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.
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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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..
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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.

For myself, life over the past few years has seemingly gone from bad to worse - and before I go into the details -this isn’t a “pity-post” or a sympathy searching exercise, this is simply a warning, and hopefully a lesson to others who are entering the crypto scene.
My crypto journey began back in earnest at the start of that famed 2017 “bull run” – I had a little bit in savings and had done my due diligence – this really was the future, and it could potentially set me and my family up for life.
I bought in with every bit of money I had to spare. All told, it was about £6,500, and the price of Bitcoin sat at just under £9,000.
This was exciting. The price continued to increase and I religiously opened and closed the Coinbase website to see the price soar by the hundreds and into the thousands. Work took a backseat and I became consumed with the markets, red and green candles being the first and last things I saw in the day.
I wanted more. I became envious of those that had bought into cryptos years before. So I looked at alternate avenues to increase my Bitcoin holdings… this was going to be the making of me! Sadly it turned out to be quite the opposite.
Scams, Scams everywhere…
The first venture I looked into was a third party bitcoin mining platform which promised exponential growth. It sounded too good to be true (spoiler: it was). I used a credit card to buy more Bitcoin. First mistake. I maxed the card and sent around £6,000 in Bitcoin to a mining company known as Crypterra. The reviews were good, the discord was active, people were seeing payouts – it was all looking legitimate. But of course it wasn’t. Payouts dried up. The devs went silent and the site disappeared and re-appeared sporadically before going offline indefinitely. It was over and I had lost most of the £6,000 from my credit card.
Robots are the future?
The price of Bitcoin was still holding strong and I’d made small gains with my original investment which was still untouched. Perhaps I could increase by Bitcoin gains elsewhere and pay off the credit card I had maxed out.
Again, I looked into ways to bolster my Bitcoin reservesI looked into trading platforms, cryptocurrency bots in particular. How hard could it be? As long as the price of Bitcoin went up, it should balance out any losses as I learned the ropes. There were a few that caught my eye. And following what I thought was sage “youtuber” advice – I dove into the world of trading with bots – linking up a Binance account and setting up my automated systems to work their magic and trade whilst I was asleep/working/sitting on the toilet, you name it.
As you can imagine, these bots weren’t the holy grail they were promoted to be, and I was losing Bitcoin left, right and centre. I became more and more “experimental” with the strategies… doubling my stakes, tripling my stakes to recoup what I had lost. I didn’t see it as real money (despite paying with hard earned money to fund these accounts) – it was magic internet money, just ones and zeroes – so the reality of it didn’t hit home how much I was actually losing. Shock horror, I lost it all.
Taking it to the bookies…
I had effectively been gambling my money away, and in my increasingly agitated state I sought out other communities to try and regain my money. Sports-betting communities, gambling communities, Twitter “tipsters” and Facebook groups who had all the inside knowledge.
I was down over £12,000 from my savings and the £6,500 from the credit card combined. I decided to open another two credit cards. One to fund my betting account and the other for backup. I quickly went through the first card’s funds, but I was ‘still learning’, this was ‘Ok’ – next time I would get it right. The second card (third in total) was quickly exhausted, and I was now close to £20,000 in the hole from when I started, all within just a few months.
The hole grew ever darker
As I write this now I am actually afraid and embarrassed to share the total losses I have made over the past few years (it’s actually much worse than I could have ever imagined). I have no-one to blame but myself; the greed, stupidity and at times, pure arrogance have lead me down this path. A path which at the moment seems irreversible for me.
To see the price of Bitcoin now makes me feel physically sick – if only I had been patient. If only I hadn’t chased my losses, if only I hadn’t played with money that wasn’t mine - I wouldn’t be in this predicament. As the debt mounts ever higher and interest rates on credit cards are crippling me, it will be an incredibly long time before I have any financial stability again. It has made me mentally unwell and I’m still figuring out the next steps which I know include professional support and removing my head from the pile of sand in which I have buried it.
