these funds rolled out. It would be a narc-ish betrayal of the team spirit of the subforum – not to mention an unpopular post – if a user were to confess to setting aside their stimmy to pay for 2020 taxes, bills, necessities, or mounting debts. Better to stay in the game. And what’s gaming got to do with it anyway? The way this generation that’s now seen as having joyfully slung-shot Wall Street in its smug face looks at the world as largely shaped by their experience of scoring points and taking down digital bad guys in the games they grew up with. But it’s not entirely clear that video games are to blame for these traders’ nihilistic, burn-it-all-down mentality. “Gamers look at trades like a blip on a screen, just a flashing thing on a screen,” Arnade tells me – but, he adds, that’s not necessarily a new point of view... “People have been treating it like a lie for a long time,” he says of the stock market’s relationship to real values. “The gamers just figured out the lie.” The consequential reality of these trades and valuations has always been rooted in a type of gamesmanship, just one made real by enough people’s personal investment in its meaning. It only stands to reason that an up-and-coming group of gamers should so adeptly get one over on another – when the latter is, or was, complacently established in its mastery of the same it’s-worth-what-we-say-it-is arena. One documentary about the GameStop phenomenon prominently features 20-year- old Shawn Daumer, who made just north of $46,000 off of GameStop in January – half a million at one point, he says, until he “got greedy.” Daumer let filmmaker Keith Elliot Greenberg and an attendant crew follow him
around Valparaiso, Indiana where he grew up and now works as a real estate broker. They interviewed his mom and filmed him hanging out at the restaurant where he used to work. He’s been quoted in the New York Times , where a mini-profile contrasts his quarter- million-dollar portfolio with his taste for Hooters wings. When Daumer and I talk, I’m surprised to find a humble Midwesterner and a careful student of conventional investing wisdom – not a sardonic Redditor, not one of those nihilists we’ve been warned about, and not even a garden-variety gamer. The consequential reality of these trades and valuations has always been rooted in a type of gamesmanship, just one made real by enough people’s personal investment in its meaning. “I tried to get my buddies from high school to do it way back when we were juniors,” he tells me, “And they all were bums!” Now, though, they’re beginning to understand the value of his advice. “It’s all, Dude we should have gotten in when you did, man . That could have been me .” With such a lucrative hobby and a career he finds fulfilling, the prospects of going to college or pursuing any kind of traditional career in finance don’t appeal to him. Though he doesn’t directly cite Gordon Gekko and Jordan Belfort among his heroes, Daumer says he was initially inspired to pick up investing by blockbuster movies he saw
American Consequences
41
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online