Smoothbrain: An unwrinkled brain yet to be trained in the distinguished art of GME Stonk lore.
Today’s the day, friends!
After 11 long months, I’m FINALLY breaking the blogging hiatus to fill you in on the extraordinary situation myself, and millions of other investors have found themselves enveloped in since January 2021.
In this post, I’ll be breaking down everything you’ve missed from the GameStop (GME) saga since it went viral last January, WHY you haven’t heard about it since then, and most importantly, why I believe it’s so important to stay up-to-date on what very may well be an inflection point in human history.
Yeah. I went there.
I ask that you take a moment to inhale a deep breath of oxygen, exhale all the garbage you’ve associated with the madhouse of the US economy recently (should take a few minutes…) and open your mind to what I’m about to lay down. I promise I wouldn’t take the time to write this monster if I wasn’t thoroughly convinced that writing this blog post may be the most important thing I ever do.
Ready?
Let’s go 🚀
A few quick disclaimers before we swan dive into this thing:
#1. This post would get an F in my high school English class
Okay MAYBE a D after the memes…but it’s full of twists, turns, backtracks and a fair amount of repetition on core concepts. I opted to keep this repetition in the post, because as the great author Zig Ziglar taught me: ”Repetition is the mother of skill.”
#2. I’ve over-simplified several concepts to keep things beginner-friendly
This post is aimed toward those who have NOT been nip-deep in GME this year, namely my own friends and family whose eyes glaze over as I send them lists of Reddit links and charts. For deeper digging, I’ll be sprinkling links to Reddit posts and other resources throughout our adventure, as well as a dedicated section at the bottom where you can venture as deep into the rabbit hole as your heart desires.
#3. There is a TON of room for subjectivity
Irrefutable data has its part in this story, but there is a ton of subjective nuance as well. Every GME veteran I know has a slightly different view on the situation (which outcomes are most likely, which data points matter more than others, etc.). This giant melting pot of different ideologies is one of the most beautiful parts of this whole thing, and for this reason, I urge you to take everything I say with a grain of salt, continue digging at your leisure using the TOP POSTS lists I’ve highlighted in the BONUS section at the very end, so you can come to your own conclusions on the information presented.
#4: Crediting is subpar
My right-click-save finger can sometimes get ahead of my credit accounting, so if you see something of yours in the sea of memes, please shoot me a DM on Twitter or Instagram so I can credit you properly! 🙂
#5: I’m an idiot
NOTHING in this post should be taken as financial advice. I am but a mere monke tossing poo against the wall in case any onlookers care to take a walk-by sniff.
Furthermore, to all my supremely-wrinklebrained brethren out there, if you spot any errors in my math or reasoning, I implore you to reach out! In an arena so rife with blindfolds, teamwork is and always will be our most impenetrable asset.
~~~
Last preemptive note (I promise): this post is going to be a beast, so I’ll be signposting the Table Of Contents (below) onto each new section. That way you’ll never be too far from a roadmap if you’d like to skip around/review certain sections more than once.
For the first few sections of the post, we’ll be dissecting the situation from a big-picture, public narrative standpoint. If your Top Ramen is getting cold and you want to skip straight to the charts, Section 5.
Or, if you want to bypass my dumb ass altogether and dive straight into the Reddit due diligence that this entire thesis is built on, skip to Section 11.2.
The date is January 28th, 2021.
Everywhere you look–Twitter, Instagram, your mom’s Facebook feed–EVERYONE is talking about GameStop. How a bunch of dumb kids on Reddit bought GME stock, “squeezed” some hedge funds, and the whole thing got “ruined” by Robinhood and the big bad suits allegedly colluding to screw the little guy.
Well folks, I’m here to tell you that just about every part of the story you’ve been told has been a straight lie, as I’ve come to learn from months of total obsession over this incredible, soon to be world-shifting saga.
Why the heck have I, and hundreds of thousands (likely millions) of other investors whom are learning on the fly, put our lives on hold this entire year to laser-focus on every crumb of development around GME since this thing “ended” in January 2021?
Simply put, because the notion that this story has “ended” is preposterous, a downright LIE, and the greatest example I have EVER seen of a blanket misinformation campaign to hide the truth from the masses.
The truth?
The GME squeeze never. actually. happened.
What did happen was a textbook can-kick by the institutions who were about to get poofed into oblivion, followed by a full year of bullshit propaganda from the media to convince YOU that the squeeze DID happen.
Unfortunately for these multi-billion dollar can-kickers, the only people that they truly needed to cave–the GME investors around the world who bought and held the stock–did not budge. They only bought more.
And because of this…the fate of the Wall Street elite has been sealed: a far bigger short squeeze that won’t just blow their empire into teeny tiny pieces, but grant GME shareholders a war chest of life-changing, generational wealth.
“We have come dangerously close to the collapse of the entire system”
-Interactive Brokers founder and chairman Thomas Peterffy, February 17, 2021
This ain’t hyperbole, folks…what’s coming is about to change everything. A chaotic, out-of-control fireworks show the likes of which we’ve never seen in the history of finance.
Welcome to the greatest story ever told–I am humbled to be your guide.
Below are a handful of core concepts and definitions that apply to the GameStop story, as well as a hefty dose of storytelling weaved in to help you understand the importance of each. Keep in mind, many of these definitions rely on each other to make sense (I’ve tried at least a dozen re-orderings but it’s impossible to avoid), so if something seems like it’s lacking context, the missing piece is probably just further down the list. Grinding through it will be worth it, I promise 🙂
GME: The abbreviation for GameStop stock. Referred to as the “ticker symbol” in stock market lingo.
GameStop: The company at the heart of it all. They’ve been struggling in recent years due to straight-up bad management, showing ineptitude at transitioning the business away from its brick and mortar mall-retailer roots and into the digital age. Thanks to the new captain at the helm (Ryan Cohen) who has a STELLAR track record in the digitalization of outdated business models, the winds of change are in full swing at everyone’s favorite video game store.
Ryan Cohen: The new sheriff in town. RC came in like a wrecking ball to the GME story, planting his flag as a double-digit-percent shareholder into the company and becoming Chairman of the Board of Directors in April 2021. He’s a certified memelord, a silent-assassin, and has a KILLER background, headlined by Chewy, a pet food company he launched at 25 years old and grew into a $3.35 billion dollar stealer of Amazon’s lunch. He’s now a veteran e-commerce prodigy/billionaire at only 35 years old as of this writing, and is primed to dominate the digital/tech/e-commerce space.
Oh, and I’m officially on record predicting that he will soon be the richest man on Earth. Save the tweet.
Keith Gill AKA The Roaring Kitty AKA u/DeepFuckingValue: The #1 boyfriend draft pick for wives everywhere. He reached legendary status by being one of the only people on Earth who saw this GameStop resurgence coming YEARS ago, and rather than hide that knowledge for himself, he decided to fight through the meat grinder of Reddit and YouTube naysayers to enlighten his fellow small investors of the enormous opportunity he saw.
His hundreds of hours of research created the foundation for this massive ball of knowledge, community, excitement, and inequality-destruction to get rolling.
In other words, an absolute lock for hall-of-fame status in the archives of financial history. Period.
— Dr. Parik Patel, BA, CFA, ACCA Esq. (@ParikPatelCFA) February 17, 2021
Melvin Capital: The hedge fund that caught most of the media attention in Jan 2021 for overleveraging their bet against GameStop. As you’ll soon learn, though…they’re just a baby minnow in the fucksville sea.
Citadel: A 5-headed hydra of a financial institution, which has essentially purchased their way into every single corner of the financial world to ensure they ALWAYS win, while screwing as many people as possible in the process. For example, they operate both a hedge fund arm (trading stocks in hope of profiting in the market) AND a market maker arm (which controls the actual flow of buy and sell orders from EVERYONE).
In plain English, they are the judge, the jury, and the executioner at the same time.
I could write a novel of all the criminal allegations against Citadel, but to keep things short and sweet, here’s the baseline you should know in the context of our story:
As theorized by the sharpest minds of the interwebs, Citadel, led by their CEO Ken Griffin, swooped in to intercept Melvin’s short positions to prevent them from collapsing under the weight of GME back in January. Their reason for doing that? Likely to prevent a chain reaction that would have domino’d into the death of their empire as well.
Since then, there has been alllll kinds of debauchery going on with those toxic short positions that NOBODY wants to be left holding the bag on. It seems like every month the puck is being passed somewhere new so each SHF can report a clean book, and maintain the illusion that nobody is holding the hot potato.
This Reddit post breaks down the theory of Wall Street’s GME hot potato game in detail.
Ken Griffin: CEO of Citadel, and soon to be greatest wealth-inequality-breaking philanthropist in history. Hobbies include: bedpost javelin, talking on TV about how great he is, and flying all over the world for completely normal reasons that have nothing to do with future home shopping in coincidentally extradition-friendly jurisdictions.
SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission): The police of Wall Street–or at least they SHOULD be. For decades, they’ve been totally complicit to the rampant illegal activity going on in the financial markets. A few recent hires, Gary Gensler and Gurbir Grewal, gave the investor community some hope early on, but after several months of no action…it’s getting tough for the optimists to continue defending them. To their credit, they inherited an absolute MESS, so whether or not they’ll be able to turn things around and salvage a glimmer of trust for their image is yet to be seen.
Stonk: Just a funny meme-ified word for “stock” that was made up by degenerates of Reddit.
Stocks can go up or down…but STONKS only go up 😉
Reddit: The social media platform that started it all. Reddit is not (always) a timesucker piece of garbage like Facebook–it’s a HYPER-efficient platform for community problem-solving and collaboration. If a group of people on Reddit (referred to as a “subreddit”) are presented with a common goal, its algorithm and upvoting/awarding system make it a hivemind-like force to be reckoned with.
Combine this with the virality-friendly algorithm of Twitter? Yeah…the ability to work in the shadows is getting a bit trickier for the big baddies these days.
