THREAD

Goldman Warns If The Short Squeeze Continues, The Entire Market Could Crash (Zero Hedge Premium)

Last Friday (Jan 22) we advised readers who thought they had missed the move in Gamestop (they hadn't), to position appropriately in the most shorted Russell 3000 names:

which included such tickers as $FIZZ, $DDS, $BBBY, $AMCX, $GOGO and a handful of other names, as it was likely that the short-squeeze was only just starting.

We were right and all of the stocks listed above - and others - exploded higher the coming Monday,

and all other days of the week, with results - encapsulated by the WallStreetTips vs Wall Street feud - that have become the only topic of conversation across America, while on WSB the only topic has been the phenomenal gains generated by going long said most shorted stocks.

To wit, the basket of top shorts we compiled on Jan 22 has tripled in the past week.

And while some are quick to blame last week's fireworks on the "dopamine rush" of traders at r/wallstreetbets who seek an outlet to being "copped up with little else to do during the pandemic"

while also blaming widespread lockdowns and forgetting that it has been Bloomberg that was among the most vocal defenders of the very lockdowns that have given us the short squeeze of the century), the reality is that at the end of the day

So I've followed DFV's $GME journey from beginning and think it says a lot about what's going on here. How do u go from $50k to $40ml deep value screening in about a year which btw beats $nflx and $amzn growth return holding for decades? A

1)
As someone who tried the blockbuster rinse and repeat short (unsuccessfully btw) on $gme almost a decade ago I'm quite familiar with the name. Burry's re-emergence at the end of 2018 & roughly $5ml gme position disclosure then put the stock on the deep value radar.

2)
$gme dropped like 50% in h1 2019 and his q2 disclosure indicated he had exited the name. It was at this time DFV emerged onto WSB with an essentially i'll take this shot at half MB's cost basis with the console refresh a year out thesis.

3)
I don't recall him fully articulating the thesis then, but that really didn't matter as MB remerged with a 3-4% activist stake by the Aug 2019 about 70% lower than his year end 2018 cost basis. MB wanted a buyback immediately & criticized mgmt past capital alloc failures.

4)
To be clear the thesis did not provide deep dive analysis on $GME or the industry. MB simply seemed to be of the view that the console refresh meant things were not ending anytime soon, and that simply buying back stock in size was the right move for mgmt.

Education is an investment.

If you're coming to study in Canada, be proactive in choosing a program, especially if you plan to work in Canada

Research and check how relevant your program is

Below are the Top 10 Most Valuable Degrees in Canada according to Royal Bank of Canada.

This ranking is by highest average salaries compared to tuition costs

It is to give info on degrees with good returns on (education) investment

"No matter what program you choose in the end, with careful budgeting, planning & hard work, you can find success in any field." - RBC

1) Business/Management Sciences

The discipline is more tied to math than commerce and will teach students about theories and models in statistics and programming

It will also teach students how to apply the knowledge/skills to a variety of business problems.

This is in demand!

2) Petroleum or Chemical Engineering

They learn about subjects such as fluid mechanics, heat and mass transfer, and process modeling in order to design operations that will transform raw material into specified products for industries (oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, or energy).

3) Finance

Students who specialize in finance will learn how to plan, manage, and analyze the financial aspects of businesses, banks, and other organizations.

They will work as analysts in a variety of financial roles.

#wallstreetbets #WallStreetBetsnew #wallstreetsbets #GME #GameStop #reddit #robinhood
Hey, do you want revenge against #WallStreet ? #silversqueeze
Read this thread and RETWEET and speak of it around as much as you can please🚀
edit: Other threads to follow bcause not enough spc

Today wallstreet decided to take your money and pop the bubbles they helped you to create and I can say with 100% confidence that they made money on the way up then they gonna make money on the way down. They rule THEIR game!

But what they've done since a very long time to protect the system that serves their hegemony is suppress the price of one of the most ancient and most popular form of money throughout the history: SILVER

They do it because #wallstreet is dependent of the dollar printing machine of the central bank. Every competitor of the dollar must be eradicated or controlled. The Silver is especially important for them because of its history as money.

Silver has been money more often than Gold, there are still 42 countries (including mine: France) where the word money and Silver are the same.
It's people's money, that you used to use to fill your tank or buy your groceries.

The dominant narrative around the $gme story is that some weirdos in their mom’s basement are manipulating the stock market.

That’s is so, so wrong.

[thread]

A prominent user of the #wallstreetbets community has been publicly posting about their position and positive outlook on $GME since September 2019. #YOLO

They didn’t pick the stock randomly. There are reasons to like GameStop. Google “Ryan Cohen” for more on that.

