54 ms·

u/DeepFuckingValue and the GameStop Reddit mania

486 points by gangwolf 6y ago

doublerabbit 6y ago
Add a . to the end of wsj.com to get past the paywall.
- anand-bala 6y ago
  Doesn't seem to work on Firefox mobile.
  - _-david-_ 6y ago
    Worked fine for me on Firefox for Android. To be clear you should do wsj.com./
- jjazwiecki 6y ago
  or safari
- winter_blue 6y ago
  It doesn't work on Chrome either.
- Stevvo 6y ago
  The "Bypass Paywalls" extension is also effective, although you may want to limit the number of extensions you run for memory usage or performance reasons.
- cookie_monsta 6y ago
  Nice, thanks. FF on android
TerribleHeight 6y ago
Hi Keith, what do you think about CytoDyn (cydy)? Their monoclonal drug Leronlimab has 3 different clinical trials with FDA and are FAST TRACKED. They've also applied for an upgrade to NASDQ. Current price $5.38. Their suppose to release results any day now on the COVID trial.
TerribleHeight 6y ago
Hi Keith, what do u think of CytoDyn cydy? Their monoclonal drug Leronlimab has 3 clinical trials with the FDA and has a fast track designation. They've also applied for an upgrade to NASDQ. Current price is $5.38. Their suppose to release results on their COVD trial any day now.
findjashua 6y ago
web archive: http://archive.today/iP9IX http://archive.today/iP9IX
- devops000 6y ago
  I hope one day we will see an IPFS link
  - pmlnr 6y ago
    What is stopping you from making and sharing one?
  - eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 6y ago
    Why do people constantly have to re-invent the wheel? :( Freenet [0] has been providing censorship-resistant, anonymous, decentralized hosting for 20 years - and is still in active development! You could upload it to Freenet without any server whatsoever and it would stay online for as long as it is popular, even if your machine goes offline. And you'd be anonymous while doing so! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet
    - prepend 6y ago
      Freenet doesn’t make money for speculators like ipfs. Making gobs of money is an important feature driving wheel reinvention, I think.
      - jMyles 6y ago
        Are speculators making money on ipfs? How? This is news to me.
        eruleman 6y ago
        via Filecoin: "In short: IPFS addresses and moves content, while Filecoin is an incentive layer to persist data." https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/faq/#ipfs-and-filecoin https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/faq/#ipfs-and-filecoin
PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
not really an interview. It wasn't clear they even talked to him at all? [EDIT: ok, they did talk to him, but this still isn't what most publications would call "an interview" ]
- ksherlock 6y ago
  “This story is so much bigger than me,” Mr. Gill told The Wall Street Journal in his first interview since the unboxing this week of a volatile new stock-market game. “I support these retail investors, their ability to make a statement.”
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    They seem to have gotten a couple of comments from him, then fleshed it out with remarks from his mother and a few other online identities, plus some simple background research. Nothing like I would expect for "an interview with...", which would normally be dominated by the subject's own words.
- dang 6y ago
  Ok, I've taken 'interview' out of the title above. Not necessary really.
Dirlewanger 6y ago
This is one of the very, very few positive stories about how powerful the Internet can be to the masses. Keith is no different from Jim Kramer yelling on CNBC to buy some stock and watching it spike because their boomer audience raced to their landline phones and told their financial advisors to invest. It's just at a much faster pace, and old media is scared shitless of it, so they endlessly denigrate the people involved and call for daddy government to stop it. Unfortunately I don't think it's going to end well for retail investors.
- paulpauper 6y ago
  yeah except unlike Cramer's picks, his actually go up and make people money
- PartiallyTyped 6y ago
  Unlike Cramer, he provided DD and was transparent on his positions.
  - smcl 6y ago
    I keep seeing “DD” and I’m finally going to ask: what does this stand for.
    - wting 6y ago
      Due Diligence
    - ska 6y ago
      due diligence, I suspect. i.e. "show your work".
    - jakemauer 6y ago
      I believe it means due diligence.
    - ricardonunez 6y ago
      Due Diligence
u678u 6y ago
I like Matt Levine's comment " The guy behind one of the greatest trades of our time was giving out financial advice for MassMutual, and somehow they let him go." edit I missed the best part of the quote "I hope he showed up at client meetings in a headband and sunglasses with a glass of champagne in one hand and a chicken tender in the other. I hope he was like “never mind life insurance, man, you gotta buy GameStop calls! Get those tendies!” And then I hope the clients were like “what” and MassMutual fired him and he just went and did the thing. " https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-29/reddit-traders-on-robinhood-are-on-both-sides-of-gamestop https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-29/reddit...
- hehehaha 6y ago
  Really helps discredit this notion of retail vs hedge fund. Most people who frequently make “DD” posts to r/wsb have ties to the financial industry and Wall Street. They either work there or have worked there. And yet they are critical of the Man? This is like ex-Facebook employees having a found-Jesus moment.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    Some folks have no choice but to bootstrap at The Man. There’s no startup accelerator for starting your own fund.