I sincerely hope that those who read this account of my situation don’t fall into the same trap. The world is once again hyped for crypto, and with it come the pitfalls and scams and false promises of financial freedom and becoming rich. Don’t try and cheat the system, don’t chase your losses and don’t use money that isn’t yours in the first place.
TLDR:
To put it succinctly, the above is a very short overview of the financial hole I have found myself due to greed, arrogance and stupidity over the past few years. Hopefully a warning to others. Don’t chase losses, don’t look for the next get rich scheme and don’t invest money that isn’t yours to start with. Basically, don’t ruin your life like me. If only I had just held.
EDIT:
A quick edit to say thank you to everyone who has taken the time to read the above and replied in the comments. I've had some very honest and insightful responses and some incredibly useful suggestions about how I can bring myself back from this dilemma. I'll be seeking professional help both for the gambling and the debt management and hopefully get myself on the right track for the sake of my own sanity and that of my family's.

Hey guys. Not entirely sure if this is the right place for this post, but here goes.
Since the GameStop short squeeze and the Elon Musk Bitcoin pump happened, there's been a lot on my mind about both Bitcoin and regular stocks and I need to get this off my chest.
One thing above all has really been bothering me and I couldn't put it into words until recently: how rotten the whole system is and how it allows a minority to earn enough money to never need to work again.
Whether it's Bitcoin or speculative stocks, it works out very similarly. People throw money and hope they get lucky, no better than any gambling.
When they win, it's not because they were smarter or did some great service to society. They only had to install an app on their phone, go through some KYC and throw money at their crypto or stock of choice.
Money is a currency used to determine how much access to society's resources someone has. The more money you have, the more resources you can access. This can be better apartments, lambos, yachts, mansions, whatever.
The winners of crypto or stocks are just gamblers, they get a disproportionately high share of society's resources without creating anything of value.
And then there's people like me. I work a day job, working hard every day and trying to improve my skills, hoping to get recognized and achieve some measure of success in life, yet I get a pittance while all these gamblers win big.
To be clear here, I'm not salty because I didn't invest money or lost it. I don't believe in either speculative stock investing or crypto "investing". I realize that speculative investments have a far higher chance to lose money, and losing money can really hurt you and your life prospects.
With both Bitcoin and speculative stock investing, what happens in practice isn't very different. They're glorified casinos and the winners are set for life, and it really grinds my gears because they didn't do anything to earn it, while I'm sitting at a desk day in and day out, working hard yet barely getting anything out of it.
But what's even worse is that the winners' wealth is created through exploitative means. For someone to win money in the casinos, someone else has to lose. Usually a lot of someones. And the losers? They can be drastically affected by their loss.
It's even more sad when you realize that most of them were suckered into playing the game with false promises: "Bitcoin/Gamestop is guaranteed to moon! Invest now and you'll never need to work again!" and so on.
Then when things fail and the hysteria ends, a lot of people are left holding the bag. Some turn to substance abuse, others commit suicie, yet others double down and throw more money at the casino in the vain hopes that they'll win the next time.
And even if speculative investments had a 50% or higher chance of making you a winner, what would that mean for our society?
I'm no economist, but I'm pretty sure that our society would start running low on resources as people buy more luxuries they couldn't afford before and this would result in price inflation. Which in the long-term, would nullify the winners' wealth and make everyone else worse off.
It's all so upsetting, and very sad what our society really values.
Sorry if this was too long or rambly, but I really needed to get this off my chest. Let me know what you think in the comments.
Edit: This might not have been clear to some, but I'm not a Bitcoin supporter. I know how it works and why it's terrible.
Edit 2: Well, my free day of shitposting is ending, so I'm wrapping up this thread. Thank you all so much for your responses! There were many interesting discussions, even with coiners. I might respond more tomorrow, but not as much as today.

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.

Really sorry for the long post. TLDR Spotify is amazing and the app is so slow it's like they're shooting themselves in the foot. The app experience should represent the width and depth of quality of the rest of the software.