[2/?]

So, many on #wallstreetbets already liked $GME since late 2019.

Then, someone realized that there was a lot of money shorting that stock, essentially betting that the stock would go down.

And, I mean A LOT of money!

[3/?]

Shorting a stock, in simplest terms, is borrowing shares of a stock for a fixed amount of time, and immediately selling it at the current market price.

When the stock price goes down, you buy it back at the lower price, pay the lender back and pocket the profit.

[4/?]

There are lots of legitimate uses for shorting a stock, like hedging your risk, which is sort of like buying an insurance policy.

However, that’s not what the impacted hedge funds were doing. They were making a big risky bet that GameStop’s stock was going down.

[5/?]

The largest wealth transfer in history.

Time for a thread 👇👇👇

Today’s mix of monetary and fiscal policies are having a very different economic impact then we saw post the GFC.

Back then, deflationary forces were exacerbated by a brutal wealth loss problem.

Especially the lower classes.

They lost over 84% of their net worth from '07-'11.

This time we are seeing the complete opposite.

Lower classes just increased their wealth at the highest annual amount in the history of the data.

In fact, the bottom 50% net worth not only increased but is now 77% higher than it was at the peak of the housing bubble.

If we zoom out, this is what the prior chart looks like going back to the 90s.

THREAD: Do the people on Reddit's #WallStreetBets who are buying Gamestop, AMC, and other stocks have any legal liability to do so?

1/ Although the facts are still evolving, it appears that many users on #WallStreetBets (a "sub-reddit" on Reddit, a social media site) and others starting buying Gamestop, AMC, and other stocks that they believed were being "shorted" by certain Wall Street firms.

2/ You "short" a stock when you sell a stock that you don't own, betting that the price will go down. The goal is to sell high and buy low. If you "short" a stock and the price goes up, you can lose a lot of money by buying shares at a higher price than you sold them at.

3/ Based on media reports, it looks like a lot of Redditors didn't like that certain Wall Street firms had bet big that the price of Gamestop and AMC would go down via COVID.

By buying up Gamestop and AMC stock, they caused the price to shoot way up in a short period of time.

4/ That caused fast gains for them and potentially huge losses for firms that shorted those stocks.

So did they engage in "market manipulation," as some people on social media have claimed? Could they get in trouble with the SEC, which is "watching" the matter, or go to prison?

THREAD: A lot of my students have been asking me about the current events involving GameStop, Bitcoin/Dogecoin, minimum wage, stimulus checks, so I thought I'd make a thread that carefully explains this stuff for people who feel out of the loop: (1/97)

On May 28, 2016, a three-year-old boy climbed into a gorilla enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden and was grabbed and dragged by Harambe, a 17-year-old western lowland gorilla. Fearing for the boy's life, a zoo worker shot and killed Harambe.

The incident was recorded on video and received broad international coverage and commentary, including controversy over the choice to use lethal force. A number of primatologists and conservationists wrote later that the zoo had no other choice under the circumstances, and that

it highlighted the danger of zoo animals near humans and the need for better standards of care.

Harambe (/həˈrɑːmbeɪ/ hə-RAHM-bay) was born at the Gladys Porter Zoo in Brownsville, Texas, on May 27, 1999. He was named by Dan Van Coppenolle, a local area counselor who won a naming contest sponsored by the zoo.[1] He came up with the name after listening to the song "Harambe

Robinhood is not the only brokerage that limited buys on GameStop this week, so why is it catching all the heat?

Maybe because @stoolpresidente & others were quick to spread a theory that hedge funds must have forced the move? Or, Robinhood acted alone

A thread on facts 1/X

In our 20-minute interview with Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev I tried to push for answers tied to their decision in 2018 to internalize a boring but important part of users' trades to boost revenue

Their decision came with a tradeoff: A spike in volatility could be very, very bad 2/X

It's a behind the scenes part of your trade, but Robinhood or E*Trade passes your stock order to what's called a clearing house

They carry some liability in the days it takes for your trade to settle. That usually isn't a problem, but can become one if a stock swings fast 3/X

Most smaller brokers forgo added revenue to outsource the duties of a clearing house to giants like Apex Clearing, which solely focus on this part of your trade

But Robinhood in 2018 decided to cut ties with Apex to build their own clearing house called Clearing By Robinhood 4/X

Building your own clearing house is ambitious. TD Ameritrade and Schwab built their own but they are industry titans

In Robinhood's own blog they trumpeted their achievement as the "only clearing system built from scratch, and on modern technology, in the last decade." 5/X

Even though Ryan did an impeccable job at explaining shorting stocks, I just thought of an even simpler explanation using candy bars instead of stocks. @MattJonesRadio @DrewFranklinKSR @ShannonTheDude @ryanlemond

If you buy a candy bar for $1 and sell it for $1.50 you make $.50 profit. Everyone understands that. You expect that the price of candy bars will go up. But what if you expect the price of candy bars to go down? That is where shorting stocks comes into play.