    - hehehaha 6y ago
      Yes, my comment was harsh. I am happy for the guy, really, especially as a Bostonian.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - tootie 6y ago
    I think this is almost expected behavior. Anybody who spends enough time in the trenches of any industry will come out jaded and bitter. In my limited time working on the tech side of some Wall St giants, 99% of the grunts are normal people with their noses in very narrow tasks. Tasks that seem too mundane to have any implications for the outside world. I even heard a top marketing exec at Goldman talk about how to shed their image as a "vampire squid". None of them set out to be evil, they just set out to earn profits. Same everybody else.
raziel2701 6y ago
On wsb u/deepfuckingvalue showed he still holds 50,000 shares and 500 deep ITM call options. He has secured a profit of $13.8 million dollars, and his remaining open position is valued at $45 million. I would caution people to not quickly fall into the "if he's still in, I'm still in" meme. He has secured a $14 million bag, regardless if the stock goes to zero he's already secured a life changing amount of money, he can afford to weather the storm. If you're holding because he's still in and you haven't taken any profits you are nowhere near in the same position as him. A hodling mania has overtaken the subreddit that would make btc blush. Know that we don't know what kind of deals are happening behind closed doors in these two last days of manipulated activity. A sustained short interest does not necessarily mean that the shorts are holding their initial position, they could have closed and reopened at these elevated levels. The narrative has changed so quickly from this being a value play, to a short squeeze, to now militant activism via buying stock as a means to sticking it to the man. The rhetoric is as volatile as the price. The overall market is stressed, things are getting weird and I would not be surprised if this is the beginning of another stock market crash.
- tootie 6y ago
  It says as much in the article. He literally just thought GME was undervalued on its merits. He had no intention of creating a squeeze or punishing Melvin.
  - hehehaha 6y ago
    The guy struck rich! Same with people who shorted crude last year when it went straight to -40. Billions were made.
    - dbtc 6y ago
      I realize I need to do some basic reading on this stuff... but, when you say "made" does that really mean "changed hands"? Or is value/money somehow generated in these processes?
      - 6y ago
f430 6y ago
What makes WSB legal vs emails about imminent pump on an unspectacular stock? What stops somebody from purchasing aged reddit accounts and then pumping up, upvoting their own threads?
- tony0x02 6y ago
  > What stops somebody from purchasing aged reddit accounts and then pumping up, upvoting their own threads? I think it is already happening. Search Reddit for Tootsie roll. One 3 yr old Reddit acct with no posts makes a flurry of posts about TR and it jumps 30% in 2 days.
- JacobSuperslav 6y ago
  nothing. I'm in the social media business and I can tell you it's very easy to make 5 figures/month gaming reddit(as an individual operation) using farmed accounts and it's been going on for years. Not necessarily with stock schemes. they got next to none security when it comes to stuff like this. agency that I worked at a few years ago literally had thousands of aged reddit/twitter accounts in their portfolio. there are whole apps available for sale that manage your reddit farms including fingerprint faking, proxy management, captcha solving(outsourced to developing countries), etc. the market for it is pretty huge. Edit: hints = look at porn subreddits, /r/entrepreneur, stock subreddits. By the way, some of the moderators are making a killing too (by promoting their "own" people)
  - ALittleLight 6y ago
    How do you make 30-50k a month gaming reddit? I'm aware of buying upvotes and similar, but I have a hard time believing it's that profitable.
    - dualthro 6y ago
      My guess is putting out content and pumping it up or making it go viral, that somehow promotes clients of yours. Or your own products or affiliate programs or something.
t-writescode 6y ago
Compared to the general air I've been seeing about articles hating on a bunch of Redditors, this one is decidedly more neutral and seems to speak more about what is actually happening than "redditors bad, mess with stock, they evil". I appreciate that. Not enough to give WSJ $20 (!!!) a month, but I do appreciate it.
misiti3780 6y ago
I'm honestly confused by the press around this event. I get it, /DFV started a short squeeze and got rich, that is great for him. I don't support naked shorting, it should probably be illegal (if it is not already) and it looks that was part of the reason this happened. Everyone has been suspecting for a while (especially here) that a lot of volatility in stocks like TSLA etc was due to Robinhood. As of 5:33 EST, I'm on CNN right now and the main headline "Inside the Reddit army that's crushing Wall Street" (And the reddit army isnt crushing Wall Street, it's crushing a few hedge funds that happened to hold short positions in a few stocks. ) , so now a lot portion of America (and the world) is paying attention. Hedge funds blow up all the time. Enron blew up, basically all of the Investment Banks blew up in 2008, LTCM blew up. Why is this such a big deal?
- MuffinFlavored 6y ago
