OT Gamestop: Wall Street + Animal House?

Discussion in 'Blazers OT Forum' started by wizenheimer, Jan 27, 2021.

  1. Natebishop3

    Natebishop3 Don't tread on me!

    Joined:
    Sep 17, 2008
    Messages:
    92,735
    Likes Received:
    55,374
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Location:
    Portland, OR
    I don't know dude..... the meme seems dead. How long are we supposed to hold on this shit? I mean..... At this point I'm not expecting to get my money back lol
     
  2. barfo

    barfo triggered obsessive commie pinko boomer maniac Staff Member Global Moderator

    Joined:
    Sep 15, 2008
    Messages:
    34,035
    Likes Received:
    24,902
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Location:
    Blazer OT board
    Well, yeah. I understand doing it for fun, but if you are investing in something that has near-zero intrinsic value as a money making plan - that's about as high-risk a financial plan as one could come up with, so some people are guaranteed to be burned when it comes back down.

    barfo
     
  3. SlyPokerDog

    SlyPokerDog Woof! Staff Member Administrator

    Joined:
    Oct 5, 2008
    Messages:
    122,799
    Likes Received:
    122,786
    Trophy Points:
    115
    I'M INVESTING EVERYTHING IN BARFOCOIN AND BITPIRATE!
     
  4. EL PRESIDENTE

    EL PRESIDENTE Username Retired in Honor of Lanny.

    Joined:
    Feb 15, 2010
    Messages:
    50,346
    Likes Received:
    22,531
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Burn, baby, burn.
     
  5. barfo

    barfo triggered obsessive commie pinko boomer maniac Staff Member Global Moderator

    Joined:
    Sep 15, 2008
    Messages:
    34,035
    Likes Received:
    24,902
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Location:
    Blazer OT board
    Those are solid buy-and-hold blue-chip investments.

    barfo
     
  6. Shaboid

    Shaboid Well-Known Member

    Joined:
    Apr 30, 2014
    Messages:
    10,021
    Likes Received:
    13,150
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Bezos stepping down as CEO!! Short AMZ!!!

    :NOTMARIS:
     
  7. Natebishop3

    Natebishop3 Don't tread on me!

    Joined:
    Sep 17, 2008
    Messages:
    92,735
    Likes Received:
    55,374
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Location:
    Portland, OR
    God it’s tempting to buy more GME. But is it over?
     
  8. SlyPokerDog

    SlyPokerDog Woof! Staff Member Administrator

    Joined:
    Oct 5, 2008
    Messages:
    122,799
    Likes Received:
    122,786
    Trophy Points:
    115
    What are the nerds on WSB saying?
     
  9. Natebishop3

    Natebishop3 Don't tread on me!

    Joined:
    Sep 17, 2008
    Messages:
    92,735
    Likes Received:
    55,374
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Location:
    Portland, OR
    It’s extremely divided. There are people posting to hold and that the squeeze is still coming, and there are people who say the squeeze already happened and that the halt killed the rest of the squeeze.

    I don’t know what to believe. At this point it makes no sense to sell. I’m not out that much money and most people say the stock is worth probably 60 at fair value.

    I will just stick with it long term but BB and AMC are probably better long term investments.
     
    SlyPokerDog likes this.
  10. SlyPokerDog

    SlyPokerDog Woof! Staff Member Administrator

    Joined:
    Oct 5, 2008
    Messages:
    122,799
    Likes Received:
    122,786
    Trophy Points:
    115
    I'm just going to wait until morning before deciding anything. @EL PRESIDENTE got us into this so if it turns out that we lose some money we can hunt him down and get it from him.

    Remember the majority of his Blazer collection is still at his parent's house.
     
  11. SlyPokerDog

    SlyPokerDog Woof! Staff Member Administrator

    Joined:
    Oct 5, 2008
    Messages:
    122,799
    Likes Received:
    122,786
    Trophy Points:
    115
    https://tradesmithdaily.com/investi...uld-be-real-or-deceptive-market-manipulation/

    Over the past few days, the level of hedge fund short interest in GameStop fell sharply. Or did it?

    On the evening of Monday, Feb. 1, Bloomberg reported that “GameStop Short Interest Plunges in Sign Traders Are Covering.”

