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Hertz, the original meme stock, is turning out to be worthless

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Re: Hertz, the original meme stock, is turning out to be worthless

#141
post #63

It's not worth discussing BTC, TSLA, GME, or HTZ. That is missing the forest for the trees. The degradation of even the appearance of an orderly market is the story. The money movement (volume of excess trades X magnitude of price change) seems out of reach of unleveraged retail. Faith in private and public institutions is justifiably poor, but also under organized attack. This is going to end badly for everyone, exc…

I think in regards to finance, the only thing that's under attack is the idea of "stock market as source of knowledge about value." But I'm not sure that the stock market has actually served that purpose for decades. IMO, it's good that people are beginning to see the stock market as a casino. If people want to "invest," they'll figure out more pro-social ways to do it than the stock market, and if they want to gambl…

Ben Graham said many decades ago that over the short term the market is like a voting machine but over the long term it's a weighing machine.

There have always been periods of irrationality in the markets but there's no reason to believe that equities are fundamentally untethered from their inherent value in perpetuity.

Eventually most of the overnight WSB stock picking geniuses are all going to lose their shirts and we'll see less of this GME nonsense. They make up a tiny fraction of trading volume anyway.

It happened in '07-08, late 90s dot-com bubble and about every decade or so before that for different reasons

Re: Hertz, the original meme stock, is turning out to be worthless

#142

Hol' up. While in bankruptcy, some fools ran up the price of Hertz stock. Then, while the price was up in the middle of bankruptcy proceedings , Hertz sold some new shares to the same fools. The final result of the bankruptcy wiped out all of the shareholders. While the buyers were obviously fools, Hertz should have known that zero shareholder value was a likely outcome. How was selling more stock in that situation l…

I think that sale never went through. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/hertz-ends-plan-to-sell-st...

Re: Hertz, the original meme stock, is turning out to be worthless

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Looks to me like the executives saw an opportunity to part some people from their money and took it. AKA business. > That's wildly different from issuing new shares when you have inside information which prices them at zero. That’s wildly different from Hertz’s bankruptcy being public information. If people want to gamble on unlikely outcomes, that’s their business.

That description also fits straight up robbery. I don't think it's a particularly meaningful statement in this situation.

No one chooses to be robbed, people chose to buy garbage.

Re: Hertz, the original meme stock, is turning out to be worthless

#144

Hol' up. While in bankruptcy, some fools ran up the price of Hertz stock. Then, while the price was up in the middle of bankruptcy proceedings , Hertz sold some new shares to the same fools. The final result of the bankruptcy wiped out all of the shareholders. While the buyers were obviously fools, Hertz should have known that zero shareholder value was a likely outcome. How was selling more stock in that situation l…

Hertz in official filings: "Hey guys, this stock is most likely totally worthless"

Meme stonk buyers: buys stock

Hertz: "Hey guys, here's some new stock. Remember we disclosed that it's likely totally worthless"

Meme stonk buyers: continues buying worthless stock

Meme stonk buyers: "How could you do this to us?"

Re: Hertz, the original meme stock, is turning out to be worthless

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the end of the day, people are betting on what they believe (or throwing away their money for the lulz). I genuinely, no bullshit, think TSLA is more irrational than GME, and has been for years. I put my money where my mouth is and I'm up 5x in 2 weeks. I know it won't last, but hey TSLA is crashing too. Nothing lasts forever.

I agree that TSLA is irrational, and I think that this is true regardless of whether you think there are more gains to come. My impression of TSLA investors is that many of them just want to be a part of the future, and many others are trying to make money off the volatility & irrationality.

[deleted]

Re: Hertz, the original meme stock, is turning out to be worthless

#146
post #2

I think TSLA and AMD were the original meme stocks.

AMD isn't a meme stock - I knew it was going to be a safe bet when it was at 5, but didn't have money to do anything with it. It is guaranteed to exist, as it is the only x86 competitor to Intel, and IIRC their x86 license is non-transferable. It is nvidia's only main competitor. It does its job pretty well. Is it a blue chip in terms of stability? Clearly it is a bit more volatile. But it isn't dying anytime soon.

Because a company is going to exist doesn't mean it's going to jump 10x+ in value in a few years.

I remember following the WSB AMD memery several years ago and no one really predicted what would actually happen over the ensuing years.

Intel shit the bed on some key foundry investments and AMD had some chip breakthroughs to capitalize on their screwup.

So yeah, some people ended up being right that AMD would do well but I never saw anyone predict WHY.

ANd I can point you to many many that were predicted to do gangbusters and never amounted to anything, funny those always get forgotten.

Re: Hertz, the original meme stock, is turning out to be worthless

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD isn't a meme stock - I knew it was going to be a safe bet when it was at 5, but didn't have money to do anything with it. It is guaranteed to exist, as it is the only x86 competitor to Intel, and IIRC their x86 license is non-transferable. It is nvidia's only main competitor. It does its job pretty well. Is it a blue chip in terms of stability? Clearly it is a bit more volatile. But it isn't dying anytime soon.

Respectfully those are meme stock arguments. A company can have all those things and be worth between 0 and 1 trillion, the question is whether the company is valued accurately by the markets and worth the price. Tesla is valued at what Apple was in 2019, but hasn’t made any profit ever without tax credits. AMD is at $100 billion, which seems high but could be worth it. Doesn’t matter if they mismanage cash and have…

No what you don't understand is that no one else in the market had caught on to the fact that AMD was the main competitor to Intel!

If only we had known way back when!

Re: Hertz, the original meme stock, is turning out to be worthless

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully those are meme stock arguments. A company can have all those things and be worth between 0 and 1 trillion, the question is whether the company is valued accurately by the markets and worth the price. Tesla is valued at what Apple was in 2019, but hasn’t made any profit ever without tax credits. AMD is at $100 billion, which seems high but could be worth it. Doesn’t matter if they mismanage cash and have…

No, they're stock arguments. They're "fundamentals". Did I look at their balance sheet, no. But asking questions about their competition and likelihood of being around and healthy in a few years isn't meme. Even "Hey this has short 140% of float" isn't a meme stock thing. The definition of "meme" stock is it being a meme - is it getting hyped up on social media and reddit with inside jokes and collective action (as m…

>"They're "fundamentals". Did I look at their balance sheet, no."

Please for the love of god tell me you are trolling right now.

Re: Hertz, the original meme stock, is turning out to be worthless

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GME is not bankrupt yet (it is indeed overpriced and comparable to HRTZ), but TSLA and BTC? They don't belong to the same categories. TSLA and BTC will see a lot of gains to come. Eventually without a definite date what goes up comes down but it'd be silly to not take a piece of the pie yourself and keep your savings in cash...

BTC is not a stock so I really don't follow why people keep treating it like it has some underlying value

It sort of has underlying value, in that owning bitcoin lets you write entries in an extraordinarily inefficient append-only database.

(It seems clear to me that this isn't a valuable enough capability to justify the current price of BTC, but I guess that's a separate discussion.)

Re: Hertz, the original meme stock, is turning out to be worthless

#150
post #51
post #2

I think TSLA and AMD were the original meme stocks.

AMD was not a meme. If anything it was a proxy for TSMC doing well. The business case was apparent, and it happened: Intel apparently decided to get to their next node using, I don’t know, a magnifying glass and a flashlight, they fell badly behind, and now AMD has an extremely solid position in the high-end enthusiast market, plus a plum spot in PlayStation and XBox sales.

It's always interesting how the great investments are always so obvious looking in the rear view mirror.
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