Apes:How GME shareholders refer to one another. This scene from Planet Of The Apes became a rallying cry in the early days, and remains a favorite mantra of this diverse community of individual investors.
Retail Investors: Just another word for your Average Joe investors. Apes = retail investors that love GME.
MSM: Mainstream media. Totally cool and not a conflict-of-interest that many of them are literally OWNED by the hedge funds who have their backs against the wall:
That’s the Citadel logo plastered all over CNBC’s live stage. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence…
💎🙌 (Diamond Hands): The term for holding onto a stock with the strength of King Kong no matter what craziness happens to the price.
Example: If your stock tanks from $500 to $40 then rockets up to $50,000,000 and you don’t sell a dang thing, congratulations! You have 💎🙌.
🧻🙌 (Paper Hands): The opposite of diamond hands. If you get spooked by a dip, or tempted by a rip, and sell your shares, then you might want to buy your wife’s boyfriend an origami guidebook, because those hands are made of straight paper, my friend.
Example:
I have officially sold all my meme stocks. I lost 700k ish. Vlad and company stole it from me and should be in jail. pic.twitter.com/qXP1N1UFil
FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt): I actually dig Wikipedia’s definition for this one: “A propaganda tactic used to influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or false information and a manifestation of the appeal to fear.”
Basically, misinformative garbage that’s spread across the internet to convince you that something is bad. Think “modern day agenda-fueled propaganda”
Robinhood: The most infamous of the stock brokers that “turned off the buy button” AKA shut down retail investors’ ability to buy GME during the January Sneeze.
Robinhood operates under a business model called payment for order flow (PFOF), which has been a HOT topic among governmental regulators this year.
Payment For Order Flow: A business model where retail brokers sell their clients’ order data to market makers, so the financial giants can frontrun individual investors and squeeze additional money out of them.
Remember how I told you that Citadel has a hand in the actual flow of stock buys and sells? Yes, Citadel PAYS Robinhood and other PFOF brokers a FRICK TON of money for those orders, so they can see every hand at the poker table and fleece everyone legally! It’s an extreme advantage, and has been under a great deal of scrutiny (as it should) by regulators and financial commentators since the events of January 2021.
In addition to making a fortune stealing from retail investors on a per-trade basis, there’s been all kinds of evidence rolling down the pipeline that Robinhood shut off GME buys because hedge funds like Citadel and Melvin were massively short on the stock, so they strong-armed RH into nuking their brand to save their skin.
Aside from a few weeks of #KenGriffinLied trending on Twitter, the true depth of this collusion hasn’t made it into the public eye yet. Methinks that once Citadel goes bye-bye, the lid will fly off the pressure cooker and EVERYONE will find out the extent they’ve been lied to all this time.
DD: Due Diligence, AKA what people on Reddit call their in-depth research posts. This is where the Short Hedge Funds truly fucked up–they inspired MILLIONS of lowkey brilliant internet dwellers to work together and solve the labyrinth of mystery that old-money has constructed to confuse the masses into ignorance and hopelessness in the markets.
HF: Hedge fund. Think gigantic club of rich old people that have no intention or ability to provide actual value to the world, so they spend all their time running around Wall Street finding innovative ways to leech off of those that do.
SHF: Short Hedge Fund, AKA the “big money” formerly known as “smart money” who bet against GameStop (shorted it), and therefore Ryan Cohen, DFV, and the millions of apes who are literally too dumb to find the sell button on their computer screen.
(Spoiler: BIG OOPS)
Citadel is the most notorious of these SHFs as of now (thus Ken Griffin becoming the most involuntarily memed man on the planet) but as you’ll soon learn, there are a TON of big players sucked into the short side, so keep your head (eyes?) on a swivel.
Going “long” on a stock: The traditional form of investing. You buy a stock low, hoping that it will go up, so you can sell it for a profit. Peculiarly, when GME investors do this, it’s condescendingly labelled “gambling” “frenzy” “mania” by the media. I wonder why that would be 🤔
Going “short” on a stock: Betting AGAINST a stock. Unlike the traditional idea of investing, where you buy a stock hoping it rises in price, when you SHORT a stock, you actually SELL first, and BUY later. Thus you want it to go DOWN (ideally zero–the company going bankrupt) so you can buy the shares back at the lowest price possible, and pocket the difference between the original sell and the subsequent buy.
Shorting a stock is VERY RISKY, because it carries infinite risk.
When you buy a stock first (going long), your maximum loss potential is that stock going to zero. But when you SELL a stock first and must buy later, that stock can theoretically keep going up and up and up, growing your bill infinitely.
Oh and another thing…when you’re forced to bite the bullet and buy these shares back that you’ve short-sold (called “closing your short”) the buying pressure from these forced share purchases rockets the stock even higher. If things get too out of control, this can create an infinite feedback loop, with the potential of going positively stratospheric if the longs on the other side of the trade just happen to sniff out the bullshit, and form an entire culture around diamond hands 💎🙌.
This is the nightmare scenario that every institution that’s shorted to hell on GameStop has found themselves in. There’s nothing…NOTHING they can do once this self-feeding shitshow starts rolling, except to get the long holders to sell their positions. Not ideal when these longs just happen to be born-and-bred gamers with a knack for spending ungodly amounts of hours battling final bosses on the internet for fun (more on that *chef’s kiss* perfection later).
Naked Shorting: You may have heard back in Jan. how GME was shorted over 100% of the float (226% according to Robinhood’s legal filings, which we’ll be looking at later).
How can they short more shares of GME than even exist?
Well firstly, a little sprinkle of every hedgie’s favorite thing in the whole wide world…
But also, because the SHFs were SO confident and SO greedy in their belief that GameStop would crumble to dust under their vicious shorting attack. They didn’t think in their wildest dreams there’d ever come a day that the investing public would catch onto their scheme, and use it to screw them right back in the bunghole.
Float: The shares of a company which have been issued to the public for trading on the stock market.
As in, if apes buy up all the shares of the float, they will have complete control over how high the price goes in an all-out MOASS (Mother Of All Short Squeezes) scenario.
And by the way, it’s actually possible for the apes to buy MORE shares than exist in the public float, since SHFs have pooped out boatloads of “synthetic shares” in order to keep the shorting train rolling.
The result of this is, once the chickens come home to roost, the SHFs will have to buy the entire float-worth of shares back from apes multiple times in order to close their positions.
Short Interest (SI%): A general measure for the percentage of the FLOAT that has been SHORTED by SHFs. This shouldn’t ever go over 100%, since that would imply that naked shorting has taken place (AKA shorting shares that they don’t have), but due to a laundry list of loopholes being used to hide GME’s true SI%, it’s all but confirmed that GME is shorted into the deep hundreds, or more likely THOUSANDS of percent.
Just a couple of the data-backed theories that we are in complete stupid-land as far as SI% (note that these are now OLD posts, meaning that after several more months of continued ape buying + short suppression, these are now lowball estimates 🥴🥴🥴:
To give you an idea of how utterly insane these 3,000-10,000 P-E-R-C-E-N-T short interest estimates are, remember that back in 2019-2020, Tesla stock was considered very heavily shorted at 20%, as in TWO ZERO percent.
What happened next? A 10,000% gain (100x the starting price) TSLA short squeeze.
Let’s put that next to GME for comparison of how big of a nuclear bomb we’re sitting on here:
For you extra-smooth🧠, if we slapped $TSLA's 20 FUCKING PERCENT SI onto $GME (which led to 100X in share price), and ELIMINATED the fact that unlike $TSLA, $GME shareholders have built an entire culture around "💎🙌"…that would STILL lead to a $GME floor of ~$20,000. #BUCKLEUP
Yesssssssir we are DEEP into muy loco town folks, and all I’m gonna say is, I don’t plan on closing this margarita tab anytime soon.
***Side note: It’s probably a good time to emphasize that basically all exact numerical data, SI% being a glaring one, is NOT ACCESSIBLE to the public. This is one of the main projects of the smarter apes in the GME community–analyzing every single piece of data that we do have to infer as accurately as possible. If we ever DO find out the true numbers, we’ll probably be reading them from our moon journal, as the starry abyss of the solar system whizzes by outside our 🚀 window.***
Closing/covering shorts: (These are different things, but so many people mistakenly use them interchangeably that I’m not going to get too deep in the weeds on semantics. This article does the best job I’ve seen clarifying the difference if you wanna git learned).
The shorts’ act of buying back that stock that they sold first, and returning it to whom they borrowed it from.
Guess what–when shorts are forced buy that stock, it causes the price to fly up EVEN MORE, as we explained earlier. To review, this self-feeding frenzy forces other shorts to close their positions, creating an inferno of very sad hedge fund managers and very happy primates.
The technical term for this is a:
Short Squeeze: The official term for the situation above, where those “shorting” a stock get stuck in a continuous loop of closing their positions, blowing up price, needing to close more, etc. etc.
Their losses in this case could theoretically reach infinity (as would the longs’ profits 😉) since there is no inherent ceiling to how high a stock can go. When someone REALLY needs to buy a thing, but none of the holders of that thing are willing to sell it at the price being offered, the price continues moving upward until a deal is met.
What happens when there are hordes of panicking buyers and ZERO willing sellers?
Therein lies the question…
January Sneeze: The fake squeeze that occurred in late January 2021. MSM led the way on pumping the narrative that GME’s price run to ~$500 was “THE END OF THE SQUEEZE! That’s all, folks! Thanks for playing! Now everyone get back to your day jobs, nothing more to see here!”
It wasn’t until the weeks/months following that the apes of Reddit cracked these headlines wide open as total horseshit, digging deep into the plumbing of the market to prove without a shadow of a doubt that the squeeze never squoze–the mainstream narrative was a flat-out lie. This should be no surprise, since as I mentioned earlier, all of these financial media outlets are under the thumb of the very same hedge funds that have their balls in a vice grip.
