everybody on ilx complains about reddit

^^ otm and seems like a reasonable outcome from this, if anything, should be more pressure/oversight on hedge funds to prevent them from shorting companies into the ground. Which of course means that the Congressional response will instead be to, like, ban investment subreddits or something.

congress should start with banning themselves from single name stocks and sector based funds. There is so much front-running going on there (their trades are public). They are raking it in.

The Robinhood app updates constantly so you can watch ‘line go up’ like a rat hitting the sugar water button. That seems psychologically exhausting for someone buying stock for the first time.

― Joe Biden Stan Account (milo z), Wednesday, January 27, 2021 12:03 PM (forty-one minutes ago)

yeah it's totally deranged

my brother is (er...was) the CTO of a crypto-investment app which allowed really funky leverage things to happen & he has indeed confirmed that "line go up, line go down" is 80% of the appeal of these things

wonder if bitcoin dropping $7k in the past week (had been holding steady at 37k for a while, now it's down to 30k) is from a million crypto dudes pulling money out to get into stocks

t/s: reddit disrupting the stock market vs. barstool sports disrupting the stock market

I’m up right now damn GameStop let’s go ⬆️

— Soulja Boy (Drako) (@souljaboy) January 27, 2021

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EstI_tsW8AA10Tk?format=jpg&name=medium

If this can kill bitcoin then I'm all for it I guess

bitcoin was going to dump anyway with the tether issue and double spend scare.

they can't talk about needing to protect the poor retail investor when they allow these funds to short companies into the ground hoping to push them into bankruptcy and making shares worthless.

― Yerac, Wednesday, January 27, 2021 12:20 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Is it really possible to short a company into bankruptcy? How would that even work?

he has indeed confirmed that "line go up, line go down" is 80% of the appeal of these things

I only discovered this whole wsb thing a couple of days ago, but the one comment that makes me giggle every single time it's rolled out, is how any excessive talk of fundamentals and dividends and such are firmly countered with the great truth: "Sir, this is a casino".

Very generally, they walk down the share price so low, that even if the company tries to do an offering to raise money they just further dilute themselves, it becomes a death spiral.

yeah the Telsa run up pretty much dispelled any illusion that stock prices were tied to real-world factors at all

tesla was also partly fueled by people who kept trying to short and then other people who just really liked tesla buying out of the money short dated calls and squeezing the price in an endless loop.

feel like a positive feedback loop might be a problem in the long run?

Good way to get more people to cheer on redditors:

Game spot is kind of like a late millennial’s toys-r-us, and watching a bunch of day-trading Reddit bros toy with it like orca play with a seal’s corpse is kinda grotesque and violating.

— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) January 27, 2021

GameStop stores generally look like a garbage truck full of sub-Funko Pop grade nonsense tipped its load into a storefront and the 0.8 employees in there at a time generally seem like they would rather have jobs picking up broken glass in the park with their hands, I wouldn’t call them “toys r us” exactly

^^^ ilx posts with vivid imagery

I'm not sure what the future holds for companies like Gamestop but I suspect in 20 years there will still be a big market for used Nintendo shit

I never set foot in a Gamestop until about three years ago when we bought our Switch and I actually found it to be a way better experience than I expected. The guy that worked there was always super friendly and patient with my kid's questions about games he was curious about. It was also always fairly busy, seemed like a lot of their traffic was people buying the big new release day games that had some sort of tie-in physical, deluxe version package. Not sure how omnipresent stuff like that will be in five years tho, but like frogbs I can def see a future in used Nintendo stuff.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EswtSUZUUAEqSQY?format=jpg&name=medium

I'm not sure what the future holds for companies like Gamestop but I suspect in 20 years there will still be a big market for used Nintendo shit

― frogbs, Wednesday, January 27, 2021 1:05 PM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

there was a time when they were trying to save space, we told them don't throw away those fuckin NES boxes and instruction booklets, don't get rid of the saturn stuff, etc etc but they tossed a lot of boxes, cases etc because it was easier to warehouse, so dumb, they could have basically started their own bidding auction site on old shit like those sneaker apps and shit

I think I'm like a lot of people, late to the party (invested in AMC today), but I took it like hey let's pretend I'm in Vegas, invested $200 of my stimulus and let's see what happens

Very generally, they walk down the share price so low, that even if the company tries to do an offering to raise money they just further dilute themselves, it becomes a death spiral.

