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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: MulhollandDrive who wrote (167592)1/26/2021 5:16:30 PM
From: TobagoJack1 Recommendation

Recommended By
marcher

  Respond to of 217754
 
Thank you much for the pointer to where the chatter is. Shall read and hopefully get it.

I agree with you that the nature of the GME insurrection is materially different than all that went before. The GME happenings resemble much more the French Revolution than Yahoo chit-chat. For blood has been drawn by unemployed mobs with handful of free-money united by social network and imbued w/ the spirit of hackers-anonymous whilst weaponised by RobinHood. Drawn, as the narrative goes, against the ilk that includes Leon Black who hanged out but did not hang with Jeffrey Epstein.

What a wonderful start to 2021!

Someone else gets the joke, it seems, and wondering if the authorities should / would intervene to save the pros before the pros require another round of bailouts funded by the people for the people against other people, which of course would p*ss off the mob even more.

All in one editorial. Just super.

bloomberg.com

GameStop Is Just a GameAlso BlackRock, Melvin Capital and Leon Black.
Matt Levine
January 27, 2021, 1:14 AM GMT+8

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering finance. He was an editor of Dealbreaker, an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, and a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit.
Read more opinion Follow @matt_levine on Twitter

Infinite Game
Of course the chart of GameStop Corp.’s stock price from yesterday is nuts. It closed on Friday at $65.01, opened yesterday at $96.73, got as high as $159.18 and as low as $61.13, and closed at $76.79. Almost 178 million shares traded, worth almost $17 billion. GameStop’s 10-day realized volatility is 308%. I am typing these words before the market opens on Tuesday, but by the time I send them the stock will have been trading for hours, and I am sure that it will have touched $4 and $4,000 and every number in between. It seems meaningless to talk about the price of GameStop stock, as though a single number could represent such an elusive concept. GameStop stock has all the prices at once.

Maybe the craziest thing in the chart is not the wild spikes up and down, but the flat lulls when no one was trading because the stock exchange wouldn’t let them. “The stock surged as much as 145% to $159.18 on Monday,” reports Bloomberg News, “triggering at least nine trading halts.” The theory behind a trading halt is basically that the stock has moved around too much, too quickly, for people to really mean it. The stock has gapped up or down because people aren’t paying attention: It is “really” worth $100 or whatever, and lots of people in the world would happily buy it for $100 and lots of other people would happily sell it at $100, but they’re all out at lunch and there are just a few algorithms trading the stock and they have accidentally pushed it down to $90. (Or up to $110.) So the exchange halts trading for five or ten minutes, so that everyone who wants to buy or sell has time to get back to their desks and put in orders. “This stock is trading at $90, that’s a steal,” people will think, if they have five minutes to think about it, and they’ll put in buy orders and push the stock back to its natural price when it reopens.

I do not think this theory really applies to GameStop. It has all the prices at once. If you halt GameStop for going up too much, people are just going to hang out on Reddit talking it up more until it reopens. Or the other way: Between 10:45 and 11:15 yesterday, GameStop fell from $159.18 to $88.09, with four trading halts along the way. When the stock plummeted from $159.18 to $132.32, and then was halted for five minutes, nobody said “oh wow this $159 stock is trading at $132, what a bargain, I’d better jump in.” Those concepts mean nothing now.

Here (via Robin Wigglesworth) is a post on Reddit’s r/wallstreetbets forum asking “Can I get a flair for buying GME at the literal top ($155.29)?” (It was not the literal top, but close.) “This is the way,” a chorus of redditors replied. It is a way! Gleefully getting top-ticked on a stock—buying it at its highest price ever and then bragging about it as the price collapses—in order to earn the strange respect of your friends on Reddit: That is a thing you can do. You might enjoy it. I am not going to say it is irrational; people have spent their money on worse things. But it is not the sort of rationality that the stock market is set up for. “When stock prices get too high, sensible value motives will take over”: Nope.

We talked a lot about GameStop yesterday, but I missed this terrific article by Bloomberg’s Brandon Kochkodin taking the long view of Reddit’s infatuation with the stock. GameStop first came to WallStreetBets’ attention in March 2019, when it was trading around $10, and a user made a deep-value case that was “not contingent on a turnaround or business expansion.” Stuff soon got weird though, with another poster proposing a WallStreetBets takeover of GameStop. And then the main character appeared on the scene. We talked about him briefly yesterday; he goes by “Roaring Kitty” on YouTube, and by an unprintable name on Reddit. He started buying GameStop in 2019, took a victory lap on Friday with chicken tenders and champagne, and as of yesterday he seems to have turned a $53,566.04 investment into $13.9 million.