We’ll dig into the supporting data in future sections, but the overarching jist is this: the media-led story that the GME saga is “done” has been a broad-brushed campaign to paint the narrative that the price tank from $500 to $38 was a result of retail selling. In fact, that price action was actually due to the hedge funds throwing 1, 2, 3 more kitchen sinks at the short button to kick the nuclear bomb down the road, effectively digging their World War I trench-sized hole even deeper.
In that fateful moment in late January when the Sneeze was cut flat, what was already primed to be an explosive upward move became something MUCH bigger…
Ladies and gentlemen, this is when the MOASS was born.
MOASS: The Mother Of All Short Squeezes.
Talk is cheap, it takes memes to describe MOASSes:
More of a reading type? Look up “ENORMOUS, IMMOVABLE demand, and ZERO supply” in your Economics textbook.
Yup. Once the can gets too big to kick any longer, the GME stock price should simply continue going up forever. Until apes sell, which, ya know, isn’t really a thing since they’re literally editing the HTML code on their browsers to remove the SELL button.
I don’t think the shorties’ algorithm accounted for these levels of degenerate…😬
This bizarre, parabolic explosion a la MOASS isn’t just possible for GME, it’s all but mathematically guaranteed given the circumstances, barring some sort of illegal witchcraft fuckery unlike the world has never seen. (We’ll dive further into this skeptic concern later, in the Arguments Against section. In short: I ain’t stressin’ on it.)
Here’s an awesome video explanation of the MOASS concept, and how infinite risk leads to potentially infinite upside:
(start at 2:37)
“The computer has no emotions. The computer says ‘Oh, I must close, BEEP BOOP'”
-my guy Ape Andy
In other words, what happens when the spoiled children of Wall Street can’t take an L, so they fuck themselves even harder, and harder, and harder…until it threatens the integrity of the entire global economy?
(hint: GME🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀)
Margin Call AKA “Marge”:
Again, super over-simplified here, but the jist of a margin call (technically a failed margin call) is this:
When SHFs get too deep into poo poo land, the financial institution(s) above them in the pecking order (example: Bank Of America, the “daddy” of Citadel) can pull the rug out from under them, completely blowing up whatever manipulation fuckery they were using to prevent a short squeeze from rocking their shit.
Using this example, why would Bank of America want to screw Citadel like this? Because Citadel is paying loads of money on interest to keep the GME price down, and if their attempts to get apes to sell keep resulting in fat L’s (😘💎🙌) then BofA is the next in line to foot the bill when Citadel reaches the *GAME OVER* screen.
And trust me…nobody wants to pick up the GameStonk tab.
Something to note however: it is possible that these prime brokers above the SHFs are so intertwined in the corruption that it may be more complicated than simply spamming margin calls and calling it a day.
The resulting market disruption if BofA and others were to rug-pull Citadel would be so big that it could bite them in the ass in all kinds of indirect ways, since they have a ton of long positions in the market as well, which would get killed in a mass-liquidation event.
In normal times, Wall Street is nothing but a bunch of bloodthirsty sharks, all trying to eat each other at any opportunity. But this time, the very way that they ALL make their money (spiking the SEC’s juice boxes with Ambien while robbing retail blind) is at risk of falling apart for ALL of them. It all depended on keeping the convoluted labyrinth of secrecy intact, and well…now this is happening:
We already saw Citadel run to Melvin’s rescue in January, which some wrinkle-brained apes have theorized was a textbook example of this desperation-induced-teamwork (AKA GME hot potato as referenced to earlier) taking place I.E. it’s possible that we don’t see a prototypical margin call process happen, but rather a much more convoluted shitshow of institutions going KA-BOOM left and right with no rhyme or reason.
Prime Broker: The technical term for those big bad bois above the hedge funds, AKA Bank Of America in the example above.
There are even bigger whales out there, but they’re a bit outside the scope of this post. See the chart below for a great breakdown of this “totem pole of bill-footing” if you will:
Before our next definition, I suggest reading this Reddit post which does a really swell job intertwining the previous few definitions (Short Squeeze, Margin Call, MOASS) into a more straightforward breakdown of how they all mesh.
Done? Good! Onto the next definition–and this one’s a D♾ZY…
Infinity Pool: Originally coined by the late legend u/BluPrince (rest in peace brother 💙) this MOASS endgame theory is basically an extra spin on the margin call scenarios we outlined above. It states that if each ape placed a portion of their shares into an aggregate “never sell pool”, and that pool grew big enough to cover the entire free float of shares (meaning it would be impossible for SHFs to EVER close out their short positions…)
Fuck, guys.
Do I need to keep repeating myself?
This shit is purely, positively bonkers in a way that cannot be logically explained. The possibilities are flat out ridiculous.
This is the point where I begin to tell my family, friends, and colleagues…why would you not take a shot at this? I mean really…I know I’m an idiot non-financial advisor, but I can tell you that after months upon months of following this thing with coffee in hand and crazy-eyes bouncing from Reddit post to Twitter thread to Reddit post…there has never been an instance in the history of the stock market where a single security has been SO shorted, SO misunderstood, and SO firmly held by SO many shareholders at the same time. It’s a recipe for complete madness, and it WILL end in fireworks–we just don’t know exactly how, or when. Financially, historically, socially–it’s unprecedented. A burning fuse that once lit, is primed to catalyze an explosive transfer of wealth from the largest funds on Earth to the brokerage accounts of normal, everyday people.
If you’re new here, I hope you’re beginning to understand why this situation fascinates millions of investors to no end. The amount of co-mingling pieces strewn across the chessboard can make it appear complicated, but what it really boils down to is this:
This will be the kind of event that’s written about in history textbooks for generations…and you’re telling me that all anyone has to do to participate is to buy and hold a stock that’s already fundamentally undervalued as it is???
To help hammer in allllll that fun terminology I just threw at you, I’m going to basically copy/paste over one of my favorite Reddit posts of the year (with a few tweaks of my own), that sums up this section just beautifully.
All credit to the original author, u/writerofjots.
~~~
‘Shorting’ and ‘naked shorting’ are actually pretty simple to understand.
Basically, imagine that I borrow your favorite necklace. It’s a nice vintage thing that you love, but I’m your best friend, so you loan it to me. Now, I know that type of necklace is really hot right now, so I pawn it. Yeah, I’m a shitty friend, but I really needed the money. Besides, I’m very confident that this vintage necklace fad is going to pass, and when you finally ask for your necklace back, I’ll be able to buy it back for a much cheaper price than I originally pawned it for.
So that’s what I do.
I borrow your necklace while the fad is at its peak, I wait for the fad to pass, then I buy the necklace back for half of what I originally sold it to the pawn shop for. Then I return it to you, and everyone’s happy. Plus, I’ve got some extra cash from the whole ordeal–the difference between what I sold it for at first (expensive), and what I bought it back for later (cheaper).
That’s what shorting a stock is–you make money on a stock going down in price.
But what happens…if the stock instead goes up?
You still have to buy that necklace back, but now it’s twice the price, so you’ve lost money.
And what could make that situation worse? If the pawn shop sold the necklace to someone else, and the new owner reeeeally likes it. Now it’s gone, and I can’t buy it back to return to you on our agreed time. This is called a failure-to-deliver (FTD) and is often the consequence of naked shorting, which is a little more complicated (and beyond the scope of this blog post) so feel free to look that up for some extra XP if you’d like.
Alright so, let’s say it’s the year 2020, and you want to make some money. You find a company that’s dying. Has been dying for quite some time. Let’s call it GameStop. The share price is down to the single digits. A pandemic has just hit and no one is going to physical stores or malls anymore; they’re buying all their video games on Amazon or Steam. Plus, you’ve done your research and know that GameStop has hundreds of millions in debt that it must pay off in the future, or it’s almost certainly going to go bankrupt.
What’s a savvy investor to do?
Well, you could short the company, just like in the necklace example above. You borrow shares that you don’t have to return for a whole year, sell them on the market (which bludgeons the share price down even further than it already is, adding an extra layer of panic on existing shareholders), and wait for the death throes of the company before buying them back for pennies on the dollar (or even for “FREE” if you successfully bankrupt them).
Problem is, you’re greedy, and have absolutely zero morals. So, it’s no longer a question of what a savvy investor would do, but what a bloodthirsty trader bent on sucking up the maximum possible profit would do. And this is what the Short Hedge Funds (SHFs) like Citadel, Melvin, and Point 72 did with GME.
They went BEYOND all-in, by selling more shares of the company than actually exist. It’s called naked shorting, it’s illegal, and a quick way to make some serious cash. Infinite money, nearly, because what’s to stop them from selling hundreds of millions of shares that don’t exist if they know for a fact that they’ll never have to return them?
And how would they be so sure that they’d never have to buy these shares back later? Because they’re such big players on Wall Street that they literally have their hands in the order flow of retail investors (PFOF), and can at any time pick and choose which orders (in this case GME buys) are BAD for their investments, and hide them away in the shadow realm (known as Dark Pools) as part of their can-kicking strategy.
When everyone wants to buy something, the price goes up. Just look at gaming consoles during their launch and the people who buy ten of them to resell for twice the price on eBay. Conversely, when everyone is selling something, the price goes down. Supply and demand. Basic economics, right?
So what happens when they print all these fake shares out of their ass and flood the market with them? The price tanks. It drops and drops to $3 a share. $2 a share. They could get out now with a hefty profit, but they could make even more. You see, if the company goes bankrupt before the due date when they have to buy back and return those naked shorts, then there are no more shares. They vanish. Like tears in the rain. Which means they don’t have to return those shares anymore. They don’t have to do anything except keep…
All. The. Profit.
AND TAX-FREE, TOO.
This is the WET DREAM of a shorter.
But…
…something unexpected happens.
