Jumped on the $GME bandwagon on Friday, 4 @ ~316. My 36 hours of day trading has already taught me that no matter how this plays out, I will never YOLO on a bubble ever again.
The principle seemed straightforward: hedge funds got lazy/greedy, over-shorted their positions, bet against a company that wasn't actually going under, and some astute monkies on reddit caught them and triggered a short squeeze. Even as someone who knows almost nothing about the stock market, the basic premise makes sense. But the devil's in the details, and hype is blinding.
First red flag was when I realized DeepFuckingValue did not bet on the short squeeze, he bet on undervalued stock price over a year ago. He has also trimmed his position such that no matter what happens in the squeeze, he walks away with 8 figures. So the people screaming "if he's still in, I'm still in!" and "look at those brass balls, if he can lose $5MM in a day then I can hold" are really living up to the dumb ape meme. He didn't lose $5MM yesterday, he lost $5MM in *unrealized gains*, there is a *huge* difference.
Second red flag was a common sense idea that hedge funds won't go down without a fight, and they have literally billions of dollars and decades of experience. You don't get that without learning how to game the system in complex, subtle ways. So even if they are still heavily shorted (which they might not even be anymore), and even if somehow WSB is holding some kind of meaningful leverage over them, that doesn't rule out the very real possibility they have a dozen ways out of this that people like me have no idea about.
But even in the off chance that somehow this turns around, and $GME does go "to the moon," that doesn't change the fact that it's bad long-term strategy to bet on bubbles and jump on bandwagons. They almost certainly fail, and if they don't, they only serve to inflate egos that will fall even harder on the next gamble. I'm still holding my shares but I don't expect to see my ~$1200 ever again. In the off chance I break even or see a profit here, I will count it as dumb luck and use it as seed money to learn how to invest in real long term gains.
Edit: holy shit RIP my inbox. No way I can read all that.
Want to clarify a few things. Not financial advice.
My position: I knew I was late to the party. I wanted to gamble. I knew what I was doing, and (mostly) why I did it. Hindsight showed me it was more based on emotion than I wanted to admit, but still, I'm not surprised by the outcome so far, and I'm totally OK with taking the L and calling it a lesson learned. I don't blame DFV, WSB, or anyone for my choices. I own them, even proudly, because I wanted to step out and take a calculated risk vs. sit on the sidelines out of fear of loss. I'm holding because I already bought my tickets to this ride, want to see this thing play out, and I'm fine with gambling the final $300 on the outside chance things turn around.
Your positions: brothers, sisters, nonbinary siblings: you are not your portfolio. whether up or down, your value is not based on how big or small an imaginary number is. you are a human being on the bleeding edge of 3.5 BILLION years of evolution, you have more actual success in your past and potential success in your future than you'll ever know. 12 years ago I was a penniless alcoholic literally stealing change from my grandpa to get loaded on 211 Steel Reserve. I hit my bottom, joined AA, and now I'm a network engineer, wife, kids, the whole lot. Anything is possible if you don't give up on yourself. But I know it's not that easy, we all need borrowed self-esteem before we can see the real value inside. So if this $GME gamble hit you hard, please reach out to someone. don't give up. Hell, this bubble isn't even over, it might even turn around! But either way, don't give up.
Edit2:
wow, never expected this to go this far. wrote it on my way out the door as a way to cope with the situation. read a ton of replies, probably missed most of them. thanks for all the love and hate and everything inbetween! A few more points:

• Agreed that RH deserves to be held accountable. No question they manipulated this.
• Agreed it's not over yet. the squeeze could happen. but if it does, my main personal takeaway from this experience will stand: I won't speculate on bubbles anymore. This is my position if I lose everything or make $100k.
• if you posted gains, that's awesome! so glad for you, I wish you the best!

Edit3 2/3/21:
Full disclosure, I closed my position this morning at a ~$900 realized loss.
My gut says the squeeze happened, short interest isn't what I thought it was on Friday, and the stock will return to actual value soon.

Disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor. This entire post represents my personal views and opinions, and should not be taken as financial advice (or advice of any kind whatsoever). I encourage you to do your own research, take anything I write with a grain of salt, and hold me accountable for any mistakes you may catch. Also, full disclosure, I hold a net long position in GME, but my cost basis is very low (average ~$67--I have to admit, the drop today was too tasty so my cost basis went up from yesterday)/share with my later buys averaged in), and I'm using money I can absolutely lose. My capital at risk and tolerance for risk generally is likely substantially different than yours. In this post I will go a little further and speculate more than I'd normally do in a post due to the questions I've been getting, so fair warning, some of it might be very wrong. I suspect we'll learn some of the truth years from now when some investigative journalist writes a book about it.
Thank you everyone for the comments and questions on the first and second post on this topic.
Today was a study in the power of fear, courage, and the levers you can pull when you wield billions of dollars...
Woops, excuse me. I'm sorry hedge fund guys... I meant trillions of dollars--I just briefly forget you control not just your own but a lot of other peoples' money too for a moment there.
Also, for people still trading this on market-based rationale (as I am), it was a good day to measure the conviction behind your thesis. I like to think I have conviction, but in case you are somehow not yet familiar with the legend of DFV, you need to see these posts (fair warning, nsfw, and some may be offended/triggered by the crude language). The last two posts might be impressive, but you should follow it in chronological order and pay attention to the evolution of sentiment in the comments to experience true enlightenment.
Anyway, I apologize, but this post will be very long--there's just a lot to unpack.

Pre-Market

Disclaimer: given yesterday's pre-market action I didn't even pay attention to the screen until near retail pre-market. I'm less confident in my ability to read what's going on in a historical chart vs the feel I get watching live, but I'll try.
Early in the pre-market it looks to me like some momentum traders are taking profit, discounting the probability that the short-side will give them a deep discount later, which you can reasonably assume given the strategy they ran yesterday. If they're right they can sell some small volume into the pre-market top, wait for the hedge funds try to run the price back down, and then lever up the gains even higher buying the dip. Buy-side here look to me like people FOMOing and YOLOing in at any price to grab their slice of gainz, or what looks to be market history in the making. No way are short-side hedge funds trying to cover anything at these prices.
Mark Cuban--well said! Free markets baby!
Mohamed El-Erian is money in the bank as always. "upgrade in quality" on the pandemic drop was the best, clearest actionable call while most were at peak panic, and boy did it print. Your identifying the bubble as the excessive short (vs blaming retail activity) is money yet again. Also, The PAIN TRADE (sorry, later interview segment I only have on DVR, couldn't find on youtube--maybe someone else can)!
The short attack starts, but I'm hoping no one was panicking this time--we've seen it before. Looks like the momentum guys are minting money buying the double dip into market open.
CNBC, please get a good market technician to explain the market action. Buy-side dominance, sell-side share availability evaporating into nothing (look at day-by-day volume last few days), this thing is now at runaway supercritical mass. There is no changing the trajectory unless you can change the very fabric of the market and the rules behind it (woops, I guess I should have knocked on wood there).
If you know the mechanics, what's happening in the market with GME is not mysterious AT ALL. I feel like you guys are trying to scare retail out early "for their own good" (with all sincerity, to your credit) rather than explain what's happening. Possibly you also fear that explaining it would equate to enabling/encouraging people to keep trying to do it inappropriately (possibly fair point, but at least come out and say that if that's the case). Outside the market, however...wow.

You Thought Yesterday Was Fear? THIS is Fear!

Ok short-side people, my hat is off to you. Just when I thought shouting fire in a locked theater was fear mongering poetry in motion, you went and took it to 11. What's even better? Yelling fire in a theater with only one exit. That way people can cause the financial equivalent of stampede casualties. Absolutely brilliant.
Robin Hood disables buying of GME, AMC, and a few of the other WSB favorites. Other brokerages do the same. Even for people on 0% margin. Man, and here I thought I had seen it all yesterday.
Side note: I will give a shout out to TD Ameritrade. You guys got erroneously lumped together with RH during an early CNBC segment, but you telegraphed the volatility risk management changes and gradually ramped up margin requirements over the past week. No one on your platform should have been surprised if they were paying attention. And you didn't stop anyone from trading their own money at any point in time. My account balance thanks you. I heard others may have had problems, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt given the DDOS attacks that were flyiing around
Robin Hood. Seriously WTF. I'm sure it was TOTALLY coincidence that your big announcements happen almost precisely when what has to be one of the best and most aggressive short ladder attacks of all time starts painting the tape, what looked like a DDOS attack on Reddit's CDN infrastructure (pretty certain it was the CDN because other stuff got taken out at the same time too), and a flood of bots hit social media (ok, short-side, this last one is getting old).
Taking out a large-scale cloud CDN is real big boy stuff though, so I wouldn't entirely rule out nation state type action--those guys are good at sniffing out opportunities to foment social unrest.
Anyway, at this point, as the market dives, I have to admit I was worried for a moment. Not that somehow the short-side would win (hah! the long-side whales in the pond know what's up), but that a lot of retail would get hurt in the action. That concern subsided quite a bit on the third halt on that slide. But first...
A side lesson on market orders
Someone printed bonus bank big time (and someone lost--I feel your pain, whoever you are).
During the face-ripping volatility my play money account briefly ascended to rarified heights of 7 figures. It took me a second to realize it, then another second to process it. Then, as soon as it clicked, that one, glorious moment in time was gone.
What happened?
During the insane chop of the short ladder attack, someone decided to sweep the 29 Jan 21 115 Call contracts, but they couldn't get a grip on the price, which was going coast to coast as IV blew up and the price was being slammed around. So whoever was trying to buy said "F it, MARKET ORDER" (i.e. buy up to $X,XXX,XXX worth of contracts at any price). This is referred to as a sweep if funded to buy all/most of the contracts on offer (HFT shops snipe every contract at each specific price with a shotgun of limit orders, which is far safer, but something only near-market compute resources can do really well). For retail, or old-tech pros, if you want all the contracts quickly, you drop a market order loaded with big bucks and see what you get... BUT, some clever shark had contracts available for the reasonable sum of... $4,400, or something around that. I was too stunned to grab a screencap. The buy market order swept the book clean and ran right into that glorious, nigh-obscene backstop limit. So someone got nearly $440,000 PER CONTRACT that was, at the time theoretically priced at around $15,000. $425,000 loss... PER CONTRACT. Maybe I'm not giving the buyer enough credit.. you can get sniped like that even if you try to do a safety check of the order book first, but, especially in low liquidity environments, if a HFT can peak into your order flow (or maybe just observes a high volume of sweeps occurring), they can end up front running your sweep, pick off the reasonable contracts, and slam a ridiculous limit sell order into place before your order makes it to the exchange. Either way, I hope that sweep wasn't loaded for bear into the millions. If so... OUCH. Someone got cleaned out.
So, the lesson here folks... in a super high volatility, low-liquidity market, a market order will just run up the ladder into the first sell order it can find, and some very brutal people will put limit sells like that out there just in case they hit the jackpot. And someone did. If you're on the winning side, great. It can basically bankrupt you if you're on the losing side. My recommendation: Just don't try it. I wouldn't be surprised if really shady shenanigans were involved in this, but no way to know (normally that's crazy-type talk, but after today....peeking at order flow and sniping sweeps is one of the fastest, most financially devastating ways to bleed big long-side players, just sayin').
edit *so while I was too busy trying not to spit out my coffee to grab a screenshot, piddlesthethug was faster on the draw and captured this: https://imgur.com/gallery/RI1WOuu
Ok, so I guess my in-the-moment mental math was off by about 10%. Man, that hurts just thinking about the guy who lost on that trade.*
Back to the market action..

A Ray of Light Through the Darkness

So I was worried watching the crazy downward movement for two different reasons.
On the one hand, I was worried the momentum pros would get the best discounts on the dip (I'll admit, I FOMO'd in too early, unnecessarily raising my cost basis).
On the other hand, I was worried for the retail people on Robin Hood who might be bailing out into incredibly steep losses because they had only two options: Watch the slide, or bail. All while dealing with what looked to me like a broad-based cloud CDN outage as they tried to get info from WSB HQ, and wondering if the insta-flood of bot messages were actually real people this time, and that everyone else was bailing on them to leave them holding the bag.
But I saw the retail flag flying high on the 3rd market halt (IIRC), and I knew most would be ok. What did I see, you ask? Why, the glorious $211.00 / $5,000 bid/ask spread. WSB Reddit is down? Those crazy mofos give you the finger right on the ticker tape. I've been asked many times in the last few hours about why I was so sure shorts weren't covering on the down move. THIS is how I knew. For sure. It's in the market data itself.
edit So, there's feedback in the comments that this is likely more of a technical glitch. Man, at least it was hilarious in the moment. But also now I know maybe not to trust price updates when the spread between orders being posted is so wide. Maybe a technical limitation of TOS
I'll admit, I tried to one-up those bros with a 4206.90 limit sell order, but it never made it through. I'm impressed that the HFT guys at the hedge fund must have realized really quickly what a morale booster that kind of thing would have been, and kept a lower backstop ask in place almost continuously from then on I'm sure others tried the same thing. Occasionally $1,000 and other high-dollar asks would peak through from time to time from then on, which told me the long-side HFTs were probably successfully sniping the backstops regularly.
So, translating for those of you who found that confusing. First, such a high ask is basically a FU to the short-side (who, as you remember, need to eventually buy shares to cover their short positions). More importantly, as an indicator of retail sentiment, it meant that NO ONE ELSE WAS TRYING TO SELL AT ANY PRICE LOWER THAN $5,000. Absolutely no one was bailing out.
I laughed for a minute, then started getting a little worried. Holy cow.. NO retail selling into the fear? How are they resisting that kind of price move??
The answer, as we all know now... they weren't afraid... they weren't even worried. They were F*CKING PISSED.
Meanwhile the momentum guys and long-side HFTs keep gobbling up the generously donated shares that the short-side are plowing into their ladder attack. Lots of HFT duels going on as long-side HFTs try to intercept shares meant to travel between short-side HFT accounts for their ladder. You can tell when you see prices like $227.0001 constantly flying across the tape. Retail can't even attempt to enter an order like that--those are for the big boys with privileged low-latency access.
The fact that you can even see that on the tape with human eyes is really bad for the short-side people.
Why, you ask? Because it means liquidity is drying up, and fast.

