Noted nihilist philosopher Eugene Thacker, explaining the metaphorical nature of “mists” within horror, writes, “The mist in these types of stories is not only itself vaguely material and formless, but in many cases its origin and aims remain utterly unknown to the human beings that are its victims.”
So, instead of attempting break down all the strange facets of GameStopGate, let’s just simplify things by way of philosophic horror pessimism: A formless, vaguely material meme entity has descended upon Wall Street by way of the hell dimension, Reddit, and is currently devouring hedge fund managers for fun and profit.
This mist derives its power from inflating GameStop stocks and screwing over the billionaire wealth firms that bet against it for years, but its appetite has grown insatiable, and it expanded its reach to include companies like AMC and BlackBerry. Now, it’s come for Dogecoin and Frankie Muniz.
Dogecoin, we are now forcing you to recall, is one of those dumbass joke cryptocurrencies, in this case referencing that “Doge” meme from a while back. Some people still use it, apparently, but all the recent meme economics chatter now has people thinking it’d be really ironic (or something) to invest in the useless, ephemeral digital money. Multiple outlets are now reporting that the price of a single Dogecoin has risen over 142% overnight. And Frankie Muniz is on board.
Muniz, we are now also forcing you to recall, is a former child actor star of Malcolm in the Middle turned race car driver turned olive oil entrepreneur turned surreal, horny Twitter user. This morning, he tweeted his love for Dogecoin, indicating that he, too, is aware of the current r/WallStreetBets ridiculousness, and is possibly hoping to cash in on the weird, pseudo-critique of stock market capitalism.
Unfortunately, we regret to inform him that the aforementioned 142% value hike is still worth less than dogeshit: a single Dogecoin is currently equivalent to about $0.012 USD.
Such free markets. Much wow.
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71 Comments
Copyright 1989 Hang in there or not that cat is long dead.
Kabosu, the 14yr old Dogecoin doggie, ain’t doing so hot either.
https://decrypt.co/40418/the-real-dogecoin-dog-is-recovering-from-vestibular-disease
Anybody else having trouble embedding links all of a sudden?The links go to the front of the post, no matter where you embed them.
Diamond hands baby. Use those fucking diamond hands and HOLD ON
Holy fuck, I watched this some 4 or 5 times in loop before it dawned on me. I may have startled my neighbours when I bursted into laughter.
Great, seeing Frankie Muniz next to a dog is giving me a My Dog Skip flashback. Thanks for making me cry, AV Club.
What the fuck is this headline?
I don’t even bother to ask anymore.
The Moviepass PWR BTM collaboration usurped by unexpected rise of Azathoth and…you guessed it…Frank Stallone.
That was actually way easier to understand!
It’s short for Hoobastonk.
Charles Wilson Stonkton III, of the Boston Stonktons
Welcome to 2021! For the rowers keep on rowing, and they’re certainly not showing any signs that they are slowing.
Hodl till u Lambo
I think the alternate headline wasJulia Stiles is “extremely embarrassed” by her stint on Ghostwriter
“Unfortunately, we regret to inform him that the aforementioned 142% value hike is still worth less than dogeshit: a single Dogecoin is currently equivalent to about $0.012 USD.”So buy while it’s low, yeah?
It’s already gone up 100% since this post, so I’d say yes.
I remember when a single bitcoin was measured in cents. My kid told me we should get some. It’s the future of money and would be worth a fortune. Stupid 11 year old. What does he know anyway?
Dude, back then I was living with other tech dudes during college, and we talked about setting up a farm while it was still viable, and ended up voting that it wasn’t worth the electricity, it was dumb and useless.
Oh Well, we’re all doing fine anyways 😀
It’s back up to .019. I don’t own any but I’m curious to see if this takes off lol.
I still don’t really understand the Gamestop thing. Near as I can tell, some people who are supposed to know these things as well as anybody can felt the stock was overvalued when it was at $16 (or close) so they shorted it. This pissed some people off either because they love games on physical media or hate rich people (ignoring all the pensions that may hold these funds) so they artificially inflated the price by spending their own money and buying the stock. This has caused some of those rich people (and pension funds) to lose a few billion dollars so far.The thing is, if it was overvalued at $16, then it sure as hell was overvalued at $470 (10AM this morning). So what is to stop those same people from shorting it at $470? It isn’t like the company is any more sound than it was a month ago. So those hedge funds can easily make back their losses pretty quickly (it is down 50% in the last 3 hours) and the people losing money will be the Redditors that pumped it up to a price that it could not sustain.What am I missing here?
Google GME short squeeze or just short squeeze to learn how it works.
Nothing. People are trying to claim that this some sort of anti-capitalist movement like Occupy Wall Street 2.0, but it is just a standard pump-and-dump stock scam.
It went down 60% today. A lot of short-sellers made a lot of money off it today.
