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PREOCCUPY WALL STREET: The Rationally Irrational GameStop Gambit

A timely and fascinating example of how rational irrationality can move very big mountains.

PREOCCUPY WALL STREET

A timely and fascinating example of how rational irrationality can move very big mountains.

Made possible by the Members at BillWhittle.com, where all of these ideas develop and grow.

https://youtu.be/G_1zVOH1joo

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57 replies on “PREOCCUPY WALL STREET: The Rationally Irrational GameStop Gambit”

Got this off the r/wallstreetbets
For anyone watching the situation on GME, please also consider these relevant points and taking the relevant actions:

  1. Big money is MORTIFIED and the retaliation is completely unprecedented: coordinated attacks, willingness to risk prison over financial loss, concealing data, etc. They’re shaking because we’re holding GME. Despite any other lack of information available, this may be the best signal for why you should hold. Period.
  2. After the massive GME rise, there was a LOT of bot activity trying to distract, dissuade, etc. They’re poisoning the well, and it’s difficult to know what can be trusted and what can’t. The one thing we DEFINITELY know, however, is that all of those attacks are being done to make us sell GME and spin the narrative that the complicit agents are victims / good guys.
  3. Robinhood + Citadel are trying to spin a BS narrative. If your institution can’t afford something, shut everything down equally and go bankrupt. Choosing a specific stock to shut down is perhaps the most egregiously corrupt action ever taken in the market (which is saying A LOT). YOU weren’t allowed to buy when major funds were, especially at CRITICAL times with CRITICAL buying opportunities to protect Citadel + big money and it collectively cost us tens of billions in lost opportunity. They’re being sued, and rightfully so, but laws need to change to ruthlessly punish them NOW. Contact your representatives, SEC, etc. if you haven’t already.
  4. Hedges might lie about their short positions, or restrict visibility as much as possible. They can break laws and face negligible fees by comparison to the rest of what they stand to lose. Therefore, it’s reasonable to assume they might do this among many other PR stunts to terrify you. Keep updated. Someone pointed out that iborrowdesk is no longer reporting on updated gme because, again, the legal consequences don’t matter enough and they’re protecting their interests. Refer to #1.
  5. We don’t know WHEN short positions will be covered, only the math that requires them to cover as we move forward. So if they delay and everyone gives in, they could save a lot of money. However, the longer they delay, the more they have to pay. So it’s a matter of whether or not they double down and face higher risk/reward or not. Be prepared to WAIT.
  6. If you set visible limits, the hedge funds can use this data to their advantage and potentially have attack vectors against us. However, if you don’t set limits, you might miss out on major trading spikes when they happen. The selfless act is to avoid low limits, but the ultimate goal is to distribute wealth to the people so take if you’re the people who need it.
  7. If you’re angry at Robinhood, move accounts AFTER this is over so that you’re not frozen. Then consider moving to SoFi, since Chamath is perhaps the one major CEO that’s on our side here and is offering probably the best alternative.
  8. If you’re angry at Google for removing negative Robinhood accounts, use Ecosia instead. They’re just as user friendly, effective, and they give 80% of their profits to green energy and planting trees. Google will lose hundreds or thousands of dollars per year from your ad revenue and data collection.
  9. Join a class action lawsuit against Robinhood to leverage the losses from the day you couldn’t buy GME. Document evidence of owning GME (it will be in your Robinhood history), or any intent of it such as on Reddit about your intent to buy stocks before they locked trading. If you owned a lot, you should join as a Named Class Representative for outcomes specific to you. These are civil cases to redistribute wealth back to you, and could be significant. Only sign up in one class action suit or it could be considered fraud. Details are still coming.
  10. It’s hard to anticipate what other stunts will be pulled to try to screw us over. Contact your representatives, particularly those in finance committees and demand REAL consequences for this criminal behavior. This matters.

You’re welcome to exchange this info freely if you find it useful. I am not a financial advisor, yadda yadda, you know the drill.

