details So ACAC is confirmed to be merging w/ playstudios! Idk much but I like the idea of playstudios (real rewards outside of the games etc.) and the company roster looks great. What do we think about the SPAC deal? Anyone wanna chime in? Details of deal in link 🤟🏽
Ignoring everything money-wise that's happened with GME the past week, month, and year I believe two very simple things have happened that are as valuable as any investment necessary to obtain it.
Wall st is dirty and will do ANYTHING to stay in control, no matter the moral or ethical transgressions. Duh, we knew how messed up they are but GME has brought it all to center stage. The financial paradigms are shifting for the better.
Secondly and related is commoner interaction. Wealth inequality is real and only 45% of Americans own stock. This campaign has no doubt moved that percentage up. Whether it's Mark Cuban's son or reigniting stock interest myself more people are playing the game. The game often reserved for fat cats. This is the most beneficial and largest organic educational series I've seen since Pokemon GO single handedly lowered the Body Fat Percentage of chubby kids across America.
But hey I'm no philosopher nor financial adviser. I just like the stock along with a lot of other people. Power to the players.
China Stocks: "Cash is king during Chinese New Year, with gift-giving in the form of ‘red packets’ a major driver. Given that companies and stock markets are closed over the festivals, swathes of profit-taking take place to take vast sums of cash out of the system – causing fluctuations in stocks." $TANH – found resistance at $2.01, but the bullish trend of the RSI and MACD could have break resistance to my PT $2.72 $CAAS - Double bottom measured move to $8.36. $WEI - being backed by several social media influencers with PTs ranging $3-5+ Sympathy/Related: #QTT # CTK #WIMI #TIGR #AIHS #CMCM #UXIN #LAIX #TAL #DQ #LU #SEED #SXTC #BEST #TC #GSX #CCNC #PETZ #TKAT #PLAG #NCTY #MOXC #TANH #EVK #JRJC #AIH #HGSH #CCM #PLIN #BABA #TAOP #TEDU #LXEH #KXIN #OCG #YGMZ #ATIF #JFIN #CLEU #BHAT BTC/BLOCKCHAIN: Bitcoin hit 40K this weekend and Doge $0.07 $MARA $RIOT $BRQS – with bitcoin hitting 40K these are something to keep watch on Monday Sympathy/Related: #SOS #RIOT #MOGO #NXTD #IDEX #MGI #IZEA #EQOS #IPDN #EBON #DPW #MARA #PHUN MARIJUANA: $SNDL - Pullback to $0.85ish, buy the pullback for an inverse head and shoulders with a price target of $2.61 $HUGE - Daily trend about to turn bullish with massive volume spike. $CRBP – Huge gap to filled back up on the daily chart. PT $3.33 $KERN – Swing alert (weeks) growing nicely on the daily chart, but I wait for a pullback before making an entry. Long term PT $18.58 Sympathy/Related: #ACB, #TLRY #OGI #CGC #HEXO #CRON #APHA $ICG Energy Sector: $OPTT - Weekly trend about to change from bearish to bullish with significant volume increases week by week. PT: $8 short term, $18-20 longer term. $SPI - weekly chart bullish harami. Bullish pennant price action pattern. EMA200 $19.55 MACD crossed bullish. Daily chart hammebull pin bar impulse pullback Sympathy/Related:: #WWR #CBAT #PECK #PLUG #CLSK #FCEL #SUNW #AMTX #PEIX #TRCH $#ENG #SPI #WATT #ALAC #TRCH #OPTT #OEG BLM STOCKS: BLACK HISTORY MONTH Sympathy/Related #LMFA #IMTE #SALM #UONEK #CARV #BYFC $UNONE Biotechs: $OCGN – Swing alert (Weeks) huge volume coming in after the split. Base on my daily fibo chart $10.73. Sympathy/Related:: #ANVS #VXRT #AEZS #MBRX #SLS #CRMD #PRTA #VTVT #ALVR #PLRX #ARTL #GMDA #GRCL #TLSA #ATOS #IMNM #NKTX #AZRX #OCGN #SAVA #ADMS #SBBP #CNSP #AKER #SAVA #TTOO #AGEN TECHNICALS: $CNSL $RVPH – Both have double bottom with a hammer candle on Friday. $VISL – Huge volume on Friday. Continuation play PT $5 $BDR - this low float stock is weekly play. Typically spikes over $2 at least once a week and usually on Monday or Tuesday. 10-50%. $NAKD - Trend change and golden cross on the daily. Look for pullback to $.80 or so, then a push back to $2+ $CTRM - Over 25 million shares shorted on 1/15 that need to cover by tomorrow. Could be more powerful than the GME squeeze. Massive volume spike the past few weeks. First target $1, next target $2.69. $LMNL looks like it's time has come to start really retracing back to the teens. Bullish harami on weekly. 3 white soldier on the daily. Bull flag broke down for a DBR set up. 4hr set up for PM gapper. PT $5.96 then $6.99 for a break above $6.07 ~10-30%+ gainer Fib retracement levels 23.6% $11.19 / 38.2% $15.06 / 50.0% $18.19 / 61.8% $21.33 $ADMP - weekly chart showing extreme bullish confluence. bullish hammebull pin bar EMA6 bounce pattern/backtest old resistance as new support to maintain $1+ compliance. EMA200 $2.144 Daily chart fish hook pattern gap to 1.40 and 1.64 great chart set up for possible rockets. Backburners: ^WPRT ^PPBT ^MBII ^LAIX ^CLNE ^ELVT ^VRTV ^NAVB ^AAME ^VOR ^IMCR ^WHLR ^BOLT ^HTBX ^CLOV ^ABUS ^MRNA ^HGEN
The /wallstreetbets GME retail investors vs the 0.1% situation has lead me to a place of clarity. The game is rigged, and the owners of the system will react with haste and break any laws they must to protect their cartel. For those not following the event - Retail investors, realised the shares of GME and some other companies were heavily shorted and in short supply, so they started buying in the hope of forcing a short squeeze (whereby the holder of the shorts will then have to buy more stock to cover their shorts, sending the price through the roof, an example is Volkswagen [VW] in the 2000's). This is perfectly legal. - the plan worked, GME went from $2 to $470 in a short space of time. - Melvin Capital, a Hedge fund took a massive (likely $6 billion) short position in GME and faced closure if the bet went against them, they were losing money at a fast rate and got a bail out last week by other wall street Hedge funds. - Melvin Capital then went on CNBC and other networks to reveal they had closed their short positions, it's highly unlikely as the options volume did not back up their claim, they were simply spreading disinformation, again this is perfectly legal - the retail investors at /wallstreetbets simply would not give up, they kept buying, the end goal could have seen the stock reach $5K based on the VW scenario. - the 0.1% moved to then protect the 0.1% from losing money by using the stock brokerages they own or control(Robinhood, TD, IB and all the other big players) to firstly prevent the retail investors buying more stock, you could simply not buy these stocks, you could only sell, some companies even forcibly closed down open options positons even in the absense of margin calls, so your account is in good standing with enough liquidity and they decide which stock you can have and which you can not, in this time big institutions are allowed to buy as much of this stock as they desire, just the retail traders are locked out of the casino. This is highly illegal and known as market manipulation, it also flies in the face of the idea that we have a free market. - people like AOC, Elon Musk, Chamath have all come out on the site of the retail traders at /wallstreetbets - Interactive Brokers chairman and founder Thomas Peterffy goes on CNBC’s “Closing Bell” an is literally weeping, explaining he feels hurt that his large, moneyed 0.1% friends are losing money due to the retail investors, oh the horror, how can these small investors make my friends lose money? Don't they know the implications of their actions? The horror. The guys at /wallstreetbets simply did not understand that in our world only old money gets to make real money, the little guy must be shut down and should never have a slice of the action, all he gets is inflation and a 9 to 5 job, plus side hustle if he/she's lucky. If the little guy ever finds a way to gain an advantage the loophole is quickly closed. - the SEC Chair then threatens to investigate the redditors on /wallstreetbets by tracking down their IP numbers with the help of reddit - The /wallstreetbets discord server is banned. All the years I talked trash about bitcoin, I apologise, now I genuinely understand the value of having a system not controlled by the government, where they can not on a whim decide to inflate the money supply and bail out their friends, while you carry the load in the form of additional taxes and inflation.
Playboy is going public, and CEO says potential ‘is endless’
Playboy is returning to the stock market Thursday after 10 years as a privately held company, but the iconic brand looks far different than it did when it left in 2011. Founder Hugh Hefner died in 2017, the company stopped printing its famous men’s magazine last year and current CEO Ben Kohn has repositioned the firm as a consumer-products company rather than a publishing business. “We’re not trying to be a magazine company. That doesn’t make sense to me,” Kohn, who will be one of the firm’s largest shareholders, told Seeking Alpha in an exclusive interview. “What makes sense to me is being the lifestyle platform that this business originally was.” Playboy recently agreed to merge with special purpose acquisition company Mountain Crest Acquisition Corp. (MCAC) in a SPAC deal that values the company at about $381 million. The stock will begin trading Thursday on the Nasdaq under the ticker “PLBY.” MCAC raised some $50M through an initial public offering in June, and its shares rose more than 30% since the IPO to close Wednesday at $13.34 (see chart below). As for Playboy, the firm still offers articles, adult pictorials and videos via Playboy.com, but Kohn said consumers also buy $3 billion a year of Playboy-branded products that the firm sells on its own or through licensees. He said that even in Playboy’s heyday as a men’s magazine, the company owned or licensed consumer businesses that ran the gamut from casinos to cufflinks that featured its iconic rabbit logo. Kohn, who helped that Playboy private in 2011, said that when he first met the company’s legendary founder, “Hef said to me: ‘I might not be the best editor or the best publisher, but I am goddamn the best marketer.’ I think that’s what we’ve brought back to the company, which is really [to be] an aspirational lifestyle business.” Despite the print magazine’s demise, 68-year-old Playboy remains one of the world’s best-known brands, with 97% of people around the globe recognizing the rabbit logo. Some 90% of customers are under 40, and women make up more than 40% of e-commerce sales. Playboy-branded products sold online range from underwear to calendars to sex toys. Offline, a Chinese company operates more than 2,500 brick-and-mortar Playboy clothing stores in the Asian nation, while a partnership with Caesars Entertainment (NASDAQ:CZR) runs the Playboy Club London casino. The revamped Playboy operates in four verticals: Sexual Wellness. This includes products like Playboy condoms and sex aids. The company also recently signed a $25M deal to buy Lovers, a chain of 41 U.S. brick-and-mortar “sexual-wellness” shops. Style and Apparel. The Playboy name is one of China’s top men’s fashion brands, sold through brick-and-mortar stores and more than 1,000 e-commerce sites. Gaming/Lifestyle. Beyond its London casino, Playboy has partnerships with online-gambling software companies Microgaming and Scientific Games Corp. (NASDAQ:SGMS). The company is also working on online sports gambling, while in the lifestyles arena, Playboy sells furniture via Wayfair (NYSE:W). Beauty and Grooming. Kohn said Playboy “has been an arbiter of beauty for 68 years,” and currently sells or is developing perfumes, skincare products and cosmetics. The CEO said that simply by tapping into the growing direct-to-consumer trend, the company can get a bigger share of the existing $3B revenue pie for Playboy-branded products while growing sales organically. “We can drive the lifetime value of our consumers up because we can offer them multiple different products, whereas a licensee can only offer them one product,” he said. Playboy recently released earnings for 2020’s third quarter and first nine months that showed big year-over-year gains. For instance, the company reported that net revenues rose 86% year on year in the third quarter to $35M, allowing the Playboy to turn a $1.3M profit vs. a $3.4M loss during the same 2019 period. And for 2021, the company is guiding to more than $160M in revenues and $40M of EBITDA. Kohn said that when you add in more than $100M in working capital from the SPAC transaction and $180M of prior years’ carried-forward losses that will cut taxes, he sees big opportunities for growth ahead. “The runway that’s in front of us is really endless,” he said. https://seekingalpha.com/news/3661149-playboy-stock-is-going-public-and-ceo-ben-kohn-says-potential-is-endless
I used to think WSB was exactly what they describe themselves as: retards at a casino. While that still may be true, there might be some brilliance to their madness. Traditionally, valuations follow fundamentals. That's what we've all been taught: P/E, DCFs, revenue/earnings growth and multiples. TSLA completely shattered this reality. A promise of a company that could transform an industry led to retail investors piling up shares and increasing valuations past any sense of normalcy. While we can say that "eventually all bubbles pop" it doesn't really matter anymore. TSLA used this irrational market to raise $12B in CASH. That's enough to guide it through whatever obstacles it meets. With this war chest (and its retail investors "buying the dip") it's much clearer to see TSLA come out the winner of the EV/autopilot revolution and justify its $800B valuation. (There's a whole other argument to be made about top talent wanting to work in a company that will make you a millionaire thanks to stock options). In essence, fundamentals for Tesla are being built around its valuation. The recent GME hysteria seems ridiculous, but it could end up being a similar situation. While this week's movements is a game of liquidity between longs and shorts with a limited float, GME could end up being a leader in the gaming industry simply because of the amount of cash it will undoubtedly end up raising at these valuations. We've all heard that "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent", but that was said in a world when access to capital was more limited and a lack of technology only allowed linear growth. I'm slowly being convinced that due to technological exponential growth and access to capital, (many cases, not all cases of) irrational valuations will more quickly be caught up by fundamentals than they're caught up by a lack of support. That's especially true with stocks that generate emotional decisions such as TSLA. So, is it different this time? I'm beginning to think it is.