The Liquidity Tide is Flowing Out Quickly. Who's Naked (short)?

Market technicals time. I still wish this sub would allow pictures so I could throw up a chart, but I guess a table will do fine.
​

Date	Volume	Price at US Market Close
Friday, 1/22/21	197,157,196	$65.01
Monday, 1/25/21	177,874,00	$76.79
Tuesday, 1/26/21	178,587,974	$147.98
Wednesday, 1/27/21	93,396,666	$347.51
Thursday, 1/28/21	58,815,805	$193.60

What do I see? I see the shares available to trade dropping so fast that all the near-exchange compute power in the world won't let the short-side HFTs maintain order flow volume for their attacks. Many retail people asking me questions thought today was the heaviest trading. Nope--it was just the craziest.
What about the price dropping on Thursday? Is that a sign that the short-side pulled a miracle out and pushed price down against a parabolic move on even less volume than Wednesday? Is the long side running out of capital?
Nope. It means the short-side hedge funds are just about finished.
But wait, I thought the price needed to be higher for them to be taken out? How is it that price being lower is bad for them? Won't that allow them to cover at a lower price?
No, the volume is so low that they can't cover any meaningful fraction of their position without spiking the price parabolic almost instantly. Just not enough shares on offer at reasonable prices (especially when WSB keeps flashing you 6942.00s).
It's true, a higher price hurts, but the interest charge for one more day is just noise at this point. The only tick that will REALLY count is the last tick of trading on Friday.
In the meantime, the price drop (and watching the sparring in real time) tells me that the long-side whales and their HFT quants are so certain of the squeeze that they're no longer worried AT ALL about whether it will happen, and they aren't even worried at all about retail morale to help carry the water anymore.
Instead, they're now really, really worried about how CHEAPLY they can make it happen.
They are wondering if they can't edge out just a sliver more alpha out of what will already be a blow-out trade for the history books (probably). You see, to make it happen they just have to keep hoovering up shares. It doesn't matter what those shares cost. If you're certain that the squeeze is now locked in, why push the price up and pay more than you have to? Just keep pressing hard enough to force short-side to keep sending those tasty shares your way, but not so much you move the price. Short-side realizes this and doesn't try to drive price down too aggressively. They can't afford to let price run away, so they have to keep some pressure on at the lowest volume they can manage, but they don't want to push down too hard and give the long-side HFTs too deep of a discount and bleed their ammo out even faster. That dynamic keeps price within a narrow (for GME today, anyway) trading range for the rest of the day into the close.
Good plan guys, but those after market people are pushing the price up again. Damnit WSB bros and Euros, you're costing those poor long-side whales their extra 0.0000001% of alpha on this trade just so you can run up your green rockets... See, that's the kind of nonsense that just validates Lee Cooperman's concerns.
On a totally unrelated note, I have to say that I appreciate the shift in CNBC's reporting. Much more thoughtful and informed. Just please get a good market technician in there who will be willing to talk about what is going on under the hood if possible. A lot of people watching on the sidelines are far more terrified than they need to be because it all looks random to them. And they're worried that you guys look confused and worried--and if the experts on the news are worried....??!
You should be able to find one who has access to the really good data that we retailers can only guess at, who can explain it to us unwashed masses.

Ok, So.. Questions

There is no market justification for this. How can you tell me is this fundamentally sound and not just straight throwing money away irresponsibly?? (side note: not that that should matter--if you want to throw your money away why shouldn't you be allowed to?)
We're not trading in your securities pricing model. This isn't irrational just because your model says long and short positions are the same thing. The model is not a real market. There is asymmetrical counterparty risk here given the shorts are on the hook for all the money they have, and possibly all the money their brokers have, and possibly anyone with exposure to the broker too! You may want people to trade by the rules you want them to follow. But the rest of us trade in the real market as it is actually implemented. Remember? That's what you tell the retailers who take their accounts to zero. Remember what you told the KBIO short-squeezed people? They had fair warning that short positions carry infinite risk, including more than your initial investment. You guys know this. It's literally part of your job to know this.
But-but-the systemic risk!! This is Madness!
...Madness?
THIS. IS. THE MARKET!!! *Retail kicks the short-side hedge funds down an infinity loss black hole\*.
Ok, seriously though, that is actually a fundamentally sound, and properly profit-driven answer at least as justifiable as the hedge funds' justification for going >100% of float short. If they can be allowed to gamble INFINITE LOSSES because they expect to make profit on the possibility the company goes bankrupt, can't others do the inverse on the possibility the company I don't know.. doesn't go bankrupt and gets a better strategy from the team that created what is now a $43bn market cap company (CHWY) that does exactly some of the things GME needs to do (digital revenue growth) maybe? I mean, I first bought in on that fundamental value thesis in the 30s and then upped my cost basis given the asymmetry of risk in the technical analysis as an obvious no-brainer momentum trade. The squeeze is just, as WSB people might say, tendies raining down from on high as an added bonus.
I get that you disagree on the fundamental viability of GME. Great. Isn't that what makes a market?
Regarding the consequences of a squeeze, in practice my expectation was maybe at worst some kind of ex-market settlement after liquidation of the funds with exposure to keep things nice and orderly for the rest of the market. I mean, they handled the VW thing somehow right? I see now that I just underestimated elite hedge fund managers though--those guys are so hardcore (I'll explain why I think so a bit lower down).
If hedge fund people are so hardcore, how did the retail long side ever have a chance of winning this squeeze trade they're talking about?
Because it's an asymmetrical battle once you have short interest cornered. And the risk is also crazily asymmetrical in favor of the long side if short interest is what it is in GME. In fact, the hedge funds essentially cornered themselves without anyone even doing anything. They just dug themselves right in there. Kind of impressive really, in a weird way.
What does the short side need to cover? They need the price to be low, and they need to buy shares.
How does price move lower? You have to push share volume such that supply overwhelms demand and price therefore goes down (man, I knew econ 101 would come in handy someday).
But wait... if you have to sell shares to push the price down.. won't you just undo all your work when you have to buy it back to actually cover?
The trick is you have to push price down so hard, so fast, so unpredictably, that you SCARE OTHER PEOPLE into selling their shares too, because they're scared of taking losses. Their sales help push the price down for free! and then you scoop them up at discount price! Also, there are ways to make people scared other than price movement and fear of losses, when you get right down to it. So, you know, you just need to get really, really, really good at making people scared. Remember to add a line item to your budget to make sure you can really do it right.
On the other hand..
What does the long side need to do? They need to own as much of the shares as they can get their hands on. And then they need to hold on to them. They can't be weak hands either. They need to be hands that will hold even under the most intense heat of battle, and the immense pressure of mind-numbing fear... they need to be as if they were made of... diamond... (oh wow, maybe those WSB people kind of have a point here).
Why does this matter? Because at some point the sell side will eventually run out of shares to borrow. They simply won't be there, because they'll be safely tucked away in the long-side's accounts. Once you run out of shares to borrow and sell, you have no way to move the price anymore. You can't just drop a fat stack--excuse me, I mean suitcase (we're talking hedge fund money here after all)--of Benjamins on the ticker tape directly. Only shares. No more shares, no way to have any direct effect on the price whatsoever.
Ok, doesn't that just mean trading stops? Can't you just out-wait the long side then?
Well, you could.. until someone on the long side puts 1 share up on a 69420 ask, and an even crazier person actually buys at that price on the last tick on a Friday. Let's just say it gets really bad at that point.
Ok.. but how do the retail people actually get paid?
Well, to be quite honest, it's entirely up to each of them individually. You've seen the volumes being thrown around the past week+. I guarantee you every single retailer out there could have printed money multiple times trading that flow. If they choose to, and time it well. Or they could lose it all--this is the market. Some of them apparently seem to have some plan, or an implicit trust in certain individuals to help them know when to punch out. Maybe it works out, but maybe not. There will be financial casualties on the field for sure--this is the bare-knuckled capitalist jungle after all, remember? But everyone ponied up to the table with their own money somehow, so they all get to play in the big leagues just like everyone else. In theory, anyway.
And now, Probably the #1 question I've been asked on all of these posts has been: So what happens next? Do we get the infinity squeeze? Do the hedge funds go down?
Great questions. I don't know. No one does. That's what I've said every time, but I get that's a frustrating answer, so I'll write a bit more and speculate further. Please again understand these are my opinions with a degree of speculation I wouldn't normally put in a post.

The Market and the Economy. Main Street, Wall Street, and Washington

The pandemic has hurt so many people that it's hard to comprehend. Honestly, I don't even pretend to be able to. I have been crazy fortunate enough to almost not be affected at all. Honestly, it is a little unnerving to me how great the disconnect is between people who are doing fine (or better than fine, looking at my IRA) versus the people who are on the opposite side of the ever-widening divide that, let's be honest, has been growing wider since long before the pandemic.
People on the other side--who have been told they cannot work even if they want to, who wonder if congress will get it together to at least keep them from getting thrown out of their house if they have to keep taking one for the team for the good of all, are wondering if they're even living in the same reality.
Because all they see on the news each day is that the stock market is at record highs, or some amazing tech stocks have 10x'd in the last 6 months. How can that be happening during a pandemic? Because The Market is not The Economy. The Market looks forward to that brighter future that Economy types just need to wait for. Don't worry--it'll be here sometime before the end of the year. We think. We're making money on that assumption right now, anyway. Oh, by the way, if you're in The Market, you get to get richer as a minor, unearned side-effect of the solutions our governments have come up with to fight the pandemic.
Wow. That sounds amazing. How do I get to part of that world?
Retail fintech, baby. Physical assets like real estate might be a bit out of reach at the moment, but stocks will do. I can even buy fractional shares of BRK/A LOL.
Finally, I can trade for my own slice of heaven, watching that balance go up (and up--go stonks!!). Now I too get to dream the dream. I get to feel connected to that mythical world, The Market, rather than being stuck in the plain old Economy. Sure, I might blow up my account, but that's because it's the jungle. Bare-knuckled, big league capitalism going on right here, and at least I get to show up an put my shares on the table with everyone else. At least I'm playing the same game. Everyone has to start somewhere--at least now I get to start, even if I have to learn my lesson by zeroing my account a few times. I've basically had to deal with what felt like my life zeroing out a few times before. This is number on a screen going to 0 is nothing.
Laugh or cry, right? I'll post my losses on WSB and at least get some laughs.
Geez, some of the people here are making bank. I better learn from them and see if they'll let me in on their trades. Wow... this actually might work. I don't understand yet, but I trust these guys telling me to hold onto this crazy trade. I don't understand it, but all the memes say it's going to be big.
...WOW... I can pay off my credit card with this number. Do I punch out now? No? Hold?... Ok, getting nervous watching the number go down but I trust you freaks. We're still in the jungle, but at least I'm in with with my posse now. Market open tomorrow--we ride the rocket baby! And if it goes down, at least I'm going down with my crew. At least if that happens the memes will be so hilarious I'll forget to cry.
Wow.. I can't believe it... we might actually pull this off. Laugh at us now, "pros"!
We're in The Market now, and Market rules tell us what is going to happen. We're getting all that hedge fund money Right? Right?
Maybe.
First, I say maybe because nothing is ever guaranteed until it clears. Secondly, because the rules of The Market are not as perfectly enforced as we would like to assume. We are also finding out they may not be perfectly fair. The Market most experts are willing to talk about is really more like the ideal The Market is supposed to be. This is the version of the market I make my trading decisions in. However, the Real Market gets strange and unpredictable at the edges, when things are taken to extremes, or rules are pushed beyond the breaking point, or some of the mechanics deep in the guts of the Real Market get stretched. GME ticks basically all of those boxes, which is why so many people are getting nervous (aside from the crazy money they might lose). It's also important to remember that the sheer amount of money flowing through the market has distorting power unto itself. Because it's money, and people really, really, really like their money--especially when they're used to having a lot of it, and rules involving that kind of money tend to look more... flexible, shall we say.
Ok, back to GME. If this situation with GME is allowed to play out to its conclusion in The Market, we'll see what happens. I think all the long-side people get the chance to be paid (what, I'm not sure--and remember, you have to actually sell your position at some point or it's all still just numbers on your screen), but no one knows for certain.
But this might legitimately get so big that it spills out of The Market and back into The Economy.
Geez, and here I thought the point of all of this was so that we all get to make so much money we wouldn't ever have to think and worry about that thing again.
Unfortunately, while he's kind of a buzzkill, Thomas Petterfy has a point. This could be a serious problem.
It might blow out The Market, which will definitely crap on The Economy, which as we all know from hard experience, will seriously crush Main Street.
If it's that big a deal, we may even need Washington to be involved. Once that happens, who knows what to expect.. this kind of scenario being possible is why I've been saying I have no idea how this ends, and no one else does either.
How did we end up in this ridiculous situation? From GAMESTOP?? And it's not Retail's fault the situation is what it is.. why is everyone telling US that we need to back down to save The Market?? What about the short-side hedge funds that slammed that risk into the system to begin with?? We're just playing by the rules of The Market!!
Well, here are my thoughts, opinions, and some even further speculation... This may be total fantasy land stuff here, but since I keep getting asked I'll share anyway. Just keep that disclaimer in mind.

