Until a few days ago, most people had no reason to think about GameStop, a retail chain that sells video games and accessories. If you have kids, you probably know the place, because your kids like to go there. Otherwise, the only reason to think about the place was to wonder how they managed to survive as a brick-and-mortar operation in a world dominated by on-line retailers. They exist as a reminder that humans still prefer in-person shopping, even if it comes at a premium.
That is the funny thing about the GameStop story. While other traditional retailers struggled to maintain margins, they are an exception. This is a company with ridiculously high margins. Even with a drop in sales due to the great reset launched by the managerial class this year, they maintained their margins. Whatever they are doing in their shops, people think it is worth a premium. Despite this, their stock was a dog, falling below $4 until the recent explosion.
It is the explosion in their share price that has them in the news. The share price as of the close of business yesterday was $347.51. The pre-market ask is $489.00 as these words are being typed. That number keeps going up, so it is not unreasonable to think that shares will be trading at or above $500 today. Everyone now wants a piece of the winningest stock since the dot-com bubble. If you had this company in your portfolio six months ago, you are a very happy investor.
Of course, this explosion in share price did not happen because everyone suddenly realized this was a great company. The story here is retail investors organizing on Reddit noticed that some big hedge funds were shorting the hell out of the stock, despite its depressed price. Shorting a stock is when you borrow shares of the stock and then sell them, hoping to buy them back at a lower price. You then return them to the lender, and you collect the difference.
These hedge funds took this a step further and borrowed shares that did not actually exist, which is called naked short selling. Basically, the center of the naked short sell is a promise to sell the shares at a price on a certain date. If the seller is unable to borrow those shares, then they must go into the market and buy them. If the price is below the promised price, no problem. If not or if the shares are simply not available to be purchased, then it is a very big problem.
This is where we are in the story of GameStop. At least one hedge fund was committed to delivering shares of this company at a few bucks per share, but now the shares are many times higher and becoming something close to unobtanium. The result is the hedge fund, Melvin Capital, has been wiped out. They had to liquidate all of their other holdings to cover their short position. Even with help from other hedge funds, they will file for bankruptcy next week.
By itself, this is an amusing story, but hardly big news. But, no one really knows if this is an isolated situation. The insiders were targeting a number of companies, hoping to jawbone down their share prices while they aggressively shorted those stocks. It is not unrealistic to think there are dozens of hedge funds out there working this grift, so this could be the tip of a much larger iceberg. The movie chain AMC Entertainment is seeing its stock follow GameStop for the same reasons.
Now, this may not sound very interesting, but even in today’s world of magical finance, math still matters. If you have to raise cash to cover your bad bet on a naked short sell, it means selling something to raise the cash. Hedge funds tend not to sell their furniture or expensive sports cars, so they sell their good holdings. Usually, they sell their best holdings, as they are the most liquid. If enough hedge funds are forced to liquidate their good holdings, those holdings will decline in price.
This is the great fear in these situations. No one knows how much exposure there is to this bad trade. That is why the general market will decline, as the robots that do almost all of the trading move into the safest of safe harbors. This, in turn, can result in selling of otherwise solid assets, simply because no one wants to be holding an asset in decline, especially in a declining market. Given the ridiculously inflated share values, this short squeeze could signal a very big correction.
It could also be a big nothing or it could mean the government comes in and makes everything right with bailouts or new rules to prevent further erosion. That really is the story here with GameStop. This revolt of small retail investors against this hedge fund is about the larger issue. The marketplace has been perverted by insiders with special access to both market makers and market regulators. The financial markets are no longer tethered to economic reality. It is just a giant bust out.
This is why this event is being compared to Gamergate. Like the populist revolts we have seen all over the culture the last ten years, this organized attack by small investors is about a larger issue. The institutions we are supposed to rely upon to regulate our lives have been corrupted by managerial insiders. Just as the marketplace of ideas is now manipulated by thugs and lunatics on behalf of the oligarchs, the financial markets have become a grift operated by wealthy insiders.
What this means, of course, is that the insiders getting hurt in this will go to their colleagues in the ruling class and have the insurgents crushed. These people will be pushed off public forums, have their accounts closed by the trading companies and some will probably be arrested on made up charges. In a society where mocking the rulers on Twitter could get you ten years in prison, anything is possible. The ruling class will not be mocked or defied.
On the other hand, it is great example of how to resist managerial tyrants. These people will not be talked out of their corruption. They have no scruples, so they cannot be shamed into doing the right thing. They have real power, so they cannot be removed from their positions. The only course is to drive up the cost for them. Throwing sand in the gears whenever possible drives up the cost of rule. Eventually, the managerial state becomes the naked short sell and has to be liquidated.
Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.
The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.
Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb. Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.
For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.
usNthem said: It’ll be fascinating to see how this plays out. I don’t see how this is even a question or speculation at this point given the events of the past few months, and quite frankly, during the ‘financial meltdown’ of 2008. Last few months: Elites, managers, and well connected left get all the protections of the law including 25k garrisoned soldiers, an army of alphabet agencies to hunt down ‘terrorists, etc. You the plebes get to cower in your house while all your sh-t is destroyed, stolen, burned, and you are beaten. Also last few months, if you create… Read more »
You are right about what will happen–it is happening now, but that will further destroy the markets, which depended on gullible fools believing they were free from manipulation. The overreaction will demonstrate further how fraudulent share prices and the market is overall. Seizure of private assets to prop up the grift is the next stage.
Nope, that about sums it up.
However, at the moment, TPTB will hold off on Reddit because the public is on their side and watching. The govt will go after them later when the public has moved on.
They’ll say the Reddit crowd was guilty of collusion or market manipulation, unlike hedge funds that dump 90%+ of a company’s stock on the market via short selling. I mean, how could flooding the market with a company’s stock change its price?
We have to always remember that the other side has the guns, the courts and they make the laws.
“muh 2A!”