But is it securities fraud?If a lot of people on Reddit band together to drive the price of a stock higher, is that illegal? I have been asked that question a lot recently, and I want to be clear that:

I don’t know, andIf I did know, I wouldn’t tell you, because I do not give legal advice in this newsletter, and I particularly do not give legal advice that people on Reddit might read while pumping up stocks.That said I suppose we should talk about the question in general and extremely not-legal-advice terms. I guess my answer would be that it might be illegal in all sorts of ways, but it is not obviously illegal, and if the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission were to go after WallStreetBets for this stuff they will be breaking new ground and going beyond their previous cases. I do not want to say “this stuff is all fine,” but I will say I am not all that bothered by it.

There are two main things that are illegal. One is “securities fraud.” This basically means lying about a stock. The other is “market manipulation.” Nobody knowswhat this means. Legally, it means something like:

To effect, alone or with 1 or more other persons, a series of transactions in any security … creating actual or apparent active trading in such security, or raising or depressing the price of such security, for the purpose of inducing the purchase or sale of such security by others.

So if you buy stock with the purpose of pushing the price up so that other people will buy it, that’s market manipulation. If you buy stock hoping that the price will go up because other people buy it, that’s not market manipulation; that’s just normal. Those things are not so different. There is a “ traditional four-part test for manipulation that has developed in case law”:

(1) That the accused had the ability to influence market prices; (2) that the accused specifically intended to create or effect a price or price trend that does not reflect legitimate forces of supply and demand; (3) that artificial prices existed; and (4) that the accused caused the artificial prices.

So consider the general concept of a “pump-and-dump” scheme. The most classic pump-and-dump goes like this:

I buy some GameStop stock.
I put out rumors—in my subscription newsletter, on Reddit, in fake press releases, whatever—about some catalyst for the stock to go up. “Hey I hear from an inside source that GameStop just got an exclusive contract to supply downloadable video games in Tesla cars,” etc.People see these rumors, believe them and buy GameStop stock, pushing the price up.I sell the stock to them at the higher prices.This is very straightforwardly illegal and the SEC goes after this stuff all the time, alleging securities fraud. Lying about stocks. Here is the SEC’s “ Investor Alert: Social Media and Investing -- Stock Rumors,” which pretty much defines a pump-and-dump this way:

For example, in a “pump-and-dump” scheme, promoters “pump” up the stock price by spreading positive rumors that incite a buying frenzy and they quickly “dump” their own shares before the hype ends. Typically, after the promoters profit from their sales, the stock price drops and the remaining investors lose money.

There are variations. The SEC has gone after forms of dishonesty that aren’t quite lying about the stock. For instance, if you are a widely followed stock promoter with a subscription tip newsletter, and you email tips to your subscribers and then sell your stock to them while saying that you’re buying, that seems dishonest, and the SEC will go after you. Or if you are a promoter or research firm and you put out positive research about a company, but you don’t disclose that the company paid you to put out the research, that is also bad.

Now, I think you could do a pump-and-dump without any actual lying. For instance:

I email subscribers to my expensive private newsletter saying “hey let’s pump GameStop.”We all buy GameStop, knowing that we’re just doing it for the pump, with no real or fake catalyst for the stock to go up.It goes up, because we bought a lot of it. Other people, innocents and high-frequency trading algorithms, see it go up on heavy volume and think “hey this is a good stock, we should buy it.” They buy it, pushing the price up.We sell the stock to them at the higher prices.In this version, I have not lied about a stock. On the other hand, I have effected transactions in the stock to create trading activity and raise the price, for the purpose of inducing people to buy it. Seems like market manipulation, “painting the tape” or something. The SEC goes after stuff like this occasionally.

I think that in modern markets you could even do a bit better than that and have a completely honest pump-and-dump:

I show up on Reddit and say “hey let’s pump GameStop.”
We all buy GameStop, knowing that we’re just doing it for the pump, with no real or fake catalyst for the stock to go up.It goes up, because we bought a lot of it. Other people see us doing this, read my Reddit post, know we are pumping the stock, and also buy it, because we seem to be having fun, and they like fun too.

Eventually some of us get bored and start selling and the price collapses.The point here is that it is at least theoretically possible that no one buys stock for any reason other than “hey it’s a fun pump.” That is, no one is deceived about the fundamentals (there’s no fake news about the company), and also no one is deceived about the technicals. No one says “huh this stock is up on a lot of good buying pressure, I should buy some”; everyone who buys says “hey this stock is up because it’s being pumped, and if I get in now I might still get out before it collapses, and that’ll be fun.” It is “ respect the pump” as a quasi-mystical mantra.

I bet the SEC would say that’s market manipulation, but I am not so sure. I suppose we did our trading “for the purpose of inducing the purchase or sale of such security by others,” but not by deceiving them about what’s going on. “Join us in a fun game of chicken,” was our basic message here. Did we try “to create or effect a price or price trend that does not reflect legitimate forces of supply and demand”? Who’s to say what’s “legitimate”? Surely the price did not reflect expectations about future cash flows, but just as surely the price reflected supply and demand: We all wanted to own it because we were having fun, so the price went up.

