Should we pool some money together and get in on GameStop?

[epaul]

Anyone have a trading account we could use? We could pool together some bucks and help sink a couple hedge funds. I don't understand what is going one but I support it! Viva la Revolution! Screw those shorting hedge fund moneyboy bastards. Bankrupt them.

[millring]

I'm saving my money for when gas is back up to $4 a gallon this summer.

[Dave Poor]

Gamestop's last week.

It's time to short RobinHood!

Dave

[Dave Poor]

And by "short" I mean borrow a bunch of RobinHood stock and hope those Wall Street guys don't figure out how to reverse squeeze us.

I mean, other than that, what could go wrong, right?

[dradtke]

Where have you guys been? I'm retiring.

[epaul]

You're just in time, Dave. We can double your retirement funds easy-peasy!

Remember that game Todd had cooking at the Waterville Legion Club when he managed to score us free drinks the entire night until they figured it out and beat us up? Well, this would be the same kind of deal, except we are far enough away they shouldn't be able to hit us. Send me a grand and then I'll send some of it on to Elkabong for information on how to execute that double-twist reverse forward thing he was talking about, and then it is off to the races and your first really big boat.

[Marshall]

Jan 29, 2021 18:34:09 GMT -5 epaul said:

Anyone have a trading account we could use? We could pool together some bucks and help sink a couple hedge funds. I don't understand what is going one but I support it! Viva la Revolution! Screw those shorting hedge fund moneyboy bastards. Bankrupt them.

YES ! Let's do it.

[TKennedy]

I have read a couple of articles on it and still have no fooking idea what they are talking about. Might as well be sub atomic particle physics.

[Marty]

By the time the punters like us have heard of it, it's too late, we are cannon fodder for the finance world. 

[Russell Letson]

I wouldn't play that game--but I did notice that one of the stocks in our retirement portfolio was among those being targeted by the hedge funds and decided we'd better sell it before the bubble burst. We originally bought it more than 20 years ago, took reasonable profits when it split, and had been just letting the remnant sit along with the stocks we were no longer actively managing (the ones that actually issue dividends). If I'd noticed two days ago, we could have gotten twice the already-inflated price it was today. So we rejoined the financial world for about five minutes, took our money, and ran.

[drlj]

No.

[Cornflake]

I'm with LJ.

[majorminor]

My strategy of buying Martins high and selling low has brought me this far. I’m sticking with it.

[Cosmic Wonder]

I’ve had this whole thing sussed out for a while now. I’ve been making money hand over fist, f you guys want in on it, send me some big fat checks and, ummm, I’ll be in touch,.

Mike

[TKennedy]

I did some more reading on Reddit and that subreddit and trading app. Sounds like a black hole for stimulus checks. Scary stuff.

www.cnn.com/2021/01/29/investing/wallstreetbets-reddit-culture/index.html

[jdd2]

‘Meme stock’ rally rescues AMC theaters from $600M debt
January 29, 20214 Min Read
This week’s bizarre “meme stock” rally, which has delivered lottery-like windfalls for holders of GameStop stock, also wiped out $600 million in debt owed by the AMC theater chain.

That’s because, on Wednesday, a private equity firm named Silver Lake — and private equity firms are popularly considered the “bad guys” in this snobs-versus-slobs drama — elected to convert the corporate bonds it held into AMC Entertainment Holdings stock. Although the theater chain’s stock price has tumbled and soared since the move, the debt relief is permanent.

Just Monday, AMC was warning investors that “there is substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern.” The reason is obvious: the COVID-19 pandemic has savaged the movie theater business, and the broader stimulus, payroll, and recovery actions by the U.S. government have done little to prop it up.

Wiping out more than half-a-billion dollars in debt, though, should take a lot of pressure off AMC in the short term. “A week ago, it was not crazy to think this company was doomed,” Bloomberg’s Matt Levine wrote on Thursday. “Now it is entirely possible that it will survive and thrive and show movies in movie theaters for decades to come because everyone went nuts and bought meme stocks this week.”

As of this weekend, AMC was third on a list of U.S. stocks being short-sold the most; Redditors in the r/WallStreetBets subreddit, and elsewhere, have piled into these shorted stocks because, essentially, institutional investors are betting the companies will fail and their share prices will go down. The collective action of Reddit’s day-traders (“retail investors,” as the industry calls them) has driven some share prices up, with GameStop’s headline-making rally leading the charge.