It went down because Robinhood stopped allowing buys. RH is conveniently backed by fund A, who was buying up at a discount, fund M that shorted GME. RH was, even if only temporarily, pushing GME’s value down in an effort to get individual buyers to panic and sell. But the drop only continues if individuals bail en masse. If individuals keep buying when allowed, the price will go back up.
The major shortsellers were shorting it when it was below $20 a share.
Those fuckers got hosed
The hedge funds aren’t making back their losses. That’s kind of been the point. That a bunch of randos on Reddit using Robinhood and their checking accounts managed to beat those multi billion dollar hedge funds at their own game is the unprecedented part. And some Redditors and even average joes have been walking away rich. A few are now muti- millionaires. Some mechanic made $1500 just by trading a few hours. It really has nothing to do artifically raising their stock or being pissed at GameStop. This is all just really a weird experiment that the media brought undue attention to and kind of made it worse by attracting even more people to do it.The thing and problem is that it’s gone to some of their heads, as they think they’re activists now taking down the man, and they’re trying to do this to every distressed company with cheap stock like Blackberry, Nokia, American Airlines, Dogecoin, etc, but they’re being blocked and stopped by the apps, and other retail investors, probably at the behest of the SEC who has had enough of the volitility and loss of control of the market to redditors and to stop those who are trying to pump and dump this, though, I don’t think that kind of investor is common.
It’s fascinating to me that “pump and dump” is one thing, but aggressively promoting low-value stocks so that people can make money very quickly is a different thing. I guess it comes down to motivation, but at a certain point isn’t it an academic point?
Not really because the intent of pump and dump is purely and very illegal. You’re straight up lying to people in that case like saying you have “insider info” that a stock is going to go a guaranteed way (which you absolutely cannot say) going a certain way. Or guaranteeing an exact price will happen at this certain time because of an exact event, therefore buy/sell now when you know its not true.
Here’s the difference, and why it’s (possibly/probably) not fraud:
Everyone promoting Gamestop (as well as Nokia, Blackberry, and AMC movie theaters) were VERY clear about why they were promoting it. They were promoting it for the explicitly stated purpose of screwing over vulture capitalists, and they had confidence in the new board members that had joined Gamestop (people who had set up a successful e-commerce website) would be able to transition a brick-and-mortar retailer to a new business model.
But that’s obviously not true of everyone, since plenty of people bought into GameStop and then sold quickly. That netted them a profit but does nothing to help GameStop in the long run (if anything it makes their stock more volatile and less appealing to the long-term investments that the corporation needs).The people promoting this high risk stock made clear statements, but the net result was that their actions caused a rapid, transient inflation of the stock. It seems like they either figured out a different way to do a pump and dump schemd, or else they backed into a pump and dump scheme accidentally by trying to troll Wall Street.
That’s what happens in a bubble. A few people win big short term until it pops. So why can’t those hedge funds short Gamestop now? It isn’t going to stay over $200 for long.
Because its too high of a price that they don’t want to pay and they already lost tons of money and got stopped out of their positions when it went bullish. They’re going to wait until the price bottoms and recover their money out before they resume buying again.
They can’t short Gamestop stock now because they had already shorted over 100% of the available stock.
That a bunch of randos on Reddit using Robinhood and their checking accounts managed to beat those multi billion dollar hedge funds at their own game is the unprecedented part.Actually more like reversing the game by pumping and dumping to keep the hedge funders from shorting the stock. If you’re rich you can probably absorb the loss, if you’re leverage heavy you’re fucked, and hedge funders are really fucked because when lenders call in their stock they got nothing to give them.
Pump and dump does not mean what you think it means and it wasn’t really the case here, otherwise the SEC would’ve swooped in and shut down that subreddit and RobinHood. This really was for the most part a bunch of randos who got real lucky that their experiment to buy and hold a failing stock on the cheap in order to troll hedge funders, and make themselves some money in the process worked. Some of those redditors and average joes did come out of this millionaires. It’s only those who got in too late, especially after the media hype, or didn’t get out on time that got fucked.
Sorry I meant pump and hold it so the hedge funders won’t be able to buy it back without incurring a massive loss until the randos sold it back at top dollar.
Now some people are saying it is a pump and dump scheme. Interesting to see how SEC handles this, maybe some new rules to guard against short squeezing.https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/28/gamestop-now-called-a-pump-and-dump-scheme-what-you-need-to-know.html
Stop trying to make this a pump and dump. Its not a freaking pump and dump. You (including the people in that article) really don’t know what it is or means. Let it go with this two day old thread.
Did I hit a nerve there because short squeezing is not illegal…yet?
I’m actually going to hit the dismiss button because you’re being an annoying little prick. Byeeeee!
“A bunch of randos” you do know there several million share orders put in by these “randos”? Sure a lot of smaller retail investors made some bank, but it was part of a much larger manipulation.