Well, perhaps I should have said that the other side has guys with guns who won’t go to jail if they use them.
Unless they shoot an “aspiring rapper.”
One positive result is that most of these reddit guys buying stocks tend to be lefties. While the inevitable government intervention on behalf of the (((big traders))) won’t make them DR, they will definitely become aware (if not based) on the JQ.
So evidently like the Borg are fond of saying, resistance is futile. We should all slink back into our homes, put on the mask and settle down the watch the liberia ball spectacular in a couple of weeks, right? You don’t think the hysterical over-reaction by the pols, tech and/or oligarch jack offs – now seen to be obvious by millions – isn’t going to generate blow back of any sort or magnitude? Everyone is just going to cower down and continue to take it up the ass? You paint a pretty damn bleak picture and you might be right.… Read more »
Resistance isn’t futile, but we have to be smart. You don’t play to your enemy’s strengths.
At the moment, resistance is forming small groups whom you can trust. Getting involved in local politics, not because you think the system will save us but to start building our own system using the existing infrastructure.
Start laying the foundation to build something more in the future.
This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass!!
That needs to be our response.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2-SG0S5orA
Given what you have described, why is Bernie Madoff in jail? His crimes seem rather bland in comparison.
The same reason Charles Kushner went to jail.
He scammed his fellow tribesmen.
People knew Madoff was dirty, that was why he was so popular. Only, his exclusive roster of (investors) believed he was scamming the goy, not running a Ponzi scheme targeting his own customers.
BTW Wall Street/CNBC wouldn’t be screaming like stuck pigs unless WSB exposed the soft under belly and weakness of our stock market. If the market was healthy they would simply shrug this off. But the market isn’t healthy, it’s sick and very much a over leveraged scam that is still engaged in the same practices that caused the 2008 blow up. But on a much larger scale. Sooner or later it will blow up again and this time no amount of PPT fedbucks can fix it. As for #4 You do realize a lot of these people the Feebs would… Read more »
Back in the day companies went public to raise money for productive investment. Price Discovery was a real thing based upon company performance. Failure (Creative Destruction) was also a possibility. That disappeared with taxpayer-funded bailouts, “Too Big to Fail,” and the repeal of Glass-Steagall. So comparing IPOs v. Stock Buybacks for the last decade, which $$ would you guess is larger?
No, sir. No questions. You nailed it.
Weird how the local news uses the Gamestop story as a segue to a “domestic white Trumpist terrorist arrested.” Almost like they’re trying to link the two in people’s minds.
No questions here. Well stated.
Great post, Apex.
James Kirkpatrick just tweeted: “The Crown lies in the gutter. It won’t be an anon or even some activist that we know of who will pick it up. It will have to be a rebel within the System, a traitor to his class, someone who has resources, something to lose, and more will than ’45 had. Who will it be?”
Absolutely. Any rebellion leader comes always from inside the system. Yeltsin was not freedom fighter but life time Swamp Thing and never did any real work outside communist party. Also Ceausescu was taken down by high ranking Army officers.
No, not all rebellions at all come from within the elites.
in our case elite membership would be like having a title under the Jacobins (whom we should emulate).!
D.C. is still easy street, but that will change as they turn more and more militarized to insulate themselves from the peasants.
As the System becomes more insular and incapable of effective rule, the chances of victory increase and working in the system becomes more and more stifling.
As always, it’s going to be a cold,calculating sociopath. We just need the sociopath to realize your average rural white is more useful for prosperity and rule than horrible .degenerates and backstabbing minorities.
A cold calculating rural loving socipath is begining to sound like Pol Pot. It cud be gud to not hav enny edercation.
Lmao
Or put more bluntly: there is no honor among thieves. The surprising thing here isn’t that hedge fund was driven under by the mob so much as it wasn’t done by another hedge fund. Goldman, etc. in the past have had no issue killing someone off with the knowledge that their buddies at the Fed/Treasury would step in and cover their bets even if they made things get out of hand.
The popular myth about the end of Communist rule in Eastern Europe is that the people protested so vigorously that the system collapsed. An even more ridiculous myth is that Reagan caused the fall of Communism..
In reality, the system was taken down by young elite Communists who studied in Moscow at MGIMO and wanted to be rich like the elites in the West. After they destroyed the system, they immediately proceeded to looting. Today, those that survived are rich “respected businessmen”.
Exactly. The lesson of European communism is most people will stay onboard with totalitarianism until another elite group seizes power. Someone somewhere in the United States is watching these market revelations and calculating how to be on the winning side. As someone pointed out above, that person likely is a sociopath and part of the Swamp.
most people will stay onboard with totalitarianism until another elite group seizes power.
this is universal truth
Warriors are the only good guys that can overthrow a government, this is why right now males are being feminized and females are being masculinized.
It’s Z-Man who said current USA is like Athens, well, who defeated them? it was the spartans, it’s always the warriors. But those warriors rarely come from within the oligarchical state, usually they’re outsiders.
Maybe Russia is the new Sparta, I know russian women abort babies like crazy, but they ain’t completely westernized either.
The Swamp is too weak, too craven. They don’t have young hungry sharks; they have fat middle aged women and Pajama Boys.
Rich (((respected businessmen))) is more accurate.
And, like the 1910s and 40s, they had help from (((American banksters))).
Who makes money from war loans to kings? Who did we repay our 120% GDP WWll debt to?
The (((Anglo-Dutch))) banking system asks the citizen-subject taxpayers for repayment, not some monarch who might die, default, or pogrom.
(Even “usury free” gold-futures based Islamic banks, at their root, are fronts for BIS banks.)
The “Harvard Boys” were jewish economists sent by Bill Clinton to Russia ostensibly to help them transition to a market economy. They then engineered the sale of the assets owned by the old Soviet Union to their co-ethnics for pennies on the dollar.
Of course Clinton and his cronies got their cut. The Russian people were subsequently impoverished and were dying due to depression and alcoholism.