Anyway, the actual GameStop situation. I suppose it’s possible that someone on Reddit has posted fake rumors about GameStop’s business, but I haven’t seen any. The posts I’ve seen about GameStop have been either (1) substance-free “GME to $1,000” stuff or (2) arguments based on publicly available information plus personal opinion and guesses about the future. They might be wrong or exaggerated or misstated, but it’s not, like, core fraud.

Is it manipulation? Well, there is not a lot of deception here. No one is buying GameStop stock because they think to themselves “boy this stock is going up a lot on heavy volume, must be a bunch of big institutions who see fundamental value here.” There is absolutely wall-to-wall coverage of GameStop in financial media, and it pretty much all says “lol those crazy redditors, pushing up the stock for no reason.” So at worst this is a sort of honest pump, people banding together to do it for the lolz and hoping they can get out before it collapses.

I’m not even convinced it’s that though. The stock closed Friday at its all-time high. Roaring Kitty was up $11 million. Everyone came back on Monday and did it again. My model here—and I should emphasize this is purely a guess—is that the people most identified with the GameStop trade on Reddit, at this point, are much more interested in securing their legendary status on Reddit than they are in taking profits at the expense of whoever came in later.

You could have other miscellaneous theories about words like “collusion” and “short squeezes.” Is it illegal for people to band together to all buy stock at the same time? “If institutional investors had an internet site or chat where they arguably cajoled each other or coordinated to buy stock to move the price higher,” one reader asked me by email, “wouldn’t that be stock manipulation and wouldn’t the SEC get involved?”

Well, a while back there were reports that the SEC was looking into hedge fund “idea dinners,” where hedge funds get together to pitch each other on their third-best ideas. 1 That sounds like institutional investors having a chat where they cajole each other to buy stock in a coordinated way. But the SEC wasn’t concerned about market manipulation. The SEC was concerned that the hedge funds might be a “group” under the securities laws, if they teamed up to own more than 5% of the stock, and that they hadn’t made the necessary group disclosures. This is less of a concern for small retail investors, just because they are less likely to get above 5% of the company. 2 Also it doesn’t seem like the idea-dinner probe went anywhere. Telling your friends that you like a stock and they should buy it is, more or less, fine.

Or is a short squeeze illegal? One popular topic on WallStreetBets is recalling stock borrow. Kochkodin’s article describes one call to action in April 2020:

The final all-caps sentence imploring GameStop owners to call their brokers and tell them to not lend them short opened a new theater to wage war against short-sellers.

It’s a little known fact, and one that you wouldn’t expect to learn on a Reddit message board, that a stockholder can request that shares they own outright not be lent out to short-sellers.

If everyone bands together to recall stock borrow, there will be fewer shares available for short sellers, and the short sellers will be forced to cover their bets by buying stock, pushing the price up more. Is that illegal? Is it illegal to make borrow impossible with the goal of messing with short sellers?

The SEC might think so, actually. In 2012, it brought charges against Phil Falcone and Harbinger Capital Partners LLC for, among other things, having “conducted an illegal ‘short squeeze’ to manipulate bond prices.” I confess I do not understand why the SEC thought a short squeeze was illegal, or what they think the fraud was, but the Falcone short squeeze is one of my all-time favorite financial stories and I advise you to read the complaint for humor and inspiration. Quick summary: Falcone owned some bonds of a company called MAAX Holdings Inc. “After hearing rumors that a Wall Street financial services firm was shorting the MAAX bonds and also encouraging its customers to do the same, Falcone decided to seek revenge.” So he bought all the MAAX bonds. Then he bought more: Short sellers would borrow MAAX bonds (presumably from him), and then sell them to him, so that he ended up with “22 million more bonds than MAAX had ever issued.” Then he stopped lending them out, forcing the short sellers to buy bonds to cover their shorts. But there were no bonds to be bought, since he owned them all (and more). At some point an executive from the “Wall Street firm” called up Falcone to talk about the situation, and even in the SEC’s dry language you can tell that it was one of the greatest conversations in all of Wall Street history:

At some point, the conversation turned to the trading in the MAAX bonds. The senior officer asked Falcone how the Wall Street firm might satisfy its obligation to Harbinger. Falcone stated that the Wall Street firm should just keep bidding for the bonds. Falcone acknowledged that the Wall Street firm would suffer some losses doing so, but told the senior officer and the others that sometimes you are just on the wrong side of a trade.

In the course of this discussion, Falcone stated that he knew that the short position in the MAAX zips had created a “long” position in excess of the issue size. When the senior officer asked how he could possibly know this, Falcone stated that he was working the position himself and that he (i.e., Harbinger) had acquired approximately 190 million bonds. The senior officer and the other the Wall Street firm personnel were stunned.

