Many movies glorify the most epic heroes as fearless warriors who are always prepared to die in service. Superman in Batman v Superman risks his own vulnerabilities by wielding a kryptonite spear to attack Zod, only to perish in battle to save the world. More memorably, Jack Dawson in Titanic freezes to death so that Rose DeWitt Bukater may live. Love is measured by loss, which further romanticizes ideations of needing to save others.

When Covid-19 hit, many retail businesses had to raise plenty of cash to tide through difficult times. Rising above all conventional methods of raising capital was AMC Entertainment Holdings ($AMC): it engineered an ingenious, large-scale meme stock phenomenon to rally individual investors. What AMC CEO Adam Aron did to position the business as a damsel in distress - unfairly attacked by short-sellers; abandoned by the likes of Disney ($DIS) and AT&T ($T) - somehow resonated, despite overarching fears of bankruptcy at the height of Covid. A large group of retail investors banded together to keep buying the stock, and the resultant price buoyancy allowed the company to raise significant equity capital. AMC was saved by everyday investors (fondly referred to as apes) who have since replaced institutional funds to become majority shareholders.

While I am not drawn to AMC as an investment, I am a big fan of going to movie theaters. Must be a generational thing. I would not, however, have invested in AMC just to help the business stay alive. Perhaps it is because I do not identify as an Enneagram Type Two, which I suspect to be the dominant personality of many AMC apes. Superman has a compulsion to save the world; by the same token, Type Two investors (and AMC investors) may be operating with the same script. Proposals like rescue financing – especially if they involve the kind of corporations that Type Twos feel sentimental towards – likely resonate much deeper with their emotions than for other investor types.

Read more about Type Two via the article below and subscribe to my FREE weekly blog, Consume Your Own Tech Investing. I explored Type One on January 31st already; the remaining seven will be featured in upcoming articles on my blog.