Tiger King, and trading turnips on Animal Crossing’s Stalk Market no longer has the same thrill. Your phone pings. A friend has sent you a free stock on an app called Robinhood. You sign up. Flush with larger-than-usual unemployment checks and incentivized by zero-commission trades and endless in-app bells and whistles, you begin to trade. And trade. And trade. Your latest buy? GameStop. For thousands of Americans last year, a version of this scene played out, sparking a retail investment renaissance that rivals that of the late ’90s, according to industry experts. Professional investors were not pleased. Criticizing Robinhood and its customers for outages and poor investment decisions became almost a sport for fintwiterati and industry experts alike in 2020.