  > I'm honestly confused by the press around this event. A lot of people wish they struck it rich, just like him. Money (to some degree) buys happiness. Gets you out of a job you don't like. Gets you more time with your family, less time doing stuff you don't like (like working). If the poor can "eat the rich" and "catch them with their shorts down" in a stock trade that literally millions of others are pouring into (check how many subscribers r/wsb has gained past 7 days), it's literal herd mentality.
  - misiti3780 6y ago
    ya sure, i get it .... but he took a bet and won, He could have easily lost everything. For every winner in the options game there are probably 99 losers. It's call survivorship bias.
    - afterburner 6y ago
      He could have lost 50k, his initial investment, and considering he's young, and has a house, this would not represent ruin for him.
      - 6y ago
eternalny1 6y ago
He posted his daily update today, he has not sold his shares through all of this chaos. Talk about "diamond hands". https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l846a1/gme_yolo_monthend_update_jan_2021/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l846a1/gme_...
- tedunangst 6y ago
  A week ago he had 1000 option contracts, now he's at 500.
  - scruple 6y ago
    2 weeks ago he had 2,000. 1,000 each with different expiry dates.
- kzrdude 6y ago
  Check all his recents posts, then you can fact-check that statement and see that he has liquidated and earned some cash, and is simultaneously holding on to some significant stocks. Both things are true.
  - strogonoff 6y ago
    About $13.8 million he’s got out of the stock to be exact, if reports elsewhere in the thread are correct. This shows how ability to influence large numbers of people can convert to money, and the closer you are to the root the bigger slice of the cake you get.
    - stcredzero 6y ago
      Basically applies to all media and startups.
      - strogonoff 6y ago
        How does it apply to all media?
kgog 6y ago
So when he posted back in June, his GME holding was $121k. According to his YouTube video from then, that represented ~2% of his portfolio. That puts his portfolio at ~$6M. So much for "poor people fighting back" LOL.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- tmotwu 6y ago
  Hedge funds only represent 5%< of the global financial markets. Everyone knows whales are playing on both sides, WSB attempting to profit on one end. However, that 5%< of finance is just objectively morally bankrupt compared to the rest - because its exclusive, delivers no value to society, yet bears a significant influence to everyone else. So sure, it's not really "poor vs wealthy" it's more "good vs evil".
jdmoreira 6y ago
I'm not sure the HN crowd appreciates his style on this picture. I love me a bandana and am known to use some ironic wolf tee once in a while. I felt so inspired when I saw the photo and am not even joking.
IntFee588 6y ago
I know this forum is capitalist to the core, but there is a lack of appreciation for this moment and an undue air of cynicism. This whole situation breaks a ton of fundamental assumptions about how markets work and will change hedging strategies for a lot of investors moving forward. Yes, we know there are hedge funds on both sides of this equation (Blackrock owns 12% of Gamestop, Burry made a ton and smartly got out earlier in the week), it doesn't change anything. The internet is already searching for more securities to manipulate. This will accelerate adoption of the DeFi space. Scaramucci called it "the French Revolution of Finance." Instead of being negative, look to see how you can learn and profit from this.
- stcredzero 6y ago
  Scaramucci called it "the French Revolution of Finance." To push the analogy: When does Robespierre get his?
- ignoramous 6y ago
  I can't help but think Wall Street needs a Cloudflare to handle future DDoS. Opportune time to start one if such a business doesn't exist already?
- twblalock 6y ago
  > This will accelerate adoption of the DeFi space. Why would it do that? I think the most likely outcome is more regulations from the government, and more rules from brokerages about what most of their customers are allowed to do.
  - IntFee588 6y ago
    Besides the huge push on dogecoin, which is big for onboarding people into crypto (yes, I know DOGE isn't DeFi), the bottlenecking of orders by brokerages undermines people's faith in the fairness of traditional securities and the markets. People will be more interested in decentralized solutions where they can have more faith in exchanges (I am aware that DeFi is not that decentralized or fair, but the majority of the public that is aware of crypto and DeFi thinks it is, just as they thought that traditional securities were fair).
ignoramous 6y ago
Looking back at (u/deepfuckingvalue) Keith Gill's comments on r/wsb, it looks like they had a solid theory to cash out by Jan 2021 for $8+ a share (most of their calls starting June 2019 were 80 cents a share or less [0]). This was by no means a strategy to make money by squeezing the short, though one user, conspicuously named u/burrym, speculated that it ought to be [1]. [0] https://archive.is/Y953e https://archive.is/Y953e, https://archive.is/w98tn https://archive.is/w98tn [1] https://archive.is/Pnuxg https://archive.is/Pnuxg
- tinyhouse 6y ago
  This is gold.
- treelovinhippie 6y ago
  He started June 2019: https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/e3kpbc/gme_yolo_monthend_update_nov_2019/f94bgh5/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/e3kpbc/gme_... And called it for Jan 2021: https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/e8wqvs/gme_earnings_thread/fafnxyj/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/e8wqvs/gme_... And his Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0patpmwYbhcEUap0bTX3JQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0patpmwYbhcEUap0bTX3JQ