Interestingly enough, I read a story a long time ago wherein a subplot was the attempt by an unscrupulous lawyer to drive down the value of a company to the point where he could buy up enough stock to control it. Unfortunately, for him, he borrowed stock – the same way the big investment firms did with GameStop – and the majority owners were able to buy up the stock so that he couldn’t make good his “short sell” borrowing. So not only was he (and his backers) bankrupted, but also arrested for securities violations. It’s just a shame the same won’t happen to the big investment firms that _deliberately_ tried to ruin the company’s stock for _their_ profit.

So when this story broke, I understood exactly what happened and could cheer on the Reddit group.

Behaving irrational in the stock market will guarantee poverty long term. You may win short term irrational speculation (see tulips, crypto, GameStop, et al). Long term, the rational approach is to give up a medium of exchange (money) for an appreciating value stream (shares of a thriving company).
With the BlackRock announcement … I see an opportunity for a “Moving Back to America” fund that invest (and votes) with our values in mind.

I am quite certain that your assessment is a wise and considered one …

…. in times of Peace.

… these well-connected, well paid Hedge Fund Elites are at War with us Peasants. They look down on us and will move the goalpost to the right, to the left, down the field, up the field, to a stadium in the next city down the interstate, to an undisclosed location on an unnamed, other continent, even planet if they can get away with it.

You are a Peace Time Consigliore. I shall consult you when there is Peace again. But by then your advice will be too Old School to be worth listening to.

I want Conventional Thinking, I will ask the Convention Center.

Edward, as the apparent pessimistic wartime consigliore (sic), what is your unconventional wisdom to fight “well paid Hedge Fund Elites” who “are at War with us Peasants“?

We have seen it done already.

Robin Hood is not the only App out in those woods.

Fight to disrupt. Enough to make Short Selling and other Derivative practices that make the Stock Market a plaything of the privileged truly dangerous to the Hedge Funds.

These Rediiters knew what to do with money they had no need of. They can’t take it with them.

You can’t take it with you either, Sam. Have you thought about imaginative and useful ways to throw away money you know you don’t need?

Edward, thank you. I was hoping for one unconventional idea to fight “well paid Hedge Fund Elites” who “are at War with us Peasants“. Instead, you praise Rediiters (sic), and throwing money away.

Well, I don’t worship Mammon.

Now what you do is madness.

And you show Intolerance to people who do not adhere to your Faith.

Do not speak to me again.

You wrote “You are a Peace Time Consigliore. I shall consult you when there is Peace again. But by then your advice will be too Old School to be worth listening to.” That is intolerant and looking down on me. Continue to look down on the world from your perch, while offering nothing but criticism and not one idea.
I would hope that we have a love for Freedom in common, but I may be too optimistic. So I reluctantly agree with you. “Do not speak to me again.”

Would this have to do with pledging our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor? The men who originally pledged that would have been considered irrational for challenging the greatest military in the world at that time.

This whole game stop thing has shown us how we can definitely fight back against the big shots when we’re willing to make a sacrifice. And sacrifice is what we have to do because freedom is never free. My whole take on this from what I read the newspapers is that the big shots on Wall Street bet that the GameStop stock would collapse. But when small time investors saw that, they fought back by buying more in the stock, Thereby foiling the big time stocks investors plans. Kudos to the smalltime investors. This is something we can definitely use to win back our country.

How about that nice round number of 100,000,000 set up a server farm to host their own social media platforms? I’m certainly no tech genius, but could we not partition off part of our hard drive dedicated to this server farm and your “fee” for belonging to the social media platform is to provide this bandwidth to it? Let the tech giants try to shut this down. I have an operation SSD and a storage SSD in my CAD computer. It was certainly no big deal and not a large expense to have this done.

I was referring to the 100 million Trump supporters Bill spoke of banding together to set up our own server network by tying personal hard drives together. I don’t know enough about the tech to get my point across. See more comments.

The real problem is the network connection and bandwidth, not the storage.
A bittorrent-like system could be created solving the storage and processing. But the ISPs could still sabotage it, as even “peer-to-peer” connections still go through them.