GameStop starts to turn itself around. E-commerce animal and entrepreneurial assassin Ryan Cohen joins the board. Regular investors start to notice just how absurdly deep these shorters are, and start buying up the shares (most notably Keith Gill AKA u/DeepFuckingValue early on).
And they buy A LOT of them. Because they see turnaround potential, combined with a short bet that’s so over-extended that the only way the stock DOESN’T eventually blow sky high is if the company goes bankrupt.
Now, remember what happens when everyone wants to buy something? The price goes up. And a position that was sure to gain you, the shorter, money is now going to cost you everything, since the potential loss is truly infinite.
What do I mean by infinite?
Well, let’s go back to that necklace story. I need to buy the necklace back from the pawn store to return it to my friend, but let’s say that the owner of the store figured out the trick I was trying to play. He knows I need this necklace back, at any cost, because it’s an AWESOME necklace, and my friend needs it back. Just like a person selling water to someone dying of thirst in the desert, the store owner can name ANY PRICE, and will still close the sale.
That’s where we are with GameStop. The short sellers have naked shorted, lost BAD, and are now stuck in a situation where they need to buy alllllll those shares back that they shorted, from a community of shareholders that are holding all the cards.
The gig. Is. Up.
They MUST deliver the shares that they don’t have, but since they can’t afford to, they just keep shorting it more and more by creating more fake shares, while simultaneously using little loopholes to prolong judGMEnt day and kick the can down the road for an even bigger explosion later. They’re stalling, but no amount of MSM FUD articles change the fact that they eventually have to buy back these shares, and when they do, the price will skyrocket.
Enter Short Squeeze.
It happened in 2008 with Volkswagen, which resulted in it becoming the most valued company in the world for a short period of time.
And due to sickeningly lackluster regulation in the markets (shoutout SEC AKA pool girl in The Big Short movie), these houses of cards are scattered all over the global economy.
This naked shorting scheme happens all the time. Remember Toy-R-Us? Same thing, but they didn’t survive. And when shorters start getting overconfident and selling way more shares than actually exist, banking on the fact that they will never have to buy them back in the end, this delicate game starts shaking like a Kenny in church. They are essentially writing more IOU’s than they could ever possibly hope to pay back.
The problem doesn’t end at the hedge funds (which are like investment groups), because the deeper you dig, the more you see that this system is rotten down to its very core. All the way up to the SEC, the Fed, the DTC, and all those other lovely acronyms that we pretend we understand. Basically, the government bodies that are meant to keep a handle on this sort of thing all have their grubby hands in the same cookie jar.
Everyone is liable, and the endgame to this decades-long scheme is lining up to be a colossal short squeeze (MOASS) for GameStop–the golden child with literally every checkbox filled for a face-melting rocket ride that wipes out all of these funds’ bank accounts and distributes the money to every person with at least one share of GME.
With a short squeeze of enough magnitude, all those hedge funds that shorted GameStop will have to buy back the shares AT ANY PRICE. If the shares go up in price enough, they get margin called, and if they fail the margin call (which is as good as going bankrupt for a hedge fund), their insurers will have to pick up the rest of the tab. If the insurers can’t manage, the buck then gets passed onto the Fed, which would then have to print money until the apes say “when”.
Again, we are deep within “who the hell knows” land here. There will be obstacles along the way, as we sit back and watch the elites attempt to tapdance through this clusterfuck as illegally as humanly possible
Before we move on, I need to highlight one more excellent DD, which elaborates in detail how this seemingly insane scenario of the freaking FEDERAL RESERVE printing cold hard tendies out of their bootyhole for a notoriously insatiable crowd of monkeybrains would actually play out: DD: Haha Tendie Printer Go Brrrrrrrrr For Apes.Hat tip to the great scholar u/sir_poops.
We’re now going to take our time machine back to the events surrounding the January 2021 Sneeze, and review the story the mainstream media wanted you to believe. This will be a very short section, because, well, the story the mainstream media told was exactly that–short.
MSM STORY TLDR:
“Well that whole GameStop thing was cool, huh? Bunch of normal people gave Wall St. a nice scare! Very inspirational! Bummer it didn’t work out because, ya know, mean ol Robinhood and the big bad guys were up to their tricks again. DARN. Anyways, go ahead and get back to your day jobs while we collect checks from our advertisers, no need to do any further research on this GameStop thing, it is oooover! Haha. Heheheh. **starts sweating**”
-Literally every MSM station, news conglomerate, and online newspaper
A certified January gem: CNBC pumping PAID ADS that the GameStop shorts had closed their positions.
Think about this. Why would “unbiased” news stations be paying money out of their own pockets to convince their audience that the GME squeeze play is over, and it’s time to sell? Especially given the fact that their supposed main revenue source, advertisers, would undoubtedly be salivating at the continued chaos, since the whole damn world was tuning in at full attention to watch it all unfold.
It suuuuuuure seems like someone(s) with a bigger wallet stepped in with a very clear message they wanted on the airwaves.
Let’s all remember who’s really running the show here…
Citadel CEO Ken Griffin with his boi, top CNBC anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin. Probably nothing.
Hm. Interesting.
Almost seems like literally every member of the ruling class wants YOU to put GameStop in the rearview mirror.
I actually followed the push notifications for a few of these “news” apps on my phone back in the early months of 2021, and can confirm firsthand: whenever the GME price dipped down, my phone damn near finished me off through my pants with notification buzzers, articles, hit pieces, flashing red stock photos, the works.
When the price went up?
*Crickets.*
Little psychological tactics like these were everywhere. From the media articles, to Google removing negative Robinhood reviews following their nuking of the buy button, to the thousands of obvious bot accounts deployed across Twitter and Reddit to spread GME FUD, and dilute the narrative with different “meme stocks” promoted as “the next GME!”
Operation Infiltration
In addition to MSM’s inundation of hit pieces flooding boomer brains everywhere, there was also a massive bot campaign deployed across Twitter, Reddit, and even Facebook groups under GME-related keywords.
The goal? To craft a hybrid-narrative that the squeeze was over, everyone URGENTLY needed to go buy other stocks instead, and everyone still holding GME was not just bagholding, but somehow hurting other people’s feelings in doing so (LOL).
This was one of the most glorious examples of Wall Street believing that simply shoveling money into fake accounts and social media algorithms would be an effective strategy against millions of veteran internet nerds. To the contrary, these desperation heaves were snuffed out immediately every time by the citizens of Reddit, once again reminding every ape just how valuable their GME holding must be.
“SSR” stands for “Short Sale Restriction”, but the bot swarm was parroting any 3-4 letter acronym that looked like a stock ticker in an attempt to sway attention away from GME. Oopsies!
These hail marys were one of the primary inflection points that separated the casual observer plebs with the hardcore GME chads.
The majority of the public ate MSM’s shit sandwich right up, went back to their usual lives, and filed GME away as a fun feel-good story from long ago. But a very special group of people–the type that literally eat crayons for imaginary internet points–were simply too dumb to follow MSM’s instructions, and decided to keep buying, holding, and carrying on through this little stonky adventure.
With each new round of FUD they witnessed, these degenerate apes became even MORE convicted, and dug deeper and deeper into the inner workings of the financial markets to find out what was really going on.
If my glorious Glossaramble didn’t make it clear, the Redditors’ consensus on MSM’s GME narrative can be summarized in one word: BULLLLLLLLLLLSHEIT.
Let’s start with a bit of devil’s advocate:
“The GME price went up so much! That HAD to have been “it”, right? Was MSM correct in calling that the ‘GIGANTIC GME SHORT SQUEEZE’ thousands of times in print?”
ANSWER: Absolutely not.
Conventionally, short squeezes cause big runs up in price, which was enough precedent for the normies to take MSM’s word for it, and assume the squazzle hath squozen.
But after digging through the surface layer, and running a few basic tests in mathematics and market fundamentals, the “January squeeze” narrative goes bunk immediately.
Let’s start with the SEC’s own GameStop Report (yes they’ve been useless in regulation, but they have access to the best data out there) which confirmed that what we saw in January was NOT the squeeze:
The jist of this data set, piggybacking off of our analogy from our necklace example from Section 3: All of those necklace-borrowers who owed their friend their necklace back were NOT buying them from the pawn shop (orange bars)…to the contrary, all of the other similar necklaces available around the world (which they desperately needed to repay their friend) were being snatched up left and right by a bunch of external necklace lovers on the internet (blue bars), making it even more difficult for the original necklace-borrowers to get enough necklaces to repay their friend back.
…in other words, the SHFs never made their repayment. They simply tripled, quadrupled, and quintupled down by printing bazillions of additional synthetic shares and dumping them onto the market, which caused the GME price to dump all the way back down to $38 in Jan.
If lines on charts aren’t your thing, Gary and friends laid it down in the smoothest of terms on page 26:
Whether driven by a desire to squeeze short sellers and thus to profit from the resultant rise in price, or by belief in the fundamentals of GameStop, it was the positive sentiment, not the buying-to-cover, that sustained the weeks-long price appreciation of GameStop stock.
-SEC GME Report – pg. 26
So there’s one confirmation. According to the SEC itself, the price swing up to the mid hundreds we saw in late January 2021 was NOT a short squeeze, but simply a result of heavy retail buying pressure. Therefore, the primary reason that thousands of retail investors originally bought in–to squeeze the over-extended shorts to kingdom come–doesn’t just remain in play, but has grown significantly since the sneeze.
Let’s check another data source: the almighty Bloomberg Terminal. It’s widely regarded by the professional investment community as the most accurate, reliable source of market data there is. (One of these bad boys costs a cool ~$25K/year to use, so yeah, it’d better be dang good.)
Captured in the thick of the January Sneeze, right up there at the top we have GME, coming in at 141.71% short interest. (Very important to note that this data was pulled when the stock was in the hundreds of dollars per share, not before, as the clueless and/or interest-conflicted MSM continues to claim).
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!
