The world used to be not so fucked. Then the world got a little bit fucked. Now the world is really fucked and it's about to get way more fucked. Fuck, it's actually fucked.
What this sub has come to learn over the past 2 years is that the root cause of the majority of the trials and tribulations most people are currently experiencing in the world today have been due to global financial systems abusing their many privileges in the pursuit of profits at any cost. Bad bets are made often and when things go south, taxpayers are left with the bill. Well, we're at the precipice of global financial collapse brought on by a massive negative feedback loop of countless bad bets, except this time, the people who usually win are losing. Badly. And we are the winning side.
Through a combination of time, greed, incompetence, negligence, corruption and crime, modern markets have become 100% rigged. Yes, you heard me. 100%. Investors are being robbed at a fixed casino, but the Game is about to Stop.
My goal in writing this is to outline 3 main reasons why I think investing in GameStop is simultaneously a smart long-term investment play and is also one the few, if not the only life raft in the inevitable financial turmoil the world is about to experince;
- GameStop is a healthy long-term investment
- NFTs are not what you think they are humor me
- Illegal Naked Short Selling/GME Short Squeeze
GameStop is a healthy long-term investment
Why? GameStop;
- is hellbent on maximizing customer experience;
- Ryan Cohen founded Chewy in 2011 and sold it to PetSmart in 2017 for $3.35 billion. It became a hyper-successful online retailer due to repeat business from customers that had incredibly positive experiences like being able to keep products ordered/sent by mistake for the sake of convenience and sending flowers and hand-written cards to customers whose pets had died. Cohen is bringing the same mentality to GameStop. Leadership has been refreshed, stores have been updated, branding has been unified, new innovative products like the GameStop Wallet are powerful and easy to use, and much more.
- has has no debt;
- has revamped leadership;
- GameStop has poached literally hundreds of top-tier talent from reputable, strong, blue chip companies. New leadership for their new direction, which is up.
- Netflix pivoted to streaming during the dawn of the internet, which made them successful and made compies like Blockbuster obsolete shh, don't tell them. GameStop is now making a similar pivot, creating a new ecosystem and ensuring they are situated to capitalize on systemic changes, and they have the right people in place to drive this change.
- is expanding their product offerings;
- Their online store offers a much wider array of products and they have strategic parnters to deliver products to customers at an impressive speed.
- is at the forefront of integrating cryptocurrencies and NFTs into gaming;
- GameStop developed their own NFT Marketplace.
- GameStop developed their own self-custodial crypto wallet;
- Self-custodial means that even in the extremely unlikely event that GameStop goes bankrupt and/or if the GameStop Wallet poofs out of existence, you still own all your assets through your Ethereum address and can access it from other UIs. Ownership of any item is not dependent in any way on the success of the company.
- They have partnerships with industry-leading companies in the crypto space;
- Loopring - an open-sourced, audited, and non-custodial exchange and payment protocol that anyone can build upon. A Layer 2 scaling solution for payments.
- Immutable X - an industry-leading NFT minting and trading platform with a heavy emphasis on gaming. A Layer 2 scaling solution for NFTs.
- Cyber Crew - A collection of digital artists creating high-quality playable characters and usable items, all tradable on the Ethereum blockchain.
- Kiravirse - KIRA is an online multiplayer blockchain-based game created in Unreal Engine 5 where users across the globe can come together to play, compete, and earn. Think Fortnite but on blockchain (remember, most consumers/gamers don't need much, if any knowledge of NFTs). Check out some footage. Nice. Why Kira over games like Fortnite? Well, you can never have your items taken from you, they're cross-compatible between games and you can earn real money through playing and trading.
- See below;
NFTs are not what you think they are
If you hear the term "NFT" and immediately think something along the lines of "overpriced JPGs are stupid", you aren't wrong to feel that way. We agree. When you see this community get excited about NFTs, that isn't what we're excited about.
While JPGs can be NFTs, that doesn't mean NFTs are JPGs. They are not synonymous terms, not even close. Instead of thinking of NFTs as images exclusively, think of them as any unique thing that is compatible with blockchain technology. That's it. Everyone has been focusing on the product itself (and often they can't be blamed for that), where a more fitting metaphor for an NFT would be the barcode on that product.
Hating on NFTs because you disagree with everything that the Bored Ape Yacht Club and other projects stand for is like disagreeing with Costco as a business because they stock Dyson vacuums.
Remember, the barcode on any product in any store is irrelevant to the average consumer, but vital to the business for logistics and operations. Think of what barcodes have done to increase the efficiency of commerce at every level. All NFTs are doing is bringing that efficiency to blockchain-based items.
Relative to GameStop specifically, gaming NFTs will be unique, blockchain items and the fact that they will be NFTs will be virtually no pun intended irrelevant to the average consumer. The important aspects of NFTs are the underlying methods by which they're created, stored and traded - trustless, permissionless, verifiable and immutable on a blockchain, and more specifically to GameStop, the Ethereum blockchain.
Ether is the native currency of the Ethereum blockchain, and like bitcoin, another ERC20 token, if I have one and you have one, and we switch, there is no difference. It's like trading a like bill or coin with a friend. You still have the same amount of money. Conversely, if I have an NFT and you have an NFT, and we switch, there is a difference. I had #20 of something and you have #35, and now we have the other. The number is what matters and it can be tracked and verified by the use of NFTs. And within the vastness of the blockchain that is Ethereum, they're basically like universal barcodes for all upcoming digital games, stores, communities and more.
It's not overly revolutionary in theory, but it does allow everyone to create, communicate and trade in one unified system. Gamers will be able to complete actions like giving/selling a game item (a skin, for example) to someone else between different games, all without the need for an intermediary. You will never have a studio step in and restrict your access to your shit in this ecosystem. You can't tell me that isn't desirable, especially in the industry of gaming.