- cauthon 6y ago
  For those out of the loop like I was, Michael Burry is the guy from the Big Short, who also owned 3 million shares of GME before the squeeze began. [1] [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/gamestop-michael-burry-big-short-stock-next-gen-discs-2019-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/gamestop-michael-burry-big-s...
  - contravariant 6y ago
    Oh and here I though it was short for Burry 'm. That's some weird coincidence.
- optimalsolver 6y ago
  What broker is he using?
wtf_is_up 6y ago
Worth noting that Michael Burry has had a long position in GME for quite a while. Will be interesting to see Scion's next 13F.
Lorin 6y ago
Just out of curiosity, is GameStop legally allowed to issue a special dividend, which would further squeeze the remaining shorts?
- csours 6y ago
  Where would they get the money for a dividend and why would they care about the shorts at all??? The best thing they could do is sell new shares.
baby 6y ago
I really hate it when medias censor words like “fuck”.
blackrock 6y ago
What can GME do with the situation? Can they cash out at $500 or $1000? Can they offer additional shares in the market, after clearing it with the SEC? Then, can they take that windfall money, and actually reinvest it into R&D, and build their own GameStation 1 video game system? In order to justify their new lofty valuation.
- mattkrause 6y ago
  That’s basically what AMC did. They issued 50 million new shares at-the-market last week. They also had a $600M loan that was convertible and converted into stock. As a result, they’re sitting on nearly a billion new dollars, which should help them ride the pandemic out.
  - Rapzid 6y ago
    I bought a bit of AMC. If WSB makes it pop to a multiple of where I entered, I'll cash out. Otherwise I'll hold through the recovery. Suspect there is enough pint-up demand for people to get out more post-COVID to boost the stock enough for me to exit higher in year or so anyway.
foob 6y ago
Does anyone know if it's illegal to lie about your holdings as an individual retail investor? I've seen a handful of screenshots on /r/wallstreetbets showing large holdings, but it would be trivial to modify the page source before taking a screenshot.
- Ecstatify 6y ago
  It’s the internet...
- paxys 6y ago
  Not illegal in itself. It's probably possible (though almost impossible just based on a random screenshot) for someone to prove that you committed fraud and it directly caused them harm.
radihuq 6y ago
Anyone here work in Wall Street? I'd be curious to hear what the discourse is currently like in the Wall Street community
- incognition 6y ago
  Not a CFA like DFV, and not financial advice but here goes. A way to assess what any stock is valued is to take the DCF, but since it's nearly black box to the shareholder for growth companies (no dividend), treat any interest payments on outstanding short float as part of the DCF. That means there's a growth directly associated with capitalization. so it makes sense that the capitalization becomes untethered with the business. Google’s ROE is about 12%, so 6-7% on the cap isnt great, but it’s not nothing either. The other side is if the short interest decreases that would collapse the cap sharply, but the longer the shorts wait, the less lucrative and difficult it could get. Edit. Cost to borrow is at 50%! https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l88i21/s3_says_we_aint_done/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l88i21/s3_s...
jessrucci08 6y ago
MurniQQ: Agen Domino Online Terbaik http://180.215.15.107/ http://180.215.15.107/
sriram_sun 6y ago
Some big boys are invested too https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/gme-stock-gamestop-investors-instantly-make-16-billion-gamestop-stock-squeeze/ https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/gme-stock-g.... They will deal with the Hedge Funds. The people will suffer.
slashbeats88 6y ago
oh nic post
whatever1 6y ago
If GameStop issues some million shares on Monday morning to raise capital isn't it game over for every retail player? Shorts will close their positions, RH users will suffer great losses from dilution. Am I missing something?
- pb7 6y ago
  If they issue a few million shares at the current price, shorts still have to cover at an absurdly high price compared to their entry which will cost them in the single to low double digit billions. It may screw over retail investors but bankruptcy is inevitable.
  - whatever1 6y ago
    Pardon my ignorance, I have no expertise in the field. When you issue new shares, do they have a fixed price or are they sold at market value (whatever market decides the price to be)? If the latter happens, I expect that the price of the [edit:GME] stock will collapse immediately.
    - pb7 6y ago
      Issuing shares is a move done to raise money. It would then follow that GameStop would want to get the most money possible for these shares so they would try to sell them for the highest price possible, somewhere around the current going price. I’m not 100% on whether they have to release them all at once but I’m guessing dumping multiple million shares all at once would crash the price which isn’t good for anyone in normal circumstances so it’s probably not done that way. Regardless, there are like 50-60M shares currently shorted — there’s no chance GameStop would issue that many.
      - samename 6y ago
        I’m new to this as well - how do you know how many shares that have shorted? I heard that even the number of shares shorted isn’t guaranteed to be accurate.