“Just keep bidding for the bonds,” “sometimes you are just on the wrong side of a trade,” I love it so much.

Where were we? Oh, right, GameStop. I suppose a really coordinated successful effort to squeeze borrow might count as market manipulation, at least in the SEC’s view, but I’m not sure how serious this effort was. In any case it hasn’t worked. “Despite a punishing two weeks and relentless chat-room taunting, GameStop Corp. haters are showing no signs of surrender,” Bloomberg reported yesterday; short interest has barely budged, and there are still shares available to borrow.

I don’t know. Taking a step back: Should the SEC care about all of this? On the one hand, I do not see a whole lot of deception in this GameStop situation. The SEC’s core concerns, about people lying about stocks and tricking the innocent, don’t seem especially implicated here; everyone is having reasonably informed and consensual fun.

On the other hand it is all pretty dumb? Like if you are a securities regulator, you can think of your job narrowly as preventing people from lying about stocks, or more broadly as encouraging capital formation and fostering confidence in markets and moving markets toward efficiency and perfection. And, you know, this is the opposite of that. A popular conclusion from the GameStop story is “well I guess the stock market is nonsense now,” and I’m not sure that conclusion is wrong. Seems like the sort of thing the SEC wouldn’t like. But what can they do about it?

Meanwhile
New Larry Fink letter dropped. We talk about these every year, and perhaps we’ll talk about this one tomorrow, but today I don’t feel like it. In a world where stocks are tokens for fun YOLO trading, doesn’t it just feel quaint, that Fink and BlackRock Inc. buy all the stocks, hold them forever, and tell companies what to do? “Mr. Fink is now calling on all companies ‘to disclose a plan for how their business model will be compatible with a net-zero economy,’ which he defines as limiting global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial averages and eliminating net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.” Companies, what are companies, we trade stocks here. I want to read Roaring Kitty’s letter to CEOs.
A funny tradeYesterday Bloomberg’s Tracy Alloway wrote about five lessons from the GameStop/WallStreetBets situation. They are good. Here is one of them:

The shorts have become the target.
Once upon a time, short-selling firms would unveil a new position to great anticipation and attention (if not acclaim). The current scrum over Gamestop — in which retail traders have gone head-to-head with short-selling firm Citron — suggests that might become a thing of the past. As Scott Nations at Nations Indexes points out: "The old game of shorting a stock then putting out a negative report is done. From now on that will just be the signal to start a massive short squeeze." A hedge fund or short-seller advertising a bet against a stock might now be the equivalent of waving a red flag to r/wallstreetbets' herd of bulls: a signal to charge in with call options and force a move higher. The predators have turned prey.

In related news, venture capitalist Josh Wolfe suggested a funny trade to me. Here’s the trade: 3

You are, say, Andrew Left of Citron Research, or Gabriel Plotkin of Melvin Capital Management—some hedge fund manager who has attracted the ire of the WallStreetBets subreddit for shorting GameStop.You buy a bunch of some smallish-cap stock. (Not a 13D-disclosable amount, but a bunch.) Ideally it would be one that has gotten some bullish attention on WallStreetBets, but not too much. Not a meme stock, just something some redditors like.You put out a research note on the stock. At the back of the research note, you have the usual boilerplate disclosing that you might be long or short the stock, you might trade derivatives, you make no promises to hold your position for any particular period, etc. 4But at the front of the research note, you say in giant letters “This stock is terrible, it’s going to zero, it has only been propped up by Reddit buying and you know how dumb those guys are.” Perhaps you record a video in which you talk about the stock for a minute and then spend the rest of your time calling redditors names.Enraged redditors band together to drive the price of the stock up, to spite you, like they did with GameStop.Remember, you had bought the stock, so you sell it at a huge profit.I like it! I mean, boy is this neither legal or investing advice, but it is funny. It might not work, of course; people might read your report and be like “oh yeah this company is bad” and sell the stock, and then you’d lose money. But if Reddit has as much magic power as it seems to after GameStop then, sure, it might work.

If it does work, it seems like … obviously … somehow … fraud, but how? You have disclosed that you could be long or short the stock. (Try, in the body of the report, to say things like “this stock is bad,” not “we are short this stock.”) You have made a bearish case that perhaps you do not believe, though it is hard to prove your beliefs. You have made a bearish case and some bullish trades, sure, but you might reasonably argue “we are bearish in the long term, but we are just making a tactical trade based on market dynamics, what’s wrong with that.” That’s not a great argument. But your best argument is: Look, we put out a bearish report, sure, and one could say it was dishonest, sure, but the stock ripped up, so no one can say that our bearish report deceived anyone. I mean, or maybe it did, but in a weird and reflexive way.

I dunno. If “spite” is a predictable driver of stock prices, you might as well exploit it. Perhaps market psychology, in 2021, is sometimes reverse psychology.