Robinhood faced a flurry of lawsuits after removing the buy button in January, and in one of the biggest ones, they were forced to state the SI% at the moment they cut the cord on the free market:
Full court document here. Breakdown of what it all means by the legendary u/criand here.
This same 226% SI number was posted by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) nearly 2 weeks post-Sneeze:
Of course, in the weeks following, these numbers were simply scribbled over and changed on all of these sources, down to laughably-low double digit numbers. No rhyme or reason–just *poof*.
For example, as of this writing, Yahoo Finance is showing a GME SI% of 24% (which I might add, even if true would still be high). But by all forms of logic, this does not mathematically compute. SI this enormous simply does not go down without the price of the stock blasting into the stratosphere, since it quite literally represents the number of SHFs that are still required to close their positions and thus apply face-melting buying pressure to the stock.
So where did these 3-digit SI numbers magically go at the moment shit got hairy for the big baddies on Wall Street?
Great question young ape. For further digging into this chin-scratcher, I’d recommend bookmarking u/atobitt’s House of Cards Series, one of the all-time classic works from a master craftsman in brain-wrinkling. (TLDR: To say that the consequences for massaging numbers in order to alter public perception is a slap on the wrist would be putting it generously).
*allegedly* 😉
Now now, let’s not get carried away here…I’m sure that FINRA is a completely trustworthy source that couldn’t possibly have any conflicts of interests at play as a self-regulated organization, and would NEVER massage their numbers to save face for a market maker/hedge fund that just so happens to have their entire empire hinging on the narrative that GameStop is over and there is absolutely nothing fishy going on behind the scenes…
Why does @FINRA repeatedly say #Citadel has no relevant disciplinary history in settlements of disciplinary actions – when that is not true? Sometimes FINRA goes farther and says that Citadel has no disciplinary history at all. Video here: https://t.co/mgQ8I7gqOzpic.twitter.com/vQ9DMYbQJ3
— Former SEC Branch Chief Lisa Braganca (@LisaBraganca) February 1, 2022
Alright alright, put your tinfoil hats away. Time to get back to those data points we pulled in the thick of the early 2021 shenanigans, which we’re going to assume are at the very least closer to the reality than the garbage we’re being fed now. To summarize, all four of these sources (SEC, Bloomberg Terminal, FINRA, and forceful lawsuit) have told us that during and after the king peak of the Sneeze, GME SI was at a bare minimum well exceeding 100%.
Reddit got to the bottom of this in mere days…but of course, this didn’t stop the shorties and their MSM mouthpieces from pushing on with an ongoing narrative campaign that the Feb ’21 downswing was a result of retail abandoning ship, and that the shorts had escaped this GME houdini trap.
Here’s CNBC’s segment breaking the “news.” Listen for language designed to finger-point and patronize retail investors, and watch the body language.
Now…I’m not a news reporting expert, but it seems odd that Mr. Sorkin has his script in 13 different places on his desk. Almost seems like he’s sweating bullets knowing this segment is going to age like fine milk…
5.2. Post-Sneeze
In the months following The Sneeze, despite nonstop manipulation of GME by SHFs, retail called every single bluff that came their way. As SHFs created more and more fake shares to keep the GME stock price suppressed, apes kept laughing, shitposting, and buying the bejesus out of it with glee. Literally every day that went by, the spring was coiled tighter and tighter (since the more synthetics they create, the more shares apes can buy for their money, further building upon the Mt. Everest of shorted shares they must buy back from those same apes at whatever damn price they choose).
Want to see what apes gobbling every synthetically-printed share looks like? Below is a representation of buy vs. sell orders on Fidelity (the #1 retail broker) for just one month:
Note: Every other month has been similar, I just plucked this graphic from Reddit and am 2 dum to maek updated vershun lol.Also keep in mind that this is not a complete data set–it’s only 1 broker, doesn’t account for size of orders, etc.–but it’s still valuable insight as Fidelity is the LARGEST retail broker, and several other sources have filled in the holes that are missing here.
As you can see, despite the overwhelming majority (consistently around 80%) of orders being BUYS, the price of GME still went either down or sideways the entire time. For you newer folks out there, this is not how prices work–when there’s more buying than selling, the price goes UP. That this isn’t happening indicates that something very fishy is going on behind the scenes, and thanks to the wrinklebrains on Reddit, we have a pretty damn solid of what that something is:
SHFs are partaking in HEAVY, ONGOING SHORTING to counteract those buys in order to suppress the price.
Now for the plot twist: the apes LOVE that SHFs are kicking this can. After all, it’s given them months upon months of extra time to stockpile moon tickets at prices that are mathematically incorrect. In the minds of myself and the majority of others in this GME rabbit hole, there has never been a more sure asymmetric winner in the history of the stock market. Yada yada not financial advice yada.
As long as this delaying of the inevitable continues, the stack of floats that the apes hoist into the infinity pool will continue to grow, since they’re buying up every dang synthetic that’s being printed through this perpetual dipping machine Kenny & Co. have running in their back office.
So…after taking all of the Sneeze shenanigans AND the months of additional shenanigans into account…just how many hundreds (or thousands) of percent short is GME sold at this point? Nobody on earth knows; I doubt even the SHFs have a clue anymore. Their entire life has been reduced to smashing every short button they can get their paws on just to live another day.
Now, let’s take a moment to recall the confirmed SI numbers we pulled from the Sneeze, and combine them with some logical estimations based on the amount of additional shorting that has taken place for over the last year plus. The possibilities start getting real ridiculous real quick…
📢 ONE MORE TIME FOR THE CHIMPS IN THE BACK 📢$TSLA (20% SI): $50 📈 $5000 (accounting for stock split)$VW (13% SI): €40 📈 €1000$GME (Likely >1,000% SI considering 226% *REPORTED* [fake] SI in Jan, followed by 6mo. of additional HEAVY shorting) ???
I tweeted this in July ’21. You can go ahead and add a few hundred extra percent minimum on top of that $GME SI estimate chief, as the buying pressure hasn’t let up a smidge since then.
Yeah…“the squeeze has squoze” my ass.
While we’re having fun here, let’s toss in another nugget from the SEC’s GameStop Report:
“A short squeeze did not appear to be the main driver of events”, heck it was “not [even] consistent with a gamma squeeze” (AKA a much smaller type of squeeze resulting from options volatility, NOT a short-closing bonanza as described earlier).
Even the most hardcore bullish apes assumed a gamma squeeze had played at least some part in the Sneeze run-up, but according to the SEC, we didn’t even see the preview of the preview of GME’s unraveling.
This settles ALL doubt. We didn’t see a damn thing in January.
5.3. Where are the shorts?
So, you may look at all of this and think:
OK…so if the SHFs didn’t close their positions during The Sneeze, then where the heck did the shorts go? Yahoo Finance, Google, Ortex, etc. are telling me that GME’s SI is 20% right now you tinfoil-hatted lunatic!
The short answer: Due to horrifically-opaque market plumbing that only the top dogs can see…we can’t say with certainty which mattress these shorts have been stuffed under
The long answer: As far as what we are able to piece together, the shorts are hidden in some combination of:
Obscure options witchcraft
Puck-passing between SHFs to falsely portray clean books
A hefty dollop of ETF shorting abuse
MANY more we haven’t even figured out yet
I won’t be covering all of these possibilities in this post (have fun diving into the DD archive in Section 11.2 for that) but I will break down just one juicy one to give you an idea of just how big of a monster is hiding under this bed:
ETF shorting
ETF (Exchange Traded Fund):A basket of stocks that trades on the market just like a stock does
In short (heheh) there is a great deal of evidence out there that SHFs are bypassing the direct shorting of GME, and shorting GME-containing ETFs instead. This way, they can skrrrrrrt their reporting numbers (and thus trot out miniscule GME SI numbers for their MSM mouthpieces to parrot on TV) while still manipulating GME’s price downward.
One GME-holding ETF that supports this suspicion by acting all kinds of sus: XRT.
Edit: Just a few days after I saved the above screenshot to add onto this post, XRT SI% blew up to more than double that, nearly 1,300%. Completely normal activity, definitely.
Remember how I mentioned earlier that $TSLA having 20% short interest a couple years ago was considered “large”? Yeah…ETFs bouncing around between the hundreds and thousands of percent IS NOT NORMAL. Source: ETFchannel.com
But this isn’t the first time XRT in particular has been popping up on radars of those in the know–check out this full presentation covering this problem of ETF shorting, which contains a direct shoutout of XRT (keep in mind this talk is quite technical, so if you’re a beginner, I’d skip it):
In short? ETF fuckery has been going on for years, and now that GME has been stuffed into the picture, the bubble appears primed to pop once and for all.
A more fun explanation:
To re-emphasize once more, the breadth of different estuaries within the rabbit hole of “WTF IS ACTUALLY GOING ON” is vast, and outside of the scope of this post. For more deep dives from the finest wrinklebrains in the land, stock up on crayons, tinfoil and toilet paper and bookmark Section 11.2.
5.4. Review
NOW. I know this section has been a bit of a firehose to drink from, so let’s review:
GME Short Interest was confirmed by multiple sources to be in the hundreds of percent in the final days of January 2021, when the stock was already in the hundreds of dollars, contrary to the narrative that the upswing was a result of SHFs covering their bad bets
Reddit said yeah naw, sniffed out the rat immediately, and carried on buying and holding despite MSM pumping nonsense into their face constantly (which continues to this day)
Evidence of major rumblings beneath the surface adding additional proof that GME holders are correct in their thesis that they are holding onto pure gold, and it’s only a matter of time before the rest of the world becomes one giant, collective surprised pikachu face
All of this culminates into the most egregious can-kick in the history of the stock market, the magnitude of which is yet to be seen. Citadel, Melvin, and other hedge funds were about to get caught up in a career-deleting shitstorm at the hands of a bunch of shitposters, so of course they took advantage of the complete lack of regulation, and found a way to delay the inevitable, ensuring an even bigger explosion later. As it stands now, it’s not hyperbole to speculate that it very well could suck the entire global economy into fray.
