Wall Street Bet On Yourself

It’s not often that every producer in Hollywood is messaging a random guy on Reddit. But not every Redditor has sent hedge funds reeling for bailouts.

Jaime Rogozinski — who founded WallStreetBets, the extremely online stock community that brought chaos to financial markets — has sold his life story.

RatPac Entertainment, the production company behind Wonder Woman and Dunkirk, wants to develop the tale of amateur online investors rocketing the shares of Gamestop and other companies to historic levels, crippling overleveraged hedge funds in the process. In exchange, Rodozinski received a payment in the low six figures.

Posters on a Movie Poster

WallStreetBets briefly upended capital markets by pushing users to invest money in struggling companies that traditional Wall Street investors had heavily shorted. GameStop short-seller Melvin Capital lost 53 per cent in January and needed a $2.75 billion bailout from bigger hedge funds to survive. Last week, the S&P 500 recorded its worst week since October amid the turbulence. Many called it one of the greatest trolls of all time.

But RatPac isn’t alone in the race to bring the Reddit saga to the screen.

• Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer acquired a book proposal about the Gamestop carnage written by Ben Mezrich, whose book on Facebook was adapted into David Fincher’s “The Social Network.”
• Netflix is also trying to rush a film with “Zero Dark Thirty” screenwriter Mark Boal, and Disney Channel heartthrob Noah Centineo is attached to star.

Regulatory Drama Not Over Yet: It’s unlikely to make for a movie sequel, but there is more boring, but arguably more consequential, WallStreetBets fallout happening in the regulatory sector. Many are now calling on regulators to ban payment for order flow, which allows trading firms to pay brokerages for the right to handle orders submitted by individual investors. Critics say it incentivizes brokers to maximize revenue while leaving their customers behind.”

Payment for order flow, at the end of the day, is legalized bribery that appears to incentivize brokers to violate rules,” said Dennis Kelleher, president of Better Markets.

The Takeaway:

Even if you’re not looking forward to a movie about posters on some website, at least you can look forward to the taut Trent Reznor soundtrack full of textural interplay and icy sound design.