Putin came along and put the interests of the Russian people first. This is a big reason Putin is so hated by the jews.
The Russian people were subsequently impoverished and were dying due to depression and alcoholism.
In the ten years following the Yeltsin coup, average life expectancy in Russia dropped TEN YEARS!
Freedom, yay!
One of the things Marx was right about, and another of the many things libertarians are wrong about, is that the market system is “natural” and will spring up or back if you eliminate “government interference”. So they thought (or lied about, whichever) that when the Soviets collapsed, there would be a resurgence of free markets. Marx would have told them that prior to markets there was a stage of “Primitive Accumulation”, i.e. gangs of armed thugs who steal as much as they can from the common wealth. These become the basis of capitalism. or the Great Houses of feudalism,… Read more »
The popular myth about the end of Communist rule in Eastern Europe is that the people protested so vigorously that the system collapsed
It is not half wrong, at least when it comes to East Germany. It was the masses in the streets chanting “Wir sind das Volk” – We Are the People – which made Hoenecker panic and throw open the gates to the West, signing his own death warrant.
Honecker was the East German equivalent of Helmut Kohl…controlled politicians. The entire country is now under the heel of the Anglo-Zionists. No escape is possible. No alternative narrative will be tolerated.
I’m fairly certain Hoenecker didn’t open the gates on Kremlin orders. By all accounts it was a panicked mistake on his part: a few weeks earlier, Czechoslovakia had opened its borders and East Germans were escaping in droves by that route. The border guards in Berlin were being mobbed by East Germans wanting to cross into West, and when asked what they should do about it, half-senile Hoenecker mumbled something like “well, open the gates, then.” He later claimed he had been misunderstood. And Kohl, IMO, was both the first and the last uncontrolled German leaders, the next-greatest German statesman… Read more »
Czechoslovakia was a good example of young Communists in cooperation with the state secret police organizing the revolution. The senior party leadership had no idea what is going on, while the top state secret police officials made sure the revolution proceeds smoothly, all uncomfortable documents are destroyed and the Moscow educated young commies can become the new rich elites.
in Germany, Honecker was just as clueless while the youngsters were dismantling the system with the help of KGB.
Same scenarios happened in all European communist countries, with the exception of Yugoslavia, which was never fully part of the eastern bloc.
The masses were just a tool.
They didn’t organize themselves. They were helped by certain elements within the party. Just a few years before, any protest would be crushed and most people wouldn’t even know about it.
Napoleon was not of the elite class, he “picked the government of France out of the gutter” as he put it. This govt is certainly The Directory.
I have pocketed about $500 from this madness. Could be alot more if I didn’t keep selling when I thought it hit its peak.
That’s my reward for being sensible in clown paradise.
Anyways. $500 is $500, and that’s alot of beer. So I’m not complaining.
u/DeepValue something on WSB is the YOLO guy who saw the insane GME float and was up $35m.
Clearly, we differ on your definition of “lots of beer”.
Good job, congrats.
The argument that retail is going away simply because of the birth of the Internet seems like a myth when one sees the shenanigans with short-selling these stocks. Sure, retailers are going to take some blows due to it, but it’s pretty clear insiders were intentionally trying to put these retailers into the gutter and profit off of it. The fact that naked short sells are not blatantly illegal shows how corrupt the system is. Their discord server got shut down for hate speech, and we’re seeing the rollout of articles weeping for the poor billionaire hedge fund managers and… Read more »
They’re probably about to find out what being deferential to the fascist oligarchy actually entails.
Back in the “old days”, say 20-25 years ago when stock prices were demarcated in 1/8ths, there used to be something called the uptick rule for shorting a stock. In other words before one could establish a short position, the stock price had to tick up by at least one 1/8th above the last traded price. I believe it was done away with in the early 2000’s, which then allowed short sellers to pile on potentially driving an injured stock into the toilet. Of course now stock prices trade in pennies, so the rule might not make much difference today… Read more »
Short selling, in and of itself, isn’t a terrible thing, at least on a small scale. If a company is being mismanaged, short sellers can expose that. The issue with short selling comes when hedge funds try to use their size to artificially drive down the price of a stock and thus destroy the company. If you borrow 50% or 100% (or more) of a company’s stock and put it into the market, you’ll drive down the price because you’re flooding the market with the company’s stock. Since so much of Wall Street is essentially momentum shops, the stock will… Read more »
That works until it doesn’t as Melvin is finding out now, but yeah.
“Short selling, in and of itself, isn’t a terrible thing, at least on a small scale. If a company is being mismanaged, short sellers can expose that.”
this right here. Short selling can expose fake companies and corrupt management… As with all things in life certain people take a good tool and turn it into a murder weapon.
I doubt whether the benefits with options outweigh their problems.
Any short sale that leads to an aggregate number of short sales being greater than the number of legally issued shares is, by definition fraud.
This is what Singer did to Cabela’s, which was a profitable company.
It appears the short to float is still around 139% which means the previous shorts never closed out despite talk of it on biz news, or other hedges took out new shorts. Insane. And if you read the wallstreetbetz forum on reddit, they have an almost religious fervor. They are willing to take losses if it means sticking it to these short sellers. Curious how the hammer will drop on them. Online brokerages stopped trading yesterday somewhat, and reddit closed that sub for a bit but it is back open and gaining 5k subscribers by the minute according to some… Read more »
I would be very careful with what’s being written on Reddit. Lots of propaganda bots, marketing accounts and I am sure pumpers ready to dump.
Oh no doubt you are right. I’m not advocating them by any means and please dont take it as such
The reaction is what is going to tank the markets. Reddit has really pointed out how naked the emperor is.
The little guy vs Wall Street smells like bs. This is more likely hedge funds feeding on other hedge funds. The little guy meme is much more satisfying though.