A Study in Big Finance Power Moves: If you owe the bank $10,000, it's your problem...

What happens when you owe money you have no way to pay back? It's a scary question to have to face personally. Still, on balance and on average, if you're fortunate enough to have access to credit the borrowing is a risk that is worth taking (especially if you're reasonably careful). Lenders can take a risk loaning you money, you take a risk by borrowing in order to do something now that you would otherwise have had to wait a long time or maybe would never have realistically been able to do otherwise. Sometimes it doesn't work out. Sometimes it's due to reasons totally beyond your control. In any case, if you find yourself there you have no choice but to dust yourself off, pick yourself up as best as you can, and try to move on and rebuild. A lot of people had to learn that in 2008. Man that year really sucked.
Wall street learned their lessons too. Most learned what I think most of us would consider the right lessons--lessons about risk management, and the need to guard vigilantly against systemic risk, concentration of risk through excess concentration of leverage on common assets, etc. Many suspect that at least a few others may have learned an entirely different set of, shall we say, unhealthy lessons. Also, to try to be completely fair, maybe managing other peoples' money on 10x+ leverage comes with a kind of pressure that just clouds your judgement. I could actually, genuinely buy that. I know I make mistakes under pressure even when I'm trading risk capital I could totally lose with no real consequence. Whatever the motive, here's my read on what's happening:
First, remember that as much fun as WSB are making of the short-side hedge fund guys right now, those guys are smart. Scary smart. Keep that in mind.
Next, let's put ourselves in their shoes.
If you're a high-alpha hedge fund manager slinging trades on a $20bn 10x leveraged to 200bn portfolio, get caught in a bad situation, and are down mark-to-market several hundred million.. what do you do? Do you take your losses and try again next time? Hell no.
You're elite. You don't realize losses--you double down--you can still save this trade no sweat.
But what if that doesn't work out so well and you're in the hole >$2bn? Obvious double down. Need you ask? I'm net up on the rest of my positions (of course), and the momentum when this thing makes its mean reversion move will be so hot you can almost taste the alpha from here. Speaking of momentum, imagine the move if your friends on TV start hyping the story harder! Genius!
Ok, so that still didn't work... this is now a frigging 7 sigma departure from your modeled risk, and you're now locked into a situation that is about as close to mathematically impossible to escape as you can get in the real world, and quickly converging on infinite downside. Holy crap. The fund might be liquidated by your prime broker by tomorrow morning--and man, even the broker is freaking out. F'in Elon Musk and his twitter! You're cancelling your advance booking on his rocket ship to Mars first thing tomorrow... Ok, focus--this might legit impact your total annual return. You need a plan, and you know the smartest people on the planet, right? The masters of the universe! Awesome--they've even seen this kind of thing before and still have the playbook!! Of course! It's obvious now--you borrow a few more billion and double down again first thing in the morning. So simple. Sticky note that Mars trip cancellation so you don't forget.
Ok... so that didn't work? You even cashed in some pretty heavy chits too. Ah well, that was a long shot anyway. So where were you? Oh yeah.. if shenanigans don't work, skip to page 10...
...Which says, of course, to double down again. Anyone even keeping track anymore? Oh, S3 says it's $40bn and we're going parabolic? Man, that chart gives me goosebumps. All according to plan...
So what happens tomorrow? One possible outcome of PURE FANTASTIC SPECULATION...
End of the week--phew. Never though it'd come. Where are you at now?... Over $9000^\)!!! Wow. You did it boys, and as a bonus the memes will be so sweet.
^\)side note: add 8 zeros to the end...
Awesome--your problems have been solved. Because...
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BOOM
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Now it's EVERYONE's problem. Come at me, Chamath, THIS is REAL baller shit.
Now all you gotta do is make all the hysterical retirees watching their IRAs hanging in the balance blame those WSB kids. Hahaha. Boomers, amirite? hate when those kids step on their law--I mean IRAs. GG guys, keep you memes. THAT is how it's done.
Ok, but seriously, I hope that's not how it ends. I guess we just take it day by day at this point.
Apologies for the length. Good luck in the market!
Also, apologies in advance for formatting, spelling, and grammatical errors. I was typing this thing in between doing all kinds of other things for most of the day.
Edit getting a bunch of questions on if it's possible the hedge funds are finding ways to cover in spite of my assumptions. Of course. I'm a retail guy trying to read the charts and price action. I don't have any special tools like the pros may have.

There is a prevailing mis-understanding among people fresh to the market that you can buy and sell as much as you want at the "market price." This is false. You are buying and selling from real people or algorithms that believe they can scalp your order. The idealized scenario is that GME rallies, Melvin covers, and everyone at reddit gets out at the top. This represents a misunderstanding of market mechanics. Melvin will cover before we truly know it, and the crash will happen as quick as the rally.
So with recent events, you must ask yourself:

Who is Your Counterparty?

Nothing is a sure bet. How confident are you that your counterparty is who you think it is? Thousands of redditors & new traders beyond have been buying stocks fully confident that Melvin Capital hasn't exited their trade. This is also supported by some analysis provided by two different firms, although their estimates differ some amount. Confounded in this is the interpretation of the data: Does this include market makers and dealers that are short stock but covered with calls or options deltas? Is their information fully accurate in an event the likes of which has never happened? It's tough to know for sure.

Know Everyone's Hand

Your guess on how much they've covered and when they covered has a massive effect on how you perceive the value of this trade. Buying if you think Melvin has $10b notional to cover is a much better bet than if they only have $2b to cover. You also have to consider how much notional the rest of the market has bought in anticipation of a squeeze. The difference between the two represents your effective edge.
Remember, we don't actually know Melvin's current position. We don't know what's going on behind closed doors. We only know the hand they're showing us via media. Has their clearing firm taken over? Has a much bigger collection of firms absorbed the position? Have they been buying since Monday? Have they covered and have new funds entered the space at a much better level?
You are fighting Goliath at a poker table in the city of Gath. The pot is worth $25 billion dollars. Ken Griffin has never lost. Melvin's prime brokers Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche are not used to losing (well, Deutsche is). They will do whatever it takes to take the pot from you and leave you holding the bag. They will not blink twice because there is a lot of fucking money on the line.

Know What Can Go Wrong

Nobody could have guessed everything that happened this week. Prepare yourself for the unexpected. Your brokerage will undoubtedly close out your position at the worst possible time. The stock could be halted for days. You could be assigned on ITM options. Your stock could get delisted. Your stock may get diluted.

Only Spend What You're Willing to Lose

This one is self explanatory. Your investment could go to zero. Even if you think you make money on every trade, if your bet size is 100%, the long term value of your portfolio is zero.

Don't Take Out Loans on Emotional Capital

If you are new, you really don't know the gut-wrenching, stomach-turning feeling of seeing the possibility of your net liquidity hitting zero or negative. It fucking sucks. You just know the highs. You're buying along the speculative frenzy and frantic rallies, wrapped in anti-billionaire & pro-underdog themes. It may even feel good to think that a guy who cut his teeth at a firm notorious for an insider trading scandal is getting his comeuppance. We love the feeling. If you are fully invested financially & emotionally, you are completely overleveraged and will pay the price. Make feeling good your goal, and set limits that you can stomach.
There are several feel-good stories of people making life-changing money to pay off their student loans or their family members' surgeries. Please think twice about this, and only spend what you can afford to lose. If placing a bet makes the difference between your pet living or dying, you may have a gambling problem. These were success stories because they got in at a much better level and could have had a much sadder ending.
Secondly, don't take it personal. There are people on the other side of your trades, your brokerage support line, the subreddit, the media. They are all playing their own hand to the best of their knowledge. It's easy to blame a broker, yell at their support desk, hate-tweet at a company, or even rage-text that guy you know who develops APIs at ETrade. A lot of people across the industry are rooting for you. Fuck, even Ted Cruz and AOC are rooting for you, because this transcends politics. If you're mad at Melvin Capital or Ken Griffin or the guys who crashed the economy in 2008, keep it that way. They will try and misdirect your anger in every single direction: brokerages, the media, and reddit. If your enemies are a few guys at the top holding a $25b short position and moving levers, keep it that way.
Thirdly, if you don't want to be a human being for the sake of the person on the other side, be a human being for your wallet's sake. You make better financial decisions in the absence of emotions.

Note: BlackBerry is NOT a cyber security company. They are a security company. Revenue does not care about your AI driven autonomous machine learning EV car with DDs. People are using these terms loosely. A quick lookup for interviews with John Chen would prove that he explicitly avoids these terms as they do not define nor matter to the products/revenue of BlackBerry. QNX revenue does not depend on any of these terms, it's on installation on any device. This includes the space station, of which there is 1 of with obviously non-recurring revenue. Buying based on these basis would be gambling.
Bull:

• Business transformation: BlackBerry is now a software company, starting the transformation in 2015. The focus is security, the general term.
• 5 Products:
  • QNX: Embedded system OS.
    • Multi-OS housing: It has the capability to allow for multiple OSs on a single chip.
    • Real-time availability/software prioritization: Not all pieces of software operate on the same priority. Steering/braking would be higher priority than media, and QNX allows for that. Even if the thread/core is shared with other applications, when high priority software is requesting a resource it will be prioritized to ensure reliability.
    • Resource sharing: CPU, RAM, and GPU resource sharing between different applications capability. Two applications can share the same CPU core and bump each other based on prioritization.
    • Why not Linux? QNX has the highest certification for security available. Linux does not. CEOs would want to avoid liability and this certification allows for that.
    • Device agnostic: It can be installed on any device, not just cars. Any IoT and offline device can use QNX.
  • QNX Hypervisor: Consolidate multiple OSs on a single SoC using virtualization
    • SoC: System on a chip. Instead of using multiple ECUs, which is what car manufacturers currently do, they can use one single chip to run multiple high priority applications and multiple OSs. This is what Tesla does now.
    • Virtualization: Running an OS in a virtual environment. Think Linux environment inside of Windows. This helps with debugging for developers without having to have the actual hardware.
  • IVY: Scalable cloud-connected software platform for vehicles.
    • What is it a solution for? When a vehicle manufacturer wants a way to transmit the QNX/OS data safely, normalize it, and visualize it/interact with it. It also allows car manufacturers to own the data, unlike other OSs.
    • Scalable: AWS servers are capable of handling the load from many endpoints.
    • Software platform: There is currently no centralized software ecosystem for vehicles. IVY is providing that.
    • Non-BB developers would be able to use an SDK to develop applications on IVY for infotainment/general apps/others. IVY will also use ML to gain insight on unrecognized patterns by developers. An example of this is detecting if a car slipped, without having the developer connect multiple sensors to figure out if that event happened.
    • 50/50 joint effort on revenue and effort to develop the ecosystem. Using AWS's knowledge in AI/ML for calculated sensors (slip, driver on seat, etc)
    • Usage by other vendors: A city can connect to the data from vehicles and detect when ice/slipping is happening. If brakes are getting overheated coming from a high elevation area. If a car had an accident, etc. An insurance company can provide an app to give discounts similar to the currently implemented OBD-2 readers. A maintenance provider can also connect to this data and check if an error is specific to maintenance, malpractice, or general misuse.
  • Spark: Endpoint management. Basically API security. Did not delve far into this, basic info.
    • Unified Endpoint Security: This is the endpoint where a laptop/phone/IoT device hits. It provides encryption and security around that. Continuous authentication is a part of it, where a device is learning the user behavior using ML and continuously checking if the behavior matches the original owner; if not, lock the device.
    • Unified Endpoint Management: Basically managing your API for devices.
    • Zero trust: I think this is specifically talking about continuous authentication. Basically, it's not an authenticate once and forget it. It's constantly tracking behavior to verify the user is the authenticated user.
  • AtHoc: Non-enterprise communication system.
    • Target customers: Government, healthcare, education, etc.
    • Solution: A communication system targeting non-enterprise businesses; specifically for Event management, cross organizational communication/collaboration, mass notifications.
    • Who does this benefit? You've seen the hacks in healthcare/educational/governmental sector. This is specifically for them.
  • SecuSUITE: Phone application to allow employees to use work related data in personal devices without cross communication (between personal and work data).
    • End to end encryption.
    • Separation of concerns between personal and work data. Employers CANNOT access your personal data.
    • Used by NATO; doesn't carry much value in my book but maybe in yours.
• Customer oriented solutions: As you've seen in the products above, some products overlap and are just names to target specific customers. It allows customers to easily understand what product could solve their issue. Continuous authentication is a great example of this: Their customer complained that they kept re-authenticating, so they designed a solution allowing them to authenticate once and using ML they learned their behavior and can continuously check if the user is the owneauthenticated user. This kind of passion in leadership is good for business.
• Liability: QNX has the highest security rating available. Most CEOs want to avoid liability when it comes to security, using QNX would help them avoid that in a similar way cloud services help them avoid being blamed for hacking.
• Leadership: BBs leadership isn't one to play on famous words to drive the stock up. John Chen explicitly states this in his interviews and says they are a security company. Not cyber, doesn't mention AI or whatever. He explicitly avoids meme words and understands what the point of BBs business is.