    Two separate research firms, IHS Markit and S3 Partners, reported the drop:

    “Short interest in the video-game retailer plummeted to 39% of free-floating shares, from 114% in mid-January, according to IHS Markit Ltd. data. Data from S3 Partners, another market intelligence firm, showed a similar pattern, with GameStop’s short sales having fallen to about 50% of its total stock available to trade, down from a high of roughly 140% reached earlier this year.”

    The reporting coincided with a big drop in the value of GME shares. This is clear evidence that the hedge funds are winning, and that the Reddit army is losing.

    Unless the short interest data is being manipulated, which is also a real possibility.

    If the U.S. Congress does any real digging when it holds hearings on the GameStop situation, it will uncover some very interesting quirks of the market, many of them revolving around shorting practices.

    Most people understand “naked shorting” to be an illegal thing, and it is — sort of.

    On the other hand, there are plenty of instances where naked shorting is more of a gray area — not so much a violation of the law as a minor infraction worthy of a parking ticket — and other instances where certain players can short a stock beyond 100% of the float, or short nakedly, in a wholly legal way.

    This is where the reported sharp decline in GameStop (GME) short interest gets intriguing.

    There are at least two plausible explanations for GME short interest declining — giving the appearance of hedge funds covering more than half their shorts — even as the GME share price fell sharply alongside.

    The first explanation is that GME squeezers lost their discipline and broke ranks.

    If a critical mass of holders on the long side of GME started selling to realize profit in GME, that would have given the hedge funds an opportunity to cover their shorts — via buying back their shares — at progressively lower levels as the share price fell.

    Plummeting short interest along with a plummeting GME share price, in other words, could indicate that the Reddit army is headed for the hills, and the longs were selling early, giving the shorts a means to cover, as the longs got out.

    The notion that the squeezers broke ranks, and that the hedge funds are winning, is certainly the perception that was created. The Bloomberg article strongly suggested that the Reddit army has lost.

    “Short squeezes can only last as long as there is a large short position in a stock,” the chief market strategist at Miller Tabak & Co. told Bloomberg. “Once that dissipates, the situation changes completely.”

    But there is another possibility, which is that the hedge fund short interest in GME didn’t really dissipate.

    If the long holders of GME shares did not break ranks and sell en masse, it would have been impossible for the share price to fall and hedge fund short interest to fall at the same time.

    That is because, without a critical mass of long-side holders selling into the market, the hedge funds covering their shorts would have nobody to buy from as they covered (bought back) their short positions.

    In this second scenario, though, the hedge funds that are short — with tens of billions of dollars on the line — could have decided to play a high-stakes trick.

    The trick would be: “Make it look like we’ve covered our shorts when we really haven’t (because we can’t), so that short interest falls and the Reddit army gets demoralized, thus breaking the squeeze.”

    The way the hedge funds could have done this — made it appear as if they covered their shorts, even when they really didn’t — involves trickery in the options market.

    The tactics involved are not a secret. In fact, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) knows all about such tactics, and published a “risk alert” memo on the topic in August 2013.

    The SEC memo is titled “Strengthening Practices for Preventing and Detecting Illegal Options Trading Used to Reset Reg SHO Close-out Obligations.” You can read it here via the SEC website.

    The memo contains a dozen pages of highly technical language, but here’s a quick rundown:

    • If short sellers are facing a squeeze because shares are hard to buy, or scrutiny for holding an illegal short position, they can create an appearance of having closed their short position through the use of deceptive options trades.
    • A hedge fund that is short a stock can write call options on a stock — meaning they are now “short” the call options, having sold the call options to someone else (typically a market maker) — and simultaneously buy shares against the call options.
    • The shares bought against the call options could be “synthetic” longs — meaning they are not part of the original share float of the stock — as sold to the hedge fund by the market maker that takes the other side of the options trade.
    • This works because, if a market maker buys options from an options writer, the market maker has legal privileges to do a version of “naked shorting” as part of their hedging function. This is necessary, under the current rules and the current system, for market makers to protect themselves when facilitating options trades.
    • As a result of the above transaction, the hedge fund that sold short calls was able to buy synthetic long shares against the calls. (A synthetic share is one that has a long on one side and a short on the other but wasn’t part of the original float.) The synthetic long shares are the other side of the naked shorts, legally initiated by the market maker, so the market maker can hedge.
    • The hedge fund that bought the shares can now report that they have “bought back” their short position via buying long shares — except they actually haven’t! The synthetic shares they bought are canceled out against the short call positions they initiated, a necessity of the maneuver by way of the market maker’s hedging of the call position they bought from the hedge fund.
    It gets very complicated, very fast.