There’s some of that, though ZH noted that a real pro operation would have also shorted the quality stocks ahead of time as well since a pro would have known that the good stocks would sink as they were dumped on to the market to cover bad bets.
There’s probably an element of both. WSoP has been running a series on “Dark Pool” trading and found that GS, JPM, etc., were trading GameStop as of the end of December. https://tinyurl.com/y2ncnz7f
Re; Big Boys in on Gamestop~ Getting the oligarchs to turn on and eat each other is not a bad thing but a good thing.
Also pitch perfect justice.
Now I can only hope that these shithead investors start dumping houses. They have driven prices through the roof.
you can’t find a decent house for under $1 million in my childhood neighborhood and many are over $5 million. It’s just insane.
I hate Yankees
Buy sand. Buckets and buckets of sand. Carry little baggies around with you. Never let it leave your mind, always look for a use for it and you will find it.
Small tubes of superglue.
We are in the same situation as in the election, viz. you are only allowed to participate insofar as you are guaranteed to lose. All of the major trading platforms are either rejecting trades of GameStop and AMC or else not allowing people to even see those ticker symbols. Obviously this is a kind of institutional collusion similar to counting mail in ballots in the dead of night with no form of verification required as to whether the voters are legitimate. It’s a rigged system throughout, where the elites already have an idea of what they want the outcome to… Read more »
so true. You connecting this to the election is so true. Same animal.
But it’s so damned obvious and in your face now. I think most people, even back in the day figured there were shenanigans going on, but never enough to really corrupt & bring down the system. Now, there’s no F-ing pretense. With so many seeing it first hand and seemingly everywhere, how much longer can this shit show continue?
I don’t think we make it out of Biden/Kamala first term without something major happening that throws over the apple cart. There is no trust left.
Broken marriage. It’s held together by strings and a million little connections that just make the formal divorce too much to endure right now. So you let it drag on while living in separate bedrooms and separate lives. But at some point, something happens to cause that hard break.
I have long maintained that the most potent force in human affairs is simple inertia. Cut the engines on a big container ship and it will drift a long, long, long way under its own (former) power. Turning the ship in any direction involves massive power output. But when the ship is obviously about to crash into a reef…
and that the people in the first class cabins are pissing on the workers in the hull These nouveau riche people who predominate in DC really have no business or acumen for running and managing people and organizations. Their myriad hang-ups and class and intellectual insecurities make them perfectly unfit for these types of roles. You NEVER piss off the staff. Old money knew this. It was bred into them. Then they got booted out by low down social climbers like Hillary and Pelosi and the usual suspects who just a generation prior were living in the ghettos of Europe… Read more »
In a sane society all these crooks on wall street would have been arrested for fraud. Of course they own congress, the SEC and DOJ so that won’t happen. They’ll sic the police state on the redditers for trumped up charges.
A good project for us will be to figure out how to throw sand in the gears without being caught. Having no martyrs is good for morale and encourages wider participation.
You want to “throw sand in the gears” ? Go buy 20 oz of physical silver.
You bet. Bags of pre-1964 silver dimes are available at any coin gallery, cheap. They’re real currency in acceptable amounts, just in case. (They’re also an attack on mighty silver-hoarding JPMorgan, your own little hedge fund.)
Or would you like this slip of paper?
Not exactly cheap. I have bunches of silver dollars worth around $26 today.
They get charged with multiple felonies, they plead guilty, they pay fines, but the Wall Street crowd almost never goes to jail. https://tinyurl.com/y2wgrkfy Just go to WSOP and type “crime” or “felony” in the search box. https://wallstreetonparade.com/
i love it when whites use israelite tactics against the system, if only the hedge fund had a precious metal name.
Oh Gawd the goyim are using our tactics against us. It’s another holocaust!
How does he do it folks? ZMan distills the massive topic of the current stock market dynamic into several paragraphs that are concise, understandable, and most importantly – truthful. In particular:
“The marketplace has been perverted by insiders with special access to both market makers and market regulators. The financial markets are no longer tethered to economic reality.”
This week has been amazing in the investment world for those paying attention. It’ll be fascinating to see how this plays out. The powers that be are definitely scrutinizing the action – will they bring the hammer down or what? A lot of these uber shorted stocks are cranking up again in the pre-market led by big dog GME. It’d be great to see some of these hedge funds go down, but undoubtedly it would have wider ramifications across the markets and what’s left of the economy. The fasten seatbelt sign is flashing.
The shocking part is the fanatics who are staying in and are foregoing massive profits just to say ‘f*ck you’.
That’s the attitude of revolution.
The assumption is fake money will be sent to prop up fake share prices. That’s been the pattern and the herd animals expect it to continue.
Unca Joe gon’ send us $1400 in stimmy!
We’s rich ma!
Go long on Air Jordans and sail foams!
Lots of talk about silver in all it’s forms, phys, pslv and other pm funds, and silver miners being the next target. I’d love to see it happen !
Lots of talk about silver for as long as I’ve had internet.
More than usual.
They’re not interested in corruption, unless it’s Russian. Of course it makes no sense focusing on Putin’s corruption, as if it dwarfs (or even compares) to theirs. The big reveal of late is that Navalny has pictures of Vlad’s mansion where he has supposedly over a billion dollars stored. But even if true, about nine-tenths of that money belongs to fellow oligarchs. Which means Putin isn’t much more corrupt than Nancy Pelosi or Obama, and has a ways to go before he can compare with an operation like the Clintons. If he’d just let transsexual American couples adopt Russian babies,… Read more »
Some of the pouting faces and Twitter meltdown reactions to this were hilarious. Trump is to blame, of course.
“A bunch of Hedge funds destroying small investors and companies through hard shorts is just business”
but
“a bunch of small investors destroying Hedge funds with stupid short positions, can’t be allowed!”
I am now so cynical that I assume every big news story is a plot by our rulers to divert our attention away from whatever they are doing. But soon they won’t bother to divert us because they won’t care if we notice or not.