486 points by gangwolf 6y ago

doublerabbit 6y ago

Add a . to the end of wsj.com to get past the paywall.

anand-bala 6y ago
Doesn't seem to work on Firefox mobile.
- _-david-_ 6y ago
  Worked fine for me on Firefox for Android. To be clear you should do wsj.com./
jjazwiecki 6y ago
or safari
winter_blue 6y ago
It doesn't work on Chrome either.
Stevvo 6y ago
The "Bypass Paywalls" extension is also effective, although you may want to limit the number of extensions you run for memory usage or performance reasons.
cookie_monsta 6y ago
Nice, thanks. FF on android

TerribleHeight 6y ago

Hi Keith, what do you think about CytoDyn (cydy)? Their monoclonal drug Leronlimab has 3 different clinical trials with FDA and are FAST TRACKED. They've also applied for an upgrade to NASDQ. Current price $5.38. Their suppose to release results any day now on the COVID trial.

TerribleHeight 6y ago

Hi Keith, what do u think of CytoDyn cydy? Their monoclonal drug Leronlimab has 3 clinical trials with the FDA and has a fast track designation. They've also applied for an upgrade to NASDQ. Current price is $5.38. Their suppose to release results on their COVD trial any day now.

findjashua 6y ago

web archive: http://archive.today/iP9IX http://archive.today/iP9IX

devops000 6y ago
I hope one day we will see an IPFS link
- pmlnr 6y ago
  What is stopping you from making and sharing one?
- eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 6y ago
  Why do people constantly have to re-invent the wheel? :( Freenet [0] has been providing censorship-resistant, anonymous, decentralized hosting for 20 years - and is still in active development! You could upload it to Freenet without any server whatsoever and it would stay online for as long as it is popular, even if your machine goes offline. And you'd be anonymous while doing so! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet
  - prepend 6y ago
    Freenet doesn’t make money for speculators like ipfs. Making gobs of money is an important feature driving wheel reinvention, I think.
    - jMyles 6y ago
      Are speculators making money on ipfs? How? This is news to me.
      - eruleman 6y ago
        via Filecoin: "In short: IPFS addresses and moves content, while Filecoin is an incentive layer to persist data." https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/faq/#ipfs-and-filecoin https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/faq/#ipfs-and-filecoin

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago

not really an interview. It wasn't clear they even talked to him at all? [EDIT: ok, they did talk to him, but this still isn't what most publications would call "an interview" ]

ksherlock 6y ago
“This story is so much bigger than me,” Mr. Gill told The Wall Street Journal in his first interview since the unboxing this week of a volatile new stock-market game. “I support these retail investors, their ability to make a statement.”
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  They seem to have gotten a couple of comments from him, then fleshed it out with remarks from his mother and a few other online identities, plus some simple background research. Nothing like I would expect for "an interview with...", which would normally be dominated by the subject's own words.
dang 6y ago
Ok, I've taken 'interview' out of the title above. Not necessary really.

Dirlewanger 6y ago

This is one of the very, very few positive stories about how powerful the Internet can be to the masses. Keith is no different from Jim Kramer yelling on CNBC to buy some stock and watching it spike because their boomer audience raced to their landline phones and told their financial advisors to invest. It's just at a much faster pace, and old media is scared shitless of it, so they endlessly denigrate the people involved and call for daddy government to stop it. Unfortunately I don't think it's going to end well for retail investors.

paulpauper 6y ago
yeah except unlike Cramer's picks, his actually go up and make people money
PartiallyTyped 6y ago
Unlike Cramer, he provided DD and was transparent on his positions.
- smcl 6y ago
  I keep seeing “DD” and I’m finally going to ask: what does this stand for.
  - wting 6y ago
    Due Diligence
  - ska 6y ago
    due diligence, I suspect. i.e. "show your work".
  - jakemauer 6y ago
    I believe it means due diligence.
  - ricardonunez 6y ago
    Due Diligence

u678u 6y ago

I like Matt Levine's comment " The guy behind one of the greatest trades of our time was giving out financial advice for MassMutual, and somehow they let him go." edit I missed the best part of the quote "I hope he showed up at client meetings in a headband and sunglasses with a glass of champagne in one hand and a chicken tender in the other. I hope he was like “never mind life insurance, man, you gotta buy GameStop calls! Get those tendies!” And then I hope the clients were like “what” and MassMutual fired him and he just went and did the thing. " https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-29/reddit-traders-on-robinhood-are-on-both-sides-of-gamestop https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-29/reddit...