So, which idea are you proposing? A server farm or a SETI-like distributed PC resource sharing solution?
Your first idea is hugely expensive, and it would surprise me if either anyone or any organization could successfully GoFundMe the necessary capital to start the construction process — nevermind the licensing and zoning costs for such a beast. In recent years, it seems that such public funding tools are also controlled by leftists who will shut this sort of venture down — HARD!
Your second idea is viable but the bandwidth will be the bottleneck. Plus, each user will have varying bandwidth available, so that means accessing some of the volumes of available data will be throttled in comparison to others. To complicate this, many individual ISP’s impose data limits, so this sort of peer-to-peer data sharing would push many people over their purchased data limits. Don’t forget that an ever-increasing number of people only have a cell phone for all personal computing and communication, which just further-reduces the available distributed data storage.
Don’t get me wrong. This sort of brainstorming is extremely valuable, but the devil always lives in the details — especially with tech.

Well there you go! I said I wasn’t a techy! So from what I am beginning to learn, the 100 million folks would need to invest in the server farm(s) to run the media platforms so that we would have control of them. Reddit and the rest got started somewhere and grew into what they are, so excuses why we can are always more productive than excuses why we can’t. We cannot afford to continue allowing a-holes like Bezos the power to shut down anything of value to us.

What is fascinating about the last 3-4 months is the number of curtains that have been drawn back to reveal establishment manipulation. We saw, and see, manipulation in the political arena. We now see manipulation in the market trading arena. Rational irrationality by the hoi poloi has the potential to upend even more establishment arenas. In retrospect, the American Revolution was an example of rational irrationality.

I think the populist move is awesome, and sticking it to hedge funds is great.
But I also think we need to be careful in characterizing Robinhood’s behavior in the Gamestop incident. RH may be acting like a Robber Baron, but whether they have malicious intent toward their customers is not clear.
When GME stock shot up, assets at Robinhood shot up as well. There are capital requirements that must be met on a continuous basis to not be shut down by regulators or trading partners. RH found itself with an unprecedented demand for capital reserves that required drawing down credit lines. Those lines are naturally at big banks.
They also needed to slow the growth of client assets before running out of credit to fulfill capital requirements. So the prohibition on buying more of the stocks causing their capital shortage may have been the “least bad” short term answer for RH’s survival.
This isn’t just a stock broker issue. Custodian of money market funds will freeze assets when a fund “breaks the buck” due to a bad investment. It is not pretty, but it is designed to slow the bleeding and get through a crisis with most assets intact.
Think of that scene in the movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” George Bailey is facing the Building and Loan account holders during a bank run and asking them not to close their accounts. “Now, now, we can all get through this if we just stick together. Don’t close your account, how much do you need today?”

“And now, The Rest of the Story”
Our apologies to Paul Harvey. 
The guerrilla action taken by Reddit investors on Game Stop not only proved successful, it also revealed how entangled the enemy web of collusion is. 
First a bit of background:
SEQUOIA CAPITAL and NEIL SHEN and the CCP are all linked. check this out:
https://wentworthreport.com/2020/11/25/the-link-between-dominion-sequoia-smartmatic-and-the-ccp/
Then, as the market run on Game Stop was occurring, Robin Hood, a trading platform, received phone calls from, wait for it, wait for it, the White House and Sequoia Capital. This quote from an insider  [from whistleblower /ClassActioRobinHood posted by u/Odin19199]: 

“…Vladimir, and the C-Suite, received calls from SEQUOIA CAPITAL and the WHITE HOUSE that pressured into closing trading on GME etc. I guarantee you the same took place at E-Trade and others who closed trading.”

this whistleblower is quoted in a pending Class Action Suit in the Southern District of New York. https://www.reddit.com/r/ClassActionRobinHood/ %5Bif you can get it- seems to drop out]
Also:  https://www.change.org/p/u-s-department-of-state-class-action-lawsuit-against-robin-hood-for-market-manipulation?recruiter=false&recruited_by_id=830934f0-6187-11eb-a73f-0b38f39edfa9
The collusion between the Biden Crime family, CCP and now the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is revealed.
Corruption crosses party lines. Recall the recent “loss” of a Republican Senate seat in GA.,Senator Kelly Loeffler? Her husband owns the NYSE. Maybe not so disappointed she lost now? While a senator, Loeffler and other senators accused of insider trading got their get-out-of-jail-free cards because