This is Ken. When Ken loses, he doesn’t accept the loss like a man. He simply uses his exorbitant financial influence to change the rules of the game on the fly, in hopes that those who bested him get frustrated by his never-ending ability to kick, scream, and squirm out of his failure. Ken is so deeply unable to take a single loss in his sad life, that he would rather drag the entire global economy down as distraction theater than let the world see how much of a spoiled child he really is. Don’t be like Ken.
But little did Kenboy and his friends know the power of the force they had reckoned with…
After years of blissfully fleecing the American public through laughable regulatory environments, the Wall Street fat cats in their fancy suits and lavish highrise penthouses made a critical, and I mean C R I T I C A L mistake by targeting GME:
They didn’t just mess with one group of people that you don’t want to screw with…they messed with several. AT THE SAME TIME.
6.1. Redditors
EXHIBIT A) They live on a platform that’s HYPER-EFFICIENT at truth-finding, thanks to its upvoting/downvoting/awarding system. It’s not like Facebook or Instagram where your feed is a mess of ads and filler to sift through–you get the best-of-the-best content as voted on by a very niche group of people, PLUS the hardcore discourse fleshing out the disagreements in the comments. In other words, it’s tailor-made to excel as a bullshit-squashing, goal-pursuing hivemind HQ.
EXHIBIT B) MEME LORDS. Everywhere. It’s impossible to get the spirits of these people down; they share a goofball mentality 24/7 that feeds on itself eternally. Not one day has gone by since the Sneeze without S-tier memes, hype trailers, music videos, and every other type of creative masterpiece you can think of coming out of the GME subs.
EXHIBIT A) I mean come on. They’ve been stepped on, screwed, and gaslighted every step of their lives. (Check out the average price of a home these days compared to any other generation’s adulting years, while being paid essentially the same wage as decades prior.) OF COURSE they’re starving for an opportunity to escape this eternal cycle of BS, while simultaneously getting epic revenge on the boomer elites who’ve trapped them there for all these years in the form of a gigantic pile of their cash.
Those with everything to gain fight harder than the paid mercenaries. https://t.co/i5TvWf6myF
EXHIBIT B) They have nothing to lose in many cases, since the cards have been so heavily-stacked against them since birth.
EXHIBIT C) They’re pissed off from watching their families get hosed in the 2008 financial crash, which was completely the fault of those very same hedge fund cronies that are tied up in the GameStop fiasco today. Of course, there was ZERO punishment served for the crimes they committed during the Great Recession–so GME is the ultimate opportunity to deliver proper justice.
How crazy would it be if the sociopaths at the top of the financial sector learned absolutely nothing in 2008, and recklessly gambled themselves into an even bigger bind as a result. Except this time there were millions of watchdogs plotting every move they made in real-time, and sharing it with the world on a blue bird app. That would be so crazy lol.
6.3. Gamers
EXHIBIT A) Trained from their very first video game to SEEK THE GOLDEN TREASURE, the motherlode chest at the end of the final boss stage, and to NEVER give up until victory is achieved.
EXHIBIT B) Embrace challenges because they wholeheartedly love them, and persevere through difficulty and monotony on the path to claiming the ultimate high score.
EXHIBIT C) Born and bred in Call of Duty lobbies, grinding their way to max prestige amidst a constant monsoon of haters, distractions, screaming and general noise blaring in their face the entire time:
Think you’re gonna knock these guys off their path with a few FUD articles? L O L.
I saved gamers for last, because this is where the pure beauty of this story comes in. The company at the core of all of this, of freaking course, is a VIDEO GAME COMPANY, which holds a place in the hearts of millions of 20, 30, and 40-somethings who grew up pulling mountain dew-fueled all-nighters, battling final bosses and engaging in non-stop verbal assault in multiplayer matches to pursue arbitrary internet points.
What do you THINK will happen when you throw all these same elements at them, tell them “they can never win”, and replace the useless internet points with REAL-LIFE riches and lifelong freedom from the corporate drone they now face years later in adulthood?
The only thing gamers love more than a final boss fight? Being told it’s impossible to beat.
This post is my favorite illustration of just how hilariously dumb it was for SHFs to jump into the trenches with these Gamers/Redditors/Millennials. Highly recommend giving it a read.
So yeah, anyways…these three subcategories of humans (Redditors/Millennials/Gamers), the absolute last ones you want to fuck with on their own, let alone ALL TOGETHER, let alone ON THEIR INTERNET HOMEFIELD, didn’t bat a damn eye when CNBC and other HF mouthpieces spouted their “squeeze is over!” nonsense.
These BS claims just tossed gasoline onto the fire, strengthening the conviction of those who were already veteran diamond-handers into KNOWING they were onto something even bigger than they originally thought.
6.4. Meanwhile at GameStop…
I feel downright gross for going on this long without talking about the freakin’ company itself!
Let’s fix that.
SO…while MSM has been tying themselves into knots trying to bash GME as a totallypost-squeeze stock *wink* *wink* with nothing but empty hype and memes supporting it, what has the company actually been up to under the leadership of Ryan Cohen?
Oh boy…where to even start?
Paid off all their debt
Locked and loaded a $1 Billion+ war chest to be used on anything they want
Hired dozens of BALLER executives from Chewy, Amazon, Zulily, Microsoft, Target, and others to get their e-commerce transition running smoother than a baby’s behind
Primed to transform into a full-blown tech behemoth with various hints (and hires) confirming Ryan Cohen’s plan to repeat his spanking of Amazon in the pet food sector in the significantly larger technology sector
So…about those shorts that can only weasel out of this thing if GameStop goes bankrupt?
HA. Good luck with that.
6.5. OK so GME shareholders are locked in and the company’s killing it…but WUT MEAN for the actual stonk?
Thanks to the shareholders’ growing conviction, fueled by a steady diet of DD, memes, and shitposts on Reddit/Twitter, everyone just kept on buying, and buying, and buying more shares.
And then they bought a few more.
And maybe a few more after that.
And PERHAPS…a few more again.
Why?
Because GameStop investors absolutely LOVE the stock, and now they knew the downside risk was basically non-existent due to the hordes of future guaranteed buyers (shorters that must close all of their positions) who are on the hook to unleash absolute hellfire once their naked-shorting Game Stops.
More buying = more floats locked.
More floats locked = even bigger MOASS.
Even bigger MOASS = …why the hell would you NOT buy more moon tickets for a few hundred bucks a pop?!
Aaaand repeat cycle.
This whole loop is a pretty N-E-A-T position to be in if you’re long on the stock.
…aaand not so much if you’re short on it. Like, AT ALL.
**Note: Welcome to speculation time! With a cast of stakeholders this diverse (financial, political, simian, etc.) plus the uncharted-ness of the situation as a whole, good freaking luck predicting the exact outcome of this bananalicious clusterfuck. But we like to have fun here, so we’re going to take a few drunk piñata swings for shits n’ gigs.
7.1. Potential GME MOASS Catalyst #1: Shorts bleed out on interest
The simplest of outcomes would be if the SHFs who are continuously keeping this spring held down simply lose the battle of attrition, due to the company in their crosshairs refusing to die. In a free and fair market, this would’ve happened LONG ago, since it costs interest (and a ton of it)for SHFs to keep using illegal tactics to prolong the inevitable. Alas, due to the bottomless depths they’ve been allowed to dig for loopholes and sidesteps, it’s unknown if this will ever happen without an external nudge.
Good news for apes is, this bleeding of SHF assets is ongoing, so at the very least, it’s working in the longs’ favor in the background, all day every day.
The earlier-mentioned Tesla (TSLA) short squeeze is a good example of this long-bleedout scenario playing out. There was a “huge” SI of ~20% on TSLA (miniscule compared to GME SI%, mind you), and the shorters of that stock were faced with a similar problem: that crazy mofo Elon Musk simply refused to let them FUD his company to death. The EV automaker just kept on truckin’, pumping out cars, growing revenues, and building a passionate fanbase (you could call them 💎🙌-lite), until eventually, the bloodthirsty shorts/MSM propaganda machine were simply outrun by the BRC (Before Ryan Cohen) king of billionaire memelords. The ensuing snowball of closing shorts led to a multi-month skyrocketing in the stock price, which I had the pleasure of watching firsthand as a very happy TSLA stonkholder at the time. *Pats self on back*
7.2. Potential GME MOASS Catalyst #2: Shorts lose the Flappy Stonk game
“Flappy stonk” is a theory/illustration coined by Reddit user “u/PowerRaptor” that I absolutely love:
It basically states that there are two boundaries, an upper and a lower, that shorts are battling with to stave off a Margin Call failure (remember from our Glossaramble, this is when the prime broker/daddy of the SHF says ENOUGH, and pulls the plug on them altogether). This rock + hard place that SHFs are trapped between is beautifully represented by the upper and lower pipes in the game Flappy Bird.
UPPER BOUNDARY:
If the GME price goes too HIGH, the SHFs risk getting a call from Marge since they’ll no longer have the AUM (assets under management) to keep their prime broker daddy from kicking their door down Kool-Aid man style.
LOWER BOUNDARY:
If the GME price goes too LOW, this is ALSO bad for them, because the apes will then be able to load up on even more cheap stonk for their money.
Remember that the more GME shares apes hold, the deeper the shitswamp SHFs are stuck in. They have to buy ALL those floats back from apes later, and oh by the way, every day that goes by, every ape reads a dozen new Reddit posts confirming that the shares they’re sitting on are worth a-n-y amount they desire, which gives them even more reason to keep on buying GME like it’s their job.
You can read the complete OG Flappy Stonk theory here, and the equally-juicy encore here.
