GameStonk Rocket Rocket Rocket

This one is particularly great.

At the risk of quoting the entire thing - some highlights below.

If you're not subscribed to Matt Levine's Moneystuff, you should be.

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Should [GME execs] sell a ton of stock to all these redditors who want it so badly? Yes, of course, absolutely, I said so on Monday, but it’s tricky. For one thing if they sell stock at the top they will surely get sued. For another thing, even at these prices, you want something sensible to do with the money; you can’t be like “we’re gonna sell a billion dollars of stock because we can, and use the money to pay ourselves bonuses and open some stores I guess?”

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Cohen paid about $75.9 million for his 9 million shares, an average price of about $8.43 per share. His stake is worth about $1.3 billion at yesterday’s closing price, or I guess twice that after Musk’s tweet. I bet that, when he was buying the stock at $8.43 a share, and when he was crafting his activist letter to the GameStop board, he thought that $40 a share would be a great outcome. Close some stores, be more efficient, build up the online presence, get to positive net income, blah blah blah, quintuple his money. It would take months or years of sustained engagement, but he is an experienced operator and was probably up for the challenge.

Oops! He’s been on the board for two weeks, he’s done roughly nothing, and he’s up 1,655%, or some other comically large number, depending on what minute you choose to look at the stock price.

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The weird part is, you shouldn’t need to do both. Like either you bamboozle an unsophisticated client into doing some nasty derivative with you, because the client’s representative is too unsophisticated to know what is going on—or else the client representative knows exactly what is going on, but you overcome her objections by bribing her. If you have to bribe the client to do a trade with you, the client is probably sophisticated enough to know that the trade is bad? I guess it doesn’t actually work that way. Still feels a bit like overkill.

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It is tempting to make fun of this but on reflection I find that I cannot. For one thing, my experience of reading sports blogs online consists mostly of clicking embedded highlight videos and seeing an error message saying that the owner of the rights to the video has removed it. If there was some Ja Morant dunk that I particularly wanted to revisit over the years, it might be worth paying a few … uh, tens of thousands of dollars … for an immutable record on a public blockchain entitling me to watch it. Sure. “We have removed this video,” the NBA would say, and I’d be like “nuh uh look at this blockchain right here.” Basically what Satoshi had in mind. Also I collected baseball cards when I was a kid, and those don’t even have video. Paying money for ephemeral manufactured sports memorabilia based on artificial scarcity is an American tradition; now it’s on the blockchain.

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