hehehaha 6y ago
Really helps discredit this notion of retail vs hedge fund. Most people who frequently make “DD” posts to r/wsb have ties to the financial industry and Wall Street. They either work there or have worked there. And yet they are critical of the Man? This is like ex-Facebook employees having a found-Jesus moment.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  Some folks have no choice but to bootstrap at The Man. There’s no startup accelerator for starting your own fund.
  - hehehaha 6y ago
    Yes, my comment was harsh. I am happy for the guy, really, especially as a Bostonian.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- tootie 6y ago
  I think this is almost expected behavior. Anybody who spends enough time in the trenches of any industry will come out jaded and bitter. In my limited time working on the tech side of some Wall St giants, 99% of the grunts are normal people with their noses in very narrow tasks. Tasks that seem too mundane to have any implications for the outside world. I even heard a top marketing exec at Goldman talk about how to shed their image as a "vampire squid". None of them set out to be evil, they just set out to earn profits. Same everybody else.

raziel2701 6y ago

On wsb u/deepfuckingvalue showed he still holds 50,000 shares and 500 deep ITM call options. He has secured a profit of $13.8 million dollars, and his remaining open position is valued at $45 million. I would caution people to not quickly fall into the "if he's still in, I'm still in" meme. He has secured a $14 million bag, regardless if the stock goes to zero he's already secured a life changing amount of money, he can afford to weather the storm. If you're holding because he's still in and you haven't taken any profits you are nowhere near in the same position as him. A hodling mania has overtaken the subreddit that would make btc blush. Know that we don't know what kind of deals are happening behind closed doors in these two last days of manipulated activity. A sustained short interest does not necessarily mean that the shorts are holding their initial position, they could have closed and reopened at these elevated levels. The narrative has changed so quickly from this being a value play, to a short squeeze, to now militant activism via buying stock as a means to sticking it to the man. The rhetoric is as volatile as the price. The overall market is stressed, things are getting weird and I would not be surprised if this is the beginning of another stock market crash.

tootie 6y ago
It says as much in the article. He literally just thought GME was undervalued on its merits. He had no intention of creating a squeeze or punishing Melvin.
- hehehaha 6y ago
  The guy struck rich! Same with people who shorted crude last year when it went straight to -40. Billions were made.
  - dbtc 6y ago
    I realize I need to do some basic reading on this stuff... but, when you say "made" does that really mean "changed hands"? Or is value/money somehow generated in these processes?
    - 6y ago

f430 6y ago

What makes WSB legal vs emails about imminent pump on an unspectacular stock? What stops somebody from purchasing aged reddit accounts and then pumping up, upvoting their own threads?

tony0x02 6y ago
> What stops somebody from purchasing aged reddit accounts and then pumping up, upvoting their own threads? I think it is already happening. Search Reddit for Tootsie roll. One 3 yr old Reddit acct with no posts makes a flurry of posts about TR and it jumps 30% in 2 days.
JacobSuperslav 6y ago
nothing. I'm in the social media business and I can tell you it's very easy to make 5 figures/month gaming reddit(as an individual operation) using farmed accounts and it's been going on for years. Not necessarily with stock schemes. they got next to none security when it comes to stuff like this. agency that I worked at a few years ago literally had thousands of aged reddit/twitter accounts in their portfolio. there are whole apps available for sale that manage your reddit farms including fingerprint faking, proxy management, captcha solving(outsourced to developing countries), etc. the market for it is pretty huge. Edit: hints = look at porn subreddits, /r/entrepreneur, stock subreddits. By the way, some of the moderators are making a killing too (by promoting their "own" people)
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  How do you make 30-50k a month gaming reddit? I'm aware of buying upvotes and similar, but I have a hard time believing it's that profitable.
  - dualthro 6y ago
    My guess is putting out content and pumping it up or making it go viral, that somehow promotes clients of yours. Or your own products or affiliate programs or something.

t-writescode 6y ago

Compared to the general air I've been seeing about articles hating on a bunch of Redditors, this one is decidedly more neutral and seems to speak more about what is actually happening than "redditors bad, mess with stock, they evil". I appreciate that. Not enough to give WSJ $20 (!!!) a month, but I do appreciate it.

misiti3780 6y ago

I'm honestly confused by the press around this event. I get it, /DFV started a short squeeze and got rich, that is great for him. I don't support naked shorting, it should probably be illegal (if it is not already) and it looks that was part of the reason this happened. Everyone has been suspecting for a while (especially here) that a lot of volatility in stocks like TSLA etc was due to Robinhood. As of 5:33 EST, I'm on CNN right now and the main headline "Inside the Reddit army that's crushing Wall Street" (And the reddit army isnt crushing Wall Street, it's crushing a few hedge funds that happened to hold short positions in a few stocks. ) , so now a lot portion of America (and the world) is paying attention. Hedge funds blow up all the time. Enron blew up, basically all of the Investment Banks blew up in 2008, LTCM blew up. Why is this such a big deal?