Foreword: I love Spotify. I've used it for more than a decade and have paid for premium for almost all of that time. It carries all the music I want to listen to and is constantly introducing me to new tracks, artists, and albums that I otherwise never would have discovered, and I honestly think its accessibility as a desktop music streaming service is one of the greatest things to ever happen to the consumer music market. All of my friends and family use it - it connects to Sonos systems - the quality isn't superb but it's fair and more than enough for 90% of its users. It has folders and manually organizable playlist orders which I love and am yet to find a comparable service that offers the same.
BUT: the responsiveness of the Spotify app is bordering on useless, and it's almost entirely killing the service for me.
Every day I get in my car, I open the app on my phone, it takes 20 seconds to load the UI of the home menu. I select Your Library and the content of the page takes up to 30 seconds to load. This is all downloaded - dozens of playlists and folders containing music that is stored offline on my phone's internal storage. But this isn't even music! Just playlists and their thumbnails, and it sits there, chugging, doing nothing. Sometimes it stalls entirely and I have to move to another menu and back again just to start the loading again. Sometimes it refuses and tells me I have no internet connection while my reception and 4G is giving full service. Eventually it loads, and sometimes this can be between 30 seconds to 2 MINUTES after I've loaded the app. Again, this is not streaming music, just browsing my playlists.
I scroll to find a folder or playlist (which has been sorted by most recently viewed instead of how I've sorted it on the desktop app for some godforsaken reason, but that's beside the point). Opening either resets this whole process and forces me to wait. Finally it will give me my songs which are, again, downloaded and stored offline. I hit shuffle play or I click on a track, doesn't matter - the player will start, but music playback will not, it'll sit on 0 seconds for up to another minute, before finally, after long last, actually playing back the music.
This used to happen when my internet was spotty, or when I streamed music instead of having it downloaded, which I understand. I used to think it was because my phone was a little old. But I've upgraded to brand new mid-range Samsungs twice in the last 4 years and it has literally been the same slow degradation of responsiveness.
It's infuriating when all I want to do is play some music in my car for a short drive, or pop in my earbuds and go for a walk, or especially if I want to play some music for someone else. It's a gamble whether or I'll be sitting there for MINUTES waiting for something to happen. If I want to play music on the desktop app, boom, it starts and is playing music within 10 seconds. Over a Sonos system through the Sonos app, it's done. But the android Spotify app is inexcusable.
I tried Tidal. It doesn't allow me to sort playlists or put them in folders. As someone with 50+ playlists, alphabetical sorting is more than useless. No other service has at least 90% of my library in its catalogue. At this point I'd pay double for Spotify premium if they fixed the app.
Rant over, thanks for listening. TLDR Spotify is amazing and the app is so slow it's like they're shooting themselves in the foot. The app experience should represent the width and depth of quality of the rest of the software.

Yes, as you read, cross post from boringpeople, but it's well worth a read, as long as it is. All credit to u/jn_ku, and go read the other parts. Godspeed autists
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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').
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.
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.
DateVolumePrice at US Market CloseFriday, 1/22/21197,157,196$65.01Monday, 1/25/21177,874,00$76.79Tuesday, 1/26/21178,587,974$147.98Wednesday, 1/27/2193,396,666$347.51Thursday, 1/28/2158,815,805$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...
..
BOOM
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.

I've seen variants of "you haven’t lost if you don’t sell" parroted around as a reason people should not cut their losses. For anyone who was a bag holder who got out who is hearing this and wondering "did I really do the right thing?"
This is not financial advice. But this is reassurance that selling and actualizing your losses is not something you should torment yourselves over.
For the sake of argument let's say you bought in at $300/share.

