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GME is not bankrupt yet (it is indeed overpriced and comparable to HRTZ), but TSLA and BTC? They don't belong to the same categories. TSLA and BTC will see a lo

GME is not bankrupt yet (it is indeed overpriced and comparable to HRTZ), but TSLA and BTC? They don't belong to the same categories. TSLA and BTC will see a lot of gains to come. Eventually without a definite date what goes up comes down but it'd be silly to not take a piece of the pie yourself and keep your savings in cash...

airstrike 6y ago
BTC is not a stock so I really don't follow why people keep treating it like it has some underlying value
- Dirlewanger 6y ago
  It has value because, again, other people think it has value. Otherwise it wouldn't be trading at ~$54k.
- croes 6y ago
  Like most stocks BTC's value depends on the buyers hope of a rise of the value. Buy low and sell high. For the original function of stocks, support a company and get a share of the profit, you are right about BTC.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - PragmaticPulp 6y ago
    That’s not really an accurate comparison. Stocks are ownership in a company, which is still subject to all of the realities of operating a company. We can’t simply continue trading Hertz stock as a speculative gamble when the company goes under. Yes, cycles of hype and supply and demand do distort stock prices, but it’s still a capital allocation market. GameStop can choose to sell shares into the hot market, much as AMC did, to raise money. Buyers of those shares are allocating capital into the company. One of the draws of Bitcoin as a speculative instrument is that there are no fundamentals. Without fundamentals, there is no mechanism to suggest if it’s undervalued or overvalued. The only thing a Bitcoin purchase funds is more energy expenditure on mining.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      > We can’t simply continue trading Hertz stock as a speculative gamble when the company goes under. What? Why not? Not only can we continue to trade stock in a defunct corporation, we do. Take a look over here: https://www.liveauctioneers.com/item/85889867_imperial-india-company-stock-certificate-from-1723 https://www.liveauctioneers.com/item/85889867_imperial-india...
      - gruez 6y ago
        That's trading the stock certificates, not the stock itself. Nowadays there aren't any stock certificates anymore so that point is kind of moot. I doubt you can still trade enron shares, for instance.
        thaumasiotes 6y ago
        The certificates still exist; the fact that you don't get one when you buy stock just reflects the fact that you don't technically own the stock. US stocks were not dematerialized.
    - MrMan 6y ago
      I don't mean to quibble but I would say that even though bit coin is not a quote unsuited real currency you can apply purchasing powrr parity valuation to it and compare purchasing power of bitcoin compared to other currency like instruments additionally the cost to mint a bit coin is not meaningless, just easy to neglect.
  - saalweachter 6y ago
    The "original function" of stocks hasn't gone away. The S&P 500 paid out half a trillion dollars in dividends last year, and performed another half trillion or so in stock buy-backs. Trading happens on the pure derivative of stock prices, yeah, and people get rich off of it, sure, but ignoring the trillion dollars a year that flows from the profits on the economic activities of the S&P 500 back to the investors in the stock is ... oversimplifying things.
    - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
      How does that come with the sum of all monies lost on trading with S&P500 shares? Serious question.
      - jfengel 6y ago
