About This Book

Power to the Players: Inside Reddit's War On Wall Street by Rob Smat

The sea shanties, YOLO’s, and red bandanas aren’t even half of the GameStop story.

 Did you know Robinhood didn’t initiate their infamous trading halt?

Did you know why Redditors refer to 2021 as the “sneeze” rather than the squeeze?

Did you know that shares in your brokerage account might be counterfeits?

If not, buckle up.

Witness firsthand the real and utterly ludicrous hivemind that brought Wall Street to its knees in January 2021 and find out why GameStop was only the beginning of an even more unprecedented retail contagion, one which will challenge everything you think you know about our markets (all over again).

If the meme mania of 2021 drew blood from Wall Street, what follows is the Shakespearean realization that Reddit’s blade was in fact poisoned.

In a digital world of frequently deleted, revised, and buried information, accurately piecing together events as they occurred is nearly impossible. Other authors and journalists have understandably struggled, but not author Rob Smat, who has been a witness to every part of the GameStop phenomenon, having lived it himself.

Power to the Players is as much an unabridged history of the GameStop “sneeze” as it is a roadmap of how retail traders regrouped in the months and years that followed, when everyone else thought the story had ended in calamity.

The truest of diamond hands never sold, and their power has only grown stronger since.

Before, Redditors were only a nuisance to the status quo. Now, they are inevitable.

In addition to his work as an author, Rob Smat is a writer and director of feature films. His work includes The Last Whistle (2019) and Walkout (2023), and upcoming books include The Wedding March, and The Birdhouse, as well as action/sci-fi novel, Backfill. Under his Reddit moniker u/MadSmatter, Rob has made the site’s esteemed front page a handful of times, thanks to posts about independent filmmaking, green bean casserole, and of course, GameStop.

Rob was the keynote speaker for the American Heart Association’s Go Red convention, a finalist for the Writer Guild of America’s Collyer fellowship, and one of the youngest filmmakers to license a film to Netflix. He grew up near GameStop’s Grapevine headquarters in North Texas, and now lives in the Southwest with his wife Kate, and their labradoodle, Chewbacca.

Imprint: Gaudium approx. 220 pp., 6 x 9 in. (229 x 152 mm) Hardcover Date of Publication: October 24, 2023 ISBN 9781592113156 US$29.99 UK£27.99