1. It doesn't matter if you never sell, that money is inaccessible to you. It's functionally the same as being lost.
   
2. You run the risk that GME still goes bankrupt. Sure the Chewey guy might turn things around, but GME was on its way out for a very good reason: brick and mortar stores largely found in dying malls to sell physical games that are increasingly becoming digital sales (with systems that don't even have disc drives anymore!) is not a successful business practice. You may "like the stock," but don't pretend it's not a risk to hold. If GME goes bankrupt it doesn't matter if you hold GME to the end of days, it will be worth $0.
   
3. Unless you sincerely believe GME will get back to $300+ that money really is lost. You can hold for an eternity, but if it never gets above $300 you will never get out of those shares what you put in.
   
4. Inflation is a bitch. Let's pretend GME will get back to $300/ea in 10 years. This is an ambitious goal to say the least. Your initial investment of $300/ea will now be back to 0. In 10 years you've increased your net value by nothing, $0.
   But worse than that, you aren't actually "even" yet. You have actually LOST value from inflation. $300 today is going to be worth a lot more than $300 in 2031. The annual rate of inflation from 1990 to 2018 was about 2.5%. To cash out in 2031 and get the same value as 2021 dollars, GME would have to be about $385. Be honest, will it be $385?
   
5. Don't forget Opportunity Cost. Let's assume you cut your losses today at $65.00. If you invest that in an index fund that historically returns 10% per year, in 10 years you'll be back up to $170 (a calculator for your entertainment). Do you really think GME is going to be over $170 in 10 years?
   And there are plenty of mutual funds that greatly outperform the stock market; my 401k has nearly doubled in just the past 12 months. You will also get to claim your GME losses on your taxes up to $3k per year from now until the loss has been fully claimed (assuming you didn't gamble with your 401k or IRA). This is your opportunity cost. It's the money you could have made, but didn't because you chose to hold GME instead of cutting your losses.
   

The idea that "losses aren't losses until you sell" does not makes a damned bit of sense. You shouldn't feel bad if you choose to stop losing money on a investment to take what's left and make a good one.
TL;DR: Holding a stock that grows poorly prevents you from holding a stock that grows fabulously. You COULD have more money next year with that $65 by putting it in almost anything other than GME. So don't let the hive mind make you feel bad about actualizing losses to stop the bleeding.

This is going to be a really long post, so read it at your pace. I'll try my best to make it worthwhile but I ain't much of a good writer.
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Genshin Impact has been released since 28th of September and so far the game has received a lot of mixed reactions from the players and most of them not being good ones. Let's dig into them. So this is a criticism/feedback/bitching/complaining post or whatever you like to call it.
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First of all What is Genshin Impact?
This is something even the game itself doesn't know and is what's confused most of the people around and is what created the first problem. Genshin has severe identity crisis. It's a JRPG? It's a Mobile gacha game? It's a AAA title aimed for all?
The game tried to find something in between all this and created the mess we see today.
You see people trying to defend the game by saying "This is a Gacha game. This is how it works. This is how it's been for years." Now all these things are complete BS.
Genshin isn't and was never intended to be your typical mobile gacha. It tried to appeal to the mainstream audience. The instant Genshin was being developed for PC, Switch and PS4 it rose above your typical Gacha game. It wanted to cater to the mainstream crowd. Now this creates the very big problem that is the difference between Mainstream gamers like PC, PS4, Switch and Gacha Addict mobile market. While gacha addicted mobile gamers are used to being fcked over by shitty practices by those companies, the mainstream crowd is different. Some of them are completely new to the gacha system. Just accept the fact that gacha is a very bad monetization model, some games have implemented it in a nicer way which actually isn't bad, but Genshin monetization is just straight up ridiculous.
Genshin was promoted as JRPG from the very beginning instead of being your usual gacha mobile game. This is where most of the mainstream players expectations shattered. Things like being limited by stamina system for play is a norm practice in mobile games(Not all games do this but most of them do) BUT it's not in the mainstream market and this is something which is not acceptable when you go for broader market. You can't just expect them to conform to your shitty stamina system and be all happy happy. You're gonna get backlash.