        The sum of all monies lost trading S&P500 shares should be negative, since the index as a whole was up. Which isn't to say it'll be up forever, but over a scale of years it has historically always been up. Even if you lost money trading S&P 500 shares, somebody else made more, which is why the index is up. Even so, that figure isn't really relevant to the GP's point. Their point was that in addition to the price of the stocks, people who owned those stocks got cash money paid into their pockets, via dividends. That amounts to about 1.1% interest on money you spend buying the shares[1]. (That's not actually a great number. 2% is more common over the last 20 years. It suggests that as of right now the market is overpriced. But that's also for 2020, which is not a typical year. So far for 2021, it's more like 1.5%) [1] https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-dividend-yield https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-dividend-yield
        saalweachter 6y ago
        When you factor in stock buybacks -- which are sort of but not quite the same as dividends -- it's "sort of" like 3%. (My vague understanding is that for complicated and silly reasons, many more companies have preferred stock buybacks to dividends in recent decades, but it's still money flowing back from companies to investors.)
- baq 6y ago
  BTC is a commodity and trades like one. fundamental value is hashed electricity... not much, but guess it counts as something for somebody. for traders, it's something that has a ticker, a price and some volume. whatever works.
  - this_user 6y ago
    Production costs don't equal value of the product. You can certainly spend more on making something than it is worth. BTC has no intrinsic value. It has some utility, but mostly in the realm of illegal activities. But that is not the same thing as intrinsic value.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  I mean, there's an argument for viewing Tesla and Gamestop similar to bitcoin; they clearly have _some_ underlying value, but it seems largely secondary to hype-induced valuation.
- NickM 6y ago
  It sort of has underlying value, in that owning bitcoin lets you write entries in an extraordinarily inefficient append-only database. (It seems clear to me that this isn't a valuable enough capability to justify the current price of BTC, but I guess that's a separate discussion.)
Judgmentality 6y ago
At the end of the day, people are betting on what they believe (or throwing away their money for the lulz). I genuinely, no bullshit, think TSLA is more irrational than GME, and has been for years. I put my money where my mouth is and I'm up 5x in 2 weeks. I know it won't last, but hey TSLA is crashing too. Nothing lasts forever.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- tacheiordache 6y ago
  Indeed nothing lasts forever but TSLA at least has something to show while GME's business is passé. TSLA is overpriced but at the moment it crashed and will jump back to new heights. Why not take advantage of the notoriety and make a gain yourself?
  - Judgmentality 6y ago
    I think it's obvious that I am holding a substantial amount of GME right now, and I think I should disclose that. Ryan Cohen, the guy who founded Chewy, is on the board for GME and leading an initiative to transform Gamestop into an e-commerce store. In other words he wants to compete directly with Steam, and while many don't realize it yet, Amazon. And this is one of the only people in history who has successfully beat Amazon in a product category before. Chewy absolutely dominated the pet market for e-commerce. What I think Gamestop should do is compete directly with twitch, and set up an online game store on top of that. Basically do what twitch is doing but better, because twitch is shockingly bad for an Amazon acquisition. Then Gamestop could host online game tournaments, and they could even draw attention at local brick-and-mortar stores. They've got the real estate, they've got the brand recognition, and they've got the goodwill of the public right now (which is something you can't even buy, Amazon doesn't have that even with a trillion dollar market cap). I don't think this will happen. But if it did, GME would be ridiculously undervalued right now.
    - waprin 6y ago
agumonkey 6y ago
crypto is still bubblish.. new field, massive returns ... everybody with a bit of mileage know it will feel bad for the last week buyer before the top. musical chair.