Where I think growth can be made:

1. QNX in more cars. They can capitalize on the idea of less ECUs = less cost for OEMs + security.
2. IVY usage by OEMs along with QNX.
3. IVY ecosystem. Maybe application billing?
4. Professional services (support) for the products listed.
5. AtHoc increased market share in more governmental/healthcare/educational entities.
6. SecuSUITE for more enterprise customers with the idea being saving employers money from purchasing work phones for employees, and worrying about securing them.

Bear:

• Revenue: It is not yet based on a subscription/usage basis. You can only produce so many cars, and they don't give an insight on how much do they charge per car for QNX. Anywhere from $2 - $20 is what was mentioned in transcripts. This is a growth area, but not at a trajectory that's excellent. IVY does work on a subscription/usage basis, but IVY can be used WITHOUT QNX. I'm worried about this, but still see it as an area that will generate revenue in the range of $400 MM - $600 MM at the price of $20 per 30M cars. The 30M per year is based on the listing of their customers and their yearly production rates. Keep in mind I stated any device, this does not include trucks or other IoT devices.
• Market share: These are relatively new products. J.P. Morgan pointed this out as a priority for growth. This could end up not working out and growth never happens. This is a relatively low risk due to QNX and IVY providing SO MUCH value for car manufacturers Vs. other products in the market.
• Patent revenue: They sold a chunk of their no longer relevant patents to Huawei. This makes up a small (<= 32%) of their revenue and is a one time sale. The coming quarter could be equal or less to the last quarter revenue due to either other sales making up the lost revenue from patents, or coming up short. It could come higher if they sold more services, but due to COVID and knowing that many car manufacturers have lowered their production due to chip shortage, the next quarter will most likely be lower.
• VW.os: VW is making their own OS. VW.os is what they're calling it. They're currently using QNX, but that revenue could potentially stop. Personally I don't believe VW is capable of doing that. It's a marketing hype. Their companies are not capable of good collaboration or good implementation based on what I've read and researched (can't find article right now), but it's something to be concerned about.
• QNX success: While IVY could be using QNX, it does NOT depend on it. There is potential for OEMs to use IVY without QNX. I think this is a low risk, but still risk. 19 OEMs are already using QNX.
• Lack of Answers: I can't get much out of their earnings call. They don't delve into pricing for QNX, how they plan to grow it besides getting more car manufacturers and more cars post Corona. How they plan to do recurring revenue. A breakdown of each revenue segment would be helpful, but I don't see that either and there is hesitancy to delve into it.

Prediction: I think QNX can become a $1B revenue per year alone. $2B revenue per year as a company is not far fetched. Without a subscription/usage based model, it is difficult to see how growth can go beyond that. BB is good in 2-5 years, not this year. I can see their revenue growing to potentially $2B - $4B revenue per year. They did mention trying to figure out a subscription/usage based billing, if done then the revenue would be much higher. I think $18 is a fair price on the high end. It could grow further than that, but expectations would be HIGH.
Resources:

1. John Chen interview: https://youtu.be/_hQQlCWMrQA?t=313
2. John Chen interview: https://youtu.be/FNdbGhun2E8
3. J.P. Morgan IVY presentation: https://cache.webcasts.com/content/jpmo001/1416508/content/58ffe5daaa24e738fdef0d065b9b15077892ea63/pdf/secured/BlackBerry_-_Winter_2020-21_Investors_Deck.pdf
4. IVY: https://blackberry.qnx.com/en/aws
5. QNX: https://blackberry.qnx.com/content/dam/bbcomv4/qnx/software-solutions/embedded-software/qnx-neutrino-rtos/pdf/QNX-Neutrino-Product-Brief-v7.pdf
6. QNX Hypervisor: https://blackberry.qnx.com/content/dam/qnx/products/hypervisohypervisorGEM-ProductBrief.pdf
7. QNX Tools: https://blackberry.qnx.com/en/embedded-software/qnx-software-development-platform
8. Spark UEM: https://www.blackberry.com/content/dam/bbcomv4/blackberry-com/en/products/resource-centeresource-library/guides/guide-blackberry-spark-uem-suites.pdf
9. Spark UES: https://www.blackberry.com/content/dam/bbcomv4/blackberry-com/en/products/resource-centeresource-library/briefs/Solution_Brief_BlackBerry_Spark_UES_Suite_Final.pdf
10. AtHoc: https://www.blackberry.com/us/en/products/blackberry-athoc
11. AtHoc in healthcare: https://www.blackberry.com/us/en/products/blackberry-athoc/healthcare
12. SecuSUITE: https://www.blackberry.com/us/en/products/secusuite
13. Customer oriented solutions - continuous authentication: Start the video at 5:04: https://www.blackberry.com/us/en/events/security-summit/2020/video-details/work-anywhere
14. Easier link: https://vimeo.com/497426347
15. VW OS: https://electrek.co/2020/06/19/vw-to-develop-its-own-operating-system-but-dodges-question-about-id-3-software/

Position: 1,500.
Disclaimer: I don't know everything, I may be incorrect about some things. This is based on what I've researched and to the best of my ability. Do your own DD. Obligatory this is not an investment advice.
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Edit: This is the only sub with a lot of discussion. I appreciate y'all.
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Edit 2: One day later, marked closed $18.03. Crazy.

There seems to be a lot of interest in stocks from young investors. I imagine that many will make their way from WSB to this sub because WSB is a bunch of monkeys flinging poo. You may have lost some money and now you want to explore stocks from less of a Meme and emotional perspective.
There is nothing wrong with Meme stocks. Meme stocks can be fun. I have had fun with it. I am also a 42-year-old man with rental properties, commercial properties, and a few small businesses. BB, NOK, AMC, and even GME are all fine. The DD is fine behind all of them. The issue is that if I lose $1,000 then I can write myself a check from one of my businesses for $10,000 to make myself feel better. That is not a brag...it is simply sharing that people come from different places in life.
You are just starting off life and probably have far fewer resources and every dollar matters more.
I challenge anyone to CMV but I am not a big proponent of stocks as a core investment strategy. Here are my reasons why.

1. Information has a time-decay of value. Meaning that information becomes less valuable over time. Data is what is mined to often produce new Information. You are at a disadvantage when it comes to both data and information. The information that you get on a retail level has already lost much of its value. This is where the saying "if you read it in the news you are already too late"
2. You have no power. You simply cannot compete with whales and whales don't become whales by letting people glean the crumbs that are leftover. They have the power to move markets, you don't.
3. You have no control over outcomes. You have no control over the success of a company. You have no control over other investors. You have no control over anything.
4. The odds on options are not that great. Even compared to blackjack our betting the outside of a roulette table they are just not that good.
5. Many people that are far more intelligent than you are, lose money at stock investing.
6. Your emotions and FOMO will be a hindrance and problematic.
7. Most stock investors are too young to understand the market cycles

I like stocks as a small part of an overall investment strategy for young people for the following reasons.

1. Time is valuable and you have the most time
2. Compound interest is the "force" behind all investing and compound interest compliments the stock market very well
3. Certain strategies can complement long-term wealth building

Building wealth through stocks is like trying to build a house one brick at a time...just you, and you are gathering the straw, digging the mud, and pressing each brick by hand. When it rains many of your bricks will wash away. If the sun shines for enough days then you will make good progress.
The problem is that all markets cycle. The housing market cycles. Petroleum and natural gas cycles. The stock market cycles. I believe that a full market cycle is around 18 years with around 7-12 years in an up cycle and 6-11 in a down cycle. In the stock market, they call these bull and bear markets. We are currently in one of the longest bull markets on record due to interest rates and the feds printing money. No one has a crystal ball but sooner or later the market will peak. When this happens Boomers will be the first to pull money out and put it into bonds or CDs. Boomers are as big of a whale as retail can get. Anyone and I mean anyone could have made money in the current market. If ten years ago you had asked a five-year-old to pick five of their favorite things and invested in their choices you would have made money. That could be Barbies, YouTube, Pizza, Sprite, and their Dog. They would have made money on any stocks you picked around those five things.
There will come a day sooner or later when Boomers and GenX will see trends in the market that they don't like. Boomers own multiple houses and are deep into retirement. GenX is a small but powerful generation that is now on the back Nine Holes of life. Gen X will largely inherit the wealth of the Boomers. There will come a shift towards mitigating losses and that shift is not far away. When they move their money from markets so goes the market.
Is it fair to say that one of the longest bull cycles on record could transition to one of the longest bear cycles?
Let's look at Millenials...a generation that is struggling to just buy a home. Boomers own a few. GenX may own a couple and Millenials that are now entering into their forties struggle with one. Millenials are a massively sized generation that I believe is now bigger than both GenX and Boomers combined because Boomers are dying at a rapid pace. Millenials are the generation that were adults starting life and careers in 2008 and full-blown families with Covid-19. Maybe one of the unluckiest generations.
GenZ is this very talented and intelligent generation. Y'all are creating disruptions in culture, in politics, and in Wall Street. You are savvy and demanding. Giving billionaires the finger while pissing on the front door of their mansions.
But you need to be careful.
Stocks are not the key to your success. They are just a single tool in your toolbox. A better tool may be early homeownership or owning a small business. Life is about options...and I am not talking about the gambling options of Wall Street. I am talking about the options of having equity in a home to adapt to economic swings. I am, talking about the options of owning a small business where your day to day decisions make you smarter and more valuable. Where you own assets that make you money. Most importantly you have control over your own destiny.
I am not telling you not to invest in stocks. I am just telling you that it should be a limited part of your overall strategy in life. Unless someone has been through two complete cycles of the stock markets then I would take their advice with a grain of salt.
General advice:

1. Don't sell stocks that you have taken a loss on
2. Buy when everyone is selling and sell when everyone is buying
3. Invest in stocks with a strategy based on your knowledge and experience
4. Invest only what you can afford to lose
5. Stocks work best with time. Leave them alone
6. Be a value investor
7. Invest with a purpose

Number seven is important. For example, I like Robotics, AI, and Automation. I like these is two specific areas....transportation and mining. I operate in the Transportation industry. I know that very soon human drivers will be eliminated and self-driving trucks will take over. Trucks will be loaded, driven, and unloaded without a single human being doing any of that work. With that will come an entire supporting industry. Tow trucks will need to be automatically dispatched when trucks break down or in accidents. AI will need to be involved in decision making. I will see these changes before I am dead and I am 42.
I like underwater mining. Our oceans are the next frontier and the next gold rush. We have areas of sea bottom that has very little life but is rich in gasses, minerals, and thermal energy. Automation, AI, and robotics will play a huge role in underwater mining. I will see this transition start in my lifetime and I am 42.
Beyond that, once we have machines that are capable of underwater mining then we have the basics for machines that can mine inner-system planetary objects. From nearby asteroids to the moon, to thermal energy collection closer to the sun, to Mars and beyond. The wealthiest person in existence will be the person that is able to start the first off-planet mining operation. Where there is no EPA, no taxes on land, where we are not building sub-divisions next to mines. Where we don't have to worry about the ecosystem. Where gasses and pollutants are not pollutants because there is nothing of consequence to pollute. The largest land-owners in existence will be the owner of off-world mining operations. That may not happen in my lifetime...but it may in yours.
I like investing in Meme stocks because they are fun. But I also invest in Robotics, AI, and automation with one-single question....is this company taking humanity one-step close to automated transportation or underwater mining? I invest with a purpose.
Sure I will grab up some value stocks every now and then. People are going to be flying more than ever in a few years. People are going to be more social than ever in a few years. Shoot Condom manufacturers are a buy right now because people will be..........you get the idea.
The whole reason that I wrote this excessively long post is to maybe get you into thinking about your strategy....what is it? And to caution you on being "all-in" on stocks.
Stonks don't always go up.