Oh, Melvin Huh:

Citadel LLC and Point72 Asset Management are investing $2.75 billion into hedge fund Melvin Capital Management, which has been hard hit by a series of short bets to start the year.

The influx of cash is expected to help stabilize Melvin, which in 2021 has lost 30% through Friday, said people familiar with the firm. Melvin started the year with $12.5 billion and had been one of the best performing hedge funds on Wall Street in recent years. The losses stem from Melvin’s array of short bets against companies and have stunned clients and other traders. Among other short positions, Melvin bet against the surging stock of videogame retailer GameStop Corp.

Citadel and its partners are investing $2 billion and Point72, which already had more than $1 billion invested in Melvin as of 2019, $750 million. The investments are in Melvin’s fund and include non-controlling revenue shares in the firm. Melvin founder Gabe Plotkin was a top portfolio manager at Point72’s predecessor firm, SAC Capital Management, before he left to start Melvin.

It is sort of a perverse badge of honor on Wall Street to get absolutely killed on a huge trade. I’m sure that now Plotkin can get into the exclusive clubs where, like, the guys from Long-Term Capital Management hang out and tell war stories. “I can see by your scars that you took a bailout from Ken Griffin,” one of them will say, lighting a cigarette with a faraway look in his eye. “I took a bailout once. It was the Russian crisis of ‘98 that did me in. What got you?” And Plotkin will have to say “well see there’s this subreddit.”

Oh, Apollo
The bad news, for Leon Black, is that he has to step down from running Apollo Global Management for paying too much money to Jeffrey Epstein:

Just months after Apollo announced an internal investigation into Black’s long association with the late financier, the investment firm said in a statement Monday that he would retire as CEO no later than July 31, while remaining chairman. Marc Rowan, one of Black’s top lieutenants, will succeed him as CEO as part of a governance overhaul that will also eliminate weighted voting rights.

Apollo said an outside law firm hired to conduct the review found that the asset manager never retained Epstein for any services and that he never invested in any Apollo-managed funds. While the law firm, Dechert, found no evidence that Black was involved in any way with Epstein’s criminal activities, its report revealed that the CEO had paid $158 million to the disgraced financier from 2012 to 2017, a sum much greater than previously known.

The good news is that he paid Epstein all that money for actual tax advice, and also that the tax advice was excellent:

Mr. Black “believed, and witnesses generally agreed, that Epstein provided advice that conferred more than $1 billion and as much as $2 billion or more” in tax savings, the report states.

It also supports Mr. Black’s contention that he paid Epstein a fee he believed was roughly equivalent to 5% of the value that the late financier generated on an after-tax basis. It describes the two men’s relationship deteriorating beginning in 2016 after a fee dispute. Mr. Black’s last payment to Epstein was made in April 2017.

Mr. Black also asked employees of his family office; attorneys at law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP; and other outside accountants, lawyers and tax professionals to vet and challenge Epstein’s advice when it was given, the report states.

“In short, there is no question that Epstein performed substantive work for Black and that Black genuinely believed that Epstein was extremely smart, capable, and saved him substantial amounts of money,” the report says.

Opinion. Data. More Data.Get the most important Bloomberg Opinion pieces in one email.

After Epstein was arrested on sex-trafficking charges and died in jail, there was quite a bit of wild speculation about where his money came from, and specifically about why billionaires were so willing to pay him so much money for somewhat vague services. After all that speculation, finding out that Leon Black paid Epstein $150 million for differentiated advice that really saved him $2 billion of taxes is in some ways the most boring possible explanation.

At the same time … what? Why was Epstein, who was not a lawyer or an accountant or a college graduate for that matter, so good at tax? I actually don’t have too much trouble believing this—in my experience, some people are just born with a natural gift for tax structuring, and need surprisingly little formal training to achieve their potential—but it is fascinating. Black would go his lawyers and say “hey my guy found this way to save a billion dollars in taxes, is it legal,” and the fancy lawyers in the Paul Weiss tax department would say “wow, sure is, this is amazing, why didn’t we think of this, this guy is a Michelangelo of tax minimization”? I don’t know, it’s just a weird niche. Also what did Black actually do to save all those taxes?

Things happenRobinhood Traders Face the Taxman After Falling In Love With Stocks. Companies raise $400bn over three weeks in blistering start to 2021. Commodities Traders, Producers Earn Cheaper Rates From Banks for Lowering Carbon Production. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Lead Bonus Bounces for Bankers in Asia. Saved Stimulus Checks Expected to Help Spur Economic Recovery. AMC Nets $917 Million in Financing to Ward Off Bankruptcy. Did everyone spontaneously applaud Amanda Palmer in a Havelock North cafe?

If you'd like to get Money Stuff in handy email form, right in your inbox, please subscribe at this link. Or you can subscribe to Money Stuff and other great Bloomberg newsletters here. Thanks!