MuffinFlavored 6y ago
> I'm honestly confused by the press around this event. A lot of people wish they struck it rich, just like him. Money (to some degree) buys happiness. Gets you out of a job you don't like. Gets you more time with your family, less time doing stuff you don't like (like working). If the poor can "eat the rich" and "catch them with their shorts down" in a stock trade that literally millions of others are pouring into (check how many subscribers r/wsb has gained past 7 days), it's literal herd mentality.
- misiti3780 6y ago
  ya sure, i get it .... but he took a bet and won, He could have easily lost everything. For every winner in the options game there are probably 99 losers. It's call survivorship bias.
  - afterburner 6y ago
    He could have lost 50k, his initial investment, and considering he's young, and has a house, this would not represent ruin for him.
    - 6y ago

eternalny1 6y ago

He posted his daily update today, he has not sold his shares through all of this chaos. Talk about "diamond hands". https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l846a1/gme_yolo_monthend_update_jan_2021/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l846a1/gme_...

tedunangst 6y ago
A week ago he had 1000 option contracts, now he's at 500.
- scruple 6y ago
  2 weeks ago he had 2,000. 1,000 each with different expiry dates.
kzrdude 6y ago
Check all his recents posts, then you can fact-check that statement and see that he has liquidated and earned some cash, and is simultaneously holding on to some significant stocks. Both things are true.
- strogonoff 6y ago
  About $13.8 million he’s got out of the stock to be exact, if reports elsewhere in the thread are correct. This shows how ability to influence large numbers of people can convert to money, and the closer you are to the root the bigger slice of the cake you get.
  - stcredzero 6y ago
    Basically applies to all media and startups.
    - strogonoff 6y ago
      How does it apply to all media?

kgog 6y ago

So when he posted back in June, his GME holding was $121k. According to his YouTube video from then, that represented ~2% of his portfolio. That puts his portfolio at ~$6M. So much for "poor people fighting back" LOL.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tmotwu 6y ago
Hedge funds only represent 5%< of the global financial markets. Everyone knows whales are playing on both sides, WSB attempting to profit on one end. However, that 5%< of finance is just objectively morally bankrupt compared to the rest - because its exclusive, delivers no value to society, yet bears a significant influence to everyone else. So sure, it's not really "poor vs wealthy" it's more "good vs evil".

jdmoreira 6y ago

I'm not sure the HN crowd appreciates his style on this picture. I love me a bandana and am known to use some ironic wolf tee once in a while. I felt so inspired when I saw the photo and am not even joking.

IntFee588 6y ago

I know this forum is capitalist to the core, but there is a lack of appreciation for this moment and an undue air of cynicism. This whole situation breaks a ton of fundamental assumptions about how markets work and will change hedging strategies for a lot of investors moving forward. Yes, we know there are hedge funds on both sides of this equation (Blackrock owns 12% of Gamestop, Burry made a ton and smartly got out earlier in the week), it doesn't change anything. The internet is already searching for more securities to manipulate. This will accelerate adoption of the DeFi space. Scaramucci called it "the French Revolution of Finance." Instead of being negative, look to see how you can learn and profit from this.

stcredzero 6y ago
Scaramucci called it "the French Revolution of Finance." To push the analogy: When does Robespierre get his?
ignoramous 6y ago
I can't help but think Wall Street needs a Cloudflare to handle future DDoS. Opportune time to start one if such a business doesn't exist already?
twblalock 6y ago
> This will accelerate adoption of the DeFi space. Why would it do that? I think the most likely outcome is more regulations from the government, and more rules from brokerages about what most of their customers are allowed to do.
- IntFee588 6y ago
  Besides the huge push on dogecoin, which is big for onboarding people into crypto (yes, I know DOGE isn't DeFi), the bottlenecking of orders by brokerages undermines people's faith in the fairness of traditional securities and the markets. People will be more interested in decentralized solutions where they can have more faith in exchanges (I am aware that DeFi is not that decentralized or fair, but the majority of the public that is aware of crypto and DeFi thinks it is, just as they thought that traditional securities were fair).

ignoramous 6y ago

Looking back at (u/deepfuckingvalue) Keith Gill's comments on r/wsb, it looks like they had a solid theory to cash out by Jan 2021 for $8+ a share (most of their calls starting June 2019 were 80 cents a share or less [0]). This was by no means a strategy to make money by squeezing the short, though one user, conspicuously named u/burrym, speculated that it ought to be [1]. [0] https://archive.is/Y953e https://archive.is/Y953e, https://archive.is/w98tn https://archive.is/w98tn [1] https://archive.is/Pnuxg https://archive.is/Pnuxg

tinyhouse 6y ago
This is gold.
treelovinhippie 6y ago
He started June 2019: https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/e3kpbc/gme_yolo_monthend_update_nov_2019/f94bgh5/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/e3kpbc/gme_... And called it for Jan 2021: https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/e8wqvs/gme_earnings_thread/fafnxyj/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/e8wqvs/gme_... And his Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0patpmwYbhcEUap0bTX3JQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0patpmwYbhcEUap0bTX3JQ
cauthon 6y ago
For those out of the loop like I was, Michael Burry is the guy from the Big Short, who also owned 3 million shares of GME before the squeeze began. [1] [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/gamestop-michael-burry-big-short-stock-next-gen-discs-2019-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/gamestop-michael-burry-big-s...
- contravariant 6y ago
  Oh and here I though it was short for Burry 'm. That's some weird coincidence.
optimalsolver 6y ago
What broker is he using?