I'll give one more example regarding ownership. Here are some recent examples of how the things you buy aren't really yours;
I understand there are certain examples where outrage may not justified, as you may have purchased the license to one specific thing and if that thing updates or changes then your license may become void in some way, but let's not get lost in the weeds.
The point is - in the modern world you do not own your assets. If a developer wants to take your stuff, they can. If a corporation wants to move the goalposts of a contract mid-game, they can. If an exchange want to restrict your ability to trade something, they can. One solution to this probelm that GameStop is about to offer through the use of NFTs is that it removes the intermediary, meaning every transation is done by somewhat of a calculator, a very secure, very trustworthy program. No one can get in the way. No one can shut it off. No one can interfere. Again, when done properly, you can't tell me that isn't desirable.
Remember, an NFT can be anything on the blockchain. So technically, games licenses could be distributed as NFTs, or skins, or rare items, or a universal gaming currency, etc. etc., and as long as you never sell them or get scammed out of them (that's on you - with freedom comes responsibility), you own them in perpetuity and they will never change.
Illegal Naked Short Selling/GME Short Squeeze
What would it sound like if I said, "RadioShack is destroying the economy!", or "Home Depot investors are stealing from teachers' pensions!"? It sounds ridiculous because it is, yet somehow when RadioShack or Home Depot is substituted with GameStop, somehow everyone believes it. Here is one question that no one has been able to answer since Jan 21' - how exactly, in terms of specific market mechanics, does retail investors buying something, aka injecting liquidity into the markets, into one specific stock, pose a threat to the entire system? I'll tell you - it doesn't, and anyone who says it does is manipulating you and if they aren't aware of that, they're on the payroll of someone who else who is.
People much smarter than me have written in great detail about the specifics of how this is done, I won't come close to doing any paticular topic justice so if you're new here I will simply direct you to the Superstonk DD Library, but I will simply do my best to summarize at a high level.
In a onceuponanuttshell, get familiar with the tern Illegal Naked Short Selling, despite what the media will tell you, it is the single most powerful mechanism by which our the stock markets are being manipulated in the modern era. Top players get to pick and choose which companies thrive and fail by controlling the stock price via creating more shares than exist, selling them in the open market to plummet the price and hiding that crime in the complexity of the system.
Let's say I have a milkshake stand and I want to go public because my milkshake brings all the boys to the yard. I sell 1000 new shares for $1, so the market cap on OnceuponaMilkshakes is $1000. BUT, Booster Juice (no disrespect, love a good BJ) sees me as a threat and wants me out of business, so the CEO of BJ conspires with some financial criminal who specializes in this sort of thing, let's call him Gen Kriffin, and they work together to secretly and illegally sell shares that don't exist. They do this by "borrowing" as many shares as they see fit with the "promise" of returning them. This artificially increases the supply of my stock which has a real-world effect of lowering the stock price. All they really need is a little drop, or a slow and sustained drop over time. Then magically bad news about my company and/or me comes out in the news and low and behold real investors see red with bad news, get fearful and sell out, creating a negative feedback loop, plummeting the price to $0.10. Now I have no capital, can't afford my debt, can't afford to continue business and I'm forced close down. Little do we know, BJ CEO, Gen Kriffon and some close friends of theirs opened up short positions at $1 based off their inside information. The initial dip was manufactured and the bad news wasn't real. They just stole $0.90 from everyone who took the bait. Paying the news company to run negative stories and risking volatile markets are just "costs of business". They will also never pay taxes on those profits - for more fun facts refer to the DD libary above!
What happened here was Illegal Naked Short Selling, in conjunction with a few other illegal practices, but they aren't important for the purposes of this example. The benefit for short sellers is they capture the difference in price when it goes down, but remember, this is a gamble. The risk is that if the price goes up, short sellers need to return the thing that they didn't have, which means they are forced to buy it.
Had OnceuponaMilkshake investors not sold, and in fact purchased those 200 new shares, the price would have risen above $1 and the "promise" of short sellers to return what they "borrowed" would need to be fulfilled. I only issued 1000 shares but 1200 exist in brokerage accounts, so shorts need to buy 200 more to close their position. The tricky part is the only place they can buy shares is from the original investors of the 1000 shares, and if no one sells, shorts need to increase their prices until they can afford 200 shares. Let me introduce you to my friend, Mr Short Squeeze.
This is obviously a gross oversimplification, but by and large GameStop has been one of many victims of Illegal Naked Short Selling like the example above. The difference is, for the first time ever no investors took the bait. We threw a really big fucking wrench into their engine and now they're all panicking because they don't know what to do with all the extra shares they borrowed and sold. And there are a lot.
In the words of Houston Wade;
There's no panic selling. These people, they may have bought at $4, sat through $400, went back to $40, went to $350, back down to $110, and they have not sold. All they've done is bought more, and there's no answer for that. It's like Art of War mastery by a bunch of idiots who should know better.
We don't know exactly how many shares are out there, but at one point last year there was official data that showed GME had 2.26x the amount of shares in existence and that number has only gone up. That's evidenced by the rabid GME community continuing to buy but the price has continued to go down.
What we do know is that the data (crime) previously hidden in the complexity of the system is slowly coming to light, especially with GME investors Directly Registering Shares (DRS) through GameStop's official transfer agent, Computershare. (Info on this can also be found in the DD Library)
In closing, GameStop was neatly packed into the 'fuck you' box, but we the investors have given Ryan Cohen and his team the capital needed to help it transform into a successful company. There is a lot more to the story but all the data points towards one thing - the Mother of All Short Squeezes (MOASS), and anyone holding GME shares will benefit from it.
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