How is it going my homies I made this post on investing a few days ago explaining all of the QAnon fantasies and why the top could already be behind us. Some people listened, processed information and asked questions. Some called me a person working for Melvin and hedge funds. It’s all in the past, but if you got burned on GME or other meme stocks, here are few things you should learn about the markets and trading these bubbles.
Set a price at which you will exit and take profit. Don’t look at what happens next, and never rebuy if the price continues growing. Likewise, set a stop loss at which you will exit no matter what.
Never, and I mean never put in more than you can afford to lose, or even lose sleep over. I have a pretty decent portfolio, and I only put in 0.5% of it in the play. I don’t give a shit about that money, but I still took profit and got a 250% ROI. Easiest cash I’ve ever made, easier than blowing a fat dude in the back alley behind a strip bar. Anyway.
If you hear about shit on the news. It’s probably not a good time to enter. There is a reason why some early people made money on the play. They understood mechanics of what was driving the increase in price. Many of them didn’t even expect a short squeeze, they just like the fundamentals. Likewise, if your 80 year old grannie (say hi to her from me) calls you and asks you about this magical company called GameStonk, sell that shit right away.
Always double and triple check information posted on forums and don’t take it for a truth even if it has a lot of upvotes. The amount of misinformation I saw on WSB over the past week with 100 thousand upvotes makes me want to vomit.
Stock trading is not a team activity. It’s not us vs them. It’s a fucking free for all, and people will drop their bags on you if they see their unrealized gain turn into an unrealized loss. You want to make money? Do your research, and be the first one on the train. Don’t jump on the train when it is speeding and going off the rails.
If you don’t understand how something works, learn about it. Again, the amount of conspiracy theories that I read about ladder attacks and this grand illuminati conspiracy is driving me nuts. Always use the Occam’s razor, meaning if there is a simple explanation to the situation, it is probably right. There is no need to build out this conspiracy theory for something you don’t understand, it does not help anyone.
You will get FOMO and you will get confirmation bias. Everybody does, but learning how to battle it is crucial. Look, my dad was a fucking casino gambler in his 30s playing blackjack and losing money, and I have the same traits. Does it mean I need to be the same? No, and I always remember my genes when trading. It is not an excuse to use when you lose money.
Realize that situations like this are extremely rare, and if you expect to make 300% gain in 3 days, I have some bad fucking news for you, markets don’t work like this.
Finance gets complicated real fast. Yes, on the surface it’s just buying and selling. I have been studying this shit for 5 years, and I still don’t know a lot of things. There are reasons why even some of the smartest people still lose money. Shit, Newton was burned on a South Sea bubble. Yes, that guy who discovered gravity lost money just any of us.
One bad trade does not define you. As long as you learn, and don’t repeat the same shit again, you are golden. There are plenty of ways to make money on the markets, be it value investing, selling options or setting up butterfly spreads.
Score Media shareholders approve resolution to consolidate shares, paving a path for U.S. stock listing
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-score-media-shareholders-approve-resolution-to-consolidate-shares/ Shareholders of Toronto-based Score Media and Gaming Inc. SCR-T -4.84%decrease voted in favour of a share consolidation resolution on Wednesday, which is aimed at helping the company list on a U.S. stock exchange. Shareholders voted to approve a resolution that would allow the company to consolidate shares within a range of one new share for between two and 20 existing shares. The range gives the company flexibility to consolidate as much as it needs to meet the minimum share price needed to be listed on a U.S. exchange, which could create the opportunity to raise significantly more capital. The company, known as theScore, provides sports news and information to users of its mobile app, which has about four million monthly active users. In September, 2019, the company launched ScoreBet, an online betting platform currently available in three U.S. states: Colorado, New Jersey and Indiana. A source close to the company confirmed that it will expand to the state of Iowa in the near future. The Globe and Mail is not identifying the source because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the expansion. TheScore’s stock has seen rapid growth in recent months, with investors on the online forum Reddit hoping that one of two bills before Parliament that would decriminalize single-game betting in Canada will pass, opening the Canadian market to sports betting operators. Currently, Canadians can only wager on two or more sporting events, commonly known as parlay betting. Shares of Score Media traded fell 4.8 per cent following the vote on Wednesday to $4.92 in early afternoon trading. In 2019, casino giant Penn National Gaming Inc. bought a US$7.5-million equity stake in the company, and struck a 20-year agreement that provides theScore access to sports betting markets in 11 U.S. states where Penn National operates casinos and racetracks. Eighteen U.S. states and the District of Columbia allow single-game sports betting.
$SNE, MASSIVE DOUBLE DICK INSIDE. Poised to moon long-term (Computer vision boom, EV boom, autonomous driving tech, gaming boom, music streaming boom, cross-media IP, vertically integrated anime streaming monopoly, online medical services boom, shift to mirrorless cameras)
Listen up retards. Do you happen to feel regret because you always think “ohhh if I yoloed my savings on TSLA/AMD/NVDA 🚀 leaps years ago I could be rich by now!!!” Well if you didn't know already, it doesn’t really matter what happened in the past. Hindsight will always be 20/20. You shouldn’t be harsh on yourself on your past self that your past self wasn’t retarded enough to yolo their savings into AMD/TSLA/.... Your past self doesn’t have the same knowledge that your current self has. It’s fine. If you judged those stocks with the best DD you could do at the time and didn’t think they were worth it, then you did a good job. If you always think about what you could/should have done in the past, then you don't have the right attitude to play the stock market casino imho. The single most important thing is to be able to look ahead. There are always plenty of opportunities around. There are thousands of rockets that are still on earth right now. Some may depart this year, others will stay a little longer on earth. The true strength lies in being able to identify those rockets with the knowledge you have right now. And if you still miss most rockets that will take-off this year that's fine, maybe you'll learn, get better and you'll do better next year. Now, what if I told you there’s a big rocket that’s parked right right here on earth and it has decent chance for take-off this year? Maybe it won't quite reach the moon this year yet, but hey leaving the exosphere should already be a cool milestone. It has rock-solid fundamentals and will see lots of growth in the following years/decade. It’s a company that has the fundamental technology to power all the computer vision tech, which is bound to boom this decade. The company we’re talking about is of course Sony, and it is extremely undervalued right now. Its P/E is only 14. They have a P/S of 1.65, a PEG of 0.92 (< 2 is already somewhat exceptional for a company/conglomerate of Sony’s size, under 1 is a steal) Much lower than all of its same-sector peers. This indicates significant undervaluation. Next up Sony has a P/CF 13.2, ROE of 20% (S&P 500 average is 14% which would already be considered pretty good. 20% ROE is excellent), PEGY of 0.89, P/B of 2.65 and finally Sony has $41.6B in cash on hand. This makes Sony one of the cheapest tech/entertainment/EV/semiconductor growth stocks you will find on the market. (ROE of 20% + PEGY of 0.89 + PEG of 0.92 means this company is a growth stock based on the numbers alone, but we’ll dig into the actual company and overall outlook in a moment) I challenge all retards to find a company with similar benchmarks in one of the mentioned sectors, seriously. Quite frankly doing this DD honestly blew my mind. I kept looking everywhere for reasons why the company could be so undervalued and why they may struggle in the future. Very important to look at all the challenges the company faces to make sure I’m not just doing confirmation bias DD. But all I could find was the opposite. After several weeks and months of working on this DD, I can only conclude that it is overall a very solid company for a bargain price. The new CEO is taking the company in a great direction imho and I'm begin to think he could be Sony's Satya Nadella. So if you want some easy tendies, maybe consider $SNE while it is still cheap, I’d say. For the autists out there who care about analyst ratings, SONY ($SNE) currently has 18 BUY ratings, 2 OVERWEIGHT, 4 HOLD and 0 SELL. (= analyst consensus is a STRONG BUY). Very little analysts cover this stock compared to other entertainment/tech companies, so this adds to my assertion that the stock is very much under the radar. Which means you have time to get in before it gets noticed by the larger investing world and before it starts to get a more fair valuation (P/E of around 30 would be more fair for this company I think, but still cheaper than many same sector peers). But, anyway the few analysts who do happen to cover this company are basically all saying it’s an instant-buy at its current price. Most boomer investors still think big Japanese tech companies are dinosaurs that have long been surpassed by China, South Korea and Apple etc ages ago. Young boomers may think Sony = PlayStation and that it's it. But the truth is that PlayStation, while very important (about 24% of Sony's total revenue last year), is a part of a larger story. Lots of investors in general associate Sony with the passé Japanese electronics companies from the 80’s and the 90’s. Just like a lot people may think BlackBerry is a struggling phone company. While Sony may not be the powerhouse in consumer electronics it was in the 80’s and the 90’s, in a lot of ways they are more relevant than ever before. Despite being a well-known brand and being known as the company behind PlayStation, for some reason its stock still seems to be under the radar among both retail and institutional investors. And boy, are they mind-blowingly undervalued. Even if a big part of its business would collapse tomorrow, they would still be slightly undervalued. And I am about to tell you why. (& btw compared to Japanese tech/entertainment stocks $SNE is still super cheap (Canon, Nikon, Toshiba, Sharp, Panasonic, Square Enix, Capcom, Nintendo, Fujitsu all have P/E ratios ranging from 18 to 77 and none of them have the combination of global clout, fundamentals & growth prospects that Sony has)) 2021 Sony as a corparation is not the fucking Sony from 2005-2015’s, just like BlackBerry in 2021 is not the fucking Blackberry from 2012. Just like Garmin in 2021 is not Garmin from 2011. Just like AMD in 2021 is not AMD from 2012. No, in 2021, Sony is the global leader in imaging technology and people do not fucking realize it. Sony has 50% marketshare in the CMOS image sensor market. There’s a very good chance the smartphone in your pocket has Sony image sensors (unless it’s a Samsung phone). Sony image sensors are powering a big part of today's vision/camera technology. And they will power even more of tomorrow's computer vision tech. In 2021, Sony is a behemoth in video games, music, anime, movies and TV show production. Sony is present in every segment of entertainment. Sony’s entertainment branches have been doing great business over the past 5 years, especially music and PlayStation. Additionally, Sony Pictures has completely turned around. In 2021, Sony is the world’s biggest music publisher (and second biggest music company overall). Music streaming has been a boon for Sony Music and will continue to be. In 2021, Sony is among the biggest mobile gaming companies in the world (yes, you read that right). And it’s mainly thanks to one game (Fate/Grand Order) that nets them over $1B revenue each year. One of the biggest mobile gaming companies + arguably biggest gaming brand in the world (PlayStation). In 2021, Sony is an EV company. They surprised the world when they revealed their “Vision-S” at CES 2020. At the reception was fantastic. It is seriously one of the best looking EV’s. They already sell sensors to Toyota. Sony will most like sell the Vision-S's tech to other car manufacturers (sensors for driving assistence / autonomous driving, LiDAR tech, infotainment system). 40 sensors in the Sony Vision-S Considering the overwhelmingly good reception of the Vision-S so far, I suspect the Vision-S could be another catalyst that will put Sony as a company on the radar of investors and consumers. We've seen insane investment hype for anything even remotely related to EV over the past year. We've seen a company that barely had a few EV design concepts (oh wait, they had a gravity-powered truck though) even get a $30B market cap at some point lmao. But somehow a profitable company ($SNE) that has an EV that you can actually drive, doesn't even have a fair valuation? In 2020’s Sony’s brand value is at their highest point since 12 years. In 2021, it is projected to be a its highest point since 2001 assuming same growth as average yearly growth from 2015 to 2020. Keep in mind brand valuation is a bit bullshitty as there’s no standardization to compare brands from different sectors, let alone non-consumer-facing brands with consumer-facing brands. But one thing we can note is that Sony both as B2C brand and as a B2B company is on a big upwards trend. https://interbrand.com/best-global-brands/sony/ https://careers.uw.edu/blog/2020/03/17/these-are-the-10-biggest-video-game-companies-in-north-america-shared-article-from-zippia/ In 2021, Sony is an entertainment behemoth. They have grown their entertainment branches by a huge amount over the past 5 to 10 years (they made some big acquisitions in the music space especially and they’re now also all-in in anime). I don’t think people realize how big Sony is as an entertainment company. I dug up the numbers and as of Q3 2020, PlayStation is the second biggest video game company in the world (Tencent is #1) in revenue (I suspect Sony might dethrone Tencent after Sony’s FY Q3 2020 is released). But Sony already comes very close to Tencent especially if you add Fate/Grand Order (which is under Sony Music and not under PlayStation) under PlayStation. There’s no single other company that has this unique combination of a dominant/important position in all entertainment segments. (video games + music + movies + TV series + anime + TV networks). I guess Tencent maybe? In 2021, Sony has amazing momentum in the camera space. If you’re familiar with the enthusiast photography space, you should know this. Basically, the market is slowly shifting from SLR to mirrorless cameras. This is because mirrorless cameras tend to smallelighter, have faster AF, better low light performance, better battery life and better video performance. Sony is the company that has been specializing in the development for mirrorless cameras for over a decade while Canon’s bread and butter has always been SLR cameras. Sony is in the lead when it comes to mirrorless cameras and that’s where the market is shifting towards. Because the advantages of mirrorless have become more and more apparent and Sony’s cameras have become technically superior, Sony has gained quite a bit of market share over Canon and Nikon in the last few years. In 2019, Sony overtook Nikon as the #2 camera manufacturer. Sony is in an upwards trend here. (they have the ambition to become the world’s #1 camera brand) Sony also has very good marketing for their cameras. (Sony has a lot of YouTubers / influencers / brand ambassadors for their cameras despite being a smaller brand than Canon) (just search on YouTube and/or Google “switching to Sony from Canon” just to give you an idea that they do have amazing brand momentum in the camera space. You won’t get as many hits for the opposite) A huge portion of Sony’s profit comes from image sensors in addition to music and video games. This is in addition to their highly profitable financial holdings division & their more moderately profitable electronics division. Sony’s electronics division, unlike other Japanese brands, has shown great resilience against the very strong competition from China & South Korea. They have been able to maintain their position in the audio space and as of 2020 are still the global market leader in high-end TV’s (a position they have been holding for decades) and it seems they will continue to be able to maintain that. But seriously this company is dirt-cheap compared to any of its peers in any segment and there’s various huge growth prospects for Sony:
CMOS image sensors & Sony’s overall imaging prowess will boom due to increased demand from automotive sector, security & surveillance industry, manufacturing industry, medical sector and finally from the aerospace & defence industry. On the longer term, image sensors will continue to boom due to increased demand for computer vision & AI + robotics. And for consumer electronics demand will remain very high obviously.