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Resin(this absolute piece of shit item in Genshin)
Resin system is just ridiculous. While being already bad in the first place, it's way worse compared to even the stamina system of other mobile gacha games. Almost 95% of the stuff you do in the game is locked behind resin system. You wanna farm Mora? go spend resin, you wanna farm exp? go spend resin, you wanna farm artifacts? go spend resin, you wanna farm upgrade materials? go spend resin. What's even more ridiculous is the amount you need per dungeons, bosses and the amount you get.
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Resin is capped at 120. So you can run hypostasis 3 times and poof it's gone. Once you get to higher level even running hypostasis 3 times doesn't give you enough material to level up your character. The regen rate is also crap 1 resin per 8 minutes.
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This doesn't stop here. One of the shittiest thing in the game is the weekly bosses.
YOU CAN FCKING FIGHT IT ONCE A WEEK AND IT'S STILL WALLED BEHIND RESIN. Can you see double the bs here. On top of being only available once a week you still need to spend 60 Resin just to collect rewards. The sheer amount of bs is ridiculous.
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Let's talk Experience
To raise your character. The very first laughable thing is that beating monsters of lv60 gives you 14-15 Character exp. I mean why even have it in the first place. This is just shitty on the face of people. You need to fight monsters for months then maybe you can raise one Level of your character. The sheer amount of stupidness that fighting monsters doesn't give you Exp is just wow. You get most of the exp from those Exp Books(Adventurer's exp, Hero's Wit). And guess what you need to spend resin to get those. And what's another fcked up thing is that one run costs 20 resin and doesn't even give you enough to level up even 1 level. Yes you can get it from chests and quests but you'll run out way too soon once you reach higher levels.
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Money walks in now which is Mora.
You need iirc 60000 Mora just to ascend a character and a lv35 Leyline gives you 44000. The amount of Mora you need to upgrade gears and characters is once again another very bad thing. You can spend few days farming 1 Million Mora and guess what it'll be gone in a poof once you get upgrade 3-4 artifacts(which you'll get fcked along the way. We'll get to that). Everything in the game needs mora be it levelling up character, talents, artifacts, weapons. The amount needed is 100x more than what you are earning. You'll always be short on this.
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Comes in the Artifact now
You have greater chance of winning a lottery ticket than rolling good stats on the artifacts. The amount of RNG implemented on Artifacts is baffling.
First you need a good main stat(Pray to RNG), then you good secondary stats. Did you know these are also assigned via RNG. Then once you upgrade the artifact additional stats are assigned based on RNG. Once you keep upgrading the artifacts existing sub stats are upgraded(based on RNG) and more new Sub stats are assigned(Based on RNG) which are further upgraded(based on RNG). Those are whole 6-7 layers of RNG to get a good Artifact. So yeah you're better off praying of being able to kamehameha than getting a good Artifact.
You can say that no problem I'm a hardcore grinder I'll farm them till I get them. But then Resin comes and grabs your a$$ and puts you in place.
Oh did you also know that Artifact drops are RNG!? Also Domains drops multiple type of artifacts you on top praying to get a good artifact main stat, first you need to pray to get the artifact at all. And you need to do this with 6 runs per day ONLY IF YOU GRIND SINGLE DOMAIN AND NEGLECT EVERYTHING ELSE.
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Now Don't ya worry because in comes the weapons upgrade materials
Weapon ascension materials are dropped from different domains and you need 20 resin per run and need to do multiple runs to get enough material to ascend your weapon.
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Talent Books have joined the Chat
You thought it was over, but it was I the talent books. Yet another piece of upgrade material which drops from yet different type of domains that require resin. Higher levels require 9 per talent level to upgrade and the domain drops 1 per run.
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Now what's the center of all the problems mentioned above? IT'S RESIN!
This single piece of item limits everything you can do in the game. The only thing you can do in this game without resin is just farming chests which(don't even get me started on this) are just another piece of shit in the game. Chest rewards are very very underwhelming. It's isn't worth farming them except for that Adventure Exp. Have you ever played a Open world RPG which limits 95% of the content behind such a system? This is one of the biggest bs in the game.
