I learned a little bit about how short sales work - and I felt some sympathy for the "little guys" who saw their fortunes halted with the short sale guys got bailed out. It's the wild west on Wall Street. ( )

As I write this, coming up on the 2-year anniversary of the Superstonk event that Ben Mezrich's The Antisocial Network captures so thoroughly and beautifully, the internet presence of the GameStop superfans lives on. I don't have a sense of how big this group is after the national spotlight has mostly faded, but they are still active and their driving force appears to be some combination of wanting to recapture the short squeeze magic of January 2021, anger at the establishment towards the rigged financial markets, solidarity with other 'diamond hands' aligned in opposition, and undoubtedly those patient bag holders not wanting to sell their GameStop shares at a steep loss.

With The Antisocial Network, the GameStop story gets personal as we hear the insider perspectives of a few everyday Johns and Janes, along with a handful of the hedge fund big wigs, who were all at the right time and moment. What remains unclear is whether the GameStop stock run was part of a larger revolution of the U.S. financial market or if it was simply an aberration caused by the general upheaval of the 2020 COVID pandemic. ( )

Does an excellent job of explaining some complicated financial terminology and presenting many different views of what happened during this year’s GameStop short squeeze. But it also suffers from a lack of conclusion and a whole lot of padding. Too often the book pursues irrelevant colour and leaves potentially significant threads on the floor.

I don’t care what someone thought of their roommate’s decor or whether they were a track champion at high school. I do care about what this event means for markets in the age of social media or how it ties into wider popular attacks on traditional power elites (the squeeze happened in the same month as the Capitol riots for Pete’s sake).

The book gestures to these things but clearly feels itself unable to answer them, in which case you have to ask what the point was to writing the book in the first place. The Big Short gets mentioned a lot and the title itself refers to The Social Network (based on one of the author’s own books); too often The Antisocial Network feels like source material in search of a screenwriter to pull it into shape. ( )

The Antisocial Network by Ben Mezrich is a very highly recommended account of the GameStop short squeeze when a group of amateur investors, gamers, and Internet trolls took on one of the biggest hedge funds on Wall Street. This comprehensive nonfiction book reads like a thriller and is the compelling true story of what happened.

Most people heard about the members of a Reddit group called WallStreetBets, who dubbed themselves "apes," when they started investing in Game Stop stocks in early 2021 and sent the price per share rising sky high which resulted in a short squeeze costing Wall Street hedge funds billions of dollars. Perhaps you also heard "The Tendieman" sea chanty. The Antisocial Network is truly a real life accounting of a David-vs.-Goliath movement. Mezrich starts the narrative back at the beginning, following the story of average people who were members of WallStreetBets, like nurse Kim Campbell, hair salon employee Sara Morales, college student Jeremy Poe, and Keith Gill who livestreamed on a you tube channel called "RoaringKitty." He tells the story of the co-CEOs Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt who started Robinhood, the investing app that was being used by the "apes" because it allowed ordinary people to trade on the stock market without brokerage fees. And he covers Gabe Plotkin of the hedge fund Melvin Capital and Ken Griffin of Citadel Securities, along with others.

Mezrich's does an excellent job presenting what happened. The events leading up to the news breaking story of the Game Stop short squeeze is clearly presented in an understandable manner that is accessible for interested readers. Even though you know what happens, it really is a page-turner. I could follow the technical information about trading and investing, although I was also following the story when it was happening. I thoroughly enjoyed The Antisocial Network from start to finish.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Grand Central Publishing.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2021/09/the-antisocial-network.html
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4232025263 ( )