― Yerac, Wednesday, January 27, 2021 1:32 PM (forty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

But this would have to be a company that was already financially precarious and desperate for cash, right? You can just like bear run a healthy company into the ground?

GameStop's financials have never been close to as bad as people think

They buy things and sell them for more than they bought them for. That's not what Wall Street cares about.

on the outside now, but from what i hear i think the management is way better now then it's been in a long time and they've already gone through some of the painful stuff like shuttering underperforming locations, and the e-commerce has done a lot better than people thought

i mean i can totally believe there's a bullish case for gamestop once malls reopen, but a market cap of $22bn seems a bit of a stretch tbh.

I mean all companies always need cash, a lot of companies they ipo have never made a profit. Let's just put all of these struggling companies out of their misery by enriching hedge funds and their uber wealthy clients. red dildo emoji.

GME & AMC trading suspended

there was a time when they were trying to save space, we told them don't throw away those fuckin NES boxes and instruction booklets, don't get rid of the saturn stuff, etc etc but they tossed a lot of boxes, cases etc because it was easier to warehouse, so dumb, they could have basically started their own bidding auction site on old shit like those sneaker apps and shit

no kidding - I'm kinda stunned how much all the junk vinyl I bought in 2005 is now worth, and it occurs to me that if you were astute enough you could've done the same thing with old video games. when I moved out of my buddy's place I just left all my Gamecube games there, in fact I probably told him "whatever keep 'em LOL" and now that I look it up I probably gave away like $700 worth of stuff. probably could ask for it back, I'm sure it's just sitting in a box somewhere, but that's sort of a Curb Your Enthusiasm situation

The Tendieman has come.

ht u/quigonshin pic.twitter.com/MfD1aqNSO3

— wsb mod (@wsbmod) January 26, 2021

Companies take debt - offerings aren't the only (or even, I think, the primary) way to raise cash. I am very pro-shorting as a general phenomenon because it's a check on scam companies and irrational exuberance. Equal amount of red dildo emoji for bullshit IPOs.

xpost oh yeah it's crazy but I think a lot of ppl just read "retail is dead" articles and assumed Gamestop was like a month from going out of business (prior to all this)

trading isn't suspended.

i mean i can totally believe there's a bullish case for gamestop once malls reopen, but a market cap of $22bn seems a bit of a stretch tbh.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Wednesday, January 27, 2021 2:25 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

someone on twitter pointed out that slack has a market cap of $25b and has 1/16th the annual revenue of gamestop. fair cop, i guess.

haha fair

check the market cap of any other company you think is crappy and compare.

what physical retail businesses with larger market caps? just target and walmart?

home depot, costco, lowes too i guess.

yerac how do i get these people to buy stock in my employer before it next vests to me?

Market cap of an early stage company is 95% growth expectations. I happen to think those expectations are bullshit when it comes to Slack, but it's very much apples and oranges to gamestop. It's a speculative bet on the potential of Slack to become some kind of global business enterprise software giant. There's no version of that case for gamestop.

A better comparison might be another retailer of non-perishable items. For example, Gap has annual revenue of $16 billion and a market cap of less than half that amount.

do you work at gamestop? if not, shrug emoji.

And Gap clothing isn't being replaced by a digital product

This just feels a lot like the old penny stock email scams, but magnified in power by social media.

It's a speculative bet on the potential of Slack to become some kind of global business enterprise software giant

that makes sense. in slack’s case it might also be a bet that the company gets acquired for lots of money

Biden team is "monitoring the situation" around GameStop.

— Jennifer Epstein (@jeneps) January 27, 2021

xp. it is bulllshit but also you could make money out of it if you got in early enough and it fucks over hedge funds? where's the downside? gambling is fun.

threab

Apparently at 1:32pm, a 587k shares of GameStop traded at $327 a share, which is $187 million. That's not coming from Robinhood. Wall Street is on both sides of this battle.

Ugly stuff.

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) January 27, 2021

Biden is monitoring some goya beans too.