I kid. They pitch ideas that they think are good and will appeal to their friends. There is some incentive to pitch good ideas, because it can be helpful to you if your friends all pile into your trade, pushing up the price. There is some incentive *not* to pitch your best ideas, because you might want the best trades all for yourself.

There was another idea-dinner probe in 2010 about whether hedge funds colluded to drive down the euro, but nothing came of it.

I have elaborated a little; the idea is Wolfe’s, as is describing it as “reverse psychology,”but any errors or infelicities are mine.

Here’s Citron’s actual boilerplate: “As of the publication date of a Citron report, Citron Related Persons (possibly along with or through its members, partners, affiliates, employees, and/or consultants), Citron Related Persons clients and/or investors and/or their clients and/or investors have a position (long or short) in one or more of the securities of a Covered Issuer (and/or options, swaps, and other derivatives related to one or more of these securities), and therefore may realize significant gains in the event that the prices of a Covered Issuer’s securities decline or appreciate. Citron Research, Citron Capital and/or the Citron Related Persons may continue to transact in Covered Issuers’ securities for an indefinite period after an initial report on a Covered Issuer, and such position(s) may be long, short, or neutral at any time hereafter regardless of their initial position(s) and views as stated in the Citron research. Neither Citron Research nor Citron Capital will update any report or information to reflect changes in positions that may be held by a Citron Related Person.”

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:
Matt Levine at mlevine51@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Brooke Sample at bsample1@bloomberg.net

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To: MulhollandDrive who wrote (167592)1/26/2021 7:31:43 PM
From: TobagoJack  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 217754
 
Must reinforce-info my son Jack (10) that 80% of the gains in a bubble, most bubbles, take place w/i the last 20% of the mania, when trajectory goes vertical, and events go pear-shape

As the proof-of-concept-pilot short of GME is going well even as 2 rolls remain w/i capability / capacity, the giggle is getting funnier, edging towards absurdity and rapidly

zerohedge.com

Musk Tweet Sends Gamestop Soaring (Even More) After Hours


Update 4:40pm: Well that escalated quickly. Just 20 minutes after Musk's tweet, GME exploded to $240...



* * *

Update 4:20pm: Just one hour ago (see below) we said that it is "increasingly likely that GME will hit $200" thanks to the stock entering the peak OTM vol "gamma gravity". Well, moments ago, GME just hit a new all time high $194.50, surging about $44 after hours and nearing the $200 gamma level on, drumroll, an Elon Musk tweet that merely said...

... That one tweet alone added over $3 billion in market cap to Gamespot (or perhaps GammaSpot) whose stock price may crush not just hedge fund but also dealers who are painfully short gamma in the name and will be forced to buy a lot more either now or when the stock opens for trading tomorrow.

In short, we are almost certain to see a $200+ print tomorrow.

* * *

For the third day in a row, Gamestop has exploded higher, and after a brief period of rangebound trading the stock has almost doubled, surging from $90 to as high as $144 (at which point it was halted), dropped and resumed its move higher.



While there has been nothing fundamental to explain the latest move higher - the bullish tweets by Chamath Palihapitiya and Cameron Winklevoss were discussed earlier - the main reason cited for the latest melt up, in addition to a continued short squeeze of course, is that GME has now fallen in the notorious "gamma vortex", and one look at the highest strike price in this Friday's expiring options confirms this: with less than 300 $200 Jan 29 puts traded, there has been an absolute frenzy of calls, which at last check were above 70,000 and rising rapidly.



A quick look at the volume at price for the $200 calls shows the insanity that is being unleashed here...



... and with dealers clearly short gamma, they are now rushing to buy the stock creating the infamous feedback loop where the more OTM call activity takes place, the higher the stock rises (amid dealer delta hedging), leading to even more call buying and so on.

What this means in English is that at this point it is increasingly likely that GME will hit $200 as the gamma gravity is activated (and for those who still need an explainer, please read " All You Ever Wanted To Know About Gamma, Op-Ex, And Option-Driven Equity Flows").

The only question we have is whether Melvin Capital is still short the stock, and whether it is about to need an even bigger bailout from Citadel and Steve Cohen. And, as a follow up, at what GME price will Citadel and Point72 themselves require a bailout from the NY Fed...

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To: MulhollandDrive who wrote (167592)1/27/2021 1:38:07 AM
From: TobagoJack1 Recommendation

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marcher

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We might be witness to two formal acknowledgment of two heretofore unrecognized classes of market participants, the rage-speculator and the naughty-gambler. The former is out for blood, and latter out for social-undertaking fun.