So I'm seeing a lot of information out here about Melvin and 6 days to cover and all that and I think a lot of it is outdated. Actually, I know it's outdated because people were saying the same thing a week ago and $GME has risen like 300% since then. There's been a huge amount of price action, and yet the shorts everyone has been talking about have exited their positions and there's still tons of short interest. What gives? Why haven't the shorts learned their lesson? Are they just stupid? Maybe. But maybe not... Let's consider the short's view on this situation:
The $GME Short Thesis as of 1/27: Here's the scene. A stock which is widely regarded as colossally overvalued has doubled in value several times within a matter of weeks. You know that the retail investor plan is to force shorts into a squeeze scenario. However, volume is up to unprecedented levels as new traders flood into the market to get in on the action, so the days to cover is falling, making it easier for shorts to get out quickly when they get a window. Meanwhile, older long retail investors (aka bought like a day ago) are staring at what are, to them, very nice gains. It's been several days of insane price action already, and people are predicting the end is near because, well, it must be, right? The uncertainty and perceived risk of losing unrealized profits are very high.
You look at this and predict the following: retail investors who have made tidy profits will sell upon a volatility move, causing a chain reaction of sell-offs. In other words, you expect that the bubble is gonna pop upon sharp price action (could be either way) and then there's going to be a sharp decline as retail investors scramble to take whatever profits they can before the next guy sells at a higher price.
So what do you do as a short with that thesis? Short the stock, of course! Even if there's tremendous upwards price action the next day, you can just sell short again, pay off the old loan with the new short money, and now you're in an even better position. Your best bet as a short is to short the stock the moment before the bubble pops. High interest rates from your lender don't bother you because, based on the thesis, you're only holding your loan for a few days and the share price on the other side is going to be way below where you shorted. This is why short interest is still strong - it's generally a good play to short a bubble that you expect to pop soon.
How the Short Thesis could fall apart: So, the whole short thesis is based upon the idea that retail investors are going to close out their $GME positions very abruptly as soon as they see some nice gains and sense that "the end is near." But here's the thing: what if they don't? As an investor in $GME myself, I did the following with my gains - I sold a portion of them to cover my initial cost basis and now I'm just sitting on the rest as "house money." I'm not buying in anymore because I'm managing risk, but I'm not pulling out because I think there's more juice to squeeze and I've got a lot of cushioning below if the price does start dropping. If this strategy is broadly applied by other retail investors (and it's a pretty classic and intuitive investing/gambling strategy), volume will slow down and the price will generally plateau.
So as a short, aren't you happy that the price stopped rising? HELL NO. You need that price to either fall so you can close at a profit or rise sharply so you can roll your position up. $GME remaining tremendously overvalued at a steady price for a long time would be horrible for you as a short. You've taken out a huge loan, you're paying huge interest, and there seems to be no end in sight. This is how shorts playing volatility are forced to close at big losses - when the interest over time eats up all of their potential profits before volatility strikes. I think this is the scenario in which we'd see a true MOASS.
Disclaimer: I am just a guy on the internet. I don't have specialized education in the market, but I think this is a pretty plausible thesis for the continued short interest and how the MOASS might develop. I could be totally wrong! Let me know what you think about it in the comments
Positions: 100 shares $GME, avg cost basis 103.95

Reposting because last post didn’t seem to go through due to network errors. Disclosure: I have no position in IPOE, nor will I ever initiate one. Disclaimer: Not a financial advisor. Do your own DD.
Note: I did this write-up for a friend; it’s obscenely long. If nobody here reads it, I won’t be particularly upset. But I’m posting it on the off-chance someone will find it interesting. I have seen a significant number of comments, in the daily threads and elsewhere, in which people call SoFi their “long-term fintech hold” or otherwise declare their intention to hold IPOE/SoFi significantly longer than a trader playing SPACs typically would - in some cases, all the way through merger and into the great unknown. Heck, I’ve even seen some commenters describe it as a “forever hold.” If that describes you, I would strongly suggest you think twice about that decision.
For months, the #1 piece of advice on this sub, beyond all else, has been to buy pre-rumor, post-Bloomberg rumor, or on an LOI - as close to NAV as possible - and sell shortly after the DA bump. Additionally, SPACs that have seen significant declines in their share prices in the days/weeks/months following a DA, as most do, could often be ripe for buying in anticipation of a run-up to the merger date. Buying after a huge run-up, with intentions of holding for the “long-term,” is hardly a strategy that can reasonably be expected to generate good risk-adjusted rates of return, especially in such a wildly speculative corner of the market.
In other words, it seems the players are becoming consumed by the game, and forgetting the rules in the process. Fascinatingly, this is an almost universal characteristic of frothy, speculative market bubbles. During the initial phase of the dot-com bubble, most retail investors were buying into pre-revenue, cash-incinerating companies at IPO, believing - often correctly - that hype would build for the company (it just has so much potential!!!) and that, as a result, they could subsequently flip those shares to another buyer at a significantly higher price. For a while, they were right. So what went wrong? Retail traders started to truly believe. It was no longer a case of playing the “greater-fool” game. They no longer bought shares and held them until other people started to believe in the potential of those companies; they started to genuinely believe in the narratives those companies were crafting and the vision of the future they were presenting to their investors. Instead of selling the sales pitches, they began falling for them. Eventually, the pool of capital sitting idle waiting to be deployed into the next “game-changing” company dried up…and the rest, I suppose, is history.
Which brings me to SoFi. Specifically, why their nosebleed valuation is not particularly attractive and the downside risks are, at least on this sub, massively under-appreciated.
To begin, let’s take a brief look at the history of the company, something that most posters on this sub seem to have surprisingly little knowledge of. In the aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis, the big banks massively de-leveraged their consumer lending portfolios. Student loan debt was one of the primary targets during this de-leveraging campaign, because, despite being non-dischargeable in bankruptcy proceedings (at least for now), it is, like most non-collateralized loans, quite risky for lenders. As such, the big banks became quite hesitant to issue new student loan debt - or refinance existing debt - at reasonable interest rates.
Enter SoFi.
SoFi, founded in 2011, attempted to capitalize on this opportunity. By offering to consolidate and refinance student loans, especially for high-earning recent college graduates, at reasonable interest rates, SoFi began putting together a large customer base that it believed it could easily cross-sell other financial products to - home loans, banking services, wealth management services, and the like. Backed by some of the most prestigious VC firms and investors, it looked like a sure winner. And, briefly, it was. Even as their marketing budget exploded, in early 2017 SoFi, believe it or not, actually expected to turn a profit of $200 million on $650 million in revenue. The same year, SoFi entered M&A talks with Charles Schwab, but ultimately talks fell apart when Schwab balked at the $8-10B valuation SoFi was seeking. Nonetheless, things were looking very good for the company.
And then everything went very, very wrong. SoFi, which had made a name for itself by offering student loan refinancing to prime borrowers from elite schools with very high incomes, saw its loans start to massively underperform expectations. Nonetheless, despite a massive $200M write-down in Q2 on underperforming loans, it still managed to book a $126 million profit on $547 million in revenue, though company guidance indicated that they expected further deterioration in the performance of their loan portfolio in the coming year. Those dire expectations seem to have been borne out; by 2018, the company was deep in the red, with EBITDA of -$227 million for the year. Their cross-selling model, which they are still describing as a key part of their business strategy, seems to have failed catastrophically - by early 2018, SoFi’s home loans were losing the company an astounding $10,000 apiece, on average.
And thus began the company’s long and hard dive into the red, from which it has not yet recovered. The decline was - to put it bluntly - catastrophic. Revenues collapsed, with 2018 revenues declining over 50% YoY to $241M. Desperate to save their rapidly-failing business, investors determined that they would need to start buying growth - at almost any cost. The company’s marketing and advertising spending shot through the roof, culminating in a deal to buy the naming rights to the LA Rams/Chargers stadium for an eye-popping $400 million. So how much growth has the >$500M in spending since then actually bought them? Let’s see.
To take a look at where things currently stand, let’s take a look at their shockingly amateurish investor presentation. (As a brief aside - for anyone still doubtful that the company is selling hype, just take a quick glance through their investor presentation. It’s littered with the logos and names of the most egregiously overvalued tech companies currently on the market (why on Earth should the name “Tesla” appear anywhere in their pitch deck, other than under an executive’s name??). And ”AWS of fintech?” Seriously?). Interestingly, their presentation claims that the company is targeting “high earners not well served (HENWS) ages 22+ predominantly earning $100,000+.” Sound familiar? It’s precisely the strategy that monumentally failed the company, beginning in Q2 2017. And, perhaps most intriguingly, it’s a strategy the CEO disavowed just last year, when he promised SoFi’s investors he would allow trading in fractional shares to target individuals who “can’t afford to buy their first stock”, and therefore, as the WSJ reporter notes, would be “unlikely to have expensive degrees from fancy schools.” In other words, SoFi was going to additionally target a completely different - and much less valuable - client base for their brokerage platform. But what’s the issue, you say? After all, shouldn’t companies be nimble, and rapidly adjust their strategy to reflect changing conditions in their target markets? And maximize market share at almost any cost? Perhaps.
Or perhaps not. In my opinion, SoFi, in their investor presentation, is now attempting to massively oversell the value of their current client base. Their user growth does, admittedly, seem somewhat impressive. But it appears to come at an incredibly high cost. Their financial services segment, where presumably most recent user growth has been generated, is obscenely unprofitable. Last year, it reported a $133M loss on $11M in revenue. It’s also quite clear that the growth there is decidedly inorganic, and therefore the staying power of those gains is questionable at best. That said, the biggest problem here is the shockingly low revenue figures, which I believe indicate that SoFi is acquiring massive numbers of “low-value” customers, and paying out the nose to do so. I know everyone here (myself included) loves to hate on Robinhood, but...in the 2Q 2020, their trading platform generated $180M in revenue, just from selling order flow. IN A SINGLE QUARTER. I really hate to admit it, but that’s incredibly impressive. On an annualized basis, RH is generating an incredible $55 ARPU by selling order flow. And it’s important to remember that SoFi’s user base is incredibly small, in comparison. In 2020, their “SoFi Invest” platform had a paltry 334k users. RH had over 13 million. SoFi, however, projects 150% YoY growth for their brokerage platform. To be completely honest? I think that’s bullshit. The massive influx of retail traders into the market due to COVID has already happened. And, to put it bluntly, Robinhood won. Sure, there may be something of a minor exodus from the platform due to their incredibly poor handling of the whole meme stock fiasco. But, seriously...you think those disgruntled traders will be going to SoFi? A platform with very limited capabilities (they still don’t have options trading?!) and a clunky UI that doesn’t even offer margin trading?!
“But not everybody trades options! Surely at least some of the Robinhood exiles will land at SoFi!!” Yes, this is probably true. But, unfortunately, options traders are the real cash cows for these discount brokerages. Of the $180M in revenue RH generated in Q2 last year, $111M was from selling order flow on options. That’s an absolutely massive 62%. And those traders now only have 2 choices: they are either going to forgive RH and stick with them, or move to a big-boy broker like TDA, Vanguard, Fidelity, or IBKR.The reality is this: only the least valuable Robinhood customers are likely to land at SoFi. Acquiring the more valuable customers further down the line will be incredibly expensive, if not outright impossible.
But SoFi is more than a brokerage firm, so let’s stick a valuation on that portion of their business and move on. Robinhood is planning a $20B IPO; let’s say the market triples that and gives it a 60B valuation. Robinhood, as of EoY 2020, has roughly 40x as many users, and their users are MUCH more valuable based on ARPU figures. But let’s be incredibly generous and value SoFi Invest at $2B.
Let’s see what else SoFi has to offer. The vast majority (83%, to be exact) of their revenue comes from their lending platform, which offers primarily student loan consolidation and refinancing and personal loans. Because both types of loans are non-collateralized, let’s treat them as identical. So how much are other student loan providers worth? Turns out, not a whole lot. Navient, for example, trades at just 6x earnings. At that multiple, SoFi’s lending operations would be worth just $500 million. But they’re a tech company, right!! So let’s multiply that by a factor of 10 for no reason whatsoever and agree that SoFi’s lending operations are worth $5B.
Finally, we have Galileo, their “technology platform.” What is Galileo? It’s primarily a payments processor, but it also provides bank account infrastructure services. Last year, it generated $103M in revenue; that same year, it was acquired by SoFi for $1.2B. Let’s assume, for no good reason, that SoFi underpaid by a factor of 3, and value Galileo at $3.6B. (Note that this is 36x revenue; another payment processor, Payoneer, just announced a DA with FTOC. At the current trading price, the market is valuing Payoneer at roughly 10x revenue.)
At Friday’s closing price, the implied valuation of SoFi is roughly $20B. Even with the silliest assumptions I could stomach, that’s at least double what I came up with. Yes, there have been a number of very positive changes at the company over the last 2 years. Their home loan business appears to at least generate them a small profit, and their unsecured debt portfolio appears to be much less risky that it was when things turned south in mid-2017. But rectifying some of their previous failures can hardly justify their massively bloated current valuation; even with ridiculous, completely unjustified multiples like the ones I arbitrarily chose above, there’s simply no way that kind of valuation can be justified.
Which brings us full circle. I don’t have a clue what the short-term price action of IPOE stock will look like. If I did, I would have opened a position in it last Friday. But I can assure you that the current implied valuation is completely nonsensical. Maybe you will buy the stock, and find a “greater fool” to sell it to at a much higher price sometime in the near future. Perhaps you will double your money overnight. Maybe you will hold it for 10 years, and by then SoFi will have eclipsed even JP Morgan. Despite the decidedly unexceptional nature of all of their offerings, maybe the “one-stop-shop” approach to personal finance will make them an unstoppable juggernaut. But understand that you’re making a gamble. A huge gamble. On a company that is attempting to execute a solid turnaround strategy, but has not yet succeeded. My advice? Stick to the tried and true strategy of this sub. As difficult as it may be sometimes, do not forget the rules of the game. In almost all cases, once you stop playing the game, the game plays you.
GLTA.