So yeah what's the game at higher levels? You login -> burn resin in 10 minutes -> you get trash -> you curse -> you logout -> rinse and repeat. Basically you're a trash collector.
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Congratulations you've made it so far. Now that the resin is done we look at another horrendous aspect of the game that is Monetization and Gacha.
Now for all those white knights out there just accept the fact that the gacha rate is horrendous. 0.6% to get a 5 star character is way too low. As the CN guy said it's just double the rate of a glass blowing up.
Gacha has been for around quite a while. There are examples of good and bad gachas all around. BUT GENSHIN FALLS INTO THE WORST ONE.
You have 0.6 rate to get a 5 star character which is basically non existent and you get pity at 90 pulls. Here's comes another scummy part. At 90 pulls you have 50% chance to get the UP characters. See this bs. It's actually a pity but not a pity. You can pull 90 times but are still reliant on RNG to get you the desired character. Real pity comes at 180 Pulls which is just straight up ridiculous. 180 pulls are 32000 primogems and converting them to real life money that's a whopping $400 just one Freaking 5 star character. That's like whole month worth of food.
and Congrats if you got the 5 star character cuz that's not his full potential. You need another 6 of him to max him. So in worst case you're looking at $2400 just to max out one 5 star character. Holy flames this shit.
4 star rate is also so low that you rarely get them out of 10 pull pity which is just another scummy practice.
Cost for primogems is yet another crappy practice to greed money. $100 gives you 8800 primogems which are about 55 pulls. This is not even enough to hit that initial pity of 90 pulls let alone that 180 one.
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Monthly Pass and Battle Pass
Another two methods of monetization that the game uses. These two are absolutely worthless. Now you may say that Monthly Pass is actually really good value. You can get 3000 Primogems for $5 which is a steal. and Yes it could have been good had the rates been decent.
Just look at what 3000 primogems net you. A 4 star character you don't want? A useless 4 star weapon? or will you hold out on to hope that it will give you a 5 star character? Even after spending money you are still reliant on that small chance to get something good.
Battle Pass. Oh don't get me started on this piece of crap. It's the single worst BP I've seen during my whole gaming life. From those ridiculous requirements which force you spend primogems to refresh resin to the locking of weekly Exp, this is just accumulation of every single crap lying around. Not even worth a shit.
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Achievements
This doesn't fall under Monetization but is another bs aspect of the game that I'd like to discuss. Achievements spit in the face of the player. Collecting 100 chests gives you 10 primogems. and what's that number? That's 1/16 the amount you need for one damn pull. Even if we count the primogems you get from those 100 chests it nets you 200(2 from each) + 10 = 210 primogems which doesn't even amount to two pulls. I feel like this system is there just to mock the player.
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Hats of to you. You've made it this far. Next we move on to other aspects.
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COMMUNITY
First of all I'm very happy that people are shitting on these crappy practices and voicing their opinions. There's definitely no need to accept these types of things. Once you accept this, they'll go even lower next time.
Along with this I'm baffled at the people still trying to defend such scummy tactics. Take a look at these posts
https://www.reddit.com/Genshin_Impact/comments/j799kw/i_will_say_my_biggest_tip_to_enjoy_the_game_and/
https://www.reddit.com/Genshin_Impact/comments/j7atw9/my_take_on_the_negative_reviews_as_a_long_time/
I won't go into any of them. Feel free to look at them yourselves.
CN players are not happy and they're bashing the game everywhere and trying to make sure their voice is heard. This is what we also need to do. Some people say that "It's a Chinese Company. It won't matter whether you bitch here". This is 100% bs. This is not just a chinese game. It's released worldwide for everybody to play. They have people everywhere looking at stuff. So voice you complaints wherever you want official discord, forums, reddit, twitter, youtube, in game feedback.