    But the gist is that hedge funds can use tricks to make it look like they’ve covered their shorts — even if they haven’t truly covered, and can’t, for lack of available float — by way of exploiting loopholes that exist due to an interplay of reporting rule delays, market maker naked shorting exceptions, and legal practices of synthetic share creation (new longs and shorts made from thin air) relating to market-making.

    Below is a section of the SEC memo (from page 8) that gets to the heart of it:

    “Trader A may enter a buy-write transaction, consisting of selling deep-in-the-money calls and buying shares of stock against the call sale. By doing so, Trader A appears to have purchased shares to meet the broker-dealer’s close-out obligation for the fail to deliver that resulted from the reverse conversion. In practice, however, the circumstances suggest that Trader A has no intention of delivering shares, and is instead re-establishing or extending a fail position.”

    In plain language, “Trader A” in SEC parlance could intentionally be giving the appearance of closing their illegal short position — when in reality they have no intention of doing so (or no ability to do so).

    Under normal circumstances, tricks like these were used to help hedge funds maintain short positions that, legally speaking, they weren’t supposed to have because the shares were never properly located.

    The GameStop squeeze is a unique scenario, however, because it is a very public fight to the finish between the Reddit army and the hedge funds that are short. Either the Reddit army wins and the hedge funds pay four-digit prices ($1,000 or more) to cover their shorts because of margin calls, or the hedge funds win and the GME share price falls back to the low double-digits.

    In a battle like that, with public coverage influencing both sides, perception is a weapon. As such, if the hedge funds can generate the appearance of having covered most of their shorts, while driving down the GME share price through aggressive selling on low volume (something known as a “short ladder attack”), then the hedge funds increase their odds of breaking the squeeze — in part because media outlets will report things like “GameStop Short Interest Plunges” without looking deeper.

    To be clear, it is also possible the first scenario is true.

    GameStop shares may have fallen precipitously, with hedge fund short interest falling alongside, because a critical mass of long GME holders simply lost faith and tried to sell before the squeeze was complete.

    But it makes a lot of sense to question that narrative, given the wide array of deceptive tricks that some hedge funds (certainly not all of them, or even most of them) have used to perpetuate questionable or even illegal shorting tactics for a very long time.

    And again, these tricks are so pervasive and old, the SEC wrote a “risk alert” memo about them in 2013.

    As such, whether the drop in GameStop short interest was real or smoke and mirrors, the fact that changes in the level of short interest can be faked — with hedge funds making it look like they have closed out, but haven’t — is a serious compliance loophole that should be forcefully addressed.

    As a side note, the answer to this problem likely resides in the blockchain.

    Apart from market maker privileges, the three big reasons hedge funds can play games with short positions — delayed reporting requirements, time windows of days (or even weeks in some cases) for trades to settle, and related transactions being executed in different places, or with different counterparties, for the sake of deception — could all be answered with a blockchain-based settling and clearing system where transactions are noted instantly and made visible to all parties (plus the SEC).
     
    Haakzilla likes this.
  12. SlyPokerDog

    SlyPokerDog Woof! Staff Member Administrator

    Joined:
    Oct 5, 2008
    Messages:
    122,799
    Likes Received:
    122,786
    Trophy Points:
    115
  13. SlyPokerDog

    SlyPokerDog Woof! Staff Member Administrator

    Joined:
    Oct 5, 2008
    Messages:
    122,799
    Likes Received:
    122,786
    Trophy Points:
    115
    News Release

    GameStop Appoints Chief Technology Officer

    Announces Two Additional Executive Hires to Support Transformation

    GRAPEVINE, Texas, Feb. 03, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- GameStop Corp. (NYSE: GME) (“GameStop” or the “Company”) today announced that it has appointed Matt Francis to the newly-created role of Chief Technology Officer. Mr. Francis has a start date of February 15, 2021.

    Mr. Francis brings more than two decades of experience in e-commerce and consumer technology to GameStop. Most recently, he was an Engineering Leader at Amazon Web Services. He previously held senior-level technology roles at companies such as QVC and Zulily. At GameStop, Mr. Francis will be responsible for overseeing e-commerce and technology functions.