Sony is aiming for 60% market share in the CMOS image sensor market by 2026. Biggest threat here is Samsung here who have recently started to aggressively invest in image sensors and are challenging Sony. Sony has technological lead + higher production capacity (and Sony will soon open a new plant in Nagasaki), so Sony should be able to hold off Samsung.
The iPhone 12 Pro has 3 cameras + a lidar sensor. Apple now buys 3 image sensors (from Sony) + LiDAR sensor (from Sony) per iPhone 12 Pro they manufacture. Remember the iPhone X and iPhone XS? That one had “only” 2 rear cameras (with image sensos from Sony of course). Basically, Sony will be selling exponentially more image sensors as more smartphones get equipped with more and more cameras.
Now think about how many image sensors Sony can sell to Apple if the iPhone 13 will have 5 cameras + LiDAR sensor (I mean the number of cameras on smartphones certainly won’t decrease)
Gaming (PS5 hype, PSN game sales are booming, add-on content is booming, PS+ subscribers count is booming and finally PSNow & first-party games sales are trending upwards as well). Very consistent year-on-year profit & revenue growth here. They have a history of beating earnings expectations here. The number of PS+ subscribers went from 4M to 48M in just 6-7 years. Investors love to hype up recurring revenue and subscription services such as Disney+ and Netflix. Let’s apply the same logic to PS+? PS+ already has more subscribers than HBO Max in the USA.
PlayStation (video games in general) has not even scratched the fucking surface. Most people who play video games now are millennials and kids. Do you think those millennials will stop playing video games when they grow older? No, of course not. Boomers today also still watch movies and TV. Those millennials have kids and those kids are now also playing video games. The kids of those kids will also play video games etc. Basically the total addressable audience for video games will by HUGE by the end of the decade (and the decades after that) because video games will have penetrated all age ranges of the population. Gaming is the fastest growing segment of the whole entertainment business. By a large margin. PlayStation is obviously in a great position here as you can guess from the PS5 hype, but more importantly imho, the growth of PS+ subscribers (currently a bit under 50 million) and PSN users (>100 million MAU) over the past 5 years shows that PlayStation is primed to profit from the audience growth.
On top of that you have huge video game growth in the China where Sony & PlayStation is already much better established than Xbox (but still super small compared to mobile games and PC gaming in China). Within the console market, Xbox only competes with PlayStation in North America. In the rest of the world, PlayStation has an enormous lead over Xbox. Xbox is simply a lesser known and lesser desirable brand in the rest of the world
Anime streaming (basically they have a monopoly already + vertical integration, it might still be somewhat niche right now, but it will be big within 5 years. Acquiring Crunchyroll was a very good move)
Music streaming (no, they don’t have a music streaming service, but as music streaming grows, Sony Music also gets a piece of the growing pie through licensing/royalties, and they also still have a little 2.8% stake in Spotify)
Apple, Amazon, Netflix, AT&T and Disney are currently battling it out in the streaming wars. When there’s a war you have little chances of winning, you shouldn’t be the one waging the war. You should be the one selling the ammo. Basically Sony Pictures (tv shows + movies) is in that position. Sony Pictures can negotiate good prices for their content because Apple, Amazon, Netflix, AT&T are thirsty for content and they all want their own exclusive content. Sony Pictures does not need to prop up their own streaming service just like Sony Music doesn’t need their own music streaming service when they can just license out their content and turn a profit. There will always be demand for TV & movies content, so Sony Pictures is well positioned is as an independent content provider. And while Apple, Amazon, Netflix, AT&T and Disney are battling it out on the forefront, Sony is quietly building their anime empire in the background. Genius business move from Sony here, seriously. They now have anime production & distribution.
Netflix has 200M subscribers and they currently have a 250M market cap. Think about what Sony will have in 5 years? >30M Crunchyroll subscribers (assuming all anime will be consolidated into Crunhyroll) & >100M PS+ & PSNow subscribers? Anime and gaming is growing faster than movies and TV shows. (9% CAGR for anime, 12% CAGR for gaming vs. 5% CAGR for the whole movies & TV show entertainment segment which includes PVOD, SVOD, box office, TV etc etc). And gaming as a whole is MUCH bigger than SVOD streaming. Netflix gets 99% of their revenue & profit through subscriptions. For the whole Sony Group Corporation, their subscription services (games + anime) it’s currently only 4.5% of their total revenue. And somehow Sony currently has a meagre $128B market cap?
PlayStation alone is bigger than Netflix in terms of operating profit. PlayStation has a MUCH higher profit margin than Netflix. For Q3 2020 Netflix posted $790M operating profit and PlayStation posted $988M operating profit. Revenue was was $6.44B for Netflix vs. $4.77B for PlayStation. (and btw Sony’s mobile gaming revenue (~$1B / year) is under Sony Music, it is not even in those PlayStation numbers!!!)
Think about it. PlayStation alone posts bigger operating profit than Netflix (yes revenue is bit smaller, but it’s the operating profit that matters most). And gaming is growing faster than movies. And PlayStation is about 24% of Sony’s total revenue. And yet Netflix has a market cap that is equal to the double of Sony's market cap? Basically If you apply Netflix’ valuation to PlayStation then PlayStation alone should have a bigger market cap than Netflix' market cap.
Sony Vision-S & autonomous driving tech (selling sensors + infotainment system to other car manufacturers). Sony surprised everyone when they revealed their Sony Vision-S electric vehicle last year at CES 2020 (in-house design and made in cooperation with Magna Steyr). And it’s currently being tested on public roads. Over the past year we have seen absurdly big investment hype into anything even remotely related to EV’s (including a few questionable companies). We’ve even seen an EV company with a gravity-powered truck get a $30B market cap in June last year. Meanwhile Sony, out of nowhere, revealed what is arguably (subjectively) one of the best looking EV’s. It got very positive reception at CES 2020. An EV that you can actually drive. But somehow their stock is still dirt-cheap based on their current fundamentals alone? Yet some companies that had pretty much nothing but some EV design concepts got insane valuations purely due to hype?
LTE chips for IoT & Industry 4.0 (Altair Semiconductors)
Cross-media IP (The Last of Us show on HBO, Uncharted movie etc). Huge unrealized potential synergy here (it’s about to change). We have seen that it can turn out super well when you look at The Witcher, Sonic the Hedgehog and Detective Pikachu. When The Witcher released on Netflix, sales of The Witcher 3 significantly increased again. Imagine the same thing, but with Sony IP’s. Sony Pictures is currently working on 7 video game IP based TV shows and 3 movies. We know The Last of Us tv series is currently in production for HBO. And then the Uncharted is currently in post-production and scheduled to be released in July this year currently. If Uncharted turns out to be successful, it will mark a big, new milestone for Sony as an entertainment company imho.
Aniplex (Sony Music Entertainment Japan subsidiary for anime production, distribution & mobile games) had a fantastic year in 2020. (more on this later) There is a lot of room for mobile games growth with Aniplex. Thanks to Aniplex, Sony might beat their earnings forecast.
Drones. DJI just got put on Entity List in USA and Sony started developing drones for prosumer / professional a few years ago. Big opportunity for Sony here to take a bit from DJI’s dominance. It only makes sense for Sony to enter the drone market targeting the professional & prosumer video market, considering Sony’s established position in the professional audio/video/photography space
Currently Sony also has several ventures & investments in AI & robotics
Over the past decade, Sony has also carefully expanded into medical equipment tech & biotechnology. Worth noting that Sony also has an important 33% stake in M3 inc (a medical services through-the-internet company with a market cap of $65.5B) (= just their stake in M3 Inc is worth $22B alone, remember Sony, with their large, diversified revenue streams & assets only has a market cap of $128B?)
Sony Pictures has a great upcoming movie slate (MCU Spider-Man, Uncharted, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Venom 2, Morbius, Spider-Verse sequel, Hotel Transylvania 4, Peter Rabbit 2, Vivo, The Nightingale). They will profit from the theatre reopening and covid recovery. They may even become more favourable among movie theatre chains because they won’t release their movies on the same day on streaming services like Warner (and yeah movie theatres are here to stay, at least for a while imho)
All the above comes on top of established, mature markets (Financial Holdings & Electronic Products)
Oh yeah, btw though TV’s are a cyclical and mature market and are not that important for Sony Group Corporation’s bottomline*, Sony TV’s will continue to do well for the following successive years: o 2020: continued pandemic boost
2020-2021: PS5 / Xbox Series X/S
2021 Summer Olympics (tv sales ALWAYS spike during the olympics) (& the effect is more pronounced for high-end TV’s, = good for Sony because Sony’s market share is concentrated in the high-end range (they are market leader in the high-end range)
2022 FIFA world cup (exact same thing as for the olympics)
You could say it’s already priced in, but the stock is already ridiculously undervalued so idk…
You would think this company somehow has a bad outlook, but that could not be further from the true, let me explain and go over some of the different divisions and explain why they will moon: Sony Entertainment While Netflix, Disney, AT&T, Amazon, and Apple are waging the great streaming war, Sony has been quietly building its anime streaming empire over the past years.
Sony recently acquired Crunchyroll for $1.175B (it is a great deal for Sony imho and will immediately be more valuable under Sony. Considering the growing appetite for anime I honestly do not even understand why AT&T sold it, they could have integrated it with their other streaming service (HBO Max) but ok)
With Crunchyroll Sony now has the following anime empire:
Aniplex (anime production & distribution, subsidiary of Sony Music Entertainment Japan) F
Funimation
Manga Entertainment UK (production, licensing, and distribution, UK)
Wakanam (licensing and distribution in Europe)
AnimeLab (licensing and distribution in Australia & New Zealand)
Crunchyroll (3 million paying subcribers, 90 million registered users and 50 million social media followers)
* Why anime matters: Anime growth “The global size is expected to reach USD 36.26 billion by 2025, registering a CAGR of 8.8% over the forecast period, according to a study conducted by Grand View Research, Inc. Growing popularity and sales of Japanese anime content across the globe apart from Japan is driving the growth” (tl;dr anime 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀, Sony is all in on anime and they have pretty much no competition) Anime is the fastest growing subsegment of movies/video entertainment worldwide.
Sony also has a partnership with Bilibili for anime distribution in China:
Bilibili already partnered with Sony Music Entertainment Japan to bring Aniplex’s hugely successful Aniplex’s Fate/Grand Order mobile game in China.
Sony acquired a 5% stake in Bilibili for $400M in March 2020 (that 5% stake is now already worth $2.33B at Bilibili’s current share price ($BILI) and imho $BILI still has lots of upside potential considering it is the de facto video creation/sharing/viewing à la YouTube/Twitch for GenZ in China)
Sony Music (mobile games) generated $400M revenue from its mobile games in Q2 FY2020, published through Aniplex (Sony Music Entertainment Japan, “SMEJ”) subsidiary
They are the publisher of Fate/Grand Order, one of the most profitable mobile video games of the past 5 years (has generated $4B in revenue (!!) by the end of 2019 and is still as popular as ever). Fate/Grand order is the 7th most profitable mobile game in revenue worldwide as of 2020 (!)
Aniplex launched Disney: Twisted Wonderland in March this year. In Q3, it was the #10 most downloaded mobile game in Japan. (Aniplex now has two top ten games in Japan)
Fate/Grand Order was the #2 most tweeted game in 2020 and #3 was Disney: Twisted Wonderland. You can see that Aniplex has two hugely successful mobile games. (we are talking close to $1B of revenue a year here). It is the #2 game in Japan by total revenue from Q1 2016 to Q3 2020 and the #9 game in worldwide revenue from Q1 2020 to Q3 2020.
SMEJ earns about > $1B from mobile games in revenue from mobile games and there is still a lot of future growth potential here considering Japan’s mobile game market grew a whopping 32% yoy from Q3 2019 to Q3 2020.
Aniplex recently co-distrubuted the movie Demon Slayer: Mugen Train in Japan in October 2020. It became the highest grossing film of all time in Japan with a total gross box office revenue of $380M. In the middle of a pandemic. It still needs to release in South Korea, China and USA where it will most likely do great as well.
Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) (Game & Netwerk Services business unit):
We all know 2020 was a huge year for video games with the stay-at-home pandemic boost. The whole video game sector brought in $180B of revenue in 2020, a whopping 20% increase yoy.
But 2020 will not be just a one-off temporary exceptional year for video games. The video game market has a CAGR of 13% which means it will be worth $291B in 2027. Video games is by far the segment with the highest growth rate in the whole entertainment industry.
