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The Battle of GameStop

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Re: The Battle of GameStop

#491

Post by imtringued »

SilasX wrote: post #482
blaser-waffle wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone really believe that? The Fed'Gov couldn't get it together enough to vote for $600 assistance checks. We might see something before too long... maybe. And this is for a global pandemic. You think they're gonna do anything if people choose to make risky-ass bets that don't pan out?

Isn't that exactly what happened with home ownership? Everyone levers up to buy a home, real estate goes into a bubble, and when it would normally crash, the government comes out in force with grants and easy credit programs ("Making Home Affordable" etc) because those malinvestors dominate the voting pool.

That's basically the reason why interest rates should be above 0% right now. Inflation is mild but it is still higher than 0%. I consider it extremely foolish of the Fed that the interest rates aren't at least at 0.5% just to send a signal that the easy money is slowly disappearing.

That easy money is driving malinvestment and it will just fuel any future bubble that inevitably ends up popping.

Re: The Battle of GameStop

#492

Post by rank0 »

SpaceRaccoon wrote: post #449
rank0 wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is silly. If there was no possibility for financial gain, nobody would be investing in GME.

No, I have friends who have put thousands on the line who are happy to lose it if it bankrupts Melvin Capital.

Your friends are lying through their teeth.

Do you honestly believe these people aren't motivated by profit, when they are clearly entering long positions with the intention of driving up GME's price? It's straight up doublespeak.

Re: The Battle of GameStop

#493

Post by imtringued »

dls2016 wrote: post #414
dvt wrote: post #6

> The same emotion that caused us to root for the thieves in Ocean’s 11 is what makes Wall Street Bets so enticing. Put frankly, Millennials are tired of getting fucked by the man. When you’re underemployed with $100,000 in student loan debt, your financial situation feels overwhelming. You really don’t want to take the advice of your parents or CNBC talking heads [5] to invest 10% of your salary for a 4% annual retu…

> It's a never-ending shit-show. Exactly. Interests rates at 0%, wages stagnating and the system has been setup so that I'm essentially forced to participate in the market (otherwise I miss out on salary). AND these hedge fund idiots are feted as geniuses for their stupid plays. I am basically at 110% cynicism regarding my 401k and would lose but an hour of sleep if it disappeared tomorrow. Fuck it, I'm all in!

You know, one would expect inflation to go up because of the aging population. Lots of people leave the work force and they start spending their retirement funds. That should be good for all those few youngsters. Somehow it is not. It will get really ugly once those youngsters enter their mid 30s and still have no job experience.

Re: The Battle of GameStop

#494

Post by ntsplnkv2 »

mbg721 wrote: post #476
ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Baby boomers didn't have to spend hours in extra curricular activities in HS plus getting 5.0 QPAs to maybe get accepted into a good college so they can have a semi decent chance at a good living. My dad was able to go to a steel mill and make huge amounts of money plus overtime and insanely good benefits. Housing was extremely affordable. Very low debt from trade school. Women wanted to have kids and settle earlier.…

A degree from a state school in something reasonably marketable will still provide a decently comfy lifestyle in most of the US, and there are still plenty of single women who aren't spending all their time looking for someone a little bit snazzier on Tinder. Sure, it might not be quite as easy now, but I think the benefits of baby-boomerdom are a little exaggerated.

This attitude is what continues to kill us as a nation. "Everything is fine! remember this!" but if you look deeper most of it is not true. Things are not well for this nation. The capitol was just stormed.

Those statistics are easily gamed. For one, salaries aren't that high in the cheap COL areas and there aren't any jobs or room for advancement in Tusla. Sorry, that's just the facts. There are plenty of shitty places to live for cheap. But there is no hope of ever advancing or growing yourself - which is extremely important for a nation - advancement.

> and there are still plenty of single women who aren't spending all their time looking for someone a little bit snazzier on Tinder.

This is irrelevant- less people are partnering up and less people are having sex. Single women exist - they're working and focusing on their careers, not settling down.

> The dollar's buying power is less than what it was 20 years ago, meaning what you earn doesn't stretch as far as it once did. Government statistics show that while household income has been steadily increasing, it has failed to keep up with the pace of inflation. In addition, the cost of buying items like houses and automobiles has increased at a rate that outpaces the rise in inflation.