7.3. Potential GME MOASS Catalyst #3: Dividend fun
The amount of bullish directions we could go with this makes my head hurt, but let’s put just one under the microscope:
In short, the introduction of a stock split as a dividend drastically changes where brokerages’ incentives lie. Up until now, they’ve made a hefty amount of money by lending retail’s shares to SHFs to keep the short-bus running, but given this new accounting twist, they suddenly have a lot more reasons to ditch these lending desk revenues and throw their SHF clients under the bus in order to save themselves from a massive tax burden. (Read this Reddit post for a more in-depth analysis of this game-changing development.)
*UPDATE*
The dividend hath been distributeth, and lo and behold, it stirred up all kinds of madness, including straight up international securities fraud by the DTCC to sidestep the usual stock-split-as-dividend processing. How this tangential wrinkle will unfold is TBD, but in the meantime, I’m gonna go ahead and buy more GME. DTCC shitshow coverage DD can be found here, here, and here.
7.4. Potential GME MOASS Catalyst #4: Ryan Cohen Thanos snap
One of the most zen-inducing realities of the apes’ current position is the overflowing arsenal of K.O. sledgehammers at the disposal of the GameStop team, particularly the Ring Leader of the circus himself, Ryan Cohen. Make no mistake, no company enjoys being shorted to death, and much like Tesla in 2020, this company is led by a master in his craft. And by craft, of course I mean posting GIFs of smiling shit:
(Obviously the tweet of someone very stressed out about the position they’re in)
The most simple yet diabolical of these options is as follows: Buy more shares.
Yes dear friends, according to Item 1.01 in GameStop’s 8K filing, the big boss himself is contractually allowed to increase his GME stake from 13% to 19.9% whenever he pleases. This pro gamer move would drop a devastating 9 million-share anvil onto a shorty crew which is already playing on Veteran Legendary Expert mode with a blindfold on and jumper cables attached to their nips, so there’s little doubt that it would all but Stop the Game.
I’m sorry I’m awful at photoshop. But I admit to always improving
7.5. Now…let’s COMPLETELY forget about all this “infinity pool” “short squeeze” “MOASS catalyst” mumbo jumbo, and explore GameStop’s fundamentals if none of these even existed
This could make up 15 blog posts on its own, so instead of making this section 100 pages long, bookmark these classic Reddit posts that do a much better job of explaining than me! Keep in mind that these are old analyses–things have gotten significantly more bullish since their writing…
Now, I would be remiss if I didn’t touch on the potential risks in GME. Let’s lay them out, along with my reasons for why they are dumb and suck 😉
8.1. Argument #1: What if GameStop goes bankrupt?
AKA the only way the shorts are able to escape their 420-foot deep hole and weasel their way out of this disaster.
Yeah…no longer worried about bankruptcy. As discussed earlier, GameStop has:
Paid off all debt
Raised an additional $1 Billion to play with
An absolute FIRE executive team, headlined by the best of the bestin e-commerce, marketing, supply chain management, etc. to use this juicy piggy bank to its highest potential
A rabbid shareholder base that loves the stock so much they’ll shove a banana up their ass for it
Wait, what?!
Don’t worry about it…
8.2. Argument #2: The GME price is so volatile! 2 much risk 4 me
Let me remind you the true beauty of holding a stock with mondo short interest:
Every single shorted share = a guaranteed future buyer (ALL SHORTS MUST CLOSE).
Moar future buyers = moar number go up.
I’m not a mathemegician, but to me this sounds like the most un-risky proposition imaginable…especially in a VERY sketchy market environment where a single correction could trigger mass-margin calls across alllllll the SHFs who are over-leveraged to the areolas.
When the worst-possible case scenario is being strapped in alongside time-traveler DFV and entrepreneurial beast Ryan Cohen, apes couldn’t care less about a little volatility.
8.3. Argument #3: Couldn’t retail brokerages turn off the GME buy button again like they did during the Sneeze?
I mean, it’s certainly a possibilityonce things start getting wild, but Robinhood has been in a tailspin since their PR nightmare from Jan ’21, and no brokerage wants to face that same fate. Sure, a decision of this magnitude could be forced upon them by entities higher up the chain, but if this scenario were to present itself, there would be even MORE eyeballs, both potential customers (foreign and domestic) and wary regulators, watching when the MOASS price run makes the Sneeze look like a mosquito bite on the GME chart. They will do anything they possibly can to avoid planting a target on their own back like RH did.
But just for fun, let’s say that literally ALL the brokerages are forced by the clearing houses to turn off the buy button once 🚀 penetrates the Earth’s atmosphere.
Still won’t matter.
The GME faithful have been through it all, including the absolute tank of the GME price from ~$500 to ~$40 when it happened the first time, and they didn’t sell shit. They just memed about how obvious of a pump-fake it was, waited til the button turned back on, and continued their merry stonk-stacking.
Let me repeat that: the smokebomb attempt of dumping the price back in Jan ’21 backfired catastrophically for the SHF cabal, since Reddit saw straight through the bullshit and diamond-handed even harder.
The apes WELCOME them to try that stunt again, and layer on even more confirmation bias that the apes are holding onto the most important asset in the entire traditional finance system.
Shorts no close? Apes no sell. That’s all there is to it.
8.4. Argument #4: Unprecedented levels of fuckery by the big boys
Potential suspects:
a) Government
b) SEC
c) Some other branch of elites that personally gains off of the completely corrupt status quo, and will do anything to keep the house of cards propped up
This is, in my opinion, the only risk worth discussing, since we can all agree there’s no bounds the top 0.1% won’t cross to hold onto their magical boomer powers (crime).
There’s no doubt that a MOASS/infinite price scenario is completely uncharted territory, and could open up a black hole that blows apart anything and everything around it. To think that there’s ZERO chance some member of the corrupt ruling class would once again move heaven and earth to rage quit the game would be naive.
So, let’s explore the range of outcomes with a little help from my favorite word in the whole wide world:
INCENTIVES.
#1. Retail Brokerages:
We discussed in the previous section how a buy-button-gate repeat would actually HELP the apes, but what if they used a different tool to hold off the MOASS beast–ie continuing to lend retail’s shares to the SHFs to short, so they can keep their hot-potato game going?
While this argument is valid in terms of giving SHFs a longer leash to continue can-kicking, it doesn’t change the fact that these are still temporary delays of the inevitable.
And that’s not all…
[SECTION 7.4 RECAP]
GameStop has pulled the trigger on a major incentive shift for these brokers by declaring a stock dividend, which gives them less reason to pursue lending desk revenue, and MORE reason to throw these SHFs under the bus in order to save a ton of tax money for themselves. (Again, you gotta read this DD covering how diabolical this move is from GameStop.)
#2. SEC:
In 1 word…questionable.
Now, I should preface this by saying that the SEC’s place in all of this is a controversial topic among the GME community, so I’ll do my best to present both sides of the argument neutrally:
PESSIMISTIC SIDE:
Well…they haven’t done shit. With blatant crime occurring daily, on a massive scale, in broad daylight, essentially the only thing Gary Gensler and the team have done is release a report describing the events in January (which took them 9 months to write by the way). While this report did contain extra confirmation bias that the squeeze never squoze, literally everyone paying attention already knew that. The people responsible for this mess need to face justice, but instead they’re having closed-door meetings together:
via the SEC’s official public calendar. WTF did they discuss? Why was it 6 days after proof of collusion surfaced between Robinhood & Citadel, and 16 days before the SEC’s GameStop report was released? Were conflicts of interest presented to save face? Way too many questions, zero answers.
Thus it is very hard to assume that they will step up and prevent Wall Street from stepping up their crime game to unprecedented levels.
OPTIMISTIC SIDE:
YES the SEC has been an absolute joke for decades.
YES they’ve been complicit to the rampant crime across Wall Street, and at least appear to still be doing next-to-nothing as far as action right now.
But for those willing to take a slight whiff of hopium, there is a glimmer of optimism to be found…
It’s possible that the handful of new faces on the SEC staff have at least a partial backbone (Gary Gensler and Gurbir Grewal most notably), and simply need a loooooooong time to get the ship turned around.
On a purely first glance, surface level, they just don’t appear to be evil scumbags like previous SEC heads have. They’re either great actors, or they genuinely want to be on the right side of history, and simply have a mile-thick layer of sludge to tread through in order to make any progress on unwinding the years of deeply-entwined corruption.
NEW VIDEO from @GurbirGrewalNJ >> "To be perfectly candid, growing up as a child of immigrants & navigating two cultures was extremely difficult… It's so important for young people to be allies to others who might not look like them or worship like them…"#AAPIHeritageMonthpic.twitter.com/snKjBKcrrC
Simply put, there are arguments to be made for both sides here, although the former has a lot more ground to stand on given the amount of blatant crime that continues to occur daily. I personally doubt the SEC will magically wake up and police the crime they’re supposed to, but honestly, it doesn’t matter.
Math is math, and there are whales on both sides of this battle. The clusterfuck will unravel with or without Gary boy doing his job.
Would sure be nice…
#3. US Government:
Now this one I can actually back up an optimistic case for.
Believe it or not, the US Government would actually directly profit if they let the MOASS play out organically, since they’d make a BOATLOAD of money on the resulting capital gains tax.
Capital Gains Tax (noun):A tax levied on profit from the sale of an investment.
When the MOASS kicks off, and millions of people’s brokerage accounts go flying to Jupiter, these shareholders won’t be the only ones benefiting off of Wall St’s idiocy, but Uncle Sam too. When Marge finally takes her phone off airplane mode, the long-awaited call will carry GME to price levels where each share sold would bring in a sizeable chunk of revenue for the Bidester, which could be used to fund public works, infrastructure projects, or even take a decent bite out of the national debt.
Hell, Grandpa Joe has even weaved a few Wall Street pot shots into his social media strategy during his tenure, so depending on how thick your tinfoil hat is, there’s a chance they’re already warming up the press releases to celebrate the everyday Americans’ big win against the Wall St. baddies. (This would all be a show just to boost approval ratings and garner votes of course, but I’ll sure as heck take it).