PlayStation obviously has a huge piece of this pie and over the past years has seen consistent yoy revenue and profit growth. Think about it, for every FIFA/Call of Duty/Assassin’s Creed sold on PS4/PS5, Sony gets a 30% cut. There have been sold a billion PS4 games so far.
5 years ago 20 to 30% of PS4 games were purchased digitally. Flashforward to 2020 and it’s 60-75% and the digital ratio looks set to still increase a bit. This means higher profit margin for game publishers and for Sony at the expense of retailers
SIE has seen huge success in its first-party games over the past 5 years. Spider-Man, God of War, Horizon: Zero Dawn, The Last of Us Part 2, Uncharted 4, Ghost of Tsushima, Days Gone, Ratchet & Clank have all been huge successes. This is really big and represents a big change compared to the previous generations where Sony never really hit it big as a games publisher even though most of their games were considered quality games.
SIE is now not only a powerful platform holdeprovider, but also a very successful games publisher with popular IP’s (Uncharted, God of War, The Last of Us, Horizon, Ghost of Tsushima, Ratchet & Clank). This is an enormous asset, because firstly it increases the chances of success for cross-media opportunities (Sony Pictures can make TV shows and movies out of it to expand the popularity of those IP’s even more). And secondly, it is an obvious selling point for PS5. The more popular and bigger their exclusive content, the more they can draw people to their platform/service. This should increases PS5 total marketshare over its competitor.
The hype for God of War: Ragnarok will be absolutely through the roof. Hype for Horizon: Forbidden West is also very good already (10 million yt views, 273K likes which is very good). Gran Turismo 7 and Ratchet & Clank will also do very well in 2021. (I suspect that GoW oand Horizon might be delayed to 2022)
PS5 reception has been extremely good. Demand is through the roof as well all know. The only problem is that they cannot quite capitalize on the demand due to lack of supply, but overall, it is a very good thing that demand is very high, and that reception has been very positive. The challenge will primarily supply and production-related for the following 6 months and to be able to maintain brand momentum. Hopefully, they won’t push disappointed/inpatient customers to competitors.
Considering there’s backwards compatibility from PS4 to PS5, users will want all their PSN content to transition with them as well, so I expect them to lose very little marketshare to Xbox. Also, I do not know if Americans realize it, but Xbox is not nearly as big as PlayStation in the rest of the world as it is in the USA. PlayStation just has global brand power that Xbox just doesn’t have, so Xbox isn’t much of threat at all I’d say. Where I live, in Belgium, In Europe everyone is talking about the PS5, nobody really seems to care about Xbox Series S/X that much. Comparing PlayStation to Xbox in terms of mindshare is like comparing Apple to Motorola (not meant to be a diss to Motorola, I have a Motorola phone myself, just saying that Xbox has significantly less mindshare / brand power in Europe).
SIE is likely working on PSVR 2, this could be big.
Sony has a small stake in Epic Games (1.4%) and they have a good business relationship with them, so this might also make them open to release first-party games on Epic Games Store after exclusivity period on PS5.
Remember the Travis Scott concert in Fortnite? I believe that was one of the reasons why Sony invested in Epic Games. It serves as an example how music can sometimes converge with video games, and this can play to Sony’s strengths.
PlayStation also has way superior presence in Asia compared to Xbox. Have been expanding into China as well. Another great opportunity for revenue growth.
PS+ subscribers grew from 5.7 million by the end of 2013 to 46 million by October 30th, 2020. This is an average growth rate of 28% over the past 5 years. Considering most of the growth was early on, it will slow down, but I predict that they will have about 70 million PS+ subscribers by the end of 2023. This is huge and represents a stable, recurring source of income. Investors who keep hyping Netflix/Disney+ will love this, but it seems they have yet to discover $SNE.
There is a reason why Amazon, Google, Nvidia have been aggressively investing in video games & games streaming. They know the business is huge and is about to get even bigger. But considering the established, loyal PlayStation userbase, the established global brand of PlayStation and the exclusive games, PlayStation should be able to easily standoff competition from Amazon, Google and Nvidia (GeForce Now) in the next few years. So far, Amazon’s venture into game development, publishing & streaming has completely failed. Stadia and GeForceNow seem to have a bit more success, but still relatively niche. Therefore, I think PlayStation is well-positioned to remain one of the leaders in the industry for the following decade.
I'll get to the other divisions later, I figured this is a good first step. But so far the tl;dr Image sensors: 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 IoT/Industry 4.0 chipsets: 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 PS5/PSN/PS+: 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 Online medical services (M3 inc.): 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 Anime: 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 Fate/Grand Order: 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 Demon Slayer: Mugen Train 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 Sony Music / music streaming (the performance of Sony Music’s in Sony’s business is seriously understated. The numbers speak for themselves): 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 Sony Electronics 🚀 Sony Financial Holdings (very stable & profitable business, even managed to grow slightly during pandemic when most insurance companies performed more poorly): 🚀🚀🚀 Still have to cover Sony Pictures, but their upcoming movie slate looks pretty good honestly (Spider-Man sequel, Venom: Let There Be Darkness, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Uncharted, Morbius, Hotel Transylvania 4 so that's worth one rocket as well imho 🚀 tl;dr of tl;dr: 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 Disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor. I am an idiot that's trying to understand why $SNE stock is so cheap. Positions: SNE 105C 21st January 22
The real lesson of GME debacle is that Vanguard is the only trustworthy brokerage.
Most Bogleheads are looking at the GME situation as another classic example of a speculative bubble bursting. But that's not the full story. The people at Wall Street Bets are fine with gambling and so called "loss porn." The real problem is that Robinhood's main source of income is payment for order flow to a company called Citadel. When you place a trade at Robinhood, they send the information to a market maker, most often Citadel. Citadel quickly purchases the security from a seller and then resells it to you. This is why there is a bid ask spread when trading stocks. Citadel serves as a middleman that pockets a few pennies in every transaction. The problem is that Citadel is also one of the hedge funds that is shorting GameStop. They stood to lose billions of dollars in a short squeeze tomorrow. When Robinhood blocked the purchase of GME, but not the sale, the stock price tanked. This allowed Citadel to cover their shorts at a tenth of the price they would have had to pay tomorrow. This moved billions of dollars out of the hands of retail speculators into Citadel's accounts (along with a few other hedge funds such as Point72). Robinhood is beholden to Citadel because most of their revenue comes from them. Fidelity is a private company beholden to its private owners. Schwab is a public company that is beholden to it's public owners. But Vanguard's ownership structure is unique. The fundholders are the owners of Vanguard. As such, they have no conflicts of interest. They don't sell order flow to hedge funds. They don't take the interest out of your cash accounts. They are only accountable to you. I never appreciated this until today. Ultimately, it's one thing to lose your money gambling at a casino. But it's another thing for the dealer to steal your chips when you turn your head. Vanguard is one of the few places where you can feel truly confident that they won't do that.
China Stocks: "Cash is king during Chinese New Year, with gift-giving in the form of ‘red packets’ a major driver. Given that companies and stock markets are closed over the festivals, swathes of profit-taking take place to take vast sums of cash out of the system – causing fluctuations in stocks." $TANH – found resistance at $2.01, but the bullish trend of the RSI and MACD could have break resistance to my PT $2.72 $CAAS - Double bottom measured move to $8.36. $WEI - being backed by several social media influencers with PTs ranging $3-5+ Sympathy/Related: #QTT # CTK #WIMI #TIGR #AIHS #CMCM #UXIN #LAIX #TAL #DQ #LU #SEED #SXTC #BEST #TC #GSX #CCNC #PETZ #TKAT #PLAG #NCTY #MOXC #TANH #EVK #JRJC #AIH #HGSH #CCM #PLIN #BABA #TAOP #TEDU #LXEH #KXIN #OCG #YGMZ #ATIF #JFIN #CLEU #BHAT BTC/BLOCKCHAIN: Bitcoin hit 40K this weekend and Doge $0.07 $MARA $RIOT $BRQS – with bitcoin hitting 40K these are something to keep watch on Monday Sympathy/Related: #SOS #RIOT #MOGO #NXTD #IDEX #MGI #IZEA #EQOS #IPDN #EBON #DPW #MARA #PHUN MARIJUANA: $SNDL - Pullback to $0.85ish, buy the pullback for an inverse head and shoulders with a price target of $2.61 $HUGE - Daily trend about to turn bullish with massive volume spike. $CRBP – Huge gap to filled back up on the daily chart. PT $3.33 $KERN – Swing alert (weeks) growing nicely on the daily chart, but I wait for a pullback before making an entry. Long term PT $18.58 Sympathy/Related: #ACB, #TLRY #OGI #CGC #HEXO #CRON #APHA $ICG Energy Sector: $OPTT - Weekly trend about to change from bearish to bullish with significant volume increases week by week. PT: $8 short term, $18-20 longer term. $SPI - weekly chart bullish harami. Bullish pennant price action pattern. EMA200 $19.55 MACD crossed bullish. Daily chart hammebull pin bar impulse pullback Sympathy/Related:: #WWR #CBAT #PECK #PLUG #CLSK #FCEL #SUNW #AMTX #PEIX #TRCH $#ENG #SPI #WATT #ALAC #TRCH #OPTT #OEG BLM STOCKS: BLACK HISTORY MONTH Sympathy/Related #LMFA #IMTE #SALM #UONEK #CARV #BYFC $UNONE Biotechs: $OCGN – Swing alert (Weeks) huge volume coming in after the split. Base on my daily fibo chart $10.73. Sympathy/Related:: #ANVS #VXRT #AEZS #MBRX #SLS #CRMD #PRTA #VTVT #ALVR #PLRX #ARTL #GMDA #GRCL #TLSA #ATOS #IMNM #NKTX #AZRX #OCGN #SAVA #ADMS #SBBP #CNSP #AKER #SAVA #TTOO #AGEN TECHNICALS: $CNSL $RVPH – Both have double bottom with a hammer candle on Friday. $VISL – Huge volume on Friday. Continuation play PT $5 $BDR - this low float stock is weekly play. Typically spikes over $2 at least once a week and usually on Monday or Tuesday. 10-50%. $NAKD - Trend change and golden cross on the daily. Look for pullback to $.80 or so, then a push back to $2+ $CTRM - Over 25 million shares shorted on 1/15 that need to cover by tomorrow. Could be more powerful than the GME squeeze. Massive volume spike the past few weeks. First target $1, next target $2.69. $LMNL looks like it's time has come to start really retracing back to the teens. Bullish harami on weekly. 3 white soldier on the daily. Bull flag broke down for a DBR set up. 4hr set up for PM gapper. PT $5.96 then $6.99 for a break above $6.07 ~10-30%+ gainer Fib retracement levels 23.6% $11.19 / 38.2% $15.06 / 50.0% $18.19 / 61.8% $21.33 $ADMP - weekly chart showing extreme bullish confluence. bullish hammebull pin bar EMA6 bounce pattern/backtest old resistance as new support to maintain $1+ compliance. EMA200 $2.144 Daily chart fish hook pattern gap to 1.40 and 1.64 great chart set up for possible rockets. Backburners: ^WPRT ^PPBT ^MBII ^LAIX ^CLNE ^ELVT ^VRTV ^NAVB ^AAME ^VOR ^IMCR ^WHLR ^BOLT ^HTBX ^CLOV ^ABUS ^MRNA ^HGEN
Illegal Tactics and DTCC/Prime Broker Complicity In Naked Shorting & Retail Shutdown of GME (DTCC/Prime Brokers decision makers need to be questioned at the 2/18 GameStop Congress hearing)
TLDR: GameStop’s Congress hearing is on Feb 18th, they need to investigate the Prime Brokers and DTCC for their complicity in enabling naked shorting within GME and by extension, potential collusion to shut down trading on Jan 28th, the day the short squeeze was going to kick off. (stick to the end for an analysis of some illegal tactics short side hedge funds have been using) Thesis: On the day the retail market for GME shut down on 1/28 (the day the short squeeze would’ve happened had there been no market intervention), DTCC (clearing house monopoly) shut down retail buying in order to protect itself and Prime Brokers (which privately own the DTCC) from being exposed to the consequences of being party to illegal activity. I believe Prime Brokers and DTCC need to be called to the GameStop hearing on February 18th to be questioned for their complicity in enabling illegal naked shorting of the GME stock, as well as potential collusion to shut out retail buyers on 1/28. In my previous post (which I recommend reading for some context) I explored the subject of rampant illegal naked shorting in GME, and how Prime Brokers (consisting of banks like Goldman, Morgan, etc) and DTCC would be complicit in the naked shorting. This in turn raises the thought experiment that they would be incentivized to do anything possible to prevent the short squeeze from happening on 1/28 because had the short squeeze happened, the shorts would go bankrupt and their Prime Brokers who lent them their naked shorted shares would need to cover the shares. This would not only represent a humongous capital expense for Prime Brokers, the culpability of Prime Brokers (and that of the DTCC) in this situation would also have likely been exposed as well. A quick primer on what a Prime Broker is: Prime Brokers are essentially the service side of the short- selling business. They lend out securities and cash, you can think of them as the “house” in a casino: They provide a gambler with markers to play and to manage his winnings. According to Matt Taibi, “Under the original concept, if a hedge fund that wanted to short a stock they would first need to “locate” the stock with his Prime Broker but as time passed, Prime Brokers increasingly allowed their hedge-fund customers to use automated systems and “locate” the stock themselves, and what this does is enable short-sellers to sell stock without delivering and thereby perform naked shorts with counterfeit shares. (source: https://web.archive.org/web/20210213125246/https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/wall-streets-naked-swindle-194908/). (I highly recommend you read Matt Taibi’s article on naked shorting and how it was used to take down Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. There are so many parallels with GME it’s hard to miss. It’s amazing to consider that 12 years after this article was published and brought to public awareness, the problem of naked shorting still exists as a systemic issue.) Prime Brokers have a long history of being associated with naked shorting. To highlight a few