This books has been such an interesting read. It is based on the stock market and how the new generation are seeing where the market is going and what to invest in. The story is imagined by the author of the lives of the people who invested and sold. It’s a fascinating insight and I felt like I was there with the characters in the story.

I confess this book took me a while to get through. I had to keep putting it down and coming back to it. It was a “heavy” book,

At the same time is was a great read. It explained everything in an understandable way and in great depth, and I understood a lot more about the GameStop drama, the people responsible and how it happened after reading it, than I did at the time.

The Antisocial Network: The True Story of a Ragtag of Amateur Investors, Gamers, and Internet Trolls Who Brought Wall Street to Its Knees by Ben Mezrich does exactly as the title suggests.
Mezrich outlines the story which made global headlines earlier this year; talking us through the event from the various perspectives of those involved. His book starts at the end of 2020 and moves into the tale in 2021, as a Reddit group (called wallstreetbets) drove up the stock price of Gamestop, and in effect caused massive losses to those on Wall St who had "shorted" the stock.
This is a complex story and so the book is particularly detailed – some details are possibly irrelevant (references to a person’s background) but much of the detail delivers an explanation of the financial system – the stockmarket – works. Mezrich has inteviewed several of the participants and in the book provides their perspectives, giving a more personal sense to the tale – attempting to ‘humanise’ the story. With all of these material, the story does see bloated at times and I wonder if Mezrich would provide some explanations in an Appendix rather than his frequent expositions.
All in all, an ejoyable stroy but rather than gobble this book up in one go, I'preferred to week it over the period of several weeks - picking it up only when I had the time to truly focus on it.

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.

I enjoyed this as an explanation of the GameStop story, told from the perspective of different people involved - the trading platform, the hedge fund and the Reddit investors. I was a bit perplexed as to how much of what was written was real based on interviews or not - but it was an entertaining read nonetheless.

This is the new book from Ben Mezrich, author of The Accidental Billionaires, the book that became the movie, The Social Network. It covers a handful of weeks at the end of 2020 and the start of 2021 during which time, a Reddit group called wallstreetbets ended up driving up the stock price of a US business called Gamestop, and in effect causing massive losses to those on Wall St who had "shorted" the stock.

The book tells the story from the perspectives of several people, some more involved than others, but all of whom invested a great deal of time, and sometimes money, into this one enterprise.

The story isn't simple, because unless you're deep in the weeds of some elements of trades on Wall Street, then the complexities of "shorting" stocks and issues around "clearing" those trades on apps like Robinhood, take some explanation.

Mezrich tries to hold our hands through a lot of these steps. And, if you aren't paying close attention, he will often re-explain something a few chapters later with a different analogy in the voice of one of his protagonists, because you do need to understand what was happening to fully appreciate the story.

The book is written very much as though the author himself was in the room when these things were happening, and as such, much of the dialogue is probably imagined. Mezrich has no doubt spoken to many of those who are featured here, but it's not entirely clear that he's spoken to all of them, and at times I think he's putting himself in their shoes to try to understand their thought processes.

To my mind, the book slightly falls a little short on technical details. In an effort to make the book more accessible, some elements are glossed over or simplified. And while we concentrate solely on the shorting of Gamestop (a predominantly retail video game business with outlets in many malls across America), it ignores similar things that were going on with other stocks like AMC and Blackberry.

The "humanising" of these stories is common to many books in this field - notably Michael Lewis's books including his most recent The Premonition - telling stories directly from individuals' perspectives rather than from a higher and wider view. But I think that does lead to an amount of supposition, and not inconsiderable amount of superfluous information about our protagonists' private lives, often irrelevant to the story.

This isn't an easy story to tell, and these were events that were taking place only a few months ago, so this book has been written at speed. And although the stock price soared from less than $5, soaring to nearly $500 for a brief period, even now as I type, the stock is hovering around $200 (up around $50 from the price when Mezrich hit "send" on this manuscript). As such, it hasn't really "ended" yet.