  1. they were Senators
  2. they were major Republican donors; and
  3. a controversial rule, Rule 10b5-1., that benefits those in Congress.

https://theprogressiveinvestor.org/meet-kelly-loeffler-and-jeff-sprecher-the-most-corrupt-couple-in-public-life/
Keep up the fight! 
Bill, do grow a mustache – but the following TAC Call Signs are already taken:

  1. Snidely,
  2. Super Snidely, and
  3. Snidely 1776! 

sorry. ;{) But I might share.
GOOD DAY…

What do you think of a protective list of companies that are not doing well preferably pro free speech. If we get wind that a company on the good list is being shorted we randomly raise the price of another company on the list that are probably being shorted we use intermittent reinforcement to discourage this shorting practic and to some degree if possible protect conservative American companies. We would probably have to get help from other groups and we need to find a broker or two that would not shut us down. We teach everyone we know and who can afford to lose a bit of money how to invest. Help them setup accounts and inform them of the tax issues forms to fill out. They will be watching this from now on so we might not get the same level of impact as wallstreetbets.

I had a thought the other day along these lines. My wife is consistently getting stuff from a major on line retailer (wink) and, almost as consistently, is printing those bar code return labels because she didn’t like what she ordered, it didn’t fit, she changed her mind… What if millions of customers (100,000,000 is a nice round number) bought and returned an item in one coordinated event. FedEX and the US Mail would come out alright, but are the major on line retailer – not so much.

The instant I heard the major retailers were removing My Pillow inventories, I went directly to the My Pillow website and bought two pillows directly from them. The only thing we have not shut down from Amazon is Amazon Prime streaming. We had already paid this year’s payment when they shut down Parler. We will NEVER buy anything else from Amazon and will never renew Prime, BUT I will use it as much as I can and hope they have to pay royalties to everyone we watch until it runs out.
We are actively searching for a conservative online retailer to support and we have gone back to buying locally from those we can identify as patriots. I openly ask when I contact local companies and don’t mind them know why I do, or do not, do business with them.
What a great idea on the Amazon returns scheme!! What if every Trumpeter did it once a week and kept NOTHING they purchased?

Channeling Marvin Heeymayer: “We were always willing to be rational until it was time to be irrational. sometimes rational people must do irrational things.”
Bill’s take on this being a sort of asymmetric”behind enemy lines” warfare was spot on.
Also Bill mentioning how we are vastly outnumbered in (1)The Federal Bureaucracy (2)The Education System (3) The media (both news and entertainment) makes me think of another sort of warfare that is NOT necessarily behind the lines.
Strategic retreats and choke points.
When you are vastly outnumbered an open battlefield is a a sure way to defeat. But there are two examples I can think of from history where we can look to as an example.
The first and most obvious is Thermopylae. The legendary “300 Spartans” didn’t hold out for so long because they were such fierce warrriors, although they were..They held a tactical advantage because they used their terrain to squeeze an overwhelming enemy force into a small area where they had so many people that they couldn’t maneuver or fight. In modern terms a handful of soldiers can effectively fight off dozens of enemies in a hallway. the enemy will not use their M2 Browning in such close confines because they’d be just as if not more likely to hit their own people.
Want another example? The Winter War of 1939. The “Cliff’s Notes” version is that Russia invades a small strip of land in Finland around Lake Ladoga. They vastly outnumber Finland but the land they are trying to invade is mostly pine and poplar trees and small lakes. There are just a few basic logging roads for dozens if not hundreds of miles. The Fins are running around with cross country skiis and Russians vastly outnumber them.The Russian army has more than 2000 tanks. The Finnish army has 32. The Russian army outnumbers the Fins by 2:1.
But after it was done, the Russian army’s losses were nothing short of appalling. The Russians on the lowest estimate had more than 300,000 casualties. The Finnish army had 70,000.
A good example of [what I think] “choke point” cultural warfare was the “Me Too Movement”. This movement was originally designed to get people like Donald Trump cancelled for sexual harassment claims. But the left did what I talked about before. They used a 7.62 Gatling gun in a cinder block hallway. They ended up taking out some very big leftists like Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, etc.Notice how relatively quiet the “Me Too” and “all women are to be believed” people has become after they took out too many of their own?
Another example is with the Social Media crackdown. There is going to be a point where conservatives are going to “strategically retreat” and THEY will have no room to maneuver, There will be so many of them they will be their own friendly fire collateral damage.

