Are Meme Stocks Really a Thing? - a podcast by UCF College of Business

GameStop and AMC made national headlines for unexpected reasons as retail investors from social media website Reddit began feverishly scooping up shares in each company. While the resulting drama caused wild swings in stock prices and scrutiny against some online trading platforms, the long term impacts remain to be seen. Did"Redditors"usher in a new era of retail stock trading? Or are these so-called meme stocks just another example of financial history repeating itself?

 Featured Guests

Garrett Cummings - President, UCF Young Investors ClubKevin Mullally, Ph.D. - Assistant Professor of Finance, UCF College of Business


Episode Highlights1:04 - Introduction
2:48 - Why would anyone invest in GameStop?7:22 - What led to the media spotlight on $GME?
12:37 - Who is the group driving the run on GameStop stock?14:27 - Is this a legitimate area of finance research?
16:37 - Historical similarities20:12 - How is this run on $GME going to end?
22:08 - What's the future for meme stocks as a whole?
28:27 - Will this still be a story a year from now?31:33 - Dean Jarley's final thoughts

 Episode TranscriptionPaul Jarley:                         Remember the E-Trade Baby?

E-Trade Baby:                    A lot of people are like,"Isn't it difficult to invest in the markets?"And I'm like,"Not if you're using E-trade. Making a big investment is as easy as a single click."Boom. I just bought some stocks.

Paul Jarley:                         I think he was the first meme investor. He didn't last long.

E-Trade Baby:                    Wait, why is this line going down? Oh God, it just dropped 400 points. This is not happening. Dear Lord, I made a horrible, horrible mistake. ****Paul Jarley:                         Or maybe he just moved onto the social media site, Reddit [crosstalk 00:00:31] and lost hundreds of thousands of dollars trading stock in GameStop. Turns out he's just one of many.

E-Trade Baby:                    Take it back. Sell, sell, sell, sell, sell. Too late. It's all gone.

Paul Jarley:                         This show is all about separating hype from fundamental change. I'm Paul Jarley, Dean of the College of Business here at UCF. I've got lots of questions. To get answers, I'm talking to people with interesting insights into the future of business. Have you ever wondered,"Is this really a thing?"Onto our show.

Paul Jarley:                         So GameStop has obviously been in the news a lot over the last week, and to help me understand what's going on here, I've convened a panel of experts. Kevin Mullally is an assistant professor in our finance department. Garrett Cummings is the president of our student investment club and a finance major. And I pulled in our own Josh Miranda, who knows a little bit about viral marketing and maybe viral finance to have a conversation about GameStop and its short-term and long-term implications. But I want to start out with a story. When I first came to UCF, one of the first groups I met with were some executives at EA sports.

Paul Jarley:                         And they said to me,"We know right now we're a company that puts the $60 box in a GameStop for people to purchase, but we know that's about to go away. We know that a few years from now, we will have developed into something like iTunes, where people electronically download whatever the game is into their console. And we think after that, we will become a company that offers various components of games that people can download and create their own game. And we want to understand that consumer more and what aspects of the games they like and dislike, so that we can meet that market demand when it comes."Now, I raise that story because that was 10 years ago, and EA sports knew GameStop was dead then. So when I first heard the stories about GameStop, I have to admit my first reaction was,"Wow, they're still around?

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