Some of both might have been on the streets on Capitol Hill 6th January. Unclear to me that the SEC has mandate to intervene against either group w/o thinking through the TwoAPuc (the worst of all possible unintended consequences) - above SEC pay-grade I suspect whether they know it or not.

bloomberg.com

GameStop Is Rage Against the Financial Machine

Traders putting on the short squeeze aren’t motivated by greed. They’re engaged in an anger-driven uprising against the establishment.

John Authers
27 January 2021, 13:31 GMT+8



There’s plenty to be angry about.

Photographer: Daniel Grizelj/Stone RF/Getty Images

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Anger Is an EnergyThe saga of GameStop Corp. continues. By the end of another frenetic day of trading Tuesday, the stock had just topped its high from Monday. Between those peaks, it staged a fall of more than 50% on Monday afternoon. Colleagues have followed these extraordinary developments as they happened. I will try for now simply to process the single most important question: Is this just a weird technical situation, of the kind that comes along every few years, that can otherwise be safely ignored? Or does it tell us something important about market conditions as a whole?



Purely qualitatively, based on what I have witnessed, I think it does matter. The signal it sends is disquieting, if not surprising. It also introduces us to a new variant on an ancient market phenomenon.

The cliche is that market capitalism works on the balance between greed and fear. The standard defense is as follows: If the greed to make money by beating the competition is matched by a fear of failure through making too many mistakes or cutting corners, then capitalism works. Nothing else yet discovered gives people such an incentive to work and create growth. Speculative bubbles happen when greed becomes excessive, or when fear diminishes too much. Easy money and easier trading with derivatives oil these emotions and allow them to run riot. The financial crisis of 2008 happened in large part because years of policy had convinced investors that there would be a bailout if they failed; they lost their fear, and greed took over.

This feeds into the debate over whether we have a speculative bubble at present. Markets are pervaded by gloom and worry, so there is no lack of fear — even if confidence that interest rates will never rise is growing excessive. Meanwhile, there is little in the way of greed. Cryptocurrency has generated excitement, as has Tesla Inc., but in the main the frenzy over a historic opportunity to get rich, of the kind that was everywhere in 1999, is lacking. This is a different, worried world. The last two decades have stripped it of its positivity. The mood is nothing like the great bubbles of the past.

Instead of greed, this latest bout of speculation, and especially the extraordinary excitement at GameStop, has a different emotional driver: anger. The people investing today are driven by righteous anger, about generational injustice, about what they see as the corruption and unfairness of the way banks were bailed out in 2008 without having to pay legal penalties later, and about lacerating poverty and inequality. This makes it unlike any of the speculative rallies and crashes that have preceded it.

On Monday, I argued that it was misplaced to take pleasure at the pain for the short-sellers who had attacked GameStop stock, and then been subjected to a “short squeeze” for the ages by traders coordinating on Reddit. I received a bumper crop of feedback. Here are some representative samples (leaving out many with unprintable expletives):

“You kind of miss the point of what is going on with GameStop. How much did Melvin pay you to write this garbage? shill. Literally trying to protect an industry trying to fleece jobs from low income workers. Sleep well chump.”

“Watching entitled institutional shorts whine on TV and OP EDs that millennials equipped with margin accounts & zero fees are collaborating on Reddit to target them is my new favorite sport. Looks perfectly healthy from where I'm sitting, which is on bull side :) plus 1 for the little guys.”

“Normal isn't putting the retail trader down for being independent while organized hedge funds force you to take their way or suffer in fear. Normal is the American dream and being able to make your own way. This isn't a casino. This is a riot.”

One respondent warned that the people squeezing the shorts aren’t “a herd of impressionable youngsters with Robinhood accounts. No. They are an experienced & ruthless army of insomniacs followed by a silent legion of rapidly learning new traders. This is a new paradigm that won’t go away.”

Another told me I was a “dumb boomer” amid a screed of unprintable epithets. (Point of information: I’m just too young to be a boomer. I’m in Generation X, but it’s the intergenerational antagonism that’s noteworthy.) Another said that the short squeeze was just a way for millennials to recoup the money they had been forced to pay to bankers during the TARP rescue 12 years ago, and to put coronavirus relief checks to work:

“In other words, poor people have too much money and are now controlling the narrative. Damn those $1200 stimulus checks and $600 unemployment supplements. Too much liquidity, let's get these folks back to living paycheck to paycheck.”

“I know. Democratisation of the market is so damned inconvenient for those of us with money.”

“nobody cares about your hedge fund cronies!”

“Bloomberg defending the suits. Not surprised. They’re just mad the rubes are in on the joke now. Might this force the Fed’s hand? Too many regular people in on the game.”


This is all fascinating. In the space of 12 years, the role of the short-seller has turned on its head. Back in 2008, it was the shorts who upset the status quo, revealed what was rotten in the state of Wall Street, and brought down the big shots. They were even the heroes of a big movie. It was the Wall Streeters who attacked them.