- From the BLS

So let's be clear - it costs way more now to buy a house and a car. You need to spend 4 years not working (and not saving) and going to school to make an OK salary while taking on tens of thousands of debt (avg debt is 30k). Healthcare is extremely expensive. Computers are replacing more and more tasks. And what about people who aren't smart enough for engineering school? Which is most?

Costs are rapidly outpacing gains for the common man. And we're surprised people are anxious and don't want to marry and have wanton sex all the time? They can barely pay the bills.

Re: The Battle of GameStop

#495

Post by imtringued »

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #374
glazyrin wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of these points hit home - but why blame older people for your generation having less sex? Baby boomers didn't make casual sex illegal, nor have they bought up all the sex. Until covid, if young people wanted to have sex with each other they were perfectly free to. Isn't it simply that masturbation and pornography have become relatively more attractive propositions than they were in the past?

Baby boomers didn't have to spend hours in extra curricular activities in HS plus getting 5.0 QPAs to maybe get accepted into a good college so they can have a semi decent chance at a good living. My dad was able to go to a steel mill and make huge amounts of money plus overtime and insanely good benefits. Housing was extremely affordable. Very low debt from trade school. Women wanted to have kids and settle earlier.…

Actually, the right college degree can be an entry ticket to a good high skilled career. It's the low skill jobs that are disappearing. Most dating apps are garbage because they are basically a competitive esports game except with the pretense that they are there to help you. They are not the real world. Don't fall for that garbage.

Women can't vet men over the internet so it basically boils down to how good you look in a picture.

>My dad was able to go to a steel mill and make huge amounts of money plus overtime and insanely good benefits. Housing was extremely affordable.

It's because inflation was still doing okay back then. Inflation eats away at capital unless it is invested productively and by productively I mean primarily by gainfully employing people and providing value.

For the average worker that is very good because they do not have much savings and even if they did their savings grow much slower than the savings of the rich. Once everyone is employed the cat and mouse game begins. Workers can go for the best paying employer and that drives their salaries upwards. Higher salaries reduce the relative value of assets because you have to pay people more for the same work but the value of your assets does not increase fast enough to catch up.

With deflation you don't have to do anything to increase the value of your assets. You just wait and watch wealth inequality grow.

A quick solution is to simply increase capital gains taxes and reduce dividends taxes. Deflation gains will be taxed more. Productive income will be taxed less.

Re: The Battle of GameStop

#496

Post by jmchuster »

gruez wrote: post #381
ollifi wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/r/wsb is kind of insanity, but I’ve come to think that maybe young person can YOLO a bit against the odds somewhere in life. If something returns poorly on average, but has high payouts at the top it might just work out. Your life won’t be the average case but single sample. Lottery is too improbable but some other things ”no rational person would do” can be ok. Main thing is to get over with it soon and protect the…

>If something returns poorly on average, but has high payouts at the top it might just work out. Your life won’t be the average case but single sample. This almost certainly results in a worse average outcome, because of diminishing returns on income. Winning a 10M jackpot won't bring you 10,000 times the happiness compared to finding $1000 on the ground.

i don't know about that, if you're going from barely making rent or just straight up homeless, to never worrying about money again, the multiplier might be even more

Re: The Battle of GameStop

#497

Post by mbg721 »

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #494
mbg721 wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A degree from a state school in something reasonably marketable will still provide a decently comfy lifestyle in most of the US, and there are still plenty of single women who aren't spending all their time looking for someone a little bit snazzier on Tinder. Sure, it might not be quite as easy now, but I think the benefits of baby-boomerdom are a little exaggerated.

This attitude is what continues to kill us as a nation. "Everything is fine! remember this!" but if you look deeper most of it is not true. Things are not well for this nation. The capitol was just stormed. Those statistics are easily gamed. For one, salaries aren't that high in the cheap COL areas and there aren't any jobs or room for advancement in Tusla. Sorry, that's just the facts. There are plenty of shitty pla…

There are some real problems (such as healthcare and education costs), sure, but so many of the things that cause anxiety are self-inflicted. 1950s-level tech and medicine would be cheap, but you can't buy that today at any price. Relationships are harder because of changing social norms, not because we're too poor. The Capitol storming was a dumb stunt that's being milked for all the political capital it's worth.

The movie "Network" has all the same anxieties, (our country has been bought by the highest bidder, the air isn't fit to breathe, etc.)--if things are broken, they've been broken for 50 years, so I'm not convinced that the kids aren't all right.