I’m getting a Marie Antoinette vibe out of the Biden regime. Biden kills fracking and all leases on Federal lands for oil and gas, and Buttigeig is asked about the job losses and tells them to find other jobs. America is at a minimum 10 million jobs down from pre-Covid and Biden’s saying no problem with job losses in the oil patch (those are the best paying jobs around btw and always have been) as “eventually” there will be Green Jobs for the diverse. Now Yellen and the White House have forced Robinhood, Ameritrade, etc. to stop trading in any… Read more »
I’ve wondered about that whole forbearance business. The fact that they keep hitting the snooze bar makes me think that it’s either not a big deal, or, a really big deal. Has anyone tried to sue Uncle Shyster Sam over this as an illegal taking? Not that it would get anywhere to be sure.
Rent control is always a huge deal. It’s the best way to destroy a city short of bombing it.
My read is that the Elites want to get UBI implemented before mass evictions create a desperate White America.
Money but no job and nothing to do? But cause trouble?
there are probably enough sober minded types in government to realize that UBI would boomerang on them fast and hard. Now the other side is they could give you your money but if they ever catch you at a protest or something Ike that they you are banned, and there won’t be a job for you either. So you just sit around a penniless pariah. But people always find a way to get by and a couch to sleep on.
He’s even managing to piss the injuns off and you rarely if ever hear from them. Could the old war paint be coming out of storage?
Some Tribes have oil/gas/mineral rights to their land. Some only surface rights.
The official Zerohedge Twitter was kind enough to tip WSB off to the idea of calling one’s broker and making one’s GME shares unlendable, further tightening the squeeze.
What this means, of course, is that the insiders getting hurt in this will go to their colleagues in the ruling class and have the insurgents crushed. These people will be pushed off public forums, have their accounts closed by the trading companies and some will probably be arrested on made up charges You nailed it here. This is the biggest story of the last few years, and that means something given what all has happened. American markets have been assumed to be transparent and free from manipulation. International investors have viewed American stocks as the gold standard as a… Read more »
These whales ares all part of the ruling class. They own Congress, the SEC, etc. The trading houses like Robinhood and TD Ameritrade are also tied into them. We can see that as these retail trading houses are closing out GME positions without approval of the holders of said positions. BTW they are now facing a barrage of lawsuits as a result of trying to protect the whales. Not smart. The good news it has exposed the markets as the pile of shit and fraud that they are. As for the WSB crowd they won’t be touched, Making enemies of… Read more »
The good news it has exposed the markets as the pile of shit and fraud that they are.
The beloved markets have proved to be every bit as real as porn. That will be the long-term effect, along with letting even more people see how utterly corrupt and beyond repair the State is.
If the short positions are now covered, then there is not much upside anymore.
OTOH, if they are lying about the shorts being covered, then things can still get very interesting.
The Little Hats in the hedge funds expect the little hats in government to bail them out, per usual. The real hit will be the exposure of the United States as manipulated frauds to the rest of the world.
A very long read, 70 pages, but worth it.
https://www.deepcapture.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/deepcapture-the-story-v1.pdf
explains naked shorting, names names.
by Patrick Byrne, whose company Overstock.com, was targeted by naked shortsellers.
as long as you’re at his website, read:
How Donald J. Trump Lost the White Househttps://www.deepcapture.com/2021/01/draft-1-0-the-inside-story-of-the-steal/
it’s a first hand account, Byrne was on the inside.
There’s an excellent movie on short selling called The Big Short, about the shorting of subprime assets in 2007. In it, one of the Wall Street sleazeballs explains that the short sellers are essentially propping up the subprime markets, since you need the stock options before you can short them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A25EUhZGBws
Be advised that EVERY CHARACTER in the movie was a Jew in real life, except the spergy guy, Michael Burry.
Pain.
Real pain is the only way to shift the managerial class.
They are always sadists with regard to the Dirt People, never masochists.
The spontaneity of this recent round of pain infliction on the managerial elite is awesome. A thousand cuts, one at a time, can reduce it to rubble.
Even just getting the Normie to notice, or forcing Normie Media to cover the Corruption helps.
Watching GME happen, it reminds me that the Romanov’s didn’t see it coming either.
As far as Game Stop’s business model is concerned don’t they buy and sell old games also? That would be a major reason the brick and mortar model works with the young or the eternal adolescents.
Yeah but Sony and Xbox don’t want to sell games on disc anymore, dont know about Nintendo
My guess is the future is 100% download
I hear Microsoft’s new and upcoming Flight Simulator will be subscription based.
All of Microsoft is going toward the subscription model. Just imagine how life would have been different if Jobs had licensed the Apple OS.
Like everything else it’s turned into a grift. Sony would like to force all of their customers into Playstation Now which is a subscription service where no one owns any games. That more than anything else was a real bite into Gamestop since their model provided a way to make unaffordable games affordable (basically like a long term rental plan for people without $60 to cough up on a game).
true, but there is a lot of natural resistance to the download-only model, especially given the laggy nature of streaming even small games. And these games start eating into your storage capacity, and after 10 games or so it really adds up and then you have to keep buying external drives. I happen to buy hard copies for all my games, and there is still a good chunk of the gamer world like me. Same for DVDs for movies.
I do have to get a ‘hard’ copy of Bioshock Infinite before it’s inevitably banned. I’m sure at that point Sony will pull the license for the digital copy and give me some Sony Bux as compensation (and my prized platinum trophy gets “othered”)
How about “Duke Nukem”?
Sooooo banned.
Cloud based subscription services for corporate and business IT is the up-and-coming thing. See the RiskHedge blog, they specialize in “disruptors” like Salesforce and Zoom (as Google, Amazon, and Ebay once were.)
In-house IT is toast. Now that Silicon Vally has thousands of Pajeet families locked into Sunnyvale homes in indentured servitude (they take their green cards away), they’re not going to know what to do with them.