I’ve been wanting to do a post like this for a long time now. Now that healthcare has basically been the hottest thing for the last year (and somehow still getting even hotter), I thought it would be a good time. Many people try to buy into pharmaceutical companies around FDA approval targets without truly understanding what they’re getting into. Full disclosure, I am a doctor, but I will try to write this in layman’s terms as much as possible. If I get anything wrong, I’ll be sure to edit the post. To the best of my knowledge, everything I am about to say is researched (and therefore correct).
I’m going to go through the entire FDA approval process as a timeline, and then at the end, talk about other things to consider when investing in pharmaceuticals (i.e., more nuanced stuff that requires/applies healthcare understanding). One caveat here is people use “phases” in multiple ways. The way I will use it is the way I see most often being used in press releases and DD on pennystocks.
Preclinical: to begin, you must submit a proposal that basically states why you think a biologic compound will work. Without getting too technical, the preclinical is basically where you demonstrate a proof of concept.
Here is a very generic example: Let’s say that HIV binds to GME receptor on cells. I have been doing petri dish experiments on a compound I created that prevents anything from binding to GME (this is in vitro if you ever see that term tossed around). I submit this evidence to the FDA and say that I think my compound will work in theory. TONS of things work in vitro and never progress beyond that. At this point, the FDA says, “okay we think your compound might work too, you can start human trials.”

Investor takeaway: the results of this phase mean absolutely nothing. If a drug failed in this phase, that would truly mean the company is incompetent in both their ability to assess the science, and in their ability to provide meaningful news to generate investor buzz.

Phase 1: Anything that passes preclinical is ready for human trials. We are talking very small trials, like less than 100 people. For smaller companies, this is their chance to get some hype about their pharmaceutical. For anyone who understands the process, this is truly meaningless. Again, working in vitro does not (and likely will not) translate to working in humans. This phase typically lasts several months and is primarily designed to ensure that the drug is safe.
Here is a real life example, one that has already garnered a lot of attention: Atossa Therapeutics (ATOS) and their new breast cancer drug. Here is where medical knowledge (or solid research) can really help you. Their new breast cancer drug is called endoxifen. There are already multiple analogues (drugs that work in exactly the same way with minor differences in their chemical structures) on the market. Given the number of safe analogues on the market, it is likely (but not certain) this drug will be safe for human use. It is important to note here that phase 1 trials may be done on healthy participants without any disease, solely to test for safety. Accordingly, passage through phase 1 still may not demonstrate proof of concept on humans who have a particular disease.
Let’s say that ATOS had announced its intention to start testing breast cancer treatment and initiate phase 1 trials. Like I said, the likelihood of success is pretty high given the success of previous analogues. On the other hand the downside is huge. Companies can essentially go bankrupt at this stage if their “sure thing” drug or medical device fails. Always be sure to look at risk vs reward. A drug that enters phase 1 only has around a 14% likelihood of making it all the way to FDA approval. Certain categories of drugs like those that treat cancer have even lower success rates (3.4%). While FDA drug approval does appear to be increasing more than 80% of drugs that enter this stage will never see market.

Investor takeaway: the road from here is super long and passing this phase really can’t tell you anything about its success in further stages. Many drugs are analogues and breeze through this phase, it is important not to get too hyped on them for that reason.

Phase 2: Unlike phase 1 that focuses on drug safety, phase 2 tests the efficacy of the drug you are studying. This phase will typically have less than 1,000 participants, but they will all have the disease of interest. In this phase, we are looking to ensure that the drug works (provides statistically significant improvement) and is relatively safe as far as side effects. To limit research bias, sometimes we will divide the participants and give some the drug and keep some as the control group (they may get a placebo or no drug at all).
This is a pretty straightforward stage and lasts anywhere from months to years. It really depends on the drug being studied. I would never really expect a mainstream drug to get through this stage in under 6 months. The only conditions in which that would be logically feasible are either:

1. COVID (solely because of the politicization of the process) or
2. drugs treating conditions with extremely high mortality (because people won’t survive more than 6 months).

Lots of companies like to start releasing press releases close to FDA review of phase 2 results. Always be wary of those results. If my breast cancer drug was successful in 600 people and failed in 300, then while the numbers look good, the data may not be there. There is a lot that goes into statistical analysis and it isn’t quite as simple as more people did well than did poorly.
It’s also important to realize that side effect profile is really important. Let’s say the aforementioned breast cancer agent ends up prolonging life in 80% of the study participants that received the drug. However, there’s also this nasty little side effect of developing a pulmonary embolism in 15-20% of people. That’s not insignificant and it is up to the FDA to decide whether or not the risk outweighs the benefit. Sometimes the FDA will order companies to redo this phase if the data are inconclusive. With cancer agents, this is common because the drugs are so toxic to so many parts of the body, so it really is about risk/benefit analysis.
The important thing to look at in this phase when comparing the results of the treatment group to the control group is what is called the p-value. For those of you who took stats, you should know what this is. For those that didn’t, just know that in healthcare, results with a p-value >0.05 are considered insignificant. It’s also important to note that clinical and statistical significance are also key things to remember. Sometimes the benefit of the drug is so minimal that the side effect profile outweighs the benefits and the FDA will prevent the drug from moving forward. It’s also important to remember that if this is a drug entering a market where there are competitors, the FDA will look and see if this drug provides enough benefit over existing drugs before making a decision.
One more nuance that pharmaceutical companies love to do is change the primary target. In the statistics world, that’s a pretty big no-no. If my initial proposal was that the breast cancer agent would prolong the life of my patients, and then suddenly I start talking about how it actually increases their pain-free time, this is a huge red flag. You can deduce that they likely didn’t meet their primary target and pivoted to something else they could meet. In any study you can find specific characteristic that makes you look good.

Investor takeaway: this is the first phase that companies can really release “meaningful” information. Because of this, many companies try to raise funds at this time to capitalize on the hype, be wary of the words used in their press releases and marketing.

Phase 3: Phase 3 is basically a repeat of phase 2, but bigger. It’s used to determine real efficacy of a drug. In raw numbers, we are looking at about 300-3,000 participants and up to 4 years of data. Phase 3 looks at the exact same things as phase 2: efficacy and side effects observed among a treated group (and sometimes compared to a control group).
Statistical significance, that is, the thing that tells you whether the drug worked, is based heavily upon power. If you want to increase power, you can increase the sample size. In phase 3, the FDA is giving the drug a chance to sink or swim. They are once again looking to make sure you don’t discover any new, obscure side effects and to ensure that the phase 2 results were not a statistical anomaly/the drug really does work.
Beyond sample size, the biggest difference between phases 2 and 3 is that we are observing a longer period of time for adverse events. Note the maximum time differences: up to 2 years for phase 2, and up to 4 years for phase 3. There are side effects that don’t manifest within the first 2 years. A very simple example is, actually cancer agents that cause cardiac fibrosis or pulmonary fibrosis after years of use. These are things that may have been masked in the phase 2 study because the duration.
The other thing is that we may discover rarer, more deadly side effects in this phase. Let’s say in phase 2, we found that 2 of our 1,000 participants developed brain cancer. The phase 2 data may show that this was statistically insignificant and cannot be attributed to the drug (remember, sample size is very important). Maybe the phase 3 study will suddenly show that another 8 people developed brain cancer and it was due to the drug.

Investor takeaway: many drugs fail here, and not because they don’t work. They fail because they aren’t significantly better than what is available or the benefit is not enough to outweigh the risks. FDA approval isn’t simply contingent upon a drug working, there are many, many factors that come into play.

Phase 4: this is the big phase, thousands of participants, possibly multiple hospitals around the country/world. This phase further increases the power of the data and shows that the drug really, really does work and is actually safe. Getting to phase 4 is actually a pretty big deal.
At this point, the company will apply for FDA approval including all of the information they have gathered at this point. In this stage, we are considering not only efficacy and safety, but also simplicity of use, and drug abuse potential. Drug abuse potential is a pretty hot topic right now because, well, opioid epidemic. Many opioids in the last few years have not received FDA approval solely because they are too easily abused. This entire application process takes 6-10 months for the FDA to review all the evidence and decide what happens.
It is not uncommon for the FDA to request more data before approving a drug or further review. Many times they will request the company conduct a new study of x to determine y. This is normal but can seriously impede the approval timeline of a drug. This is where you have to remember opportunity cost. After approval it goes to market, yay!

Investor takeaway: you may think once the drug receives FDA approval that you are out of the woods in terms of your investment. You would be wrong.

Making it to market: When a drug finally hits market, there are two major things for investors to consider. Let’s start with the scary one, removal from the market. Remember how many times I’ve mentioned power, and sample size above? That becomes super relevant here. Depending on the drug, when it finally reaches market we may have many-fold more “participants” with which we can study the side effects of the drug.
Sometimes drugs are pulled from the market because certain side effects emerge that flew under the radar during clinical trial phases. Sometimes the FDA sticks a black box warning on the drug (which really makes doctors stop prescribing it unless they have to). In either care, share prices tend to drop. They will plummet, though, if the FDA removes it from market.
Market earnings: The last “opportunity” for investors in the approval process is the sales data after the first quarter of marketing. This is where the company shows their revenue from the sale of the drug. If you have medical knowledge, you can really thrive here. If you don’t, you are likely to get screwed because you probably won’t understand the nuances in what drives physicians to prescribe drugs and avoid others.
Just because a drug works super well doesn’t mean it will ever be used. Examples of that are ACRX’s new sufentanil agents. Those will likely see poor sales data because from a clinical perspective, even though they are approved, and work, they will almost never be used. You would not know that without understanding the specifics of post-operative pain management.
And finally, a disclaimer. Anything I said here, I can be totally wrong. Sufentanil could become the most popular agent on the market for reasons I don’t understand or couldn’t fathom. Maybe ACRX will have an insanely good marketing team. I am simply talking about making the best decision based on the available knowledge. Stock prices are fickle beasts and they don’t always respond the way we expect.
A message to those who tend to hold on to their bags to gamble on FDA approval:

Yes, this really is gambling. Look at the statistics of how often drugs make it past each stage. You lost 40% on ATOS, you know what would be worse? Somehow their drug fails and now you have lost 80%. You see a drug running before FDA decision deadline, don’t buy it. No one knows how the FDA is going to respond and you are just as likely to lose your money than you are to make it.
Honestly, you are more likely to lose money because there are three outcomes, and two cause you to lose money, one of which will potentially bankrupt your position. The FDA could either approve the drug (yay!), outright reject the drug (oof), or ask for more information. That last one is kind of misleading because it may not mean the drug has failed, but it definitely will destroy the hype built up and tank the share price. The extra information requested could take forever to get and you would, once again, have to consider opportunity cost.

If there is anything else you think I should have discussed, just let me know and I will try to add it.
If this was helpful, please let me know. If so, I can start posting regular medical-based DD on the trending healthcare tickers from this sub!

How the Hunt Brothers Cornered the Silver Market and Then Lost it All

TL:DR: yes its long. Grab a beer.