Re: The Battle of GameStop

#498

Post by Noos »

vga805 wrote: post #5
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #2

They're not winning. They're just minting a different set of losers and pushing the drawing out by a couple weeks. And Reddit being Reddit you can never really be sure whether organic interest is pumping the stock or if they are being manipulated by an astroturfing campaign. If day trading weren't a conflict of interest for me I'd be looking into doing something like that (and consequently not blabbing about it on HN…

the bull thesis has been laid out in detail for months and it's a good one, this is organic interest, Ryan Cohen and others coming over from Chewy was the most recent catalyst

I'm not sure if he can do much.

Gamestop has the same problem that drove other retailers like suncoast, sam goody, strawberries, and many other ones out of business; you cannot survive the digitalization of your primary products.

Gamestop relies on console systems and videogames both new and used to make the core of its primary business. These are what draw people into their locations and to their web site, and allow add on sales like memberships, warranties, collectibles, and accessories to be sold. They generally go to malls, either interior or open.

The problem is the decrease in physical games over digital kills the primary reason to go into their stores, and also prevents middlemen from existing; there is no value add to getting a digital code from gamestop as opposed to steam, ps store, etc. It also murders the high value used game and console sales because now there is less product to trade in.

That just leaves them with collectibles, which they've always been low quality and too expensive, accessories, and a tiny assortment of physical games that now they barely even have stock of. They "advertise" the top 100 games or so in their store, yet don't have stock of many of them ,and their used games are barely a shelf of them.

The problem with being an internet retailer is amazon already does what they do better; it's an uphill battle where they have no real value add. Even Amazon seems to have less and less new physical games, and they have an infinite amount of chinese sellers dramatically lowering the price of game accessories.

I don't see any way to be bullish on them because of their actual business.

edit: its not just them. There's a regional game store chain where I live, and they suffer the exact same problems. They are desperately trying to carry anything and everything geek related just to fill the store with inventory; records, collectible card games, comics, manga, crt tvs, used movies, anime accessories, model kits, etc. They actually are losing the game store focus, as used product even in the retro market is dead now...very few retro systems and games.

Re: The Battle of GameStop

#499

Post by imtringued »

koheripbal wrote: post #365
TeMPOraL wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anybody truly believe that this is a good thing? The stock market is detached from reality. It creates its own universe. The efficiency we're talking about here is self-referential - it's not efficiency in producing object-level value, it's efficiency in enriching participants of the stock market. Which depends as much on the company itself as it depends on the hype the funds and the shareholders can make around…

I find people who stand in disbelief of the markets often don't understand how they are working, and/or why they have and societal value. Skepticism is healthy, but in this case, it's closer to ignorance. The ability for corporations to go to the open market to secure capital is contingent upon a high liquidity of buyers and sellers present and actively participating. The market doesn't exist without "primary" buyers…

The primary value traders provide is liquidity and decreased volatility. There is a fixed need for these two services.

Once you have served every customer the only way to make more money is to take customers away from other competitors, or grow the market as a whole. Traders do not influence the size of the market, they only increase efficiency, so the expectation is that you run into diminishing returns stays.

There is more than enough liquidity in the markets. Any more liquidity is not providing any value.

>Without these trades, the market would lack liquidity, and companies would see an increase in their cost of new capital - which is bad for everyone because it means companies wouldn't invest in growth, equipment purchases, new jobs, etc...

The Fed is already taking care of that. The bigger problem is that there is no reason to invest the Fed money and grow the market.

Re: The Battle of GameStop

#500

Post by imtringued »

mbg721 wrote: post #371
koheripbal wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find people who stand in disbelief of the markets often don't understand how they are working, and/or why they have and societal value. Skepticism is healthy, but in this case, it's closer to ignorance. The ability for corporations to go to the open market to secure capital is contingent upon a high liquidity of buyers and sellers present and actively participating. The market doesn't exist without "primary" buyers…

I guess I'm one of the ignorant; I'm still skeptical about derivatives. I get the need for hedging, but when you can construct something mathematically equivalent to a stock without actually putting money into the company, that seems like it could end very badly.

Commodities have to be traded as futures because you cannot move commodities instantaneously. So what you do is you write on a piece of paper (its digital today) that you will provide X amount of commodities for price Y in Z days. You can then sell the contract for the total value of the commodities and when the contract is due you just send the commodity to the holder of the contract.
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