Keep in mind if you don't speak at all nothing will ever change. Once they receive enough backlash from their playerbase things will get better. The community definitely has the power to change things,
Youtube channels
To be honest I was hoping for those youtube channels would bring up some of those concerns of the community but nope. Every single one of them is dripping wet for Genshin and just screaming into the mics.
"5 AWESOME TIPS FOR GENSHIN". "5 INSANE TIPS FOR GENSHIN". "5 SUPER DUPER INSANE TIPS FOR GENSHIN". "5 TIPS FOR GENSHIN TO LEVEL UP AND GET THAT HOT MILF IN YOUR AREA".
I don't mean to criticize those channels, they may create content they want, but a good chunk of community watches those channels so bringing issues with the game will definitely help.
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"This is a Gacha Game. This is how it's supposed to be. If you don't like it quit it. You aren't enjoying the game" ---- Genshin Impact Whiteknights
First of all I have absolutely no need to hear from someone how to enjoy my game so yeah get the hell outta here with this advice.
And for all you sorry a$$ mobile gacha gaming gambling addicts out there get it through your thick skulls of yours that GENSHIN IS NOT A MOBILE GACHA GAME.
This is something even the game tries to achieve but fails very hard to do so. It wanted to be something more than your typical gacha game but in the end it's own system doomed it.
From the start Genshin is being marketed as OPEN WORLD JRPG rather than a gacha game. It also has every aspect of open world rpgs cuz that's what the game is. It is also a game that it playable on PC and console rather than mobile. 90% of the mobiles don't even run the game good. The moment Genshin touched the PC, Switch and PS4 platforms it needed to shed the skin of mobile gacha gaming concepts.
Currently the Genshin Impact for high level player is login -> burn resin in 10-15 minutes -> logout.
This is how you play Mobile Gacha games. THIS IS NOT HOW YOU PLAY PC, PS4 OR FOR THAT MATTER MAINSTREAM GAMES. This part is limited to mobile gaming. It has absolutely no place in the mainstream market cuz most of the time people play for longer hours on these systems.
Genshin is not a game that you'll play waiting at a bus stop for 5-10 minutes or waiting for your friend at the cafe. The game wants you to play it like a full RPG. and in here comes the point where the game contradicts itself.
It wants you play the game but limits it greatly or just 99% behind a stamina system.
See the absolute madness in this? This is where the greed comes in. It's where they sell Resin refills. Look at the $20 BP with extra resin, look at weekly packs in the shop selling resin. The sheer ridiculousness of the game selling you stamina just to play the game. For people waiting for the feature to pet the dogs, just hope that it doesn't cost you 20 resin to do so or they are only pettable once a week.
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Even as a gacha game Genshin Impact is a big disappointment
This is coming from my experience as a gacha gamer. The game is literal crap when compared to other gacha games. You've got examples of great gacha games like Azur Lane around(I'm saying comparatively better, not that other ones don't have problems) but still it choose to go with worst ones.
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I have nothing expect gratitude for you for reading this so far. Next we move on to the final segment that is the Company Itself.
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Mihoyo
The final boss of all is Mihoyo itself and they themselves have been really scummy and shitty.
So far they have been completely turning a blind eye and not listening to the people at all. Starting from the very first CBT to the OBT they have received constant feedback but have completely neglected the main parts which include resin and monetization. Now keep in mind that Mihoyo is not a new company. They have been in the market for years. Their other mobile game Honkai Impact 3 is very big in CN and also quite popular in global too. Throughout constant feedback from players and being in market they have learned what's good and what's bad.
And the shittiest thing is that they choose to completely ignore it and push there scummy tactics. Let's see some of them....
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The first and very obvious one being the gacha and monetization. Monetization was available during the CBT3 on CN server. It received quite a feedback due to rates being so low. But they still didn't change a thing. They just rolled it exactly the same way meaning they didn't pay any heed to the feedback regarding the monetization. They know about gacha and what's good and bad about it but still purposely chose to go with the shittiest kind of gacha.