examples, Prime Brokers like Merill Lynch and Goldman have long been implicated for naked shorting Overstock.com (https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/accidentally-released-and-incredibly-embarrassing-documents-show-how-goldman-et-al-engaged-in-naked-short-selling-244035/, https://www.forbes.com/2007/02/02/naked-short-suit-overstock-biz-cx_lm_0202naked.html?sh=271400d1763f). Another example is when Goldman’s Prime Brokerage was implicated by the SEC in 2016 and got away with a small fine of 16 million (Source: https://www.sec.gov/news/pressrelease/2016-9.html). An example that very recently came in the news is a story where CIBC, BOA, UBS and TD Bank Prime Brokerages are accused of facilitating naked short selling and using counterfeit stock to attack and bring the stock price of a company from $34.77 to $1.83 (Source: https://www.securitiesfinancetimes.com/securitieslendingnews/industryarticle.php?article_id=224548). The DTCC also has a very long history of being associated with naked shorting. The Wall Street Journal noted that 1% of the DTCC’s volume end in failure to deliver which “have put DTCC in the middle of a long-running fight over whether unscrupulous investors are driving down hundreds of small companies' share prices… DTCC has turned a blind eye to the naked-shorting problem. ” (Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118359867562957720). The DTCC has also had numerous complaints submitted to the SEC for enabling naked shorting (source: https://www.sec.gov/rules/proposed/s72303/decosta122203.htm) and have been sued tens or hundreds of times for assisting naked shorts (source: https://smithonstocks.com/part-3-in-series-on-illegal-naked-shortings-role-in-stock-manipulation-prime-brokers-and-the-dtcc-have-a-troubling-monopoly-on-clearing-and-settling-stock-trades/ and http://counterfeitingstock.com/CS2.0/CounterfeitingStock.html and https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118359867562957720) On 1/28 Robinhood received a letter from the DTCC at 4 am requiring them to halt trading or come up with 3 billion dollars, which Robinhood did not have, and therefore with one swoop of the pen the DTCC shut down buy side momentum but strangely allowed selling. Retail investors were shut out of the market and as any student of microeconomics would know, by shutting buy but only allowing sell, the price is bound to fall. Meanwhile while hedge funds were able to keep trading not only in the market but also crosstrade in the dark pools (“private” stock markets that retail is shut out of, more on this later), and use this crucial lifeline given to them by the DTCC to prevent the squeeze from happening that day. With retail abruptly being shut out from buy (even cash accounts were shut out, which didn’t make sense) and only allowed to sell, almost everyone could smell manipulation was afoot (which triggered the Congress hearing) and the most of the blame was pointed at Robinhood. Personally and in hindsight, I believe Robinhood was just a willing scapegoat. When we think about who had the most to lose if a short squeeze occurred, I’ll narrow it down to three entities, Shorts and their stakeholders (ie Citadel), Prime Brokers and the DTCC. It’s important to remember that the actual impetus that triggered the shutdown of the market for retail investors came from the DTCC. Working backwards, if you consider that GME was rampantly naked shorted and DTCC and Prime Brokers would have to be complicit in it, I believe the DTCC, Primer Brokers and possibly Citadel (who provides 40% of Robinhood’s revenue) brazenly manipulated the market on 1/28 by shutting down purchasing for retail buyers to prevent the squeeze from being squoze on that day as doing so would be catastrophic for all aforementioned parties involved. I believe that on the upcoming Gamestop Congress hearings the Financial Services Committee needs to call on decision makers of DTCC and Prime Brokers explore their role and complicity in the shut out of retail buyers that day as well as being enablers of naked shorting in GME. An interesting thought experiment: On 1/28 when the price was 450+ and shorts were likely under 100, if we assume prime brokers allowed naked shorting in GME, then when the squeeze was about to happen (or happening), if Prime Brokers had margin had called the shorts, they would presumably also also gone down because shorts would not be able to pay in that event and the brokers would be holding the bag. By that logic, they have every incentive in this case to NOT to margin call and instead the most logical option would probably would have been to make a backroom deal, which is what I personally think most likely happened. If you’ve read up to this point, you might be thinking what can I do about this? I am aware that there a lot of cynicism that we can’t do anything, that there will be no justice for retail investors who were harmed this situation, and that institutions and people in power will prevent anything from being done. I feel this sometimes too, but remember: A single voice can be drowned out, but if we all speak together then we will make our voice heard. Ape Strong Together. With the hearing coming up on February 18th, I highly recommend you email and tweet the representatives involved in the hearing, as well as your own district representatives, and urge them to read into the factors presented in this post and call the DTCC and Prime Brokers to the hearingl. They need to be questioned on why GME has so many counterfeit shares, failed to deliver, their complicity in naked shorting, and investigated for their role in the retail shut down of 1/28. Below are 4 members of congress I recommend both tweeting and emailing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez https://twitter.com/AOC, email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) Al Green https://twitter.com/repalgreen, email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) Maxine Waters https://twitter.com/maxinewaters, email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) Nancy Pelosi Email: https://twitter.com/SpeakerPelosi email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]). And you can find other members of Financial Services Committee here to reach out to: https://financialservices.house.gov/about/committee-membership.htm What follows should probably be a separate post, but I will take the opportunity to summarize some of the illegal tactics that shorts have been identified to be using in their war with retail investors. Note that this may not be an exhaustive list and there may be newer tactics deployed in the future. Retail investors might not have the same tricks, resources and willingness to break the law for profit as hedgies do, but my hope and belief is that if we pool our knowledge and analysis, we will figure out their game and effectively adapt. Feel free to forward the list below to any representatives and lawmakers if you concur that these tactics were used: Rampant Naked Shorting - With the extremely high number of Fail to Delivers (FTID) , short interest being as high as 226% recently, and institutions alone holding a staggering 177% of the total float (likely due in large part to counterfeit shares), signs strongly point to GME being rampant with naked shorts and counterfeit shares. I believe the original goal of shorts was to drive GME to bankruptcy with these naked shorts, using the laddering of naked shorts (aka short ladder attack), executed with the help of counterfeit stock which is a classic and reliable method of driving down the stock price. I believe the GME stock has seen relentlessly aggressive short attacks, especially on the week of Monday February 1st, which drove the stock price down and triggered panic selling. Ladder Attacks with the help of Dark Pools - Another identified method of ladder attacks was identified to come from crosstrading with darkpools (the stock market has its own private stock exchange where institutions can trade…). Essentially darkpools are private stock markets retail investors do not have access to, where short side funds can purchase securities “off market” and then sell “on-market”, with the effect of creating a lot more downward pressure on the market without the upward pressure from buying. Illegally masking shorts with synthetic longs. Another tactic shorts are suspected of using in GME is the use of illegally using options to evade short positions in violation of Reg SHO which SEC describes in this risk alert and which I elaborate in this post. Essentially it’s the use of using options to create synthetic longs to illegally and artificially cover and prolong short positions and at same time obscuring the true short interest %. If you consider that it would be far more profitable for shorts to not cover at high prices but instead ladder attack the price and wait for retail investors to lose interest and close their shorts at as low of a price as possible, then you can see why this strategy would be very effective. Using way out-of-money call options to obscure true short interest. You may have heard about the 43 million worth of 800 dollar calls purchased when the price was 100 and found it odd. Later it was identified as a tactic to cheaply purchase synthetic call options (since at 800 its way out of money) to obscure their short positions (with the added benefit of hedging at 800 if a squeeze does happen) One thing I want to note, particularly to legislators at the GameStop hearing: Retail investors were not incited to pump GME. Retail investors spotted a unique Short Squeeze opportunity created by the greed of short side hedge funds, whereby GameStop was being abusively naked shorted with the goal of bringing it to bankruptcy, and hedge funds were so greedy about it that they shorted the company with a short interest of 226% of float, meaning A LOT of counterfeit shares were being used to short the company. Retail investors saw this as an opportunity to short squeeze the hedge fund shorters, which is a legal and legitimate investment strategy. The short squeeze would have happened had everyone played fair, but instead, financial institutions who were culpable to the naked shorting intervened and shut down retail buying, hurting the retail investors and successfully manipulating the market. The investment itself was in my opinion a sound decision based on the short squeeze, but in hindsight retail investors did not seriously consider the risk of the market would be blatantly and publicly manipulated and that the market would be rigged against them. If this post was useful (and I hope it was! Gave up my Friday night to write this for you Apes), please upvote for visibility and share it far and wide. The GameStop hearings could be a first step and hope towards legislative change, and it’s extremely important that the right story is told at those hearings (and by the right story I mean the real truth of what happened.) I hope the truly culpable parties are investigated and brought to justice. Again, I know many of us feel cynical that anything meaning will be done towards finding justice against the lawbreakers in this case, but if you feel even an ounce of injustice or empathy at how retail investors were unfairly harmed in the course of investing in GME, I strongly urge you to contact a legislator associated with the GameStop hearings and bring this to their attention so they can review this case with more complete information. In addition I recommend you to contact the SEC and any journalist you know or via journalist tip lines. It’s not going to be easy but the more awareness we raise the higher the likelihood our voices will be heard and positive change will be made. As we navigate the rocky waters ahead, I’ll gift you with a favorite quote of mine: The only difference between a nightmare and a dream is how big your balls are. 🚀🚀🚀 Disclaimer: I am not an investment advisor, I just like the stock. Ps. If you’ve read to the end, I’ll leave you with a few more thoughts and reminders: - If I were to distill life into one thing, it would be to never lose hope. - Remember that if you’ve lost money in any way shape or form, don’t be depressed, money can always be made back and the important thing is to maintain a good attitude. - Only invest what you can afford to lose. - Perhaps the most important factor in good investing is patience. If you’d like to read more about counterfeiting stocks this is a good place to start http://counterfeitingstock.com/CS2.0/CounterfeitingStock.html
I'm in the u.s. but have been dipping into Australian stocks using foreign ordinaries on the u.s. side because there seems to be more value overseas. I've found a few posts on here about 5 months ago about points bet, but I need to bring up what is going on in the u.s. now. We've finally decided to stop protecting people from themselves and legalized gambling so states are slowly bringing gambling online. Each state is bringing it on according to their own rules and they are all different and chaotic (naturally). In the u.s. most states are allowing casino operators to operate a limited number of "skins". These are rights to operate an online sports book casino and poker room. Casinos own the skins and decide what software they will use on each of these skins. In Michigan we decided to have a single skin for all these gaming types. That means that each casino can only have one sports book, casino and poker room. The fact that one of them chose points bet is actually pretty big. They also have market share in other states that have legalized gambling (5 others right now). They have positive net gaming revenue, which doesn't sound significant, but with heavy promotions going on right now things are pretty tight for the operators. For example there's a Canadian based online sports book here in the u.s. (score media) that delivered negative net gaming revenue for the year in similar markets as points bet and is still commanding a ~1.3b usd valuation (although they have some potential upside in Canadian single game sports betting being legalized). All that said: here's a few big points why the stock is going higher. Right now all these gaming stocks in the u.s. are blowing up as people finally start to realize that there's going to be huge opportunity here as all these states bring gaming online. Points bet owns their own code and has a unique feature which differentiates itself from other books. I think this has gotten the attention of casino operators and how some australian company no one here has heard of got a skin in the single skin Michigan market. They have a deal with nbc which will almost guarantee their adoption in other u.s. states as the network will promote their book to a national audience. They will bring an online casino to Michigan later this year to compliment the sports book. It's already in new jersey and I imagine will come to other states soon. If this thing was trading in the u.s. market at a more significant clip than 10,000 shares a day I think the valuation would be much more significant. Tldr: points bet has big potential in the u.s. market that is understated. 🚀🚀 Edit words and: been to Melbourne and Sydney a couple times and lost money betting on the Sidney giants. Can't remember if it was them or the team they were playing but one of them have the same fight song as notre dame in the u.s.