Weaponized Autism is the term the Chans and R/Subs use to describe this targeted hive action. In the past it has mostly been a force for pranking, but I suppose with many of the early meme warriors now adults and out of work it’s only natural that those skills for focused action would begin to enter the adult world of business and politics. It’s arguable that the 2016 meme war is what got Trump elected in the first place.

Tidings of hope and joy from the GameStop Gambit:
1) Many, maybe even most Americans haven’t had their sense of fair play completely brainwashed out of them. 
2) Unexpected disruptive reality can instantly dismantle the coercive corporatist fictional narrative. 
3) Uniting in our delight at sticking it to the villain proves the American spirit lives on.
4) A good bad example is a powerful teacher. Nothing teaches the value of justice like colossal injustice.
5) For believer and unbeliever alike, the ultimate rational irrationality: an omnipotent Creator granting his human creation free will. Amidst all the suffering that free will has unleashed upon the world, without it, we could never enjoy the opportunity to experience such a wonderfully improbable event like this.

What if we thought about banding together to sink or at least financially injure, the most destructive media or social media companies? Facebook and twitter are big big fish but who owns CNN?

It’s owned by AT&T’s WarnerMedia.

On a completely unrelated note, DuckDuckGo is a great search engine that doesn’t use trackers to violate your privacy.

The reddit forum r/WallStreetBets has been shut down. but the whole thing started on the technology reddits anyway.
Its also banned on Discord. But those talking about the VR technology weeks ago are not banned.

I read that the gamestop play is not irrational. They were experimenting with VR Haptic feedback technology and have a new design that solves a problem that others can’t fix. This means they genuinely were undervalued significantly. Wall street has all it’s money in a rival older technology. Its a kodak moment for wall street.
I’m looking for the patent. Its not in gamestop’s name it appears.

The Gamestop kerfuffle reminds me of “The Big Short” and how they big banks and investment houses tried to screw the main characters at the end when everything was collapsing.

Exactly. The collusive ‘rules’ being inflicted on us by our “betters” in this post-constitutional age have a familiar ring . . . oh yeah, I remember:
“The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power…
“American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery…
“Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.“

The Dangers of American FascismVice President Henry A. Wallace
An article in the New York Times, April 9, 1944.
From Henry A. Wallace, Democracy Reborn (New York, 1944), edited by Russell Lord, p. 259.
https://truthout.org/articles/the-dangers-of-american-fascism/

tl;dr: Shortselling is pessimistic killjoy, and crony shorting means tripping up the guy you’re betting against. The Reddit investors are doing this for fun, not profit, to stick it to the shorters. Read their forum for a few laughs… and if you can’t laugh, then really ask yourself why the Pursuit of Happiness is up there next to Life and Liberty, and why you aren’t living up to those values.

Full Post:
Shortselling is cynicism. You only shortsell when you think a company is going to fail. It’s a killjoy. How’d you like to hear that people are shorting your company? Not only telling you that you’re going to fail, but betting on it?

Crony shorting is worse: you take a company that could fail but could also succeed, you short them, then you parade around claiming they’re going to fail. If you’re convincing enough, people jump ship, dropping the prices and letting you short someone who wasn’t failing. Basically, you trip the guy you’re betting against.

This band of Reddit squeezers got tired of cynicism. They’re tired of people betting against success. They’re tired of doomsayers and naysayers and all the other crapsayers out there. The vast majority of people on that thread don’t have any interest in making money. All they care about is making the elites sweat for once. And having fun while they’re doing it. If you haven’t yet, you should check out that forum here.

If reading what they’re posting doesn’t make you laugh (even if you’re just laughing at the retards) then you really need to reexamine Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness and wonder why happiness is on the same level as the other two.

