What happens to the foot soldiers of the meme trading revolution?

Graphics by Michele Doying / The Verge

It would be funny, except that it drags real people down with it.

The S&P 500 has fallen 10 percent in the last 30 days, the Nasdaq is down 14 percent, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average is down 6.5 percent. But fintech is not as good as it could be.

In the last 30 days, it dropped two-thirds. The company formerly known as Square fell by 40 percent. The shares of the company fell by a third. The stock has fallen less than it did before.

The meme stocks are also down. The company fell more than 40 percent in the last month. AMC lost more than 40 percent of its value. Bed, Bath and Beyond is worth less than it was a month ago. In the last month, the prices of the two digital coins fell by a quarter. They may fall further.

Retail investors tend to congregate in meme stocks, which is why there are institutional investors in all of these things. Do you remember them? A small army of people started day trading during the Pandemic. Diamond Hands: The Legend of WallStreetBets will be on MSNBC on May 15th. It will start streaming on Peacock on May 16th. It is timely, though perhaps not in the way it was intended.

The narrative around Gamestonk was that it was a populist uprising against Wall Street. At the time, I thought the narrative was bullshit, but narratives are powerful. The narrative mattered most to people who understood the least about the financial markets, according to the documentary.

The investors used upstart service Robinhood to get into the market.

Some of these users were well-versed. The documentary crew was told by Alvan Chow that his game is asymmetric betting, where you use a small amount of capital to make large returns. The GameStonk was played before it happened. In the documentary, this post is read by his brother because he finds his own language charming.

I remember texting my dad when Musk sent his first message. He says in Diamond Hands that this is the top for sure. A hedge fund made the same call. He makes a lot of money. He doesn't describe himself as a master of the universe in the documentary, he just describes a small fish that made off with scraps.

It isn't his experience that is haunting me right now, but I'm happy for him.

When this all started, she had no savings account. She buys GameStop stock, holds it through the run, cashes out and then goes intocryptocurrencies. She tells the filmmakers that she is set for life with what she has done with her portfolio. I have to hold it. Deadass.

I think of her as I sit in on the earnings calls.

Matt Kelly, a former military diver, had his car taken away at the beginning of the Pandemic. He had a cyst on his brain. It meant that if I start to have more problems with my brain, my kids will be okay. We will have something to fall back on.

He looks at his phone during the short squeeze. He stops sleeping. Kelly is incensed that retail traders are not allowed to place orders because they messed up their risk calculations and left the retail investors holding the bag. He bought in at $17 a share and sold at $120.

Kelly went back into the store. Kelly bought and sold shares of other companies when Gill told Congress that he liked the stock. He says in the documentary that he has $1 million in his account.

I hope he left that trade.

The institutions? They will probably be fine. Some of the companies talked about their wallet offerings on the earnings calls, reminding investors that people spend more when they deposit their paychecks directly into PayPal or Block, which means that the companies make more. Every trade is paid by the company. It does. Wall Street makes money by charging fees.

People will get squeezed in other places. Block acquired Afterpay earlier this year. Afterpay is part of a larger group of companies that allow consumers to pay for clothing in installments. Consumers spent more than $20 billion on point-of-sale loans. Credit cards were supposed to be challenged by this sector. It seems like another way to get more money out of consumers.

The retail investors who crowded into the market in the last two years may not have correctly judged their risks. I worry. These are the people I fear for when the line goes down.