Alienation has deepened since then. Short-selling hedge funds are now seen as part of a corrupt establishment, as is the media. The motives of anyone defending the shorts, or anyone wearing a suit, must be suspect. And there is a deep generational divide; those unable to own their own home and forced to rely on defined contribution pensions have a stunningly unfair deal compared to those a generation older, living in mortgage-free homes with guaranteed pensions. That percolates into anger, and a determination to right the scales by making money at the expense of corrupt short-sellers.

We lack precedents for an angry bubble, so predictions are even harder than usual. But there are enough similarities with past incidents to raise serious cause for concern.

First, the little guys have had their success so far with the aid of margin accounts, and by using derivatives. We know what happens when these things are used to excess; even the Dutch tulipmania relied on margin debt and derivatives. Little guys (and everyone else) deserve safer tools with which to build wealth.

Second, “democratization of finance” isn’t new, and in itself is nothing that anyone can object to. The problem is that investment and financial planning are difficult, and require time. Regulate these things, and you no longer have true democratization. Leave people free to take chances, and you get disasters like the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000. That also followed plenty of hype about the success of the “little guy,” and the first great explosion of online discount trading succeeded in sucking an army of new retail investors into the bubble’s final climax. Unregulated “democratization” led to the little guy bearing the brunt of the losses.

“Democratizing” finance also leaves newly enfranchised financial citizens prey to spivs and frauds. I started my career covering the disastrous repercussions of one of Margaret Thatcher’s last reforms in the U.K. — giving people the right to leave their defined-benefit pensions, offered by employers, and take on defined-contribution “personal pensions.” Unscrupulous salesmen persuaded miners, firefighters and police officers to abandon copper-bottomed index-linked pensions for plans that came burdened with excessive charges. It was a repellent spectacle, and the bill for compensation was in the billions.

These points doubtless make me appear to be a complacent shill for the financial industry, talking down to the rubes. For the record, I’m still angry about the way workers were ripped off in Britain more than three decades ago, and about the way the little guy ended up bearing the brunt for the financial implosions of 2000 and 2008. But it looks horribly to me as though the same thing is going to happen again — and I don’t think the answer to today’s many ills is to empower poor people to bankrupt themselves with margin accounts and derivatives.

Anger, even more than greed, has the capacity to make us throw caution to the winds. Many of us have a lot to be angry about. If this carries on, and spreads beyond targets like a video-game retailer, I don’t want to see the consequences when history’s first angry bubble bursts.

Survival TipsSleep matters, and we don’t get enough of it. That, it appears, is because of the pervasive ills in society that are also provoking people into squeezing short-sellers; contrary to much perception, sleep deprivation afflicts the poor more than the rich.

I live in New York, which prides itself on being the city that never sleeps. But according to a very interesting study I was sent, there are six big cities in the U.S. that sleep even less, and many more smaller ones. Detroit and Cleveland, Rust Belt cities hit by far greater poverty than New York, are the nation’s most sleep-deprived. The best way to get a good night’s sleep, with all the physical and mental health benefits that go with it, is to be free from poverty:



If we have wealth in place, what else might work? I’ve written before about putting on orange glasses late at night to filter out blue light. The science of combating sleep apnea grows ever more advanced and is worth following. Putting a CPAP machine mask and tube over your face before going to bed may not be necessary; a dental device to hold your jaw open sounds even worse but I am finding works much better.

And then there is the option of music. In the classical realm, Chopin’s Nocturnes rather corner the market: try this one, or this one. Debussy’s Clair de Lune is a musical evocation of moonlight that has much the feeling of a lullaby or a goodnight story. When it came to singing lullabies to my own kids, I always found that no actual lullabies came to mind. Instead I always ended up singing one of two arguably inappropriate songs. First, there is Please, Please, Please, made famous by Dream Academy in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but originally by the champions of my generation of students, The Smiths. This is what it sounds like when performed only by the lead singer Morrissey, and by the guitarist Johnny Marr. It does make a good lullaby, and both of them are great musicians. The other is I Go To Sleep, by Ray Davies of the Kinks, which was most memorably performed by The Pretenders, at a point when Davies was in a relationship with the lead singer Chrissie Hynde.

Analyze exactly what these songs are saying and I shouldn’t have been singing them to my kids. But they’re beautiful and they sound like lullabies. Now to try to get a good night’s sleep before a busy day analyzing what the Federal Reserve’s Jerome Powell has to say about inflation and the future of rates in his first press conference of the year on the morrow. If you’re reading this on the East Coast of the U.S. just after midnight, I urge you to do the same.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:
John Authers at jauthers@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Matthew Brooker at mbrooker1@bloomberg.net

John Authers is a senior editor for markets. Before Bloomberg, he spent 29 years with the Financial Times, where he was head of the Lex Column and chief markets commentator. He is the author of “The Fearful Rise of Markets” and other books.

Read more opinion Follow @johnauthers on Twitter

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