Wall Street didn’t build this country—the great American middle class did. This time, when we rebuild the middle class under the American Jobs Plan, we’re bringing everyone along.
Could be nothing, could be something. Again, we’ll just have to wait and see.
Oh, and whether or not you think the government will use this money responsibly is irrelevant. All I care about is that they WANT money, and will GET IT right alongside us in a MOASS scenario.
Aligned incentives = happy apes.
One last point to mention here is the risk of blowback internationally if US Gov were to try something cute. There’s a whooooole lot of foreign investment in GME as well, both retail and institutional, and all eyes will be on the regulators to not screw them out of their money. The USA relies on foreign investment to maintain its image of having the largest stock market in the world. It would be disastrous if they were to throw all international trust under the bus.
Internet guy Houston Wade has done a great job describing the government’s favorable incentive toward MOASS in a couple of different videos:
Start @ 37:00:
And another one–start @ 4:20 (heheh):
TLDR on the risks presented by these potentially sus actors:
Theoretically, anything can happen. There’s no guarantee any which way on how these different establishments will act, making this an exercise in weighing different incentives among the players involved in a totally bizarro situation.
For a great community discussion on these risks plus the likelihood of each outcome, check out this fantastic Reddit thread.
8.5. Argument #5: Even with all that…I just can’t believe they’d allow the poors to get a big win against the giants like that
Well that’s another fun thing. It ain’t as simple as ONLY retail investors vs. ONLY Wall Street whales.
There are PLENTY of big institutions, state pension funds, etc. that are long on GME as well, and they want their money from these grubby-handed SHFs just like we do.
You may recognize a few of those names–Blackrock, Vanguard, Charles Schwab, and Morgan Stanley to name a few. These are the biggest mofos on the block. You think they want to get paid on their GME longs? I’m gonna go with yes.
It’s worth noting that both reporting standards, and underlying incentives for these institutional buys are squirrely at best (and can change), so take these numbers with a grain of salt. At the very least, we know that there are plenty of whales that would be happy to see Citadel and SHF friends go kablooey, whether to gain off the MOASS with the apes, or to bump themselves up a peg on the Wall Street totem pole.
And yeah, I know, all of these listed institutions are evil and we hate them. But for now, having their massive hand in lobbying power on the long side of GME ain’t a bad thing. We’ll handle them later…
There will never be another GameStop situation after this.
It’s [Wall Street’s] game after all. It was supposed to be, “crash the economy and run with the money”. Not “crash the economy and pay up to retail”. But GameStop was a flaw exposed by their greed
Alright Ben so a few million shitposters might get rich as fuck. Cool story bro, what does that mean for all the non-investors, my family, or society as a whole?
What an incredibly important question. I am SO GLAD you asked it. When I was a boy on r/WallStreetBets…
*AHEM* *cough*
Societal implications:
Due to the astronomical pile of stressors to the corruption-ridden financial system that the GME saga has exposed to the world, it very much marks an inflection point not just for the balance of power in the stock market, but for the general public’s ability (and confidence) to use their collective power to stand up and pulverize the elites who shit on them in every aspect of their lives.
Can you imagine how epic of a story it will be when millions of normal human beings plant a gigantic straw into the heart of Wall Street, and suck out billions of dollars of their ill-earned money…then allocate a significant portion of that capital to fix all kinds of problems that these assholes have caused around the world?
It’d take a whole new blog post to decipher how interconnected society’s problems are, but here’s a hint: It all comes down to the money.
And right now, the money it completely and utterly fucked, manipulated, and controlled by a select group of people who use all kinds of trickery to enrich themselves, and cause havoc amongst the general population of the world.
Once the scripts are flipped…we’d be talking enormous philanthropic campaigns, feeding the homeless, assisting endangered wildlife efforts, new pathways to share/celebrate art and creativity, new media networks to crush misinformation and eliminate the fear & divisiveness they rely on for revenue…the possibilities are truly endless!
We’ve already seen the early ripples of excitement GME investors have for improving the world with their incoming wealth:
via The VergeShoutout to my guys! Heavy reinforcements on the way 🦍❤️🦍
Keep in mind this flurry of donations was sparked by a single post on WallStreetBets, and the whole thing lasted just a few days. 350 G’s.The tip of the iceberg.
Many apes have even begun brainstorming how they’ll be using their profits to make the world a better place once all is said and done.
I promise you this: once this baby blows, the piles of cash will not be used to screw people as it has been for decades through Wall Street’s crime ring–it will be put to fantastic use by the next generation of genuine, caring, loving minds.
Aside from the tangible good that an influx of capital will do for important causes across the globe, I envision this event being a major signal of enlightenment and hope for billions of people as well. All those folks who’ve been stuck in the constant toxicity of left-vs-right culture will see the veil being torn down in front of their eyes, as justice is (hopefully) served to those who have created this facade to cover up their life of crime–the true root of essentially all of society’s most pressing problems.
It’s hard to speculate exactly how this paradigm shift will translate to specific change, or if it will be preceded by a lengthy period of turmoil due to the SHF’s insistence on causing as much destruction as possible on their path to defeat…However I do believe that once this gigantic glob of human scum is sufficiently pulverized under the weight of their own stupidity, the phoenix that rises from the ashes will ring in an exciting new era of prosperity and opportunity for far more people than just those directly involved with GME.
Need even more confirmation that GME is a huge freakin’ deal for the direction society moves in the future? Bookmark this post, laying the case for how GME MOASS could legitimately increase prosperity worldwide, even for people who have never touched the stock market in their lives. It’s one of my favorites I’ve read all year.
Dozens of my Instagram followers, friends, and family have asked me over the past several months: Ben…of all the crazy things going on in the world…why are you so enamored by freaking GAMESTOP of all things?
Easy.
Personal interest alignments aside (investing, gaming, community togetherness, dank memes, etc.) I truly believe the outcome of the GameStop story will mark a major turning point for power distribution not just in the USA, but around the world. ALL the boomer-built plumbing we see within the financial system was designed from the ground-up to maintain the power of the elite few, while screwing everyone else through endless hidden dollar extractions.
This system, intentionally designed to normalize inequality (to the point where people are actually CELEBRATING the need to beg other poors for financial assistance so you literally don’t die) is fucking absurd when you stop to think about it, and I hope all people on all political sides are able to take a deep breath amongst the left vs. right shitfights and agree that we are in dire need of systemic change.
As we’ve already seen…the GME situation has proven to be the only issue in the history of freakin’ politics that ALL SIDES of the aisle have united on.
All of these cross-aisle endorsements, to me, proves without a shadow of a doubt that GameStop is so much bigger than a story about one stock. It’s very much a story of the whole world waking up to who the real enemies are–the ones at the top who pull all the strings regardless of political affiliation.
The dawn of the internet was the first sniff of an impending shift toward a fairer power distribution, but it came with a hefty period of growing pains.
The web at its core is a living, breathing civilization of its own, and like all new civilizations, it’s taken some time to figure itself out. And what’s more, its potential has been strangled every step of the way by those it threatens to disrupt, who have a seemingly nonstop supply of money cannons at the ready to twist and turn these new technological opportunities to the will of the status quo.
GameStop has brought multiple niches of the most internet-savvy humans together to fight side-by-side against the system that’s screwed them their entire lives. An entire generation raised by CoD lobbies and crass Reddit forums, finally reaching the XP levels to challenge the final boss boomers head-on, wrestle those money-cannons around 180 degrees, and pack them chock-full of chicken tender ammunition for the finishing blow.
And this won’t just be a feel-good story about a bunch of Redditors making some money–this event will shake the entire broken system to its core, all the way up to the elites who have carefully nurtured this minefield of left vs. right squabbles (wealth inequality, racism, sexism, homelessness, guns, climate change–you name it) that damage, divide, and most of all distract the 99.99% from the fact that these 0.01%ers are the ones who are TRULY behind every damn one of these cultural divides.
How will the final battle play out?
I don’t know. Nobody does. But I do promise you this…once the kicking and screaming by the bitter losers runs its course…the end result will be an awesome sight to behold.
Y’all take all of this information as you will, and base your own actions/opinions on it however you like.
But as for me…I like the stock.
Thanks so much for taking the time to read this babbling stream of consciousness! Before you go, I highly recommend you flipping through the BONUS FUN section I compiled below, filled with dozens of my favorite posts that have surfaced from the last year of shenanigans.
Then, once you’re ready to join me on the frontlines of the craziest rabbit hole ever, shoot me a follow on Twitter, where I’ll be continuing my lifelong dream of shitposting my way to world domination 😈
Well. You dun gone and made it past the “Conclusion” section and you want MORE?? I’m proud of you. I’d buy you a cookie if I hadn’t spent all my money on more GME 🙁
Below is a dump of my favorite posts from the saga, in a few categories that I have arbitrarily deemed most awesome:
Beginner’s Pack
DD Hall of Fame
Hype Videos
Soundtrack
Happy exploring!
And for all you veteran gamestonkers out there, if I’m missing any golden nuggets here, please let me know! I plan on updating this regularly, until I literally can’t read my computer screen from the G-forces 🚀
And I saved the absolute BEST musical goodness for last…the dawg u/BodySurfDan AKA The Real DMT with the most fire collection of GME tracks this side of the moon. Watch literally every one of his videos with the word “GameStop” in it:
Coming in at only 66 pages, I knew this book would either be a masterfully-simplified crash course, or a rushed disaster. Today I’ll be finding the answer, so you don’t have to. Click here for my full review!
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Coming in at only 66 pages, I knew this book would either be a masterfully-simplified crash course, or a rushed disaster. Today I’ll be finding the answer, so you don’t have to. Click here for my full review!
…aaand not so much if you’re short on it. Like, AT ALL.
