Keith Gills became a legend are specific to Gamestop, but quite a lot of the topics covered are more general to this time period that we’re living in.

Spoiler alert, but as the title puts it, the people who ultimately benefited from Gamestop stock rising were a few lucky individual investors, a few Gamestop insiders, big investment banks, and all the other mutual funds who had Gamestop stock or who stepped in after Melvin Capital, Andrew Left and a few other mutual funds made a loss. On the whole, it does seem like the establishment benefited more from this than the individual investors.

Overall, I found this an interesting book that explained the events and factors behind the Gamestop stock rise and short squeeze in an easy-to-understand way. If you followed the events as it happened and you want to understand what was happening, I think this would be something that you’ll want to read.