u/DeepFuckingValue and the GameStop Reddit mania • Hacker News Board

Re: u/DeepFuckingValue and the GameStop Reddit mania

#431

Post by fma » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 4:53 AM UTC

tartoran wrote: post #395

pishpash wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Gamestop" is a string of letters. Unless it has a pile of unrestructurable liabilities, what's forcing it to become bankrupt vs. being a startup?

It’s its management. Gamestop wasnt able to catch up with the times and a pile of money won’t help them. The model isn’t vaible anymore and if they pivot into something else they may as well change the name as it would be irrelevant. A start up experiences most progress when they’re small and nimble. I assume Gamestop as a corp has accumulated a lot of cruft and that would hold them back.

Speaking of management...Ryan Cohen, founder of Chewy.com is a recent heavy investor in Gamestop. Pretty sure he knows a thing or two about startups and he wouldn't be pouring in money into it if he felt it's hopeless.

Re: u/DeepFuckingValue and the GameStop Reddit mania

#432

Post by __MatrixMan__ » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 4:54 AM UTC

fakedang wrote: post #425

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not without sympathy for them, but I also think it would be good if people stopped allocating their retirements towards "money tricks on Wall-Street" and instead found ways to put it towards creating a world worth retiring in.

If they did that, I doubt their would be retirements. Assuming all eco-tech companies on WS are trustworthy enough (not Enron-esque), and investing in eco-tech will "create a world worth retiring in", most people would have seen a significant part of their retirement go to zero. Or if they decided to invest in a publicly traded life-sciences company in hopes of finding more breakthroughs, they would see their investm…

What "a world worth retiring in" means in each retiree's case is gonna vary based on their situation. Wanna die on Mars? Maybe put it all in Space X, I don't know.

All I'm saying is that it's a shame that we're taught that the point of investing is to make money, rather than make a difference with a side effect of having more money. Because left to its own devices, money tends to motivate some pretty awful things.

I don't want retire rich, I wanna retire post-scarcity. I hate letting my money sit in an account while smart kids can't afford college. Those kids are gonna develop the tech that saves my ass one day--or not--depending on how we play our cards now.

Blindly picking a fund based on performance just feels like shooting my future self in the foot.

Re: u/DeepFuckingValue and the GameStop Reddit mania

#433

Post by eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 4:55 AM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #377

eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you elaborate on this? This reads as essentially false to my understanding. No, it's not false AFAIK :) By 'endpoint' I mean what an address on those networks actually *addresses*. Both a Tor-address (a .onion hostname, or a regular web address if you use Tor to access one), and an I2P-address, are essentially similar to an IP-address in terms of being the address of a *machine*. They are anonymized, but the da…

The wording can be a little confusing, because i believe in tor when people talk about censorship resistance they mean censorship of the whole network - e.g. blocking all the entry nodes, trying to find bridges and blocking them, which is a different type of censorship. I imagine freenet is just as vulnerable to that, and i would imagine that is an easier thing for powerful entities to do than to push GB of data into…

Freenet in fact is less vulnerable to that because they aim to prevent that specific attack you described with the following feature:

It offers a "darknet" mode where you manually add peers by exchanging cryptographic keys with them.

The connections to those peers are fully encrypted then and thus very difficult to block because you can't detect Freenet with merely packet inspection anymore.

Besides, the ability to censor individual Tor sites is *bad enough* already IMHO.

Re: u/DeepFuckingValue and the GameStop Reddit mania

#434

Post by arthurcolle » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 4:59 AM UTC

boring_twenties wrote: post #363

runarberg wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I’m not joking, nor am I harming my future. I don’t have to make an optimal amount of growth on my savings to afford my retirement. There is no harm in owning less money then if I had used them to swindle more workers out of their profits on the open markets. In fact, every dollar you make as a result of not working is a dollar somebody else worked for and didn’t get. You are harming workers by earning money on th…

I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a comment.

+1 for the Charles Babbage reference

Re: u/DeepFuckingValue and the GameStop Reddit mania

#435

Post by codeisawesome » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 5:05 AM UTC

smaddox wrote: post #354

fractionalhare wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends. If a hedge fund went bankrupt, the cash will go to investors who may be risk averse. If the hedge fund survives it will have significant losses and probably be cagey about deploying a lot of capital again too quickly because it just stared into the face of death. In the case of individual investors selling off everything, they might be scared because everything is crashing. There's no rule that says the m…

There's also leverage/margin (i.e. borrowing to buy stocks). With higher volatility, investors might be less willing to use leverage, resulting in less total demand, which results in lower prices. When stocks drop, excess income and capitol drops, reducing demand in the wider market. Companies come under pressure to cut costs, and end up doing layoffs. This further lowers demand, resulting in a feedback loop. This is…

Okay - that begins to explain the problem a bit. So people being afraid and just holding on to their newfound gains in just cash or say, T-bills - can depress the entire economy by a lack of interest in stocks. Structurally it seems a little problematic though that companies would depend so much on issuing stock to fund their operations or even growth - ideally they should be able to do that with revenue (or even debt)...