wtf_is_up 6y ago

Worth noting that Michael Burry has had a long position in GME for quite a while. Will be interesting to see Scion's next 13F.

Lorin 6y ago

Just out of curiosity, is GameStop legally allowed to issue a special dividend, which would further squeeze the remaining shorts?

csours 6y ago
Where would they get the money for a dividend and why would they care about the shorts at all??? The best thing they could do is sell new shares.

baby 6y ago

I really hate it when medias censor words like “fuck”.

blackrock 6y ago

What can GME do with the situation? Can they cash out at $500 or $1000? Can they offer additional shares in the market, after clearing it with the SEC? Then, can they take that windfall money, and actually reinvest it into R&D, and build their own GameStation 1 video game system? In order to justify their new lofty valuation.

mattkrause 6y ago
That’s basically what AMC did. They issued 50 million new shares at-the-market last week. They also had a $600M loan that was convertible and converted into stock. As a result, they’re sitting on nearly a billion new dollars, which should help them ride the pandemic out.
- Rapzid 6y ago
  I bought a bit of AMC. If WSB makes it pop to a multiple of where I entered, I'll cash out. Otherwise I'll hold through the recovery. Suspect there is enough pint-up demand for people to get out more post-COVID to boost the stock enough for me to exit higher in year or so anyway.

foob 6y ago

Does anyone know if it's illegal to lie about your holdings as an individual retail investor? I've seen a handful of screenshots on /r/wallstreetbets showing large holdings, but it would be trivial to modify the page source before taking a screenshot.

Ecstatify 6y ago
It’s the internet...
paxys 6y ago
Not illegal in itself. It's probably possible (though almost impossible just based on a random screenshot) for someone to prove that you committed fraud and it directly caused them harm.

radihuq 6y ago

Anyone here work in Wall Street? I'd be curious to hear what the discourse is currently like in the Wall Street community

incognition 6y ago
Not a CFA like DFV, and not financial advice but here goes. A way to assess what any stock is valued is to take the DCF, but since it's nearly black box to the shareholder for growth companies (no dividend), treat any interest payments on outstanding short float as part of the DCF. That means there's a growth directly associated with capitalization. so it makes sense that the capitalization becomes untethered with the business. Google’s ROE is about 12%, so 6-7% on the cap isnt great, but it’s not nothing either. The other side is if the short interest decreases that would collapse the cap sharply, but the longer the shorts wait, the less lucrative and difficult it could get. Edit. Cost to borrow is at 50%! https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l88i21/s3_says_we_aint_done/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l88i21/s3_s...

jessrucci08 6y ago

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sriram_sun 6y ago

Some big boys are invested too https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/gme-stock-gamestop-investors-instantly-make-16-billion-gamestop-stock-squeeze/ https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/gme-stock-g.... They will deal with the Hedge Funds. The people will suffer.

slashbeats88 6y ago

oh nic post

whatever1 6y ago

If GameStop issues some million shares on Monday morning to raise capital isn't it game over for every retail player? Shorts will close their positions, RH users will suffer great losses from dilution. Am I missing something?

pb7 6y ago
If they issue a few million shares at the current price, shorts still have to cover at an absurdly high price compared to their entry which will cost them in the single to low double digit billions. It may screw over retail investors but bankruptcy is inevitable.
- whatever1 6y ago
  Pardon my ignorance, I have no expertise in the field. When you issue new shares, do they have a fixed price or are they sold at market value (whatever market decides the price to be)? If the latter happens, I expect that the price of the [edit:GME] stock will collapse immediately.
  - pb7 6y ago
    Issuing shares is a move done to raise money. It would then follow that GameStop would want to get the most money possible for these shares so they would try to sell them for the highest price possible, somewhere around the current going price. I’m not 100% on whether they have to release them all at once but I’m guessing dumping multiple million shares all at once would crash the price which isn’t good for anyone in normal circumstances so it’s probably not done that way. Regardless, there are like 50-60M shares currently shorted — there’s no chance GameStop would issue that many.
    - samename 6y ago
      I’m new to this as well - how do you know how many shares that have shorted? I heard that even the number of shares shorted isn’t guaranteed to be accurate.