My son (he’s 22) spends a lot of time on Discord and Reddit. He’s autistic and a “gamer”. Some of the things I hear for humor are truly at the “Sam Kinnison”, “1980s Eddie Murphy” or even “Dean Martin Celebrity Roast” level of politically incorrect funny. My son in particular is incredibly witty and smart. Very good with, shall we say, adult-ish humor and puns. Most of the worst Jewish jokes believe it or not come from Isreali gamers. And Irish and Scottish gamers and redditt users are always trying to perpetuate their own bad stereotypes.

I understand your “pursuit of happiness” aspect of the gamers “taking it to the man”. And perhaps enough people will not mind sacrificing the few hundred dollars they might be playing with on this “adventure”. There will be winners and losers, as always.
I don’t have the mindset to bet on negatives rather than positives, but there is an alternative and credible view on short selling to alert the market about the potential for misallocation of capital and resources. The creative destruction element of the marketplace is also important to advance our technology and commercially available products and services. Warren discusses this pretty well at https://coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2021/01/the-public-really-hates-and-misunderstands-short-sellers.html .

This irrational action is exactly why they didn’t understand and or afraid of the Trump MAGA movement. They didn’t understand Trump he was irrational because he already had his money in his power was throwing away money on his campaign I’m taking pay cuts. All while being an outsider.
Run outside into the freezing cold in your underwear screaming like a banshee not only will people not know what your strategy is they won’t even bother to consider whether or not you have one.

This is a great idea I am just not sure how we can use it yet. What if we raise money to buy the house next to Nancy or some other deserving individual and invite a few people who need housing to live there?

I have heard, this is not definitive by any means, that there are programs running overseeing the buy/sell stock transactions. These programs watch what is happening in real time, not in milliseconds but nanoseconds, before the transaction is posted. What I mean is an incoming transaction from whatever source is read and the program decides if it should create its own transaction to post before the one it read did, thereby messing with the value of the stock in question. Did you ever wonder why a transaction you expected to take place at $10 a share took place at $12 or $8?
So, you have numerous buy transactions for the “ABD Widget Company” from several different sources. This scanning program sees these and generates its own transactions based on the behavior of the ones it is reading. Driving the price up (or down depending activity–in this case up). So the hedge funds that rely on these programs have to pony up the cash for the difference in the inflated price of the stock compared to the value it was “selling short” for.
Having to pony up the money for a stock purchase expected to be at the $4 level when it is hovering around $300 (or more) is costly. What is the number being bandied about? $58 billion? CASH! It’s like the Dukes at the end of “Trading Places,” that money was due right then and there.
But when outfits like Schwab, TD Ameritrade and Robinhood are shutting down purchases, not sales, of “ABD Widget”…the fix is in.
Like George Carlin said, its a big club and we ain’t in it.

Bill, your tale of this is pretty close to what is going on. The part that’s maybe a bit harder to understand or explain (as best I can), is that the Reddit forum realized that the hedge funds had shorted 140% of the shares of Gamestop, and those shorts are due tomorrow. Which means that the hedge funds have to buy 140% of the number of shares that even exist some time after market close on Friday – at whatever the price may be. And that ridiculous position was basically only allowed to get that way from all sorts of crazy reasons. Reddit has realized this and is calling them out on it.

Correct me if I’m wrong here, but by shorting the shares, they are actually “borrowing shares,” driving them as low as possible, buying them, and selling/returning them to the entities from which they were borrowed at the lower price making the difference in profits, seemingly out of thin air. And by shorting at 140%, that means they have to be “borrowing shares” already borrowed. Kind of like banks loaning the same money over and over again and making interest on money that doesn’t physically exist. I know there is a more elegant way of putting this, but I am on my phone atm, and I hate pecking on this thing; I need my standard keyboard. More to come.

Yeah, that’s right. They’re borrowing shares that have already been borrowed, repeatedly. They were backing their shorts with options, which is…utterly insane.

Its reported in Australia that the company owns a VR haptic feed back technology that may be a major game changer in VR and the industry and hedge funds were betting against the company because they already have invested in a rival technology. Its gone badly for the hedge funds because the technology is real and they were betting it wasn’t.
The rest of wall street thought like Bill did that gamestop sells obsolete CD games when in realty its geared up to be very significant in VR. You can’t down load VR hardware on steam.[You can buy via them.] The technology Redditors signaled the financial Redditors and the game began.

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