18 February 2021: Congress grills the GameStop crowd
The House Financial Services Committee held a hearing on the GameStop frenzy, featuring Robinhood's CEO, hedge fund managers and Keith Gill, the retail investor known online as Roaring Kitty. Gill told lawmakers simply that he liked the stock. The hearing produced plenty of soundbites and little regulation. GameStop shares, which had collapsed from their peak, kept swinging wildly for months.
The lesson: Hearings and headlines rarely change how markets work; incentives and rules do.
What it meant for investors
$1,000 in GameStop at the start of 2020 → $16,667 today, vs $2,092 in the S&P 500.
We start the clock at the start of 2020, the latest year on the wheel. That is 16.7 times the money, and $14,574 more than a plain index fund made over the same years.
What GameStop teaches: Crowded short positions can produce explosive squeezes, but price spikes driven by flows rather than fundamentals rarely persist for late buyers.
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | $8.50 | $2,941 | $3,301 |
| 2018 | $4.50 | $5,556 | $2,519 |
| 2020 | $1.50 | $16,667 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
What if you bought GameStop? Every starting year and the full story →
More GameStop history
- 26 January 2021: Elon Musk tweets one word: Gamestonk
- 28 January 2021: Robinhood stops the GameStop rally
Could you have called it at the time? The wheel picks the year, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick.
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