GameStop CEO gets 170M-payday after Reddit market frenzy | Hacker News Reader

GameStop CEO gets 170M-payday after Reddit market frenzy

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18 pointsLonisHamaili8 comments

There is lot's of talk of a possible market crash when this all kicks off. Not as Reddit users are manipulating the game, but as hedge funds have rehypothecated up to 5x the float via naked sorting of ETFs, Dark Pools and options manipulation.

Ultimately, the fact that there are more shares than possible seems not to stop them, and if/when any of the hedge funds get market called, the whole spiders web will be unraveled and we'll work out how many shares are out in the wild.

The difference this time is that a company hedge-funds went 'all-in' on, turned around and became majorly successful.

They call this the MOASS.

No one knows just how many, but I am pretty sure it's more than the 71.5 million issued. That is what the bet is.

Questions welcome. :-)

> but as hedge funds have rehypothecated up to 5x the float via naked sorting of ETFs, Dark Pools and options manipulation.

Where is the proof any of this has happened?

They don't tend to leave that lying round, so it's something of a Russell teapot, and none of the totals even from FINRA or Bloomberg terminals add up. There is zero transparency in any of this!

All short interest values are self reported, and all an FTD needs to disappear is a fresh short.

Again. That is part of the bet. If the bet fails, you are left with a profitable stock, as it does have solid fundamentals despite what MSM tells people.

It's the amount of times I've read articles telling me to 'Forget Gamespot', or suggesting other stocks that really convinced me. There is a solid effort to get people away from this stock and onto stuff like Silver, weed stocks. Anything but GME.

Maybe there's some serious bias confirmation going on in my head.

Well that's the only interesting part of this, everything else seems like elaborate fantasy without any proof of that core fact. I can come up with a billion 'interesting bets' based on some unsubstantiated thing happening.

I'm much more inclined to believe this is a massive coping strategy from people who bought in at the top of the GME hype and didn't get to see hedge funds shutter overnight a la 2008, as they had likely fantasised.

We already have a fallout in Archegos and Credit Suisse doing risky stuff (fraud TBD in court). With an exemption from the Fed on reserve levels over the last year, I'm betting those weren't isolated events and more banks have been very naughty.

Here's a documentary about naked short selling and failures to deliver if you're interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kpyhnmd-ZbU

Here's an economist, PhD and former DTC who authored "Naked, Short & Greedy" and has been trying to sound the alarm on naked shorts and phantom shares for decades: https://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2020/03/how-phantom-shares-o...

From that article - "The world‘s biggest stock fraudster, Bernie Madoff, wrote from prison February 3, 2012, “It was perfectly proper to short [my clients’] securities or purchase those positions back from those clients or others with any profit or loss recorded on my books. … The point is that this was my practice prior to the time that I fell into my crime of staying Naked Short. The fact that the prosecutor and Trustee seemed clueless of this is why my frustration is so great.”

GameStop may have gone the way of Toys R Us and countless others.

The shares shorted don't align with what should have been available. You can tally up institutional ownership, make some guesses on retail and use the short numbers available from various sources. It doesn't add up. You can also look at SEC failures to deliver.

None of this sounds like an elaborate fantasy to me. The information is out there.

Now, will anything be fixed? Definitely not unless it's exposed. Kind of what this is all about.

> If the bet fails, you are left with a profitable stock, as it does have solid fundamentals

Could you explain to me what these fundamentals are?

Well it's wiping out debt and recently raised 550M+ in ATM offering. Close to $1B in cash. Removing underperforming locations as they have some favorable leases.

They have the known brand in a huge and growing industry.

They have a revenue sharing agreement on digital sales.

Will sell more PC gear and expand product selection. Invest in better customer support like Ryan Cohen did with Chewy.

On the financial side recently - "The gaming retailer's global e-commerce sales increased 175%, representing 34% of the company's total net revenue during the quarter. During the same period last year, e-commerce made up just 12% of total sales." [1]

So still a long way to go but people are mostly betting on Ryan Cohen, the team he's assembled and shifting to be more e-commerce heavy.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/23/tech/gamestop-earnings-q4-202...

TLDR - the CEO was granted 1 million shares over 3 years at $5 per share. Now that GameStop's stock price went up due to the WSB frenzy, that stock is worth $170 million. He is departing earlier than expected, and per his contract he retains those shares but gives up a cash payout and another $50M in shares he could have had if GameStop's performance improved over the next few years.

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