There's a disconnection between understanding of what "value" is, or how to decide what is "investment" and what is "speculation". It's not binary, it's a spectrum. It's not universal, it's relative. It's relative to YOU, specifically YOU. It's not constant, it's relative to price and other opportunity. Lastly, it's not guaranteed. Ever. The future is unknown. You or I might not even be here for it. Every person reading this knows some things I don't know, and every person doesn't know some things I do. Unless you are a literate dog, we probably share some qualities. In fact, even if you are a dog, literate or otherwise, we share some qualities and no small amount of identical language in our DNA. Dogs love steaks, and fresh air. Both things I like quite a bit too. But I enjoy looking for undervalued stocks, and dogs seem more interested in fetching tennis balls. We're both animals, but we're not the same animal. To go back to GME and the toad's wild ride one more time this week, I can promise you I looked at some of the same numbers that DeepFuckingValue looked at 2 years ago. Lots of people did. I looked at gamestop in 2019, a few times in fact. I passed.DeepFuckingValuedidn't.We were both right. DeepFuckingValue looked at the company a year or two years back, and evaluated the numbers and the situation, and understood that a lot of short sellers were counting on this company to fold in the very near future. He probably also noticed that more and more short sellers seemed to be jumping on this bandwagon. He knew the situation wasn't nearly that dire. In fact it was likely to be "game on" for Gamestop, for quite a while to come. I got puns all night, so buckle up. Then he looked at the share price, understood the proposition and probability that this was a potentially very asymmetric opportunity (low probability, enormous return, mispriced very cheaply in relation to the potential return). I looked at the same things, but he got from the situation contextual understanding I didn't get. Namely the magnitude to which shorts can backfire and how to estimate it. I also recognized, back in 2019, Gamestop was probably not in as dire straights as predicted. I wasn't alone, or special in this. Lots of people, including some famous people, recognized it. Michael Burry. Ryan Cohen. That one guy from the internet. I knew about the gaming console cycle too. I looked over the balance sheet. I got that piece of the puzzle, lots of us did. What I didn't understand very well at all was how short selling squeezes worked in practice, or just as importantly how to value the proposition. I still don't understand that with any genuine confidence, but I do get it more now than I did. Doesn't matter. I didn't get it, it was too confusing for me. So I passed. I said No. People who "get it" get this concept. Two people can do opposite things for different reasons, and both be right. It's relative to you, your understanding, your tolerance for what talking heads often confuse with risk. Your tolerance for volatility. He understood the proposition, evaluated what he was PAYING for what he was GETTING (in this case not just the companies liquidation value backstop, but the potential possibilities of the price appreciation he could be getting - this eventual squeeze), knew himself well enough to decide if he could stomach the roller coaster, and chose to get on the ride. I'm genuinely happy for this guy, and everybody else on these message boards in that rocket or just popcorning along in the theatre. I'm also happy for myself, because even though I didn't have any money stake in GME I understand more about how short selling and squeezes work than I did just a week ago. I got a free option on education. The ups and downs are not risk. Volatility is not risk. Here's where we get vague, because this GME story isn't over. It's only gotten started. This has implications for the broader market. Follow me into the fog of tomorrow, will you? Even the smartest, brightest people taking this bet 1 or 2 years ago had to contend with a lot of fog. It's not gone. Certainly the picture is MORE clear now than it was last year, but things are still REALLY FOGGY. More foggy for some of us than others. What we're witnessing now is why you cannot apply mathematics to complex systems (especially systems involving people) and expect everything to go as modeled. We don't have all the rules. This isn't chess, it's life. People cheat, bend the rules, propagandize, lobby, sue, counter-sue, weaponize fear and do everything in their capacity to get an advantage, up to and including breaking the law. Life isn't chess, it's poker. But it's way more complicated than a game of hold em. It's poker with 10,000 players at your table and a deck of 2.6 million cards, and a roof that might cave in once in a while and kill some of the people at the table, and one of the waiters serving drinks, and maybe the general mood in the room. Also someone who loses might pull out a gun and shoot the dealer. We cannot know all the things that might happen. But if you're in the casino we call earth, some of these events could affect you. I'm long on humans going to Mars, or Europa, or The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. God rest your soul, Douglas Adams. This is why the proposition that the early birds took, people like DeepFuckingValue, is nothing whatsoever the same as the proposition that exists right now. Even if you and I have the same understanding of the proposition he took 2 years ago, and understand why it makes sense, it's not the same proposition that exists now. He bought in at I don't know what, $2 or $5/share. Some long dated options that cost a few pennies. People buying in now are paying $100, $200, $400/share. Refusing to pay too much is your biggest defense against being stupid. Don't be stupid. If you're a fan of that Stranger Things show, you probably recognize that theme. "Don't be stupid." "We're not stupid." In that case, we have something else in common. I love that show. There's a beautiful scene in that show where the adopted dad Hopper is trying to explain to this orphaned, frustrated teenager Eleven why she can't go outside. It's not safe. The risk is too high. Dangerous people are after you, and they aren't playing by the rules. Hopper and Eleven are arguing and bickering about this, and neither can see the other person's side. They are both right, for different reasons. This is a fictional show, and she is an extraordinarily powerful telekinetic. She can move stuff with her mind. Violently. The government scientists who raised her and trained this ability are after her. Hopper doesn't understand this yet. She can rip people in half with a willful thought. She's not in danger. Except she is. There are things she doesn't get. Weaknesses she hasn't accounted for. She's got this great little group of friends, and they aren't superheroes. They've got families. Real people she cares about, who are regular people and definitely can be hurt. This is what Hopper is trying to get across. He's got experience, he's lost people. He knows. She thinks he's just an old grumpy boomer and he thinks she's just an emotional child. But they're talking past each other, and as teenagers are wont to do, rash decisions are made and things get out of hand. People die. This has so many parallels with what's going on in Gamestop (and the markets broadly) recently. People, "the bad guys", are not playing by the rules. Other people, "the good guys", did not account for this ratfuckery. Now there's a tug of war. In the media, the courts, the SEC, congress, even in the public square of reddit and twitter. The proposition that was when DeepFuckingValue and company investigated it 2 years ago is not the proposition that is today. Even if it was the same situation, he and I came to different conclusions for different reasons because he understood it and I did not. If you want to be an investor, you've got to learn to say NO, and not because "the other guy is wrong". You say NO because you don't understand how to value what is being offered confidently, or you do understand it and you see risks in the proposition that make the price unattractive or this particular proposition untenable for your temperament. Just like anything else in life, be it dating, job offers, or nigerian prince's who just need a little help with an inheritance scheme, successful people learn to say No to almost everything. The most successful people learn to say No so gracefully the rejected party leaves feeling good about getting rejected. Investing is saying No to offers you don't understand and requiring a bargain price. Speculation is everything else. At /ValueInvesting, We're not stupid. Corrected: The girls name is Eleven, not Seven. Fixed, Thanks jelledm
Score Media and why its a massive candidate for a multi bagger
Hello fellow autists, Just a pre-cursor, this is my first post of any kind on WSB. I would occasionally peruse the forum but was obviously drawn here from the GME craze and love every part of it. Score Media and Gaming, listed on the TSX as SCR and in the US as TSCRF. These guys have nothing but positive news coming in the next 12 months and has the ability to at least double in the next half year, if not sooner. These guys are foraying into the sports betting market and are the only players that have a fully intuitive and integrated sports scores/stats application on the market. So what are the positives/catalysts for Score Media: - Expansion with the help/investment of Penn Gaming to expand sportsbook in the US. Keep in mind, Penn is the same company that invested in Barstool. The Score is already approved in New Jersey, Indiana and Colorado, with Iowa right around the corner, and Michigan up next. - Sports betting in Canada is a 14 Billion dollar market. Single wagering is currently illegal, however, there is unity across the aisle between all political parties to amend the criminal code and make single wagering legal. There are currently two bills in play. C-13 and C-218. C-13 second reading is currently delayed, while C-218 is scheduled for the House of Commons on February 24th. Like most countries, they have currently spent a ton of money propping up their respective economies due to COVID-19. It is highly unlikely the Canadian government rejects this massive taxable revenue stream when it needs it the most - Leader in sports applications for time spent on the app on a monthly basis, beating out heavy hitters like TSN, ESPN, Bleacher Report....literally every other sports media application - Only major player with an already existing sports news/fantasy application with seamless sportsbook integration. No hopping back and forth, you can wager through the sports app as if you were on the sportsbook - They are the biggest E-sports media player with over 1 million subscribers on YouTube and that lead is growing - They are pushing to get listed on the NYSE in the very near future to further growth and investment opportunities. The only real hinderance that could potentially stop the run of this company is if the Canadian government fails to amend the current laws for single game wagering, which in the current economical climate, I find extremely unlikely. ESPECIALLY with support from all political parties including the Conservatives, New Democratic Party, Bloc Quebecois and most Liberal MP's. Even in the event that this for some reason failed to pass, it still has access to an enormous US market with the backing of Penn. I love this stock boys and girls! EDIT 1: Currently with 2500 shares. Started at 1.71 and have been steadily buying dips, now at 1.91 cost average Sources and Links: Bill C-218 and Canadian Market: https://financialpost.com/telecom/everything-has-changed-canadian-companies-looking-to-cash-in-as-sports-betting-legalization-spreads https://www.radionl.com/2021/02/04/bclc-advocating-for-ottawa-to-legalize-single-event-sport-betting/ ScoreBet integration: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201112005877/en/Introducing-BET-SECTION-A-New-Dedicated-Home-for-Betting-on-theScore-App Penn investment and US plans: https://www.thestar.com/business/2021/01/16/the-faceoff-score-media-vs-draftkings-the-well-known-canadian-online-gaming-site-is-bracing-for-competition-from-its-larger-us-peer-but-its-high-brand-recognition-across-canada-gives-it-home-ice.html Canadian position compared to rivals and US listing plans: https://www.casino.org/news/thescore-ceo-says-company-in-pole-position-for-canadian-sports-betting/
Detailed DD post [re-post after r/pennystocks removed it]
I posted this yesterday morning (UK time) but after 5 hours or so, pennystocks deleted the original post. A few people messaged me asking for it to be shared in a few High Tide specific pages. So here it is! -- This is my first time posting a DD post – a friend of mine who moderates on SPACs has shared some analysis I have written previously, but I’m keen to share this here, and see if there is any appetite for sharing my own personal written DD I have on the 30 stocks I have across a number of different portfolios. I have modified this format, as it was originally a script for a video which I created on the stock. If you prefer to listen – check it out here: https://youtu.be/qsjwU7kkPsw Some of the market stats (market cap, current multiples, etc.) are correct as of Feb-06, and clearly a little outdated since the price movements. Not a financial advisor, do your own DD. I am long HITI and have an expectation of a long term hold on this stock. Overview
High Tide Canada-based cannabis retail company, operating under multiple brands. It operates under 3 core divisions:
Brick and mortar retail – 4 key brands with just under 70 locations in Canada. Brands include: Canna Cabana, New Leaf, Meta Cannabis and Kushbar. Forecast to have around 115 stores by end of 2021
Online retail – has 2 brands, both of which attract millions of viewers per month – Grasscity.com and CBDcity.com
Wholesale – manufacturer of paraphernalia in US and Canada. Number of products are branded with various celebrities, Snoop Dogg, Paramount Pictures, Trailer Park Boys and many more
Has good c-level execs and experienced executive board; hold significant stake in the business. CEO Raj Grover holds just over 21% of the shares
Currently has a market cap of around $280m. Still significant upside to the valuation – see analysis later in post
Investment Merits Very strong market growth:
Business has demonstrated growth both organically (through new store openings, more online sales and greater wholesale sales), as well as inorganically through M&A
Growth in markets which High Tide has a physical presence in is expected to be very strong. North American cannabis market (Canada and US) is forecast to grow by 30% a year to 2027 (source: research and markets)
Analysts covering High Tide are forecasting growth in excess of this, which is positive to see and implies capturing market share
New markets / geographies ‘opening up’, legalizing and regulating cannabis is also an exciting and realistic prospect for incremental growth:
The US federal legalization debate is on the table
Many other countries are considering this too and High Tide is well positioned for these; this is catalyzed by the fact that government debt has increased significantly as part of the response to the COVID-19 health crisis. This needs to be repaid somehow, and increasing tax rates on existing taxes is an unpopular political move. Finding new tax revenues is a more palatable way of increasing tax revenues for governments. This is especially important in countries where elections are upcoming.
Personally I do expect to see this accelerate the agenda for the regulation and legalization of cannabis in many new countries
Whilst predominantly Canada and US based, High Tide does have presence in some markets where cannabis is not regulated or legalized, the UK for example (~10% of Grasscity sales are made here) and so it is well positioned with a strong and established brand to capitalize on this opportunity, when / if the market ‘opens up’
Regulation
High Tide benefits from the regulatory focus and overhang on the cannabis retail sector as it represents a strong barrier to entry, making it more challenging for new competitors to enter market
Participants in the market need to have licenses and ensure consistent compliance with laws to continue operating – failure to comply can result in significant financial penalties
Personally I normally don’t like investing into retail. There are usually fairly limited barriers to entry, minimal differentiation and negligible customer loyalty, however the cannabis market does have different characteristics in this respect and makes it a more compelling proposition
Regulation also benefits those with scale, something High Tide has as the leading player in the market. It costs money to obtain and retain licences to operate and it costs money to ensure compliance with all the laws and regulations and that all staff are acting in accordance with these
Some parallels in this respect which can be drawn to casino gaming in casinos; you don’t see new casinos popping up at the same rate which you see new restaurants or apparel stores opening
Demand
There’s a lot to like about the demand dynamics for High Tide. It’s vice-nature means that demand is less correlated to disposable incomes. Given where we are in economic cycle, especially important consideration
For those doubting this, check alcohol, tobacco or gambling expenditure across economic cycles historically, for a proxy
Strong performance throughout COVID-19 crisis
Despite heavy weighting towards brick and mortar, (the most hard hit part of retail) it has effectively managed the shift to online, which is a positive
Has relied on government support and financial assistance in the form of job retention schemes (address in more detail later in post)
This demonstrates management are capable and have effectively navigated the challenging situation
Data
Massively summarized from the video, (and my video on KERN) so check that out if interested in this point, however, they have unique access to supply chain data which could be monetized effectively and generate strong levels of recurring revenues
Other established sectors have a trusted party with such unique access to data (e.g. alcohol, lithium, different foods, etc.) and the opportunity here is enormous
I would like to see High Tide capitalize on this
Forecasts financials & analysts
Currently 2 analysts covering High Tide, both have a buy rating on the business
Their coverage is slightly outdated (expect this being updated soon and a further catalyst for positive price action) and their price targets are 60c; at the time their reports were published, they were forecasting a 4x upside (HITI was trading at ~15c)
Same analysts also forecasting strong growth - 77% CAGR to 2022. They are forecasting revenues of around $250m and EBITDA of $46m. A reminder here, these are professional analysts, not YouTube students – these come from their financial models, the assumptions of which are discussed with management
Going to go quick here, its explained more slowly in the video but High Tide is currently valued at a significant discount to the other listed peers
Looking at EV / FY+1 Sales multiples – EBITDA not meaningful as some of the peer group are EBITDA negative and High Tide itself has only recently become EBITDA positive
Personally, I think Planet13 is the most comparable given its business model
Taking both Planet13 multiple and peer group average multiple, this is then applied to High Tide’s forecast FY+1 sales to calculate an enterprise value – this is adjusted for net debt to get to a market capitalization and then divided by the share count to get an implied share price
The table below shows the implied stock price valuations from this analysis
Net debt will change in coming year given the capital structure and a large number of convertible notes – this has been ignored given it will have small impact on the price
The share count will change as a result of dilution from various instruments – if this bothers you massively then look at the valuation discount on the basis of the enterprise value as it does not impact this (and only slightly on the market cap given minimal impacts to cash from instrument execution, etc.)