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Unskippable Cutscenes. Let's just accept it that the only reason the cutscenes are unskippable is because they want to prevent people from rerolling accounts. Though it didn't prevent them but it was their intention. That's why they even went as far as banning accounts who pulled 5 star but had no activity for 24 hours or so but didn't even touch those accounts that only had 4 stars. Criticism threads on the official forums are being deleted. Just another scummy tactic.
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There have been constant bashing on CN forums since 15th, taptap score is 4.7 and on other forums too. Yet they still haven't considered any of them and are just ignoring their playerbase completely.
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What's Mihoyo trying to do?
At this point it's either two possibilities one that either they didn't research enough into the mainstream audience or it's just deliberate. And the chance of it being the former is let's say 0.6
It seems like rather than catering to what the mainstream playerbase expects, Mihoyo is trying to lure them into the shady and absolute bs world of Mobile Gacha gaming. This is what garnered so much hate from the mainstream audience. While the gacha gaming addicts are used to being fcked over by these scummy tactics all year around, this is not the case with others. Some of them are even completely new to the terms like Gacha. And just accept the fact that Gacha is a horrendous system of monetization. Like Gigguk said "Who said gacha is like drugs. Drugs are way cheaper." To any sane person this model of monetization is absolute bs and it is. Even among this Monetization Genshin goes for the worst one their is. So yeah expecting a whole different player crowd to shut up and just fall into crappy and scummy practices is not gonna work and is definitely gonna blow up in your face.
And I hope that people continue to bash such systems cuz if such kind of system is accepted it will shift many other aspects to the shittier side and thing will continue to get worse. This is the reason why mobile gacha gaming is so bad. The devs pushed poorer rates and people just sat there and accepted it blowing thousands on such practices. This is the reason why something like 0.6% chance to get a 5 star character exists. It's derived from the Mobile Gacha Gaming.
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What's all these complaining posts? Why don't you just enjoy the game?
FCKING STOP PROTECTING/WHITE KNIGHTING THESE SCUMMY PRACTICES. First of all get it through your thick skulls that the who are doing the so called "complaining" are doing it because they love the game and WANT IT TO BE BETTER. They aren't doing it out of spite or anything.
You can dismiss a few troll threads when a user is hating without a reason anywhere. But know that when multiple people are complaining about one thing it means there is something wrong with that. People are making long posts giving proper reasons as to why something is bad and giving a reply like "This is how it is. Quit if you don't like it." is a rotten and crappy mindset.
The reason people are taking their time to write of such lengthy posts is because they genuinely love the game and want it to be better and more awesome. That's why something called "FEEDBACK" exists in this world. As it stands the game is just heading to its doom and the people trying to prevent it are the ones who care about it. People giving crappy answers are contributing nothing to it.
And let me ask this question why do you have to fcking head crash into people who care? Is it bad that the game gets better and everybody enjoys it rather than your sorry a$$ of a gacha gambling addict.
A fact is that if things get better these so called white knights will be jumping in joy too. BUT THERE IS ONE VERY BIG DIFFERENCE. They will call it like "Wow! mihoyo is so generous. They're the best devs in the world." rather than actually crediting it to the people who made the change possible.
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FINAL WORDS
The game itself is very beautiful. The awesome Open world map, absolutely banger soundtrack all are just too good. I absolutely love the game itself. But the current game system is very flawed and this needs to addressed as soon as possible.
If Genshin Impact stays like this, it will be removed from the mainstream audience. That's why changes need to occur if they want this crowd to stay, otherwise if all want is just money then they'll carry on with these shitty practices.
Know that at the end of all this if nothing is changed Genshin will just be another Generic Mobile Gacha Game where you'll save primogems for months for a char -> Get fcked by abyssal rates -> Curse the devs and game -> Go to sleep -> Rinse and repeat and if you enjoy it that's good for you. What sucks the most is that a game with so much potential will be ruined.