Edit: woops, probably sell their services to the surveillance state.
We’ll see. Google barely held off the scolds who wanted to get police departments banned off of their products. What Parler (and to a lesser extent Gab and others) showed was that those cloud promises are only as good as the providers word, which isn’t much.
Everything that the reddit guys were squeezing is getting beat up in premarket trading as the market is set to open. I hope most of them at least trimmed their positions and took some money out. Even Robinhood is restricting GameStop trades now, the establishment isn’t going to just let them keep doing this.
The Establishment intervention is what will kill the markets over the long haul because it exposes how overpriced and manipulated they are. More than Americans will pull away from the United States financial sector now.
WSB frothing at the mouth about class action suits about Robinhood’s lockouts on GME.
Dave Portnoy and Mark Cuban calling out RH for lying about, “democratizing,” trading.
Lots of rumors there is now big money on the squeeze side…I wonder if they can still access GME trades…
This is great!
Many billionaires are applauding. It’s largely kabuki because they don’t want to see the screws tightened on the scams they have run for years.
Wait… it’s all just a worked shoot?
Lol. New meaning to Portnoy’s Complaint
side note: both portnoy and Cuban are men in little hats, so of course the will be allowed into the family squabble and permitted (and expected) to profit off their other members. All in the family. When a rich white guy is actually allowed to go public and bash the system in the same way, I will take notice.
I still maintain that if Trump had been named Trumpstein, none of what we saw would ever have happened.
The thing about Portnoy at least is he is a degenerate gambler and is honest about viewing his entry into trading as nothing more than glorified gambling. He is very Trumpian in his self-promotion but is not pretending he is some savant about it, at least beyond his managed outward persona. There is value in someone like that, especially when lots of finance bros worship what the guy represents through his company. And he is doing good things for small business right now.
FWIW, Barstool and the Stoolies have donated >$30M to help small businesses survive government lockdowns. Good for them.
He’s been good today. He’s calling for investigations into Robinhood cutting off the trading, etc. Calling out people specifically. I respect it when you’re willing to get specific.
That said, its cute when Normie still believes in the rule of law. Truly. No one of consequence will go down from this, just like anything else.
I’m not the BarStool demo, but when the WEEI owners preferred wokeness to ratings, and BS snatched them up, I’ve had a soft spot for them.
Just like in a casino. You are allowed to lose and maybe sometimes win just a little. But as soon as you start winning big, men with thick necks come and kick you out.
yep Been there done that in a casino. I was actually arrested for apparently trying to take a swing at an undercover, but in reality my friend and I had just cleaned house and had a ton of chips on the table in front of us getting tipsy at a bar inside the casino. This was real money, like maybe $300,000. My friend had made it but I was tagging along and going to get a nice chunk of it just because. The bitch waitress reported to the undercover that I was being rude to her (I never even said… Read more »
Slightly OT: Those DR types worried about the military coming for us need to think again: Here’s a piece from Revolver on the military and it’s pretty good,.
https://www.revolver.news/2021/01/americas-military-is-the-best-in-the-world-but-not-for-long/
These changes in the article once implemented will destroy the military as a fighting force. Just imagine a military composed of the same people who populate the Chicago postal system or Democratic party in Oregon.
I’ve never been worried about our military. My son served and I got to see it up close. Our military is a joke. did you see the pics of the fat black chicks in fatigues in DC? Army NG is basically a jobs program. What our military has though is great weaponry. Compared to the civilian population that is. But in terms of “fighter IQ” on a scale of 1 to 10 they are hovering around 6 versus your typical redneck or country boy hunter who is around a 9. The military also does not select for creativity and resourcefulness… Read more »
Disagree, the model is obviously the Special Forces push in Iraq and later Afghanistan and other places that Mark Bowden discusses in “the Finish” about the killing of bin Laden. There were then 200 roughly Special Forces teams, including SEALs, Delta, PJs, Marine Force Recon, Rangers, others. They worked half on, half off, for three months. With Forward Operating Base linked in analysts, they used stuff grabbed in raids, which were about 4-5 per 24 hours, often one after another, they were able to gather astonishing amounts of evidence and basically killed 5-6 people each raid. Killing about 2,000 people… Read more »
I’m at year 23 in the USN. Everything in that article is spot-on accurate, without any hyperbole, with the possible exception of the obesity issue, though that in part is the result of the military serving profoundly unhealthy food (b/c it’s cheap and stores well) to sailors who are already prone of obesity due to their upbringing. Sea duty sailors barely have enough time to sleep, much less dedicate hours to intensive physical fitness regimes, without increasing the numbers of sailors. Otherwise … everything in that article is exactly correct, and stems from leadership that deep-down doesn’t really believe it… Read more »
I guess the silver lining is the establishment can never say they do things for just and moral purposes
Can’t be hidden anyone that it was always about money and their claims to the contrary were just a con. But they were so believable !!! Pelosi got her start really convincing people that she was looking out for them. Warren, Bernie, all of them. Turns out it was always crooks merely larping as concerned stewards of society. Gangsters.
Z is correct about the scope of these attacks. Several others were targeted by pumpers, too, albeit on a smaller share. I had a bit of stock in one and made 6,000 dollars over the course of a week with a 2,000 starting position. It’s absolutely whacko. I also threw 700 bucks into nokia, as I heard it’s the third most pumped stock in the market right now. Guess what? $300 return in FIFTEEN minutes. Wtf is going on here?