Shorting a stock is like bumming a candy bar worth $1 from a friend with the promise that you will replace it in a week. You then decide not to eat it, but to sell it to someone else for $1. So you have $1 in your pocket, but you owe a candy bar worth $1 so there is no gain.

But, if the price of candy bars drops to $.50 during the week, you have $1 in your pocket from the original sale but the replacement candy bar only costs you $.50, so you make $.50 profit overall.

Buying stock has unlimited profit potential, but low risk. You can only lose your original cost. Say you buy a $1 candy bar to sell, but your stupid brother eats the candy bar before you could sell it. The most you could lose is the original price of the candy bar or $1.

There is a serious misreading, particularly on the Left, as to what is going on with Gamestonks, $GME, $AMC, $BB, $NOK, the whole kit and kaboodle. Equating this with the Capitol Hill insurrection or with Trump or 4Chan is a mistake. Thread.

A lot of leftists are imposing their ideology on Gamestonk, rather than analyzing the conditions. This is a good explainer by @JamesSurowiecki. Using social media, options, and discount brokers, the mob figured out a way to exploit Wall Street.

Of course it's not so simple. Wall Street loses, Wall Street wins. @alexisgoldstein explains how some hedge funds make a killing even as some take a bath. But 1000s of retail investors are being screwed by Wall St and Washington in all of

Additionally, three Wall Street oligarchs have made a collective $2 billion of GameStop alone. Michael Bury, one of the famous traders from "The Big Short," has also apparently made $250 million. So, yes, rich are getting richer.

But if all you focus on is the wealthy, than you cannot explain why there is blatant market manipulation going on with many brokers suddenly preventing retail investors from buying "meme stocks" like GME, AMC, BB, NOK, BBBY. In fact, they can only sell. Who does that benefit?

The stock market is not a neutral arbiter of real value.
The stock market is not a neutral arbiter of real value.
The stock market is not a neutral arbiter of real value.
The stock market is not a neutral arbiter of real value.
The stock market is not...

Most of the banks whining about Reddit would be more bankrupt than Gamestop if the government wasn't constantly propping them up with easy money.

It's all an artificial construct. Which is fine, as long as we stop pretending it's an objective marketplace governed by natural law.

We've set up a system where everyone depends on too big to fail finance companies, public policy doesn't work without them, but they're ALSO allowed to be predatory and they're never allowed to lose money.

Citigroup doesn't get to decide who lives and who dies.

We apparently aren't allowed to decide with our VOTES that hedge funds should die and brick and mortar companies should live if possible.

And now they're freaking out if we literally start deciding it with our *money* in their "free" market.

They don't get to decide! /3

Goldman Sachs, Citgroup and Manhattan hedge funds are not sober, responsible judges of who deserves to live or die according to real capitalist value.

If the rules were fairly and equally applied, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup would be bankrupt and stripped to the bone. /4

I'll just put this out there:

1. This is classic liquidity crunch and has happened many times.

2. RH/etc. will turn out to have made mistakes, didn't plan for any of this, ultimately lose big.

3. Reform will center on how services are offered/advertised to retail investors.

4. Lots of coverage will center on class warfare narrative and the 'game being rigged'.

5. That same coverage will make 3 seem like the answer and a fair resolution to the problem.

6. The real culprit, as always, was leverage and incentives.

7. In the US financial institutions that accept deposits insured by the federal government (FDIC etc) are allowed to hold positions in risky assets, though this is regulated.

8. Other even less regulated institutions (funds etc) hold shares in the guys referred to in 7.

9. The REAL problem is those institutions are allowed to make leveraged bets that, if they go badly enough, could affect the value of 'safe' assets like savings accounts and pension funds.

10. Thus the ultimate incentive problem: Big funds ultimately insured by taxpayer dollars

11. Ultimately the ONLY real reforms that matter are:

i) Reserve requirements, i.e. how much banks/funds/etc are allowed to borrow to invest in risky assets

ii) Trade restrictions, i.e. some institutions (commercial banks) not allowed to hold some assets/positions (short)