Re: u/DeepFuckingValue and the GameStop Reddit mania

#436

Post by voldacar » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 5:11 AM UTC

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #325

chillacy wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> militant activism via buying stock as a means to sticking it to the man. > beginning of another stock market crash Hmm sounds like it's working then.. Going off of the resentment against the 'elites' in wsb comments to the tune of "I started broke and I'll go broke again but if the rich go broke..."

Maybe we'll see a new class of financial instrument come out of this. Not sure how it would work but I have to imagine that some clever person on Wall Street can find a way to sell shares of: > Give me $1 and I'll make sure your target loses $5

this sounds both illegal and extremely fun

Re: u/DeepFuckingValue and the GameStop Reddit mania

#437

Post by j2bax » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 5:11 AM UTC

sfblah wrote: post #427

raziel2701 wrote: post #22

On wsb u/deepfuckingvalue showed he still holds 50,000 shares and 500 deep ITM call options. He has secured a profit of $13.8 million dollars, and his remaining open position is valued at $45 million. I would caution people to not quickly fall into the "if he's still in, I'm still in" meme. He has secured a $14 million bag, regardless if the stock goes to zero he's already secured a life changing amount of money, he…

I'm not sure anyone cares, but the way to think about this is simply to ask if you would own GME at $300 a share if you had to hold it for the next 20 years. The answer is just obviously no. You'll never receive anything remotely close to that in dividends from the company. It's just a mania.

Why not? Gaming/hardware is a massive industry. They have enough brand recognition to take a slice of it if they make the right moves.

Re: u/DeepFuckingValue and the GameStop Reddit mania

#438

Post by eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 5:11 AM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #371

matheusmoreira wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really anonymous? How does it compare to Tor and i2p?

The short version: Freenet has better anonoyminity properties than tor/i2p at the cost of scaling poorly and only supporting static documents instead of interactive (tcp) servers. Think of freenet as anonoymous Gnutella

> scaling poorly

Source?

It's become satisfyingly fast for me over the past years.

> only supporting static documents instead of interactive (tcp) servers.

You can develop dynamic services on Freenet just fine.

It is just done in a different fashion technically:

Instead of hosting the software on a server, and running scripts on the clients' web browser, there is no server/client model. It's true peer-to-peer: Every client is its own server, and the code runs there.

I.e. users install "plugins" for Freenet, and those use the network primitives which Freenet provides to establish dynamic connections and render dynamic content.

So you can have dynamic HTML if you want to. It's just not served by the sites you visit. Instead, things are developed "once and for all" as plugins for all sites and users to use.

So it's kinda like "forced true decentralization". You can't just shove JavaScript down the throat of random visitors of your site. You actually have to go through the effort of making your site's service a real application which people voluntarily choose to run.

Re: u/DeepFuckingValue and the GameStop Reddit mania

#439

Post by pjc50 » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 5:11 AM UTC

smattiso wrote: post #368

aeternum wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GME issuing shares would be the smart thing to do. The primary goal of a stock market is really to allow exactly that. The market determines the cost of capital for each company, thereby influencing the allocation of capital in society. The question then becomes how efficiently the company can put that capital to use.

If they do that it's instant bankruptcy for GameStop. Nobody will ever shop there again. Period. It's over.

Why? Nobody will remember the memes. Boycotts hardly ever work. And AMC already did it.

Re: u/DeepFuckingValue and the GameStop Reddit mania

#440

Post by fma » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 5:12 AM UTC

ggggtez wrote: post #183

jzoch wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying to figure out the "fundamental" value of anything is a fools errand. Im not saying GME wont drop eventually but there is no value on fundamentals of everything. Look at all the short-sellers of TSLA who made the same mistake. These companies are valued on what the market decides and we all know "The market is irrational".

To be honest, this is kind of the problem I have to stock investing as a whole. It sounds great to "invest on the fundamentals", but there doesn't appear to be a way for the average person to even comprehend what "the fundamentals" even are. But there has to be at least one fundamental: If the company goes bankrupt, the stock is worth nothing. Gamestop is most certainly going to go bankrupt eventually. Their business…

Fundamentals isn't everything and is really a way that wallstreet has brainwashed people to invest in companies that provide no returns on their investment. As an extreme case, a biotech company with no sales, no profits, no approved drugs and sinking money into R&D is still worth something, and can be worth a lot.

On a more practical case, if you'd preferred to have invested in Intel on "fundamentals" instead of AMD because INTC has 10x more sales...then go ahead. But you should know, 1 stock went sideways for 3 years and another is up 750%.

And Chamath Palihapitiya said it best when he was on CNBC...who got the TSLA investment wrong? Hedge funds. Who got it right? Retail investors.