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The Battle of GameStop

paranoidenough.com

21–30 of 583 posts

Re: The Battle of GameStop

#21
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…

The first rule of Fight Club...

Re: The Battle of GameStop

#22
post #14
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. At least some of us are getting rich in /r/wallstreetbets. This is sad because most of what you've said can be applied to lotteries as well, which historically has been criticized as being a "tax" on the poor. The end result is the same: people putting themselves in a worse place financially (on average), just so they can cope with their bleak existence.

I wouldn’t compare what happened with GME to the lottery at least not for the people who understood why they were doing what they were doing.

Re: The Battle of GameStop

#23
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

People exist who in the past two days paid $150 for a share that most analysts think is worth about $14 — at a company with negative earnings for six of the last seven quarters, and minimal earnings growth over the past few years. I'm sure there was some bull case for the company, and it might have had a snowball's chance in hell around $14 or even $20/share. But at $60+ ? What on God's good earth is supposed to make…

good point, to clarify the bull thesis wasn't bullish to the current absurdity. i think the bull case is a good one but im not going to lay out the case here. check out the user RoaringKitty 's videos on youtube from a few months ago. (the stock was hovering around 4 then)

right now though the chaos has nothing to do with the underlying value. now it's all about the squeeze. but that's never been part of the bull thesis

Re: The Battle of GameStop

#25

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…

Is Melvin Capital winning with their short position? When they’re contractually obligated to repurchase millions of shares and there are no shares left to purchase, what do you think is going to happen? There are winners and losers, but in this case the loser could very well be an investment firm with 12B in assets. Some wealthy investors are about to have that wealth redistributed. I think that’s the point.

Re: The Battle of GameStop

#26
post #5

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

It works at the start, but the problem is that the people who want to sell their positions need to dump it on the losers and just keep pumping the price and making late comers lose lots of money.

The reality of wealth building is that short term it’s always 0 sum game, long term it’s a way to get rich.

Re: The Battle of GameStop

#27
post #14
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. At least some of us are getting rich in /r/wallstreetbets. This is sad because most of what you've said can be applied to lotteries as well, which historically has been criticized as being a "tax" on the poor. The end result is the same: people putting themselves in a worse place financially (on average), just so they can cope with their bleak existence.

Except, if a whole generation YOLOs hard enough, maybe the government will actually choose to bail them out for once.

Re: The Battle of GameStop

#28
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Come on, that is what you’ve been trained to say. I heard the exact same phrases from my younger brother.

Trained by who? what are you talking about?

Re: The Battle of GameStop

#29

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…

They essentially drove one of wall streets very successful hedge funds of recent years to near failure they had to make a deal for an emergency investment today to stay afloat. I’d call that winning.

Re: The Battle of GameStop

#30
post #10

Isn’t the underlying problem here that hedge funds have shorted more stock than the float? They got themselves in this mess. Don’t be so greedy, you short more than shares that trade.

It's disturbing and dishonest how the media is painting an image where the day traders on WallStreetBets are the villains and the hedge funds shorting this stock to over 100% of float for over the past year and also purchasing large numbers of puts so market makers naked short to hedge are the victims.

The float has been over 100% shorted for over a year. The shorts could have easily covered or trimmed their position when the stock was trading in the $3-$4 range this spring and summer for a profit but they chose not to. Book value was estimated to be $10 at that time. News came out that improved GameStop's situation and its future appeared less bleak. There should have been short covering on each of those pieces of news: GameStop paying off debt early, Ryan Cohen first buying 5% of the company, then 13%, then joining the board with 2 other CHEWY executives, the new PlayStation and XBox consoles releasing and always being immediately sold out, the microsoft profit sharing deal, huge ecommerce growth yoy, etc. But the shorts chose not to cover at all! Short float remained the same at over 100% as more new people bought into the company on the good news.

Many people may not know this but a new CEO was hired 2 years ago: George Sherman, and he's been doing a good job of turning around the company by doing unsexy things like shutting down unprofitable stores like where there's 2 GameStops in a single mall and improving their supply chain logistics and ecommerce business. 95% of all GameStop stores are 4 wall ebitda profitiable was what they said on a conference call 2 years ago.

I would also like to point out GameStop is a highly cyclical business. It depends a lot on the 7 year playstation and xbox console cycle. Look back on the historic stock chart. People think it's failing because revenue declines year over year then the stock goes parabolic in the new console release year. It's like the console cycle isn't priced in until it hits people in the face.

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