Not accounting for any stock split, consolidation or any other M&A deals
The FY21 financials are on the basis of the mean broker estimates from Thomson Reuters – Seeking Alpha has different and slightly outdated ones
US is only a small part of the market which High Tide addresses, while a change in regulation would have a big impact on the company, currently it is unlikely this would happen, given the discussions about potential federal legalization
Canada regulation is established and not going anywhere
Other countries likely to legalize and regulate cannabis, as outlined earlier
Dilution
No escaping that there will be some significant dilution for shareholders, as pointed out in the table below, but this should be already priced into the stock
Potential that new equity issuances could occur to help finance growth, but provided this growth is delivered, it should be accretive for the stock price
A risk that investors need to be aware with for all companies which have relied on government financial support during COVID-19 measures. Such support has resulted in the number of businesses going bankrupt decreasing massively – this is at a lower level than it ever normally is and is masking some real underlying issues within companies. As investors we need to be open eyed about this
As High Tide has benefited from support in the form of the Canada’s Emergency Wage Support scheme, there is the risk that once this is lifted it may become apparent that the cost base has not been effectively managed
Personally, I think this is mitigated by the synergy analysis conducted as part of the M&A. A full cost base analysis would have been conducted to calculate the potential $8.4m synergies so strong likelihood that this is under control, but should keep on our radar and reassess
Marketing expenses and celebrity licenses
Need more information to ascertain whether these are underpinned by a compelling ROI. Seen a lot of people suggest this is a great positive, but the impact on sales volumes from these is unknown, as is the terms of these license agreements (e.g. split between upfront fee vs. volume-based fee)
No escaping the fact that it is an increased cost and so need to understand the ROI this generates to determine whether it really is compelling
Is there really more demand to pay a premium for Snoop Dogg bongs, Guns n Roses papers, Cheech & Chong grinders, or whatever they may be?
So far management have suggested this has been helpful in driving new sales, but this is something to dig into more
Not your parents PLAYBOY: How Playboy is reinventing themselves and why you should Invest $MCAC
I know what you're already thinking. Playboy is a dead porn brand that publishes a magazine and doesn't appeal to millennials or gen z right? Wrong. Leadership Let's start with Ben Kohn, the CEO. Kohn has worked in private equity for 25 years and started a firm called Rizvi Travers which invested in pre IPO tech companies. They were the largest investor when Twitter went public and invested in Facebook, Snapchat, Square, SpaceX, Instacart, and Uber. In 2011, Kohn partnered with Hugh Hefner and took Playboy private. Kohn became the CEO in 2017 with the goal of revitalizing one of the largest, most recognizable brands in the world. Since becoming CEO, Kohn has been shutting down most of the legacy business and most recently discontinued producing a domestic magazine. He's focused most of his attention so far on growing the high margin licensing business and direct to consumer business, transforming Playboy into a consumer lifestyle brand focusing on 4 categories:
Sexual Wellness
Style & Apparel
Gaming & Lifestyle
Beauty & Grooming
Kohn is also placing a strong emphasis on appealing to women and young people, something that Playboy had never done in the past. Over the last 3 years, the female audience has grown by 70% and 90% of their audience today is under the age of 40. Out of the total e-commerce sales, 40% of customers are women. Financials Playboy is already a profitable business. They have a highly efficient, high margin business model that accelerates with growth. For the first 9 months of 2020, Playboy grew revenue by 78% from 57 million to 101 million and grew adjusted ebitda 129% from 9.5 million to 22 million. For 2021, they reaffirmed guidance of 167 million of revenue and 40 million dollars of ebitda. By 2025, Playboy is conservatively projecting 296 million of revenue and 140 million in ebitda, but expects it to be much greater. It's also important to note that they have over 400 million of forward booked minimum guaranteed cash flow, but they only recognize 67 million of that today, so the actual revenue numbers are much higher. Playboy's business is monetized in two primary ways, licensing and direct to consumer. Licensing is a key part of the revenue stream and they anticipate it more than doubling moving forward. However, Playboy is extremely excited about its growing direct to consumer business as well which I will dive into in the next section. Growth Playboy has huge growth opportunities in each of their 4 product categories. First I want to point out that Playboy is HUGE in China and it's growing rapidly in India. In China, Playboy is one of the leading men's apparel brands with over 2500 brick and mortar stores and over 1000 e-commerce stores. Playboy sells products in over 180 countries and is the 17th most licensed brand in the world. Style & Apparel: Over the last 3 years, Playboy has partnered with Pacsun, Misguided, Supreme, and others. The Pacsun and Misguided businesses have increased almost 15x over the last 3 years. Playboy also launched Playboy Labs and partnered with Steve Aoki to promote the brand. Playboy intends on transitioning this business from a pure licensing business to a direct to consumer business going forward. They have future collaborations with Yandy planned as well. Sexual Wellness: The sexual wellness category is a 240 billion dollar industry today and is projected to grow to 400 billion by 2024. Currently, the industry is fragmented and made up of small businesses with no ability to scale. Playboy is poised to become the leader in this category through strategic acquisitions of existing companies and by growing its product offerings. Yes, I'm talking about lingerie, condoms, sex toys etc. They recently acquired the sexual wellness retailer Lovers for 25 million and expect them to add 45 million in revenue over the next 12 months. They are planning on making more strategic acquisitions in this space moving forward to become the leading direct to consumer brand in this field. They also began offering online sexual wellness classes for women, which have seen large growth since inception. Gaming & Lifestyle: The growth opportunities in this category are huge. Playboy is diversifying into online gambling, mobile gaming, CBD/Marijuana, and virtual reality. They have a social club/poker room opening in Houston this year in addition to their casino in London. They currently have partnerships with Microgaming as well as Scientific Games for mobile gambling apps like slots and poker, with plans to build more. They are also planning on entering the sports gambling market through partnerships with well known sports betting operators. Moreover, they recently launched an exclusive furniture collection on Wayfair and plan on offering more in the future. They currently offer 3 CBD products and have plans to enter the legal marijuana market when it's legalized at the federal level, which might happen soon under the Biden administration. As of now they sell Playboy branded smoking materials like ash trays and grinders. They are planning on launching 4 more CBD products in 2021. Lastly, Ben Kohn said that experiencing Playboy through a virtual world format is something that is "extremely interesting to us". He gave an example of the Travis Scott and Unreal Platform collaboration. Beauty and Grooming: Currently, Playboy offers men's and women's fragrances and color cosmetics in Europe. They have plans to expand their product line and enter the North American market this year. In China, a place where Playboy has a large market presence, Men's grooming is one of the fastest growing categories and an area that Playboy is not in today. They are planning on entering this market in the near future with Playboy branded skincare and grooming products. SPAC Merger Playboy has a DA with Mountain Crest Acquisition Corp, $MCAC, with the shareholder vote taking place THIS TUESDAY 2/9/21. Once it's approved, the ticker will change to PLBY shortly after. One of the great things about this deal is that there are absolutely no warrants outstanding, meaning there will be very little dilution. They only have 1/10th of a right per share outstanding which automatically convert to common stock. Upon completion of the merger, PLBY will have only 37 million shares outstanding, which is a very low float. Any increase in volume and demand will send the stock price higher. After the merger, PLBY will have a market cap of approximately 413 million. For comparison to other global brands, Nike's market cap is 185 billion, Disney's is 329 billion, and Lululemon's is 45 billion. Now I'm not saying Playboy is near those companies today. However, if they continue growing and realize their potential, they're massively undervalued. Additionally, the management team all signed 12-month lock ups, preventing them from selling for at least one year. This is not a transaction sale, but a true capital raise to accelerate growth. They are in this for the long haul. Conclusion Playboy has big growth opportunities in multiple product categories to become a leading consumer lifestyle brand. They have a high margin profitable business model and a very healthy balance sheet. They have 100 million in free cash right now and only 40 million in net debt, or one times 2021 adjusted ebitda. They already have global brand awareness and the bunny logo alone has tremendous value. Ceo Ben Kohn knows what he's doing and has a proven track record of success. It might be flying under the radar right now because all the hype is surrounding GME and EV socks. I believe when the ticker changes to PLBY and people realize that Playboy is no longer what it used to be, this has huge long term upside. FYI: All of the statistics I mentioned are directly taken from the CEO Ben Kohn in his 1 hour webinar interview with SpacInsider. Disclosure: Long 500 commons $MCAC Disclaimer: Do your own due diligence too
Imagine you’re a hedge fund CEO or senior executive. You’ve always had an inflated ego, and going to Wharton for an MBA definitely didn’t help in that regard. You interned at GS for the summer of 2003 and told all your friends about it, probably even brought it up oh so casually on dates. When you were hired as a trader by a moderately good to great fund, you probably lost a good deal of friends from your previous life, because they “just don’t get you now.” You’re in a different league than them, even your classmates that now work at lesser funds. You act friendly, liking Facebook posts, returning their calls, but there’s a nagging feeling that they’re holding you back. That you’ve made it, and you don’t need some loser that doesn’t even work on the East Coast. Jump ahead a few years It’s September 20th, 2008. Bear Stearns closed months earlier, Lehman went bankrupt a few days ago. "Buddies" of yours from both funds have been texting you, some you know from college. Maybe you’ll take pity on them and put in a good word, maybe you’ll tell them nothing’s available right now and that you’re sorry. You don’t tell them you were part of your fund's effort to short sell theirs into oblivion. Maybe you really are sorry though. What you’re more sorry about, however, is that your bonuses are probably going to be shit for a few years. They could even dip into five figures, god forbid. Your thoughts are of course directed to the millions of people losing their jobs across the country by the news, but inevitably your bonus reduction resurfaces as your biggest concern. “It’s not like I can do anything,” you say, after downing some wine. You go to sleep fairly easily, while across the country, innumerable people are forced to contemplate moving. Let’s jump ahead a few more years It’s mid-March, 2020. At this point, its become evident that COVID-19 is going to ravage the world, in some capacity (not gonna put politics into this because that’s not the point). As either a CEO or senior executive at a mid-range hedge fund, your thoughts gravitate towards your craft. It’s clear the market is going to tank, so you do what you do best. You short the shit out of several clearly sinking industries (https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/31/investing/short-sellers-market-coronavirus/index.html). But you don't stop there. You go on CNBC, Fox Business, maybe even the BBC, and announce doom and gloom. Doing this will get people to dump their stocks, meaning your shorts print even more money. Oh well, if there’s a positive to be gained from this whole thing it’s your fund making good money, right? By late March or early April, your wife convinces you that going with the kids to the Hampton’s would be the best choice, since the upper east side is getting a little claustrophobic. You’ll need to cancel your two week St. Barts vacation, what a bummer. You rent out a nice beach house in Sag Harbor for 125k a month, managing to beat out the other bidder by upping them by 10k. Once again, millions of people are losing their jobs, and you’re shorting the companies they work for. What else should you do? Only a few months forward this time It’s October. Weeks turned into months, and while you’ve started getting back to the city more and more, you’re still staying in Sag. Sometimes you have family friends over for an ostensibly socially distanced wine + cigar. You don’t think much of the events of the summer, aside from that one tweet you had PR send out in July. Your kids might have thoughts, you haven’t asked. Just a few more months, I promise It’s January. For really no other reason than the prospect of making more money, you along with a few other funds have decided to open naked shorts on GameStop. While technically not allowed, there are loopholes. Why would the loopholes be there, if not to be exploited, right? Not like you don’t do the same thing with your taxes. Then, the unthinkable happens A bunch of retail investors, led by a specific part of Reddit, decide to fuck your position by dramatically raising the share price. Since you firmly believe these people incapable of sticking to such an audacious play, you do nothing. Before long though, you start to become slightly unnerved by how steady the growth of the stock is. It's approaching $100, and you're losing hundreds of thousands to millions every day on short interest. So, you decide to take action. You get on CNBC, and cry about fundamentals. About volatility crushing these people. They don't listen, and keep buying. A week passes with you and your rich friends trying various strategies, none of it working. You're aware of another fund leaning on a popular trading app to force them into not accepting buy orders for GME, amongst others. You're not above sacrificing pride for money, so you announce your fund has closed its shorts. You're lying, of course. What kind of looks what you get at future parties if you cowed to these people? No, fuck that. You've read all the right books, been to the right schools, made the right friends, networked at the right parties and functions. You will not close, everything in your life has conditioned you not to. In fact, you'll double down. You go on CNBC some more. Artificially lower the stock price by trading between a few other funds. None of it's working, and you're intensely aware of another potential gamma squeeze on Friday. Restrictions on buying help during the day, but after hours, the stock jumps. That momentum carries it into a solid Friday. You won't budge, but at this point you're losing millions of dollars a day. So, here we are These people do not care about you. You're the least of their concerns, actually. They care about money and fund image, in that order. We have a real chance to make guys exactly like this hurt where it counts (for them), and I want people to understand that. I'm not saying throw your rent into GME. I'm saying you have the chance to really be a part of something, to screw the people that have been doing the screwing for your whole life. The house has been running a fixed casino, and you have the chance to hit back. Do not close. We have them, and they know it. We're winning, and if we keep winning they will give in.