Yet, by converting their AMC debt holding to AMC stock, the Silver Lake equity firm has gotten hurt by a falling stock price, too. The conversion price for the bonds Silver Lake held was $13.51; Silver Lake cashed in on Wednesday, when AMC’s shares ended the day at $19.90, more than 400% better than the day before. Smart move, right?

Well, AMC’s share price at publication time Friday was about $15 — but it closed Thursday at $8.63. So, unless Silver Lake found some other sucker to buy the stock before it bottomed out, they’ve been riding a roller coaster that at best has them about 5% to 7% ahead of their original position, with no guarantee of staying there.

“I don’t really know what those convertible holders were thinking but there you go,” Levine wrote. “Maybe they were thinking, ‘Wow, Redditors really want to buy this stock, we’d better get some stock to sell them.’”

GameStop’s stock price was $19.95 on Jan. 12 when Reddit’s disruption-minded investors made their move. It closed at $193.60 on Thursday after eclipsing $400 that morning, the first major drop for the stock since the feeding frenzy began. GME, at publication time, is still $348.

The company on Thursday issued its first public comments since its stock became front-page news all over the world. GameStop’s statement, however, concerned the 100 score it received from the Human Rights Campaign for its LGBTQ workplace equality practices. The company avoided talking about its stock altogether, even though its market capitalization is (on paper, of course) now $24.2 billion.

Analysts are assuming that the hype for GameStop, AMC, and other stocks will cool off as short-sellers either give up, are no longer forced into buying the stock to cover their losses, or U.S. regulators finally intervene. The Biden administration on Wednesday said Treasury secretary Janet Yellen and her economic advisors were monitoring the situation.

[Marty]

Jan 29, 2021 23:00:51 GMT -5 TKennedy said:

I did some more reading on Reddit and that subreddit and trading app. Sounds like a black hole for stimulus checks. Scary stuff.

www.cnn.com/2021/01/29/investing/wallstreetbets-reddit-culture/index.html

See, cannon fodder I say.

[dradtke]

Jan 29, 2021 19:20:44 GMT -5 epaul said:

You're just in time, Dave. We can double your retirement funds easy-peasy!

Remember that game Todd had cooking at the Waterville Legion Club when he managed to score us free drinks the entire night until they figured it out and beat us up? Well, this would be the same kind of deal, except we are far enough away they shouldn't be able to hit us. Send me a grand and then I'll send some of it on to Elkabong for information on how to execute that double-twist reverse forward thing he was talking about, and then it is off to the races and your first really big boat.

The check's in the mail. Seriously. Look, I know the post office is screwed up these days, so if it doesn't show up in time just go ahead and buy for me and I'm sure the check will be there soon. I put a stamp on it and everything. Thanks.

[Cornflake]

Wikipedia:

"Tulip mania (Dutch: tulpenmanie) was a period during the Dutch Golden Age when contract prices for some bulbs of the recently introduced and fashionable tulip reached extraordinarily high levels, and then dramatically collapsed in February 1637. It is generally considered to have been the first recorded speculative bubble or asset bubble in history....The term 'tulip mania' is now often used metaphorically to refer to any large economic bubble when asset prices deviate from intrinsic values."

[RickW]

I think it’s pretty funny. Been lots of good articles. My favourite quote was that it’s not okay for a bunch of reddit users to manipulate the mark, but it’s okay for the hedge funds to do it, which is what they’re doing when they short.

What shorting is, for those who don’t know, is you borrow a stock from a brokerage, then immediately sell it. You hope it goes down in price, because when it’s time to return it, you buy it at the lower price and return it, and keep the difference. But of course, if it goes up in value, you’re screwed. So the Reddit users all got together to buy the stocks the hedge funds were betting against, drove the price up, screwing the hedge funds, who now have to return the stocks at a much higher price.

But, the Reddit group are a bunch of cowboys. There’s a video on CNN of one idiot. He makes about 35k a year in his job. He invested $4,500 in Gamestop, and it’s now worth over a million dollars. But, he says it’s going to go up more, so he’s hanging in there. My brother in law is a wealthy man, and one of his golden rules is don’t get greedy, get out when it’s good. That guy could take his million, pay his capital gains, and set up himself and his family for a long time. When the time comes for everyone to get out, it’s going to drop like a rock.