airstrike 6y ago

BTC is not a stock so I really don't follow why people keep treating it like it has some underlying value

Dirlewanger 6y ago
It has value because, again, other people think it has value. Otherwise it wouldn't be trading at ~$54k.
croes 6y ago
Like most stocks BTC's value depends on the buyers hope of a rise of the value. Buy low and sell high. For the original function of stocks, support a company and get a share of the profit, you are right about BTC.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  That’s not really an accurate comparison. Stocks are ownership in a company, which is still subject to all of the realities of operating a company. We can’t simply continue trading Hertz stock as a speculative gamble when the company goes under. Yes, cycles of hype and supply and demand do distort stock prices, but it’s still a capital allocation market. GameStop can choose to sell shares into the hot market, much as AMC did, to raise money. Buyers of those shares are allocating capital into the company. One of the draws of Bitcoin as a speculative instrument is that there are no fundamentals. Without fundamentals, there is no mechanism to suggest if it’s undervalued or overvalued. The only thing a Bitcoin purchase funds is more energy expenditure on mining.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > We can’t simply continue trading Hertz stock as a speculative gamble when the company goes under. What? Why not? Not only can we continue to trade stock in a defunct corporation, we do. Take a look over here: https://www.liveauctioneers.com/item/85889867_imperial-india-company-stock-certificate-from-1723 https://www.liveauctioneers.com/item/85889867_imperial-india...
    - gruez 6y ago
      That's trading the stock certificates, not the stock itself. Nowadays there aren't any stock certificates anymore so that point is kind of moot. I doubt you can still trade enron shares, for instance.
      - thaumasiotes 6y ago
        The certificates still exist; the fact that you don't get one when you buy stock just reflects the fact that you don't technically own the stock. US stocks were not dematerialized.
  - MrMan 6y ago
    I don't mean to quibble but I would say that even though bit coin is not a quote unsuited real currency you can apply purchasing powrr parity valuation to it and compare purchasing power of bitcoin compared to other currency like instruments additionally the cost to mint a bit coin is not meaningless, just easy to neglect.
- saalweachter 6y ago
  The "original function" of stocks hasn't gone away. The S&P 500 paid out half a trillion dollars in dividends last year, and performed another half trillion or so in stock buy-backs. Trading happens on the pure derivative of stock prices, yeah, and people get rich off of it, sure, but ignoring the trillion dollars a year that flows from the profits on the economic activities of the S&P 500 back to the investors in the stock is ... oversimplifying things.
  - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
    How does that come with the sum of all monies lost on trading with S&P500 shares? Serious question.
    - jfengel 6y ago
      The sum of all monies lost trading S&P500 shares should be negative, since the index as a whole was up. Which isn't to say it'll be up forever, but over a scale of years it has historically always been up. Even if you lost money trading S&P 500 shares, somebody else made more, which is why the index is up. Even so, that figure isn't really relevant to the GP's point. Their point was that in addition to the price of the stocks, people who owned those stocks got cash money paid into their pockets, via dividends. That amounts to about 1.1% interest on money you spend buying the shares[1]. (That's not actually a great number. 2% is more common over the last 20 years. It suggests that as of right now the market is overpriced. But that's also for 2020, which is not a typical year. So far for 2021, it's more like 1.5%) [1] https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-dividend-yield https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-dividend-yield
      - saalweachter 6y ago
        When you factor in stock buybacks -- which are sort of but not quite the same as dividends -- it's "sort of" like 3%. (My vague understanding is that for complicated and silly reasons, many more companies have preferred stock buybacks to dividends in recent decades, but it's still money flowing back from companies to investors.)
baq 6y ago
BTC is a commodity and trades like one. fundamental value is hashed electricity... not much, but guess it counts as something for somebody. for traders, it's something that has a ticker, a price and some volume. whatever works.
- this_user 6y ago
  Production costs don't equal value of the product. You can certainly spend more on making something than it is worth. BTC has no intrinsic value. It has some utility, but mostly in the realm of illegal activities. But that is not the same thing as intrinsic value.
rsynnott 6y ago
I mean, there's an argument for viewing Tesla and Gamestop similar to bitcoin; they clearly have _some_ underlying value, but it seems largely secondary to hype-induced valuation.
NickM 6y ago
It sort of has underlying value, in that owning bitcoin lets you write entries in an extraordinarily inefficient append-only database. (It seems clear to me that this isn't a valuable enough capability to justify the current price of BTC, but I guess that's a separate discussion.)

Judgmentality 6y ago

At the end of the day, people are betting on what they believe (or throwing away their money for the lulz). I genuinely, no bullshit, think TSLA is more irrational than GME, and has been for years. I put my money where my mouth is and I'm up 5x in 2 weeks. I know it won't last, but hey TSLA is crashing too. Nothing lasts forever.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tacheiordache 6y ago
Indeed nothing lasts forever but TSLA at least has something to show while GME's business is passé. TSLA is overpriced but at the moment it crashed and will jump back to new heights. Why not take advantage of the notoriety and make a gain yourself?
- Judgmentality 6y ago
  I think it's obvious that I am holding a substantial amount of GME right now, and I think I should disclose that. Ryan Cohen, the guy who founded Chewy, is on the board for GME and leading an initiative to transform Gamestop into an e-commerce store. In other words he wants to compete directly with Steam, and while many don't realize it yet, Amazon. And this is one of the only people in history who has successfully beat Amazon in a product category before. Chewy absolutely dominated the pet market for e-commerce. What I think Gamestop should do is compete directly with twitch, and set up an online game store on top of that. Basically do what twitch is doing but better, because twitch is shockingly bad for an Amazon acquisition. Then Gamestop could host online game tournaments, and they could even draw attention at local brick-and-mortar stores. They've got the real estate, they've got the brand recognition, and they've got the goodwill of the public right now (which is something you can't even buy, Amazon doesn't have that even with a trillion dollar market cap). I don't think this will happen. But if it did, GME would be ridiculously undervalued right now.
  - waprin 6y ago

agumonkey 6y ago

crypto is still bubblish.. new field, massive returns ... everybody with a bit of mileage know it will feel bad for the last week buyer before the top. musical chair.