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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

#271

Post by pbourke »

ksdale wrote: post #63
throwaway5752 wrote: post #47

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…

> If people want to "invest," they'll figure out more pro-social ways to do it than the stock market

Here are 99% of the things you can invest in as a person without a very large amount of capital:

- real estate (your own home or rental units)

- bonds (another security - same issue as equities in your analysis)

- private business

Are any of those inherently more pro-social than equities?

The stock market encompasses both WSB speculators and “buy and hold forever” investors.

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

#272

Post by nootropicat »

jboog wrote: post #141
ksdale wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>but there's no reason to believe that equities are fundamentally untethered from their inherent value in perpetuity.

Yes, but human lives are finite. Of course the current market is mostly a ponzi, but what if it lasts yet another decade? That's a major fraction of anyone's lifespan.

Fundamentally the ponzi started to collapse in 2007/2008, but it was bailed out by the government. Increasingly it looks like the only way the ponzi can actually collapse is by dollar inflating, everyone getting poorer and ponzi games collapsing in real terms, but not nominal terms. Unfortunately, probably the best thing to do in the meantime is to try to win at ponzi games and try to leave others with bags.

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

#273

Post by nl »

exporectomy wrote: post #216
jboog wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read some of the posts on WSB a huge number of people just really have no clue about capital markets, investing, or basic business sense. I don't know how many times I saw people claiming GME would go to $1000 because the new CEO has a brilliant new scheme to turn the company around by going digital! Why "going digital" in 2021 means your company is worth 100X what it was a few months ago I'll never quite unde…

> Why "going digital" in 2021 means your company is worth 100X what it was a few months ago I'll never quite understand. Understand it or not, it happened. Going from $3 to $300 in under a year. Just because some people stated seemingly silly reasons for their predictions doesn't mean everyone betting on it is stupid. They may be trying to encourage others, have an intuition, hope to detect the peak and quickly sell,…

> whoever makes money is not the stupid one

Errr.. this doesn't follow at all.

Plenty of people get lucky by winning the lottery. This doesn't make lotteries a smart investment in general (and yes I'm aware of some exceptions to that).

Getting in on the GME short squeeze was smart.

More than that means you are thinking there is something other than the short squeeze going on. There doesn't seem to be much evidence for that.

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

#274

Post by nl »

candybar wrote: post #128
Judgmentality wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I am aware of the publicly available data. I'm saying that's wrong, but again I can't share my data so I don't expect you to believe me. We're not going to agree. I'm exiting this thread.

What kind of data do you have? Do you work at one of these companies and know that the data is fudged? Do you run an analytics company? There could be some measurement errors or biases but it's virtually impossible that it's directionally incorrect when we're talking about 67% growth y/y.

It sounds like their data is "I've heard some people complaining".

But the market leader in any market always gets the most complaints.

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

#275

Post by raindropm »

exporectomy wrote: post #216
jboog wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read some of the posts on WSB a huge number of people just really have no clue about capital markets, investing, or basic business sense. I don't know how many times I saw people claiming GME would go to $1000 because the new CEO has a brilliant new scheme to turn the company around by going digital! Why "going digital" in 2021 means your company is worth 100X what it was a few months ago I'll never quite unde…

> Why "going digital" in 2021 means your company is worth 100X what it was a few months ago I'll never quite understand. Understand it or not, it happened. Going from $3 to $300 in under a year. Just because some people stated seemingly silly reasons for their predictions doesn't mean everyone betting on it is stupid. They may be trying to encourage others, have an intuition, hope to detect the peak and quickly sell,…

I'm sorry for being rude, but that's sounds like what people who lose all life saving said...

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

#276

Post by nl »

faceplanted wrote: post #65
aphextron wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The South Sea Company was the original meme stock.

That's kind of misrepresenting what the South Sea Bubble was, with meme stocks the public are at least in on the joke, the South Sea Bubble was a private conspiracy/social phenomenon of a different fashion.

Reading some of the comments here it's pretty clear the many truly believe the GME hype: that it was somehow something more than a short squeeze, and that it is magically going to transform into a business with revenue able to support its current valuation.

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

#278

Post by nl »

llampx wrote: post #2

I think TSLA and AMD were the original meme stocks.

Talking about the idea that AMD was a meme stock on HN seems strange. There were long discussions here before the AMD stock price rise about the technical merits of their platform, and further discussions about how they were getting better and better distribution after it did release.

These are pretty fundamental reasons why a stock price might be likely to go up.

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

#279

Post by muskox2 »

bschne wrote: post #212
TaupeRanger wrote: post #190

"The original meme stock"? The term "pump and dump" is a classic phenomenon that is very common and has happened for decades...this is neither new nor particularly interesting as a specific case.

I thought „pump and dump“ refers to coordinated penny stock fraud whereas this was less of a coordinated scam and more the internet being the internet?

They're not mutually exclusive. But as to what degree GME was or was not a coordinated scam, there's no doubt it has inspired other pump and dump schemes (RKT, DOGE)

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

#280

Post by rurp »

School-Cotton wrote: post #227
karmelapple wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you say those same people who just learned the phrase “short” or “short squeeze” are likely the same kind of people going to the casino and thinking they can successfully count cards? As mentioned elsewhere in here, it’s ultimately gambling. It’s putting money up, exposing it to risk that could completely wipe you out. If someone doesn’t understand that about stock investing, I think they’re very similar to som…

Bit of a tangent, but: it’s absolutely possible to learn a relatively simple card-counting system and play with positive expected value in a casino. You can easily run simulations to prove this.

I think this reinforces the GPs point. It's not all that hard to learn some basic card counting but probably 99% of people who try it casually end up playing a -EV game, due to the fact that the edge is very small and requires practicing/playing with much more discipline than most people want to bother with.
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