Thanks Miller!
Disclaimer: I have not watched "This is Financial Advice", so if I miss something that's covered there, my bad. Maybe I'll have time to watch it someday, but that day is not today.
Your skepticism is understandable. However, my expectations around future GME (the security) prices are not fundamentally about expectations around GameStop (the company). All GameStop needs to do is not go bankrupt (which they are doing quite well based on their cash on hand), and any future business success / profitability is just icing on the cake.
Rather than betting on some unimaginably successful 1,000x business transformation, I am betting against Wall Street. Fundamentally, valuation of securities works on the assumption that shares are fixed in quantity (or only created/destroyed by equity-preserving events by the issuer). With the ubiquitous rise of online brokerages, security entitlements, high speed trading, and a derivatives market that far eclipses the value of the underlying assets, that assumption is flawed and regularly abused by Wall Street to extract huge sums of wealth from investors and issuers. At the same time, Wall Street is laxly regulated and hugely greedy, and has no qualms about putting itself in risky situations for short term profit with the assumption that problems will be fixed down the road. Unfortunately for them, that situation has been threatened since the events of January 2021. Since then, all the evidence I've seen suggests that the financial institutions, many of them mutually liable for each others failures under the DTC or other organizations and settlement agreements, are regularly engaged in kicking the can down the road and perpetuating net short positions. However, since 2021 investors in GME have started removing their shares from Wall Street, meaning that eventually accountability will be required for naked short positions and then true price discovery can occur. Until then, price fluctuations only matter to help me understand how many more shares I can acquire.
This post originally appeared in Superstonk on March 28, 2023 (just after our most recent annual 10-K report)
My favorite takeaway from the 10-K: the majority of apes continue to hold. 197k active holders vs 210k all-time holders. Given that 4.7k holders were already inactive before March 2022, this means that 95.9% of holders that could continue to hold did so.
PS. That's before even accounting for the reality that some apes had duplicate account numbers that they may have consolidated
It really is that simple, isn't it?
(I guess 401(k) becoming actually promoted by law helped too)
Location: suburbs of Chicago, IL
While I usually live in NC, I am visiting family. In this particular brand of suburbia, every single day the streets are alive with the sound of gas powered lawn mowers and leaf blowers. While I watch the news drone on about petty celebrity drama, the graph breaking upward trend of ocean temperatures elicits barely a word from any news source, and people carry on paying to burn gasoline to make already short grass shorter and move the cuttings around.
Love when people keep receipts. Welcome to the instance!
"pillage" ok, viking
They speak as though they are the community, and not the members of the community itself
Another one. Don't forget "No more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period.โ
I remember the data was not updated for some time... did he ever resume updating it after that? maybe the maintenance burden was weighing heavily on him?
FYI, I set up a community specifically for this type of content: !anticensorship@lemmy.whynotdrs.org
I saw that too! Totally transparent... btw, we also have a dedicated !anticensorship@lemmy.whynotdrs.org community exactly for transparency like this!
Migration note: This post originally appeared on Reddit/Superstonk in April of 2022.
๐๏ธ๐ฆ๏ธโ๏ธ๐๏ธ๐๏ธโ๏ธ
Hey apes, time to RTFL: Read The Fucking Law. (That's the law they use to fuck us)
Can't read? No problem, I'll TACR it for you. Don't like my TACR? No problem, read it yourself. Can't read AND don't like my TACR? Find a lawyer and get them to read it for you.
First, disclaimers - I'm a big proponent of DRSing shares. I've been holding since Jan 2021, DRS'd in September, 99% DRS'd since October. I am not a lawyer, just reading (#blessed)
Let's start with where I started, the Queen herself:
https://twitter.com/SusanneTrimbath/status/1438653922449641472
Interesting enough on its own, I'd say. I like having rights and protections. But what is this "entitlement holder"?
The answer lies in the Uniform Commercial Code, in Article 8 on investment securities:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/8/8-102
This part bears quoting in text - Entitlement holder: person having a security entitlement against the securities intermediary (broker).
So while an "entitlement" may at first sound like an absolute thing, in actuality, it is specifically "against" your broker. It just means your broker owes you a share.
Hmm, what does that remind me of?
That's as good as shares, sir. That's a share IOU
Ok, so if an "entitlement holder" only has a "security entitlement" (share IOU from their broker), then how can someone know if they have a share IOU or a real share? What is a real share? Not an "entitlement" to a security, but the "security" itself?
Uhhh.... many word, such read, wut mean?
TACR: To be a security, something has to not fall under the exceptions in 8-103, and it has to meet all three criteria (i), (ii), and (iii).
The exceptions in 8-103 carve out things which explicitly are not securities, like options, commodity contracts, things which don't trade on markets, etc. None of them seem to apply to GME, but you can read it for yourself.
Now, to be a security, each of (i), (ii), and (iii) must be true. Let's look at (i) specifically:
(i) which is represented by a security certificate in bearer or registered form, or the transfer of which may be registered upon books maintained for that purpose by or on behalf of the issuer;
So to be a security, this must be true, which means at least one of these things:
So, if you do not have a certificate (which is hard to come by these days, pretty much no one deals in stock certificates anymore), and you are not registered on the books maintained by Gamestop/Computershare, then you do not have a GME security. Full stop.
How does one get onto these books that are maintained by GameStop's transfer agent Computershare? (Spoiler: It's through Computershare)
Honestly, that should be the end of this post right there.
Unfortunately, due to certain derivative repping shills, I also have to talk about why a share IOU is not just as good as a share.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/8/8-503
An entitlement holder's property interest with respect to a particular financial asset under subsection (a) is a pro rata property interest in all interests in that financial asset held by the securities intermediary,
"Pro rata" means proportional. "To the extent necessary for a securities intermediary to satisfy all security entitlements" means when push comes to shove.
If your broker doesn't have enough shares for all the IOUs they've handed out, you'll have to make do with fewer shares than you have share IOUs. If the DTC doesn't have enough shares for all the share IOUs they've handed out, you'll have to make do with fewer shares than you have share IOUs.
Edit to add this paragraph: I've responded to a comment saying "of course, all shares are pro-rata". To be clear, there is a difference between a pro-rata interest in the issuer (what we assume a share means), and a pro-rata interest in "that financial asset held by the security intermediary" (what this law states). The basis for determining this pro-rata proportion is not the company's issued/authorized/outstanding shares, but the potentially much larger number of shares owed by the intermediary to its entitlement holders. As an example, if a broker sold 1000 shares, including 100 to you, but only received and holds 500, you have property interest in just 50 shares, not the 100 you see neatly credited to your account.
But that's just my interpretation, what do I kn-- huh? what's that SEC staff?
https://www.sec.gov/news/speech/2007/spch101607ers.htm
Alright, let's wrap this post up. To summarize:
All along, we said the secret ingredient was crime. And there is a lot of crime. But there is also a non-trivial amount of technically legal non-delivery due to holders not RTFL and not asking for delivery of what they paid for and are owed.
PS. Special shout outs to u/millertime1216 and u/mistakesnmoney for motivating me to write this. ๐ฆ๏ธโค๏ธ๐ฆ๏ธ. Shout out to DRS haters for frustrating me enough to go look up all these laws. To any shills coming for me in the comments: hope you're not selling covered calls, those pro-rata shares may not cover you when shit hits the fan.
I've been going with Liquidate Wall Street personally