Was this a one-off, or is it a sign of changes to come in the financial markets? It's probably too early to say. But the one thing I think the book could have explored more is the Robinhood app, it's payment for order flow monetisation model (which is explained but not explored enough), and the gamification of buying and selling often risky products on a mobile phone. Is it healthy how people are using the app? Probably not. Robinhood's profits come from its users making multiple trades - not just buying some shares and then sitting on them for years at a time. All of that could have explored in greater detail. (I recommend listening to Slate Money for more on these kinds of things incidentally).

A good primer, but there's more to said about the broader environment in which something like this can happen.

The Antisocial Network is a book charting the tale of the GameStop share rise earlier this year thanks to the memes on a subreddit trying to take down financial elites. Mezrich focuses on individuals involved—from a guy whose internet fame rocketed by being involved in the subreddit and livestreams to regular people buying shares and the people who made the app, Robinhood, that made it possible—to follow the drama of what happened.

I've read Mezrich's earlier book The Accidental Billionaires (because of the film The Social Network) and I remembered the Twitter jokes about the GameStop thing, so I thought I'd give this one a go, but as I don't have any interest in stocks (or 'stonks', as per the memes) I found this one a lot less interesting and found it dragged quite a bit. It is written in Mezrich's distinctive style, dramatising the events and people in ways that may not be fully accurate but bring tension and a sense of connection to them, and I could see how it could also be adapted into a film, as with other of Mezrich's books.

Perhaps having more of a knowledge of Wall Street trading or the significance of trying to subvert it would make this book more enjoyable, as I found that I didn't really finish the book with much more understanding of the events. However, as a dramatised account of the events The Antisocial Network is decent, even if the title does feel a bit shoehorned in, and it's a useful introduction for people who saw the GameStop thing pass by and wonder what happened.

While I enjoyed the book, I don't feel like I read about anything I hadn't known from a reading of the news and a semi-casual following along of WSB. Picking a couple of average people to spotlight does kind of give an everyperson view point but it never really draws anyone out in detail, just vague archetypes.

I have to assume this was done at speed to get a quick release while the buzz is still going (and the share price still high, over 200 bucks!) and so i think if you approach it as that, then you might enjoy it a lot more. If you don't know anything about GME and Apes and Stonks, then I imagine this is a fast-paced fascinating read

The Antisocial Network by Ben Mezrich is the story of how a rather eccentric guy with a Youtube channel ,Keith "RoaringKitty" Gill ,with a firm belief ,bordering on obsession,that shares in unloved and failing company Gamestop an initial handful of other small investors and a massed army of internet trolls shook up the Titans of the Hedge fund world in America.
Gill also had a presence on Reddit in the notorious subreddit WallStreetBets where losses on the stock market were almost a badge of honour and foul language and obscenity almost compulsory. When it was discovered that Gill's beloved Gamestop was being "Shorted" by a major Hedge Fund the motley WallStreetBets crew decided to take them on, sick of the "little guy" being as they saw it trampled on by the big money men yet again. What follows is a somewhat surreal tale of everyday folk rattling the cages of America's financial institutions that snowballed and became almost a crusade for millions of people, I found a survey online that reckoned 9% of Americans owned shares in Gamestop at the height of the "battle".

Making financial manoeuvring and dealing entertaining is quite an art but one Ben Mezrich has made his speciality. He features the stories here of not only the major players but also some of the "little people" who found themselves swept along in what became almost hysteria. to give "Big Money" a bloody nose.
Not least Mezrich explains some fairly complex ,to the layman, financial tools, his was the first explanation I've ever read of "Shorting" that I actually understood,and I'm quite an experienced ,if small time,investor .

A fascinating read that kept me gripped enough to read from start to finish in one hit, something I definitely hadn't intended to do as there were several other things I really should have been doing.