Illegal Tactics and DTCC/Prime Broker Complicity In Naked Shorting & Retail Shutdown of GME (DTCC/Prime Brokers decision makers need to be questioned at the 2/18 GameStop Congress hearing)
TLDR: GameStop’s Congress hearing is on Feb 18th, they need to investigate the Prime Brokers and DTCC for their complicity in enabling naked shorting within GME and by extension, potential collusion to shut down trading on Jan 28th, the day the short squeeze was going to kick off. (stick to the end for an analysis of some illegal tactics short side hedge funds have been using) Thesis: On the day the retail market for GME shut down on 1/28 (the day the short squeeze would’ve happened had there been no market intervention), DTCC (clearing house monopoly) shut down retail buying in order to protect itself and Prime Brokers (which privately own the DTCC) from being exposed to the consequences of being party to illegal activity. I believe Prime Brokers and DTCC need to be called to the GameStop hearing on February 18th to be questioned for their complicity in enabling illegal naked shorting of the GME stock, as well as potential collusion to shut out retail buyers on 1/28. In my previous post (which I recommend reading for some context) I explored the subject of rampant illegal naked shorting in GME, and how Prime Brokers (consisting of banks like Goldman, Morgan, etc) and DTCC would be complicit in the naked shorting. This in turn raises the thought experiment that they would be incentivized to do anything possible to prevent the short squeeze from happening on 1/28 because had the short squeeze happened, the shorts would go bankrupt and their Prime Brokers who lent them their naked shorted shares would need to cover the shares. This would not only represent a humongous capital expense for Prime Brokers, the culpability of Prime Brokers (and that of the DTCC) in this situation would also have likely been exposed as well. A quick primer on what a Prime Broker is: Prime Brokers are essentially the service side of the short- selling business. They lend out securities and cash, you can think of them as the “house” in a casino: They provide a gambler with markers to play and to manage his winnings. According to Matt Taibi, “Under the original concept, if a hedge fund that wanted to short a stock they would first need to “locate” the stock with his Prime Broker but as time passed, Prime Brokers increasingly allowed their hedge-fund customers to use automated systems and “locate” the stock themselves, and what this does is enable short-sellers to sell stock without delivering and thereby perform naked shorts with counterfeit shares. (source: https://web.archive.org/web/20210213125246/https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/wall-streets-naked-swindle-194908/). (I highly recommend you read Matt Taibi’s article on naked shorting and how it was used to take down Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. There are so many parallels with GME it’s hard to miss. It’s amazing to consider that 12 years after this article was published and brought to public awareness, the problem of naked shorting still exists as a systemic issue.) Prime Brokers have a long history of being associated with naked shorting. To highlight a few examples, Prime Brokers like Merill Lynch and Goldman have long been implicated for naked shorting Overstock.com (https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/accidentally-released-and-incredibly-embarrassing-documents-show-how-goldman-et-al-engaged-in-naked-short-selling-244035/, https://www.forbes.com/2007/02/02/naked-short-suit-overstock-biz-cx_lm_0202naked.html?sh=271400d1763f). Another example is when Goldman’s Prime Brokerage was implicated by the SEC in 2016 and got away with a small fine of 16 million (Source: https://www.sec.gov/news/pressrelease/2016-9.html). An example that very recently came in the news is a story where CIBC, BOA, UBS and TD Bank Prime Brokerages are accused of facilitating naked short selling and using counterfeit stock to attack and bring the stock price of a company from $34.77 to $1.83 (Source: https://www.securitiesfinancetimes.com/securitieslendingnews/industryarticle.php?article_id=224548). The DTCC also has a very long history of being associated with naked shorting. The Wall Street Journal noted that 1% of the DTCC’s volume end in failure to deliver which “have put DTCC in the middle of a long-running fight over whether unscrupulous investors are driving down hundreds of small companies' share prices… DTCC has turned a blind eye to the naked-shorting problem. ” (Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118359867562957720). The DTCC has also had numerous complaints submitted to the SEC for enabling naked shorting (source: https://www.sec.gov/rules/proposed/s72303/decosta122203.htm) and have been sued tens or hundreds of times for assisting naked shorts (source: https://smithonstocks.com/part-3-in-series-on-illegal-naked-shortings-role-in-stock-manipulation-prime-brokers-and-the-dtcc-have-a-troubling-monopoly-on-clearing-and-settling-stock-trades/ and http://counterfeitingstock.com/CS2.0/CounterfeitingStock.html and https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118359867562957720) On 1/28 Robinhood received a letter from the DTCC at 4 am requiring them to halt trading or come up with 3 billion dollars, which Robinhood did not have, and therefore with one swoop of the pen the DTCC shut down buy side momentum but strangely allowed selling. Retail investors were shut out of the market and as any student of microeconomics would know, by shutting buy but only allowing sell, the price is bound to fall. Meanwhile while hedge funds were able to keep trading not only in the market but also crosstrade in the dark pools (“private” stock markets that retail is shut out of, more on this later), and use this crucial lifeline given to them by the DTCC to prevent the squeeze from happening that day. With retail abruptly being shut out from buy (even cash accounts were shut out, which didn’t make sense) and only allowed to sell, almost everyone could smell manipulation was afoot (which triggered the Congress hearing) and the most of the blame was pointed at Robinhood. Personally and in hindsight, I believe Robinhood was just a willing scapegoat. When we think about who had the most to lose if a short squeeze occurred, I’ll narrow it down to three entities, Shorts and their stakeholders (ie Citadel), Prime Brokers and the DTCC. It’s important to remember that the actual impetus that triggered the shutdown of the market for retail investors came from the DTCC. Working backwards, if you consider that GME was rampantly naked shorted and DTCC and Prime Brokers would have to be complicit in it, I believe the DTCC, Primer Brokers and possibly Citadel (who provides 40% of Robinhood’s revenue) brazenly manipulated the market on 1/28 by shutting down purchasing for retail buyers to prevent the squeeze from being squoze on that day as doing so would be catastrophic for all aforementioned parties involved. I believe that on the upcoming Gamestop Congress hearings the Financial Services Committee needs to call on decision makers of DTCC and Prime Brokers explore their role and complicity in the shut out of retail buyers that day as well as being enablers of naked shorting in GME. An interesting thought experiment: On 1/28 when the price was 450+ and shorts were likely under 100, if we assume prime brokers allowed naked shorting in GME, then when the squeeze was about to happen (or happening), if Prime Brokers had margin had called the shorts, they would presumably also also gone down because shorts would not be able to pay in that event and the brokers would be holding the bag. By that logic, they have every incentive in this case to NOT to margin call and instead the most logical option would probably would have been to make a backroom deal, which is what I personally think most likely happened. If you’ve read up to this point, you might be thinking what can I do about this? I am aware that there a lot of cynicism that we can’t do anything, that there will be no justice for retail investors who were harmed this situation, and that institutions and people in power will prevent anything from being done. I feel this sometimes too, but remember: A single voice can be drowned out, but if we all speak together then we will make our voice heard. Ape Strong Together. With the hearing coming up on February 18th, I highly recommend you email and tweet the representatives involved in the hearing, as well as your own district representatives, and urge them to read into the factors presented in this post and call the DTCC and Prime Brokers to the hearingl. They need to be questioned on why GME has so many counterfeit shares, failed to deliver, their complicity in naked shorting, and investigated for their role in the retail shut down of 1/28. Below are 4 members of congress I recommend both tweeting and emailing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez https://twitter.com/AOC, email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) Al Green https://twitter.com/repalgreen, email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) Maxine Waters https://twitter.com/maxinewaters, email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) Nancy Pelosi Email: https://twitter.com/SpeakerPelosi email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]). And you can find other members of Financial Services Committee here to reach out to: https://financialservices.house.gov/about/committee-membership.htm If there's one thing I took away from this its that we can't wait for other people to do the right thing, we each need to individually step up to ensure it happens What follows should probably be a separate post, but I will take the opportunity to summarize some of the illegal tactics that shorts have been identified to be using in their war with retail investors. Note that this may not be an exhaustive list and there may be newer tactics deployed in the future. Retail investors might not have the same tricks, resources and willingness to break the law for profit as hedgies do, but my hope and belief is that if we pool our knowledge and analysis, we will figure out their game and effectively adapt. Feel free to forward the list below to any representatives and lawmakers if you concur that these tactics were used: Rampant Naked Shorting - With the extremely high number of Fail to Delivers (FTID) , short interest being as high as 226% recently, and institutions alone holding a staggering 177% of the total float (likely due in large part to counterfeit shares), signs strongly point to GME being rampant with naked shorts and counterfeit shares. I believe the original goal of shorts was to drive GME to bankruptcy with these naked shorts, using the laddering of naked shorts (aka short ladder attack), executed with the help of counterfeit stock which is a classic and reliable method of driving down the stock price. I believe the GME stock has seen relentlessly aggressive short attacks, especially on the week of Monday February 1st, which drove the stock price down and triggered panic selling. Ladder Attacks with the help of Dark Pools - Another identified method of ladder attacks was identified to come from crosstrading with darkpools (the stock market has its own private stock exchange where institutions can trade…). Essentially darkpools are private stock markets retail investors do not have access to, where short side funds can purchase securities “off market” and then sell “on-market”, with the effect of creating a lot more downward pressure on the market without the upward pressure from buying. Illegally masking shorts with synthetic longs. Another tactic shorts are suspected of using in GME is the use of illegally using options to evade short positions in violation of Reg SHO which SEC describes in this risk alert and which I elaborate in this post. Essentially it’s the use of using options to create synthetic longs to illegally and artificially cover and prolong short positions and at same time obscuring the true short interest %. If you consider that it would be far more profitable for shorts to not cover at high prices but instead ladder attack the price and wait for retail investors to lose interest and close their shorts at as low of a price as possible, then you can see why this strategy would be very effective. Using way out-of-money call options to obscure true short interest. You may have heard about the 43 million worth of 800 dollar calls purchased when the price was 100 and found it odd. Later it was identified as a tactic to cheaply purchase synthetic call options (since at 800 its way out of money) to obscure their short positions (with the added benefit of hedging at 800 if a squeeze does happen) One thing I want to note, particularly to legislators at the GameStop hearing: Retail investors were not incited to pump GME. Retail investors spotted a unique Short Squeeze opportunity created by the greed of short side hedge funds, whereby GameStop was being abusively naked shorted with the goal of bringing it to bankruptcy, and hedge funds were so greedy about it that they shorted the company with a short interest of 226% of float, meaning A LOT of counterfeit shares were being used to short the company. Retail investors saw this as an opportunity to short squeeze the hedge fund shorters, which is a legal and legitimate investment strategy. The short squeeze would have happened had everyone played fair, but instead, financial institutions who were culpable to the naked shorting intervened and shut down retail buying, hurting the retail investors and successfully manipulating the market. The investment itself was in my opinion a sound decision based on the short squeeze, but in hindsight retail investors did not seriously consider the risk of the market would be blatantly and publicly manipulated and that the market would be rigged against them. If this post was useful (and I hope it was! Gave up my Friday night to write this for you Apes), please upvote for visibility and share it far and wide. The GameStop hearings could be a first step and hope towards legislative change, and it’s extremely important that the right story is told at those hearings (and by the right story I mean the real truth of what happened.) I hope the truly culpable parties are investigated and brought to justice. Again, I know many of us feel cynical that anything meaning will be done towards finding justice against the lawbreakers in this case, but if you feel even an ounce of injustice or empathy at how retail investors were unfairly harmed in the course of investing in GME, I strongly urge you to contact a legislator associated with the GameStop hearings and bring this to their attention so they can review this case with more complete information. In addition I recommend you to contact the SEC and any journalist you know or via journalist tip lines. It’s not going to be easy but the more awareness we raise the higher the likelihood our voices will be heard and positive change will be made. As we navigate the rocky waters ahead, I’ll gift you with a favorite quote of mine: The only difference between a nightmare and a dream is how big your balls are. 🚀🚀🚀 Disclaimer: I am not an investment advisor, I just like the stock. Ps. If you’ve read to the end, I’ll leave you with a few more thoughts and reminders: - If I were to distill life into one thing, it would be to never lose hope. - Remember that if you’ve lost money in any way shape or form, don’t be depressed, money can always be made back and the important thing is to maintain a good attitude. - Only invest what you can afford to lose. - Perhaps the most important factor in good investing is patience. If you’d like to read more about counterfeiting stocks this is a good place to start http://counterfeitingstock.com/CS2.0/CounterfeitingStock.html
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10 Tricks Casinos Don't Want You To Know - YouTube
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![Detailed DD post [re-post after pennystocks removed it]](https://a.thumbs.redditmedia.com/-u8f_3KNR4C4xszR_qNH3GzIEi4iY0UWG9PLnkrOHt8.jpg "Detailed DD post [re-post after pennystocks removed it]")