I can smell new restrictions on the horizon…
Things change slowly until they change very fast. Welcome to the Year of Living Dangerously USA Style. Going Dark (Cont) Going dark does not mean hiding; it means social camouflage. A hermit is a red flag to LEOs, so better to be the reticent model citizen or benign waif or wastrel. The idea is to be so boring that most others ignore you reflexively or have no reason to give you a second thought. Monotonous habits of speech and behavior can be effective tools for inducing this boredom and appearing benign and harmless. When in public, dress blandly and speak… Read more »
I love Hilary Clinton! Michelle Obama is the gorgeous wife of a brilliant man, her husband Barack Obama. Bill Clinton balanced the budget and never had sex with that woman, or any of them. It was all lies. Charles Schumer gives the best college graduation speech and is fighting for America and Israel. He is my hero. I am proud to support our President Joe Biden and his Vice President, the intelligent and beautiful Kamala Harris. Donald Trump is a bad man and his supporters are bad people. I always wear my mask, and everyone should. It’s the patriotic thing… Read more »
Now, copy and text that shit to everyone you know 100 times. Post it on twitter, facebook, and Instagram. Make it married to your IP.
Oh. Oh, – and Elizabeth Warren is a full blooded native american,
Warren couldn’t get Indian DNA in her if she were naked on a reservation.
You crafty devil. Feigning insanity is an excellent legend. But you need to go whole hog and become a smelly bum living on the street and begging for change on the corner in order to buy your next bottle of Ripple. Lose of few teeth, get an oversized great coat from Goodwill, and talk like Gabby Hayes (am I the only one who remembers him?). Let a thousand flowers bloom.
It’ll be interesting to see just how “free” this “free market” is allowed to be.
Additionally, will more people wake up if Big Brother steps in to “set things straight”? Or will they just eat up the propaganda as always? Reddit and videogames are popular in normie-land, so maybe this time the MSM narrative won’t work so well when they start blaming the little guy.
The feds aren’t going to bailout Melvin Capital. Reaction among big time investors is mixed, some hysterical loons are saying retail investors shouldn’t be allowed to trade options, which is insane. Many others, even the likes of Mark Cuban, are defending the WallStreetbets group and saying the hedge funds guys shouldn’t have left themselves exposed like this. They will contain it so it doesn’t impact the people closest to power like the Goldman Sachs crowd. Even among the elite there is a hierarchy.
So these guys will be allowed to fail for negligence, as long it doesn’t have too many downstream ramifications? (I’m not well versed in the stock market game)
I’m glad to see it happen. Naked shorting seems a touch too parasitic even for WallStreet. Do you think they’ll create new rules so this doesn’t happen again?
Melvin already got money, but had to give up equity to two other hedge funds to cover their losses. There is no reason for the Feds to step in and directly bail them out. The manipulation is coming from the suspension of trading by the retail apps. Most of the retail investment brokers are restricting trades of Game Stop today.
For the government to ban naked short selling would be a smart reaction, so I wouldn’t count on that happening. Nothing is too parasitic for Wall Street.
Too rich to fail.
The only outcome is that the little guy gets screwed as usual and this case that means they almost certainly aren’t going to be sending us more freebie stimulus checks. God knows the system would hate to see everyone pump another $600 into GameStop shares. LOL.
Exactly. We now have naive college kids dumping in their life savings because some rappers and the total frat move website are jumping into the hype.
In the end a few of the early people will make alot, many like me will make a little. And a lot, are going to get ass fucked hard.
If you loot GameStop, the global elites really couldn’t care less… but if you BUY GME, they lose their effing minds. Truly a classic turnabout I would say. YOLO.
Too rich for jail fify.
Anything named Melvin deserves a righteous ass-kicking.
Anyone want to bet on the over/under in number of months before people are no longer scared of being called an anti-semite ?
10 months.
Days, really. The Tribe blatantly bailing out The Tribe in this mushrooming stock scandal is going to mark them.
We are finding out now why no one really ever took them all that seriously At least in the west. They always crumble under pressure I guess because their paranoia causes them ultimately to unravel. Yes, they are great at making quick gains in a society and grabbing power and money, but they can never maintain it But now we have to deal with the mess they have created And endure the pain and upheaval
Yes, they are great at making quick gains in a society and grabbing power and money, but they can never maintain it But now we have to deal with the mess they have created And endure the pain and upheaval
their domination is long lived, they didn’t attain it a few decades ago, not only that but they had a lot of training over the millennia, they are a serious threat.
The people in power who WILL do all they can to destroy the uppity peons who had the nerve to best them at manipulating the market CAN be removed from power. It’s a simple task, not an easy one but a simple one. Kill them. Problem solved. They have no qualms about killing us “little people”, we should have no qualms about killing them.
only thing that stops them from killing us are fears of retribution. For example, if they ever touched me my 80 year old mom would spend her dying days seeking revenge. My cousins and family would hunt them down. Multiply that by millions
On the flip side, we fear prison time.
But which is a more powerful disincentive? I mean, if you go to jail for killing off a bunch of hedge fund billionaires you’d be a hero in prison. True, they’d pay a gang to hunt you down. So that sucks. But still better than what they got coming.
Clarity has value, but when the shit is hitting the fan, being oblique can be the wiser option. We are in fast-change mode now, and the Jackboots will soon be hunting for scapegoats to crucify and scalps to display in the public square. You need not volunteer for the coming witch-hunts and persecutions. Better to go dark, get fit, get out of the city (if applicable), and survive the initial collapse.
Very wise words, Tom.
I plan on laying low and working on a few personal pursuits. Not going to find me mouthing off on social media, except in here 😎
Dan is an FBI provocateur, an idiot or both.
Agreed. Making death threats on a public forum in Current Year, seriously?
WSB autists are potentially responsible for nearly $71 billion in short losses and multiple hedge fund collapses in 2021:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/7087-billion-reasons-why-exchanges-betrayed-retail-customers
Apparently they managed to push things close to another LTCM (collapsed in ’98) and that would have sent the entire system over the edge.