​
Until his dying day in 2014, Nelson Bunker Hunt, who had once been the world’s wealthiest man, denied that he and his brother plotted to corner the global silver market.
Sure, back in 1980, Bunker, his younger brother Herbert, and other members of the Hunt clan owned roughly two-thirds of all the privately held silver on earth. But the historic stockpiling of bullion hadn’t been a ploy to manipulate the market, they and their sizable legal team would insist in the following years. Instead, it was a strategy to hedge against the voracious inflation of the 1970s—a monumental bet against the U.S. dollar.
Whatever the motive, it was a bet that went historically sour. The debt-fueled boom and bust of the global silver market not only decimated the Hunt fortune, but threatened to take down the U.S. financial system.
The panic of “Silver Thursday” took place over 35 years ago, but it still raises questions about the nature of financial manipulation. While many view the Hunt brothers as members of a long succession of white collar crooks, from Charles Ponzi to Bernie Madoff, others see the endearingly eccentric Texans as the victims of overstepping regulators and vindictive insiders who couldn’t stand the thought of being played by a couple of southern yokels.
In either case, the story of the Hunt brothers just goes to show how difficult it can be to distinguish illegal market manipulation from the old fashioned wheeling and dealing that make our markets work.
The Real-Life Ewings
Whatever their foibles, the Hunts make for an interesting cast of characters. Evidently CBS thought so; the family is rumored to be the basis for the Ewings, the fictional Texas oil dynasty of Dallas fame.
Sitting at the top of the family tree was H.L. Hunt, a man who allegedly purchased his first oil field with poker winnings and made a fortune drilling in east Texas. H.L. was a well-known oddball to boot, and his sons inherited many of their father’s quirks.
For one, there was the stinginess. Despite being the richest man on earth in the 1960s, Bunker Hunt (who went by his middle name), along with his younger brothers Herbert (first name William) and Lamar, cultivated an image as unpretentious good old boys. They drove old Cadillacs, flew coach, and when they eventually went to trial in New York City in 1988, they took the subway. As one Texas editor was quoted in the New York Times, Bunker Hunt was “the kind of guy who orders chicken-fried steak and Jello-O, spills some on his tie, and then goes out and buys all the silver in the world.”
Cheap suits aside, the Hunts were not without their ostentation. At the end of the 1970s, Bunker boasted a stable of over 500 horses and his little brother Lamar owned the Kansas City Chiefs. All six children of H.L.’s first marriage (the patriarch of the Hunt family had fifteen children by three women before he died in 1974) lived on estates befitting the scions of a Texas billionaire. These lifestyles were financed by trusts, but also risky investments in oil, real estate, and a host of commodities including sugar beets, soybeans, and, before long, silver.
The Hunt brothers also inherited their father’s political inclinations. A zealous anti-Communist, Bunker Hunt bankrolled conservative causes and was a prominent member of the John Birch Society, a group whose founder once speculated that Dwight Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent” of Soviet conspiracy. In November of 1963, Hunt sponsored a particularly ill-timed political campaign, which distributed pamphlets around Dallas condemning President Kennedy for alleged slights against the Constitution on the day that he was assassinated. JFK conspiracy theorists have been obsessed with Hunt ever since.
In fact, it was the Hunt brand of politics that partially explains what led Bunker and Herbert to start buying silver in 1973.
Hard Money
The 1970s were not kind to the U.S. dollar.
Years of wartime spending and unresponsive monetary policy pushed inflation upward throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. Then, in October of 1973, war broke out in the Middle East and an oil embargo was declared against the United States. Inflation jumped above 10%. It would stay high throughout the decade, peaking in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution at an annual average of 13.5% in 1980.
Over the same period of time, the global monetary system underwent a historic transformation. Since the first Roosevelt administration, the U.S. dollar had been pegged to the value of gold at a predictable rate of $35 per ounce. But in 1971, President Nixon, responding to inflationary pressures, suspended that relationship. For the first time in modern history, the paper dollar did not represent some fixed amount of tangible, precious metal sitting in a vault somewhere.
For conservative commodity traders like the Hunts, who blamed government spending for inflation and held grave reservations about the viability of fiat currency, the perceived stability of precious metal offered a financial safe harbor. It was illegal to trade gold in the early 1970s, so the Hunts turned to the next best thing.
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Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; chart by Priceonomics

As an investment, there was a lot to like about silver. The Hunts were not alone in fleeing to bullion amid all the inflation and geopolitical turbulence, so the price was ticking up. Plus, light-sensitive silver halide is a key component of photographic film. With the growth of the consumer photography market, new production from mines struggled to keep up with demand.
And so, in 1973, Bunker and Herbert bought over 35 million ounces of silver, most of which they flew to Switzerland in specifically designed airplanes guarded by armed Texas ranch hands. According to one source, the Hunt’s purchases were big enough to move the global market.
But silver was not the Hunts' only speculative venture in the 1970s. Nor was it the only one that got them into trouble with regulators.
Soy Before Silver
In 1977, the price of soybeans was rising fast. Trade restrictions on Brazil and growing demand from China made the legume a hot commodity, and both Bunker and Herbert decided to enter the futures market in April of that year.
A future is an agreement to buy or sell some quantity of a commodity at an agreed upon price at a later date. If someone contracts to buy soybeans in the future (they are said to take the “long” position), they will benefit if the price of soybeans rise, since they have locked in the lower price ahead of time. Likewise, if someone contracts to sell (that’s called the “short” position), they benefit if the price falls, since they have locked in the old, higher price.
While futures contracts can be used by soybean farmers and soy milk producers to guard against price swings, most futures are traded by people who wouldn’t necessarily know tofu from cream cheese. As a de facto insurance contract against market volatility, futures can be used to hedge other investments or simply to gamble on prices going up (by going long) or down (by going short).
When the Hunts decided to go long in the soybean futures market, they went very, very long. Between Bunker, Herbert, and the accounts of five of their children, the Hunts collectively purchased the right to buy one-third of the entire autumn soybean harvest of the United States.
To some, it appeared as if the Hunts were attempting to corner the soybean market.
In its simplest version, a corner occurs when someone buys up all (or at least, most) of the available quantity of a commodity. This creates an artificial shortage, which drives up the price, and allows the market manipulator to sell some of his stockpile at a higher profit.
Futures markets introduce some additional complexity to the cornerer’s scheme. Recall that when a trader takes a short position on a contract, he or she is pledging to sell a certain amount of product to the holder of the long position. But if the holder of the long position just so happens to be sitting on all the readily available supply of the commodity under contract, the short seller faces an unenviable choice: go scrounge up some of the very scarce product in order to “make delivery” or just pay the cornerer a hefty premium and nullify the deal entirely.
In this case, the cornerer is actually counting on the shorts to do the latter, says Craig Pirrong, professor of finance at the University of Houston. If too many short sellers find that it actually costs less to deliver the product, the market manipulator will be stuck with warehouses full of inventory. Finance experts refer to selling the all the excess supply after building a corner as “burying the corpse.”
“That is when the price collapses,” explains Pirrong. “But if the number of deliveries isn’t too high, the loss from selling at the low price after the corner is smaller than the profit from selling contracts at the high price.”
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The Chicago Board of Trade trading floor. Photo credit: Jeremy Kemp

Even so, when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission found that a single family from Texas had contracted to buy a sizable portion of the 1977 soybean crop, they did not accuse the Hunts of outright market manipulation. Instead, noting that the Hunts had exceeded the 3 million bushel aggregate limit on soybean holdings by about 20 million, the CFTC noted that the Hunt’s “excessive holdings threaten disruption of the market and could cause serious injury to the American public.” The CFTC ordered the Hunts to sell and to pay a penalty of $500,000.
Though the Hunts made tens of millions of dollars on paper while soybean prices skyrocketed, it’s unclear whether they were able to cash out before the regulatory intervention. In any case, the Hunts were none too pleased with the decision.
“Apparently the CFTC is trying to repeal the law of supply and demand,” Bunker complained to the press.
Silver Thursday
Despite the run in with regulators, the Hunts were not dissuaded. Bunker and Herbert had eased up on silver after their initial big buy in 1973, but in the fall of 1979, they were back with a vengeance. By the end of the year, Bunker and Herbert owned 21 million ounces of physical silver each. They had even larger positions in the silver futures market: Bunker was long on 45 million ounces, while Herbert held contracts for 20 million. Their little brother Lamar also had a more “modest” position.
By the new year, with every dollar increase in the price of silver, the Hunts were making $100 million on paper. But unlike most investors, when their profitable futures contracts expired, they took delivery. As in 1973, they arranged to have the metal flown to Switzerland. Intentional or not, this helped create a shortage of the metal for industrial supply.
Naturally, the industrialists were unhappy. From a spot price of around $6 per ounce in early 1979, the price of silver shot up to $50.42 in January of 1980. In the same week, silver futures contracts were trading at $46.80. Film companies like Kodak saw costs go through the roof, while the British film producer, Ilford, was forced to lay off workers. Traditional bullion dealers, caught in a squeeze, cried foul to the commodity exchanges, and the New York jewelry house Tiffany & Co. took out a full page ad in the New York Times slamming the “unconscionable” Hunt brothers. They were right to single out the Hunts; in mid-January, they controlled 69% of all the silver futures contracts on the Commodity Exchange (COMEX) in New York.
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Source: New York Times

But as the high prices persisted, new silver began to come out of the woodwork.
“In the U.S., people rifled their dresser drawers and sofa cushions to find dimes and quarters with silver content and had them melted down,” says Pirrong, from the University of Houston. “Silver is a classic part of a bride’s trousseau in India, and when prices got high, women sold silver out of their trousseaus.”
According to a Washington Post article published that March, the D.C. police warned residents of a rash of home burglaries targeting silver.
Unfortunately for the Hunts, all this new supply had a predictable effect. Rather than close out their contracts, short sellers suddenly found it was easier to get their hands on new supplies of silver and deliver.
“The main factor that has caused corners to fail [throughout history] is that the manipulator has underestimated how much will be delivered to him if he succeeds [at] raising the price to artificial levels,” says Pirrong. “Eventually, the Hunts ran out of money to pay for all the silver that was thrown at them.”
In financial terms, the brothers had a large corpse on their hands—and no way to bury it.
This proved to be an especially big problem, because it wasn’t just the Hunt fortune that was on the line. Of the $6.6 billion worth of silver the Hunts held at the top of the market, the brothers had “only” spent a little over $1 billion of their own money. The rest was borrowed from over 20 banks and brokerage houses.
At the same time, COMEX decided to crack down. On January 7, 1980, the exchange’s board of governors announced that it would cap the size of silver futures exposure to 3 million ounces. Those in excess of the cap (say, by the tens of millions) were given until the following month to bring themselves into compliance. But that was too long for the Chicago Board of Trade exchange, which suspended the issue of any new silver futures on January 21. Silver futures traders would only be allowed to square up old contracts.
Predictably, silver prices began to slide. As the various banks and other firms that had backed the Hunt bullion binge began to recognize the tenuousness of their financial position, they issued margin calls, asking the brothers to put up more money as collateral for their debts. The Hunts, unable to sell silver lest they trigger a panic, borrowed even more. By early March, futures contracts had fallen to the mid-$30 range.
Matters finally came to a head on March 25, when one of the Hunts’ largest backers, the Bache Group, asked for $100 million more in collateral. The brothers were out of cash, and Bache was unwilling to accept silver in its place, as it had been doing throughout the month. With the Hunts in default, Bache did the only thing it could to start recouping its losses: it start to unload silver.
On March 27, “Silver Thursday,” the silver futures market dropped by a third to $10.80. Just two months earlier, these contracts had been trading at four times that amount.
The Aftermath
After the oil bust of the early 1980s and a series of lawsuits polished off the remainder of the Hunt brothers’ once historic fortune, the two declared bankruptcy in 1988. Bunker, who had been worth an estimated $16 billion in the 1960s, emerged with under $10 million to his name. That’s not exactly chump change, but it wasn’t enough to maintain his 500-plus stable of horses,.
The Hunts almost dragged their lenders into bankruptcy too—and with them, a sizable chunk of the U.S. financial system. Over twenty financial institutions had extended over a billion dollars in credit to the Hunt brothers. The default and resulting collapse of silver prices blew holes in balance sheets across Wall Street. A privately orchestrated bailout loan from a number of banks allowed the brothers to start paying off their debts and keep their creditors afloat, but the markets and regulators were rattled.
Silver Spot Prices Per Ounce (January, 1979 - June, 1980)
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Source: Trading Economics

In the words of then CFTC chief James Stone, the Hunts’ antics had threatened to punch a hole in the “financial fabric of the United States” like nothing had in decades. Writing about the entire episode a year later, Harper’s Magazine described Silver Thursday as “the first great panic since October 1929.”
The trouble was not over for the Hunts. In the following years, the brothers were dragged before Congressional hearings, got into a legal spat with their lenders, and were sued by a Peruvian mineral marketing company, which had suffered big losses in the crash. In 1988, a New York City jury found for the South American firm, levying a penalty of over $130 million against the Hunts and finding that they had deliberately conspired to corner the silver market.
Surprisingly, there is still some disagreement on that point.
Bunker Hunt attributed the whole affair to the political motives of COMEX insiders and regulators. Referring to himself later as “a favorite whipping boy” of an eastern financial establishment riddled with liberals and socialists, Bunker and his brother, Herbert, are still perceived as martyrs by some on the far-right.
“Political and financial insiders repeatedly changed the rules of the game,” wrote the New American. “There is little evidence to support the ‘corner the market’ narrative.”
Though the Hunt brothers clearly amassed a staggering amount of silver and silver derivatives at the end of the 1970s, it is impossible to prove definitively that market manipulation was in their hearts. Maybe, as the Hunts always claimed, they just really believed in the enduring value of silver.
Or maybe, as others have noted, the Hunt brothers had no idea what they were doing. Call it the stupidity defense.
“They’re terribly unsophisticated,” an anonymous associated was quoted as saying of the Hunts in a Chicago Tribune article from 1989. “They make all the mistakes most other people make,” said another.
p.s. credit to Ben Christopher
​

Hello all
Some days ago I made a post that got a bit of attention (scopely_you_are_losing_touch_with_your_playerbase).
But my post did not focus enough on what can be done to help alleviate some of the problems we are seeing in the game right now. So therefor I will try to do a better job of that in this post. It’s not going to be perfect, probably not even close, but I really hope it can spark a discussion that Scopely, Cerebro in particular, can take some points from and try to make this game that we like so much, and make it that much better.
Before we go into the nitty gritty, I would like to say thank you for all the positive feedback I got on the last post. I had feared that it there would be a lot people throwing mud at each other or starting to bash Scopely. But most of you kept it sober and constructive, so I hope we can keep that tone.
With that said, this post can be a bit more dividing of the community, cause we all have one thing that we think is the most important thing to fix. And some of the solutions I am going to propose might not hit the spot for you or at all, but I hope it sparks a discussion.
This is going to be a long post, and I know that it will not go down as well as the first one, for one it is simply too long, but also because it gets too focused on what changes I would like to see. Cause we can all agree on that we want changes, but when we then have to discuss what those changes are, then we get more divided. I really want to point out that I don't expect everybody to agree on what I have written. And also that my native language isn't English, but I hope that my points still gets across.
But lets get into it...