    Additionally, the Company had made two other executive hires:

    • Kelli Durkin, Senior Vice President of Customer Care – Ms. Durkin, who previously served as Chewy’s Vice President of Customer Service, has a start date of March 1, 2021. She helped establish the world-class customer service operation that positioned Chewy to achieve a Net Promoter Score of 86 in 2018. In her new role, Ms. Durkin will oversee all customer service and engagement initiatives at GameStop.
    • Josh Krueger, Vice President of Fulfillment – Mr. Krueger, who previously held senior fulfillment roles at Amazon, Walmart, and QVC, has a start date of March 1, 2021. In his new role, Mr. Krueger will oversee the management of e-commerce fulfillment centers.
    About GameStop
    GameStop Corp., a Fortune 500 company headquartered in Grapevine, Texas, is a digital-first omni-channel retailer, offering games and entertainment products in its nearly 5,000 stores and comprehensive E-Commerce properties across 10 countries. GameStop, through its family of brands offers the best selection of new and pre-owned video gaming consoles, accessories, and video game titles, in both physical and digital formats. GameStop also offers fans a wide variety of POP! vinyl figures, collectibles, board games and more. Through GameStop’s unique buy-sell-trade program, gamers can trade in video game consoles, games, and accessories, as well as consumer electronics for cash or in-store credit. The company's consumer product network also includes www.gamestop.com and Game Informer® magazine, the world's leading print and digital video game publication.

    General information about GameStop Corp. can be obtained at the Company’s corporate website. Follow @GameStop and @GameStopCorp on Twitter and find GameStop on Facebook at www.facebook.com/GameStop.

    https://news.gamestop.com/news-rele...ls/gamestop-appoints-chief-technology-officer
     
    donkiez likes this.
  14. jonnyboy

    jonnyboy Well-Known Member

    Joined:
    Aug 12, 2016
    Messages:
    6,619
    Likes Received:
    5,254
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Location:
    Wyoming
    With all the hype behind AMC and all the people who are supposedly buying or holding, the only explanation for the stock staying stagnant is the throttling being done by the brokers.
     
  15. donkiez

    donkiez Well-Known Member

    Joined:
    Jan 17, 2009
    Messages:
    4,235
    Likes Received:
    3,260
    Trophy Points:
    113
    I think it will get a nice surge once they lift the throttling. I hope it doesn't sink too much before then. I feel like it has found it's bottom of about $7.5, seems to be holding strong just above that
     
  16. Shaboid

    Shaboid Well-Known Member

    Joined:
    Apr 30, 2014
    Messages:
    10,021
    Likes Received:
    13,150
    Trophy Points:
    113
    I'm on NOK and BB and holding tight. I'm not a financial advisor.
     
    GoBlazersGo and SlyPokerDog like this.
  17. Natebishop3

    Natebishop3 Don't tread on me!

    Joined:
    Sep 17, 2008
    Messages:
    92,735
    Likes Received:
    55,374
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Location:
    Portland, OR
    I saw an article that they're developing software to track Reddit posts for stock names to prevent another GME from happening.
     
    SlyPokerDog likes this.
  18. Haakzilla

    Haakzilla Well-Known Member

    Joined:
    Oct 15, 2008
    Messages:
    9,402
    Likes Received:
    7,387
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Occupation:
    SEOWebDesignLLC.com
    Location:
    Central Oregon
    ...if social media platforms were smart they would automatically add a financial disclaimer to the posts, similar to the fact checking disclaimers. This would allow them to absolve their collusion liability etc.
     
    SlyPokerDog likes this.
  19. Natebishop3

    Natebishop3 Don't tread on me!

    Joined:
    Sep 17, 2008
    Messages:
    92,735
    Likes Received:
    55,374
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Location:
    Portland, OR
  20. donkiez

    donkiez Well-Known Member

    Joined:
    Jan 17, 2009
    Messages:
    4,235
    Likes Received:
    3,260
    Trophy Points:
    113
    I just saw an ad for POTX. Looked it up and i really like it. I am already heavy in YOLO, I even own come calls on it for august. If your looking, don't buy either today they are popping off too hot, but don't wait too long.
     
    SlyPokerDog likes this.

Share This Page