No UBI for stock trading, that will be one of the strings attached punishable by prison time
But yes, you can use your UBI to buy lotto tickets from the government
The problem with Reddit Millennials is that they don’t have lobbyists in DC. Well..they do have one lobbyist…sadly… https://nypost.com/2021/01/27/aoc-mocks-wall-street-outrage-over-gamestop-surge/ When AOC is absolutely right on something, it’s never a good day. Who doesn’t keep a short covered by the way? These funds have Exhibit A, Tesla, nearly every week, for the last two years. Of course Pocahontas chimes in too. Which is why the market is up this morning. The Biden Admin is “monitoring the situation” which means the phone calls came through. Some poor millennial will be filleted like a fish by the firepower of the state. Probably this… Read more »
“the golden age of fraud”
My bestie excitedly told me that Bernie had sold his mittens for two million dollars to charity!
When I laughed and asked, “what charities?”, he told his wife to lock me out on the freezing porch again.
Pelosi and her husband own millions in Tesla stock and call options.
TSLA isn’t going anywhere until (((they))) say it is.
BTW, I saw my first Tesla the other day. That guy’s a gazillionaire?
Yeah, I never understood Tesla or the weird guy. Never made sense to me
Teslas are a dime a dozen out by me.The typical driver is an Armenian whose cousin got him some scammy deal on the car. I still don’t get how Armenians have a new expensive car every 6 months. And meanwhile most of them live in apartments lol. Or if a house they have 10 people living in it and the garage converted into a dwelling with the cheapest materials from Home Depot. They will have homes in million plus neighborhoods with $50 windows and $100 vanity cabinets from “the Home.” Stuff you see in a cheap barrio apartment. And don’t… Read more »
I reckon they’re few and far between around here bec. putting in a charging station would mean digging up stuff/permitting/etc. (I live in 17th C. land.)
I know Armenians like the back of my hand, which is why I don’t do business with them. They have that old world, carpet trading mentality. It’s not far from Iran by the way. They have an expensive car every six months because they don’t pay taxes, or their suppliers, unless it’s on a net 1000 basis after being threatened with a lawsuit. Their cheapness regarding materials is a throwback to the communist housing blocks in which they used to live. I believe they were considered the wiggers of the USSR. What’s even worse is that it’s one of the… Read more »
Are we confusing Armenians with Albanians.
They look very similar. Gypsy like. I know little about Albanians other than they owned a pizza restaurant in my neighborhood when I was a kid and they looked like typical Eurotrash. But it was the 80’s so everyone looked like Eurotrash.
Yeah, I always read online how we’re supposed to support Armenians because they’re Christians. They don’t appear particularly Christian to me, nor particularly White.
As far as in-person retail, I really miss record stores for a variety of reasons.
I was lucky enough to have access to 2 or 3 good record stores in high school and 4 or 5 great ones in college.
OTOH, there is not much new in the last 30 years that is worth a trip to a record store.
We had one right across the street from my high school, Vinyl,Fever. Plus a Steak n Shake.
Embarrassment of riches 😂
Product curation is something that eludes a lot of online sales portals, Amazon in particular (though Ebay is notably awful in this regard). To be fair, brick and mortar was doing a pretty awful job at curation as well even before the Internet and now a days they are little more than a physical manifestation of the same scheme (where the collection of products is determined by what the vendors pay in order to be on the shelf).
plus I think there is a little bit of a team aspect to video game stores, attracts the aficionados and gives them a place to hang out and socialize. I see the same with coin shops and record stores. I frequent all of them. There is a video game store by me, Game Dude, supposedly the largest video game store in the world, sells new and used, all the old systems, but when you go there you hang out for an hour just shooting the breeze with fellow gamers. It’s fun. Starbucks for gamers. Baldy Bezos can never replicate that… Read more »
Oh, I totally miss BS’ing with the record store staff and customers about new releases, listening stations, rifling through the bins, enjoying the places with good sound systems, and the unique interior spaces they had configured.
Remember they used to merchandise records, under “pop” “rock” and so forth. I remember the big deal when they created a “new wave” section lol. It was like the world had changed and was never going to be the same. And oddly enough it wasn’t.
My personal experiences against in-person retail, and why, although I hate Bezos, he still gets my money:Took younger son to try on some jeans/work pants to check which waist size would fit depending on brand, only to learn Kohls closed all their dressing rooms because “THE VIRUS” is sneaky and hides back there.
Tried to buy some new fly swatters at Home Depot because the old ones are disgusting. “That’s a seasonal item” so “You can order it online and pick it up in the store.” No, I will order it online elsewhere and have it delivered to my door.
Love of money, etc.
#Go [Candidate]!
Too good.
The GameStop rebellion reminds me of GamerGate.
I do not even come close to understanding this short sell scam. But it sounds like something that should be illegal and punishable in the most public and extreme way. Without a doubt the government will stomp on the redditers. Protect and bail out the flim flamers. Fraudulent elections. Silencing dissent. Sowing plandemic terror , attempting to normalize degeneracy of every vile type. New and bigger lies every hour of every day. Sowing the seeds of their own destruction.
You mean tulip bulbs can be planted? Something tells me the lovely spring flowers will be little consolation.
Or eaten, as a low sailor did when a famous Dutchman turned his back on his prize tulip bulb in a shop.
The dirt people have figured out a way to eviscerate the cloud people and burn their house down. Good times.
Hate twitter:
“just in: Discord has shut down the /r/WallStreetBets server for “hate speech, glorifying violence, and spreading misinformation”,”
But of course.
https://twitter.com/catturd2/status/1354804003205312512?s=20
Replies in the thread:
“What’s the opening price on cans of woop-ass?”
Then there is this likely Biden supporter sob story:
“My retirement is based on the market. I took a pretty big hit for a retired civil servant just trying to live out my golden years in the America I so love and my entire family served. Their damn games hurt innocent people while enriching themselves – but we know that, don’t we?”
“I finally found the lying dog faced pony soldier!” John Kerry
“Imagine trying to explain Gamestop and Reddit to Joe Biden”
Hey old man (Biden), do you know what you just signed?
Yeah, I Reddit!