Red Stars

We are going to start out with what I personally find to be the biggest issue in the game right now. I know that RTA is a more hot topic right now, but I find red stars to be the biggest issue.
Right now red stars are a double edged sword. Cause when you get the 5+ red drop on the new character you of course get happy. But with the droprates in mind, most of the time red stars leave you with a sour taste.
Getting 3 red stars or lower on a new good character is so deflating that even id you got good pulls on your last 2 characters, that goodwill is out the window straight away.
So what can we do to make red stars a bit better? I think the solution is in the silvegold promotion credits. If silver credits was added to red stars so that when you get a duplicate character, then you also get some promotion credits.
Here is how one solution could be, the numbers might have to change a bit, but this is just the general idea.
1-2 star dupe: 1 silver promotion credit
3-4 star dupe: 2 silver promotion credit
5 star dupe: 3 silver promotion credit
6 star dupe: 1 gold promotion credit
7 star dupe: 2 gold promotion credit
These are just numbers to showcase the idea. If we look at my pulls for Bishop then this is what it would have netted me (all my pulls where dupes apart from the 3 star Bishop):
20 1-2 star pulls = 20 silver credits
19 3-4 star pulls = 38 silver credits
6 5 star = 18 silver credits
Total = 76 silver credits.
Now that is not a lot, and I don’t think that would break the promotion system. But I do think that it would help with the bad feeling about red stars.
With this system red star orbs are still the driving factor, and if you get lucky then you still get happy, but now when you get unlucky, then at least you progressed a bit still by having more promotions credit.
I would also like to get rid of the promotion store. We have enough randomness in the game. If we could promote characters straight from the character screen, then the system would feel a lot better.
I get that the store is probably there to make people burn some cores when they are chasing that on character they want to bring up.
Also, let us update them way faster. Right now over a month passes on most new characters before they are even added to the store.
I think the worries from Scopely is that we would start hoarding, and then only spend on the “best” new characters. But I really don’t see that as a problem in the long run. Cause with the added focus on wider rosters you will still have to bring up more characters instead of focusing on a few.

RTA and the Battlepass

So this is the hottest topic right now, at least with the people that I talk to.
If we look to other games battlepasses are generally a positive thing, but in almost all of them they are also something that you can get done by playing the game as usual. I play PUBG and while the battlepass here is something that divides the community a bit, it is one that I like. Some days I just have to get some kills and I progress. Other days I have to get kills with a crossbow (I’m not good enough to get that done), but its all something I can do by playing the game as usual, I just have to pick up some other weapons than the “meta”.
Battlepasses are created for two things:
· Have people log in every day.
But in MSF people already have to do that, so the battlepass doesn’t do anything at all for that.
· Have people spend extra money, especially in FTP games.
If spenders got the possibility to buy all the prizes we get from the battlepass for 20$ without having to grind it out, then I am 100% sure that way more people would buy it. But with the current way its tied to the RTA I actually think you are just losing money.
The current form of battlepass that is implemented is really just an offer with extra steps.
In MSF you have tied the battlepass to a single gamemode, and that takes all the possible fun out of that game mode. No people I have talked to likes RTA, not 1 person has something positive to say about it actually. But when you ask around, then a lot of people really started to like the balanced draft.
So what can we do to make this a bit better?
Solution 1: make us able to complete the objectives in other gamemodes. And if you really want us to grind the RTA also, then make it count double so that there is an incentive to play it if you want to get it over with as fast a possible.
And that is where I think the biggest problem with RTA is right now. Its not fun, it is only a grind. The way I play it is to open RTA and press auto when I’m at work. I don’t even look at it, I just wait for the winneloser screen to pop up, and then go in and do it again. I get annoyed when people are slow, or if they don’t load in.
As I see it there are 0 positive things about RTA right now. And the biggest problem I have is that no one I asked could actually find a way to make RTA fun with the current setup.
Leagues and events could be a saving grace. But since we don’t even know what Scopley have in mind about these we can’t event try to make that better. I’m afraid that events is just like the battlepass, but I think that leagues could take RTA in the right direction. Cause if you make RTA about winning and trying your best, then its suddenly competitive instead of just a mindless grind.
And I think it goes without saying, but I’m going to do it anyways, please revert the changes you made in 5.1 about quitters.

Doom raid

After my original post I was told that the Doom raid wouldn’t actually be for a limited time. And that changes my view a lot. Cause I do like that there are new and hard/almost impossible challenges. I was only worried if it was a limited that most people wouldn’t ever be able to get in there before it was taken down. But if its there to stay, then I don’t mind the current difficulty, even though I won’t step in there for at least another 6 months at best.
But the point about the prizes still stand. They are simply not enough. Not even close actually. And right now only the top alliances are even able to get them, so you have created a “the rich getting richer” scenario, cause the prizes in there are what makes you able to compete in there.

Availability of new characters

I personally don’t mind the cadence of new releases of characters, new characters are what drives the game forward. But you have to make them available faster. The last couple of releases we have seen them added to orbs pretty fast (Longshot or Shatterstar was even added as their event was going on), and that is a small step in the right direction. But lets take a look at the most grievous current unfarmable character, Beast, he has been in the game for over 7 months (possible longer, I couldn’t find the exact date he was released.) without being farmable. That is simply not good enough.
I know that he didn’t sell that well, and that Scopely has probably tried to wait with making him farmable to see if they could make more money of him, especially now that he actually seems to have a good place on the Axmen, I get it. I personally unlocked Beast at 3 stars, and I have not used him in anything than a throwaway blitz team. Is that fun? Is that something that makes me want to invest further into him? I think you know the answer.
A possible solution to this problem is to add them to some of the stores faster. I understand why you are hesitant to add anything newish to the blitz, raid or arena store. Cause people now have so many credits stockpiled that any further income on them once they are added are out the window. But I think you can add them at a much higher price point in the stores. That does two things:
You now give people something to use their credits on that they actually want, and at a higher price you are getting people to deplete their resources faster and taking both the blitz and arena store economy to a place where we once again have to make decisions on what to invest into. But at least you are giving us something to invest into. As of right now I have 150k blitz credits, so when you added Electro at 500, that wont even make a dent into that economy. But if you added new characters faster at a premium price, lets say 5-10,000 credits. Then you are giving us something to invest in, and you are bringing the economy to a better place. They of course shouldn’t stay at the premium price forever, at given intervals they should have their prices reduced until they hit the 500 credits that normal characters in the store has.
I personally don’t mind that a few select characters are orbs only for a while. I get why they are that. But I also understand the frustration that a lot of players feel about orb only characters. I only mention this so that a discussion can spark from it.
If we look at the prices on buying new characters I think we can all agree that they are too high. But I get why they are high and I don’t think that will change. I personally don’t find it to be that big of a problem, but I understand why a lot of people do. I also think the problem would be alleviated a bit, if we could start farming them in one way or the other sooner. Then players who really want the newest characters can pay and be ahead of the meta, and the people who can’t/won’t pay can still try to catch up without having to wait half a year, where the ones they can now farm are probably power crept anyway.

New player problems

This is only something that I have heard a bit about, and only mention it so that others can chime in.
But right now there is a huge scarcity of blue ability mats. And there is no real good way of farming or even buying them.
I think the problem stems from the powerlevel of characters, so now newer players don’t have to spend time on the lower raids that actually give these mats like we did when we started out. It doesn’t take a long time for a new player to be able to get into an alliance that does at least U6 or even U7, where these mats aren’t something they get.
A simple solution that I could see working out is to simply remove green and blue ability mats from the game. I doubt that Scopley are making any money on these mats, and for people that have played a long time these mats are a non issue and never will be cause we have pretty much infinite of them.
As I said, I don’t know too much about this problem as I only just heard about it on a stream not so long ago. But I wanted to add it to the list anyways. And there are probably more new player problems that I don’t even know of. So please add that to the discussion below, but also please try to be constructive about it, not just “We want more”.

Skillitary/new teams videos

We like that we can see new teams in action, but when you showcase them you have to be upfront about them. Skillitary has left a sour taste in the mouth of most people who bought into them.
Yes, they can win against Marauders if brought up to the same level, but its still a gamble and more luckbased than playing with actual skill (on pun(isher) intended). But if you miss that first disrupt on Stryfe, then the whole team just crumbles. So if you showcase a new team as the new team to take out the “big bad”, then they have to at least be able to punch up a bit on them. I’m not saying that they should just win 100% of the time, but with Skillitary they even struggle on punch downs.
If Shadowlands turn out to be as big of a letdown as Skillitary I think that will make you lose a lot of goodwill and at this point in the game, that will be very hard to gain back.

War

I am generally pretty fine with war and how it plays out. There are two pain points that keeps popping up tho. The most obvious one is the matchmaking sometimes makes you go up against unwinnable opponents. And that does make it feel very bad. But I also understand why you can’t always have it close to your own TCP. Cause who would the top alliances ever face if it was only trying to match on TCP?
If it was changed to only factor in TCP, then we would suddenly have alliances in the top leagues, who where a 10th of the biggest alliances, but they would never have to face them because of the TCP difference. So the current matchmaking system is probably the lesser of the two evils. And yes, I know that it is very demoralizing to get 50m+ punch-ups week after week. But I think that stems from a problem that is unfixable, and that is the huge TCP difference between alliances. If we take a look at Legion_of_Cabal they currently have a combined TCP of 400 million. If we look at the 100th most powerful alliance they right now have a combined TCP of 251 million. That is such a huge difference that war matchmaking will just not ever be perfect.
The second pain point of war is time spent. And in that also when you have to spend that time. Luckily my own alliance aren’t too focused on war, we are only G4. Most of the time we face alliances that wont clear us and we wont clear them. But higher up in the leagues, clearing as fast as possible is the only way to win. And that means getting on every time new energy is available, also if that means disrupting your sleep schedule to do that. I personally would never do that at where I am in life, but I understand why. I was fighting for world first in WoW back in the day, so I get why people do it. The problem is that they have to do it 3 times a week. Instead of just, in the case of WoW, when new content comes out. Its just not healthy.
I don’t have any experience in high level war in MSF, so I hope that some of you that do can weigh in on this with ideas how to make it better.

Resource bottlenecks

This is a sore point for everybody in the game. I think we all understand why bottlenecks are a thing, and we all probably understand that it is also a necessary thing in a game to have something to grind for. But in the current state of the game, there are simply way too many bottlenecks.
My proposed solution would be as follows:
Get rid of green and blue ability mats. They serve no purpose anymore other than hindering new players from catching up. Then when the next level of ability levels are introduced, then you can add new currency for that and have us start out on the same level. Spenders will then be able to get a head start as always, and that is fine. Also take away the gold cost for leveling up abilities, or at least lower them.
Get rid of training mats all together. Or change it so that they are the only currency needed to level up characters. It simply can’t be both gold and training mats unless they are giving them out a bit more freely. And I know it’s a balancing act, cause you don’t want people to have too many resources, and if we had infinite resources, that would also be bad for the game, as there is nothing fun in having everything given to you.
If the above are implemented, then I don’t even think you have to make any changes to the gold we gain now.
We of course don’t know how much money you make out of creating these scarcities, and I get it if the metrics show that you can’t just make them go away. But then at least acknowledge the problem that players are feeling about the bottlenecks. You don’t have to fix it in one big swoop.
Gear is another bottleneck, but one that I personally find better balanced. Sure, right now getting G15 isn’t easy, but I also don’t think it should be easy. A change that I would love to see however is a better way to be able to focus on the gear that we need. Right now its all random, even the offers you made us are random. But again, I get if your metrics show something else and that you are doing this to make the most profit. But sometimes the most profit is not the way to go, if the cost is that you lose players by doing it.

Help us help you

In my first post I stayed away from mentioning bugs on purpose. Bugs will happen, and if you address them as fast as possible then that is probably ok.
But you have a limitless amount of people who would gladly help you test upcoming patches for free. Right now you even have an envoy program that you clearly aren’t using to its full potential. Have them help you out with testing new features.
Just look at ISO8, when you first announced it people where up in arms about it. But you decided to have the envoys weigh in, and it has been the best and most polished feature you have ever brought out.

Finishing remarks

Right now the game is in a rut, I don’t think that is up for discussion. It is natural for a 3 year old game, mobile at that, to lose players over time. But I still believe that you, Scopley, have the bones of a game that could live on for a long time. But you need to treat it a bit more as a game than as moneymaker. It can be both, and it can be successful at both.
Make it fun again, that’s what games are about, entertainment. There has to be things that are hard or almost impossible to get, but it just can’t be every aspect of the game.
You said you wanted to look at reducing the low quality screen time, and then added RTA. I hope you can see how that makes us have trust issues.
I know this post isn’t perfect in any way, and I am very well aware that it might not change a thing. But I do hope that will, I really really do.
If you made it all the way to the end, then thank you for reading it all, or at least skimming the points that you feel are the most important.
And please, again, lets have a civil discussion about the issues we as players feel. And remember that even if we feel something is wrong, it might not actually be wrong for the game.