Originally published at: MGM buys movie rights to Ben Mezrich's book proposal about r/wallstreetbets | Boing Boing
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I’m going to have Orlando Bloom play me
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Thought experiment. Hedge funds short a retail store in malls called YarnStop. It sells knitting supplies nationwide. What happens?
Spoiler alert – short selling makes the stock drop precipitously and the company goes out of business. Yes, that’s it. No story.
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Does Yarn Stop have a new board of directors, a decent sales numbers in spite of a pandemic, not much debt, a plan to pivot to the digital, and a superstar investor from a successful pet company?
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Can you just do that? Take a news item that’s still happening, say you’re going to write a book about it and sell the movie rights?
Honestly, I’m impressed
It helps if
you’ve written several books
some of those books have been made into movies (21, the social network)
and
those movies have made money.
Otherwise, no.
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I’ll sheepishly respond to your woolly tale literally being part of the ‘stock’ market 
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Hm. I don’t know! I do know that nobody in the wallstreetbets subreddit would pay the slightest bit of attention because, you know, yarn. Instead of the store where they bought exciting games when they were kids!
Really? Some of the other tickers that are being bandied about there are biotech (remember when we all played with Hodgkin’s disease and genetic markers for colon cancer when were kids? I don’t.) Plenty of energy stocks (tilting at windmills!), and steel, batteries for cars and mass power storage infrastructure, (where’s my double AAs for my Coleco football), telecoms, cloud tech, progressive automakers, etc. The list goes on forever.
It doesn’t matter if the business isn’t “cool”, to most. It matters if there is a dollar at the end of the rainbow. I invest in Virgin Galactic’s SPCE, because it’s going to be gigantic(growth), and it’s neat (space travel is fucking awesome). I also invest in some obscure therapeutics company because they make me money. I don’t even know what they do, other than add dollars to my account.
Your post is a sure sign you have the merest surface and incorrect impression of wsb.
My impression of web is, as you say, surface, and obviously incorrect. I am going on the latest news, and believed that the offense taken at GameStop being shorted was due to sentimental attachment to the store on the part of the investor boys, who rushed to its defense out of loyalty, rather than some idea of GameStop being unfairly branded as overpriced relative to its fundamentals.
Maybe this is a tangent, maybe not, but I also don’t believe in the pious description of shorting as thoughtful investors uncovering hidden weakness in a company. I mean, okay, possible, but also possible is that a company that is functioning reasonably well with an okay stock price, but perhaps paying a living wage instead of starving its workers is considered to be “hiding a weakness”. Also, that an influential investor shorting a company is a signal that the company is indeed shortable, and that few investors do a lot of research, but rather follow the herd. So that hypothetical company could be driven out of business simply by not behaving in a way that investors might prefer, yet having an okay stock price.
Thanks for the correction.
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