It is not advisable to hold onto a short position for the long term. Short selling is very time sensitive because they don’t actually own the stock. They pay interest to borrow it for these shenanigans. The longer they wait, the more interest they end up paying.
Normally, the maximum amount of money you can lose from a stock is the amount you spent to buy it. A stock can never have a negative value. Short selling flips the script because the amount of money you risk losing is potentially unlimited.
So they take their loss since it didn’t fall from $16, then they turn around and short it again because it isn’t going to stay over $200.Sure, you can’t do that forever and you have to be able to cover the losses. But these funds have lots of money and can wait for Reddit to get bored.
These hedge funds haven’t lost anything more then a drop in the bucket, to reinforce your point. A couple kids made thousands or millions? Maybe, but only if they sold out in time and if they did good for them but even together they can’t compare to the billions of dollars these funds play with. It’s a nice sentiment but they’re not doing anything.
You’re not missing anything – it’s just that literacy is about what the stock market is and how it works is extremely low among the very-online millennial set (of which I am a core member). The narrative of “band of outsiders sticking it to the rich guys, changing the world” is appealing – but fundamentally, this is 1 stock being weird for one week. 99.9% of the market is business as usual. The rich dudes will be fine. None of them staked their entire fortune on shorting GameSpot. Most of them liquidated their position before it even got that bad. It’ll be forgotten next week. In short: It’s a meme that’s about itself.
Wow, Gamespot. So you’re the one.
😀
I have been trying to unwrap this thing. My understanding is limited and I’m simultaneously trying to educate myself on this story, get work done, and eat a delicious tuna sandwich. I’m trying to figure out how this screws me, specifically, someone invested in a 529 for my kid’s college and my own retirement accounts. Are the Redditors sticking it to Wall Street Bros, or are they sticking it to the 55% or more Americans who have their assets (retirement, college plans, etc) tied up in the stock market?
It’s possible that as funds have to close out their short positions, they might have to sell some of their long assets. This would lead to a temporary (and probably pretty small) drop in the general market.If you’re not taking out any money this quarter, this shouldn’t have any effect on you.Disclaimer: I am just a guy. I know a little about the market, but just in general.
Neither. Three or four going-to-go-bankrupt-by-end-of-year companies(of the 2800 listed on NYSE) got a temporary price surge that will not affect their business viability. A hedge fund or two that held too large a short position on those particular companies relative to their assets got a surprise and has to write off a big loss. End of story.
They’re sticking it to Wall Street while trying to make money off it without using the tools and systems a hedge fund manager needs to use. That anyone can do this with the right app, $100, and friends on Reddit.
The thing is, if it was overvalued at $16, then it sure as hell was overvalued at $470 (10AM this morning). So what is to stop those same people from shorting it at $470? If you borrow stock at $16 per and haven’t paid it back and default, why would that same lender let you borrow stock at $470?
You are correct, but it’s also important imo to note that this fuckery has also made a bunch of already rich individuals EVEN RICHER. So really, less than nothing has been achieved here.
Nothing.People will still short the stock. And it’ll likely still eventually drop back below $16 once the current meme nonsense stops.However, in the meantime, people who tried to short during the crazy period will lose a bunch of money. The thing is that shorts have a duration. When the option expires, you HAVE to cough up the cash to buy it. So if for some reason it doesn’t, you can be out a significant chunk of change in the difference between how much you thought it would be worth and how much it actually is.I’m fairly certain everyone is just letting the craziness die down and nobody is gonna try to short it now. The real danger is all the people who bought at, say, $80 and think they are rich now that its at $400 or whatever it is (I don’t care) panic selling once it starts to drop again. Cause that could cause it to crash completely.
This is all nonsense, but I want to get a Robinhood account and get in on the next stupid bubble. Anyone think WallStreetBets can do anything like this again?
Limited number of shares available to borrow for shorting. Hard to borrow = less shorting
There were million share orders put in by “redditors”, this was a classic case of market manipulation with a side order of internet fuckery.
Holy crap I didn’t realize dogecoin was still a thing!What’s next, Coinye?
Is that a joke or does that already exist? You can never tell with crypto. John Oliver and his writers tried making up stupid crypto names and still couldn’t come up with anything as stupid as actual existing ones.
Yes! Welcome to the internet!
How much did your overlord pay you to write that pile of crap?
I hope that the silver lining of this entire bug-shit crazy situation is that we’ll reach a collective realization that money is nothing more than a collective fiction, nothing’s price is based on rational analysis, and the only thing that has true value is health and human relationships.And GOLD! PRECIOUS PRECIOUS GOLD!
Yeah, a Dogecoin is still worth less than a penny. But if you bought $100 worth on Wednesday you would have $1000 on Friday. (And you might have $2 come Sunday if you hold it. Still…)