Financial news has been dominated in recent days by amateur traders investing in American gaming shop GameStop.

Effectively the American equivalent of Game, GameStop's stock surged over recent days after amateur traders organised themselves on social media site Reddit.

However today alone GameStop's stock has fallen by over 40%.

One Kingston cyber-security engineer, Alex Patton, was involved in the financial mayhem.

The 28-year-old told the BBC: "Before Covid struck, I didn't know the first thing about investing."

As a dual national with British and American citizenship, he had no difficulty in setting up an account with US trading platform Robinhood.

He added: "I didn't give it much thought until my friend said, 'You should check out GameStop.' And I realised that some of the people on Reddit do some really impressive work in researching those stocks.

"People had done research showing what a risky position those hedge funds were in. And we thought, We can exploit that. This is an opportunity.

"The theory was that as the price continued to go up, the people who shorted the stock would be forced to buy those shares at whatever price to close their short.

"They assume we retail investors can't manage our risk, whereas hedge funds have taken a huge risk, an unbelievable risk, and they're just allowed to carry on, business as usual.

"There's a huge gap between ordinary middle-class, working-class people versus hedge funds that have billions."

"Other people are hurting from this a lot more than me."

It will be fascinating to see if this new breed of amateur traders can become a major force.