While watching the GameStop stuff has been mildly hilarious (I mean who doesn't like watching the financial elite squirm?) it's pretty clear that a whole bunch of folk have convinced themselves this is ACTUALLY some kind of revolutionary activity. It isn't. 1/

Sure, it's highlighted yet another way in which the bastards profiteer but that's about it, stick it on the pile with the fifty other pro tips to keep the poor, well poor... It's todays banter and tho a few folks might have egg on their faces, literally nothing will happen. 2/

GameStop's three largest shareholders have earned £1.5bn+ during this. They sit at the top of some 200 institutions which are rolling. Meanwhile the ersatz rebels are now watching the bubble, realising there is profit to be made and having a wibble. 3/

No doubt some TRULY believe they are taking part in some kind of revolution but frankly it's utterly absurd and the vast majority are in it for the lulz and to cash in quick.

I'm sorry to tell you this, but you don't own GameStop.

4/

The reality is, the scale of the economic disparity and corruption is simply vast. Billionaires loosing a few millions means nothing. They buy one less yacht and you continue to live meal to meal.

The "Free Market" changes a few systems and the abuse continues. 5/

1/

Get a cup of coffee.

In this thread, I'll help you understand Geometric Expectations.

2/

Imagine we have an investment opportunity.

If the investment goes well, we get to double our money.

But if it goes badly, we'll end up losing three fourths of it.

There's a 50/50 chance of either outcome.

The question: is this a good bet or not?

3/

A simple way to approach this question is to calculate the bet's "expectation".

For every $1 we bet, there are 2 possibilities:

1. The lucky case, where we double our money and end up with $2, and

2. The unlucky case, where we lose (3/4)'th to end up with just $0.25.

4/

Each of these outcomes is equally likely.

So, on *average*, every $1 we put in turns into ($2 + $0.25)/2 = $1.125.

This is a *positive* 12.5% return.

Such bets are called *positive expectation* bets. On average, we expect to *make* (rather than *lose*) money on them.

5/

Suppose we could take many turns betting at these odds.

In any one turn, we could of course lose money.

But because our bet has positive expectation, *over time* we expect to make money.

There is no shortage of takes about what's going on with Gamestop (and other surging stocks), Robinhood and Reddit's r/wallstreetbets, many of them contradictory - at least on the face of them. But I think it's possible for most of these takes to be right. Here's how.

1/

First you need to understand the underlying mechanics of the story. Stock markets are fundamentally a way of making bets, including bets on the outcome of other peoples' bets, and bets on the outcomes of THOSE bets.

2/

All this complexity creates lots of exploitable opportunities. Some of these opportunities are considered legitimate and are given respectable names like "arbitrage." Others are considered illegitimate, and are called disreputable things like "stock manipulation."

3/

A hypothetical Martian observing all this through a telescope could not tell you which kinds of bets were honest and which were dishonest, because the difference isn't about any objective standard, but rather, about power.

4/

The strategies of powerful people are legit, while the strategies of their would-be dethroners are not legit. Sometimes, even outright frauds are OK if they're done by people with enough power.

5/

A thread about GameStop:

Big hedge funds made big bets that GameStop’s stock was overvalued. The way these bets work is the hedge fund borrows shares of the stock and sells those borrowed shares.

When it comes time to give the borrowed shares back, they buy them on the market, hopefully at lower prices. For example, they might sell the borrowed share at $50, hoping to be able to buy the share back at $30, to make a $20 profit. This is called shorting.

The hedge funds were so sure that GameStop was going down, that GameStop was the most shorted stock on the market. 140% of the shares in existence were “borrowed.” Imagine Bob borrows from Jane who borrows from Sue who borrows from John.

Shorting is risky, but the hedge funds were so sure that they just didn’t even care. People on Reddit realized this and basically thought “what if we all just bought shares and refused to sell them when the hedge funds need to give their borrowed shares back.”

The price goes up, the hedge funds are forced to buy back the expensive shares and lose money. Except the hedge funds kept doubling down as the price rode up, expecting that it would eventually fall. The Redditors weren't scared off and with "diamond hands" refused to sell.

A couple days back, I wrote up my best understanding of what happened with /r/wallstreetbets and meme stocks like Gamestop, trying to show how all the different, seemingly contradictory takes on the underlying financial stuff could all be true.

https://t.co/xWzre4r0Yj

1/

In the days since, a new series of contradictory takes has emerged, these ones disputing the meaning of this bizarre financial spectacle, and likewise what response, if any is warranted as it unfurls.

2/

I think that all of these takes can also be true, and as with the trading itself, reconciling them requires that we widen the frame.

Let's start with Jimmy Carter.

3/

In 1978, Carter's IRS created the 401(k), a tax-sheltered account for people who wanted to gamble on stocks to fund their retirement.

That was a fringe proposition at best.

4/

The normal retirement system was a "defined benefits" pension where your employer guaranteed you a certain monthly percentage of your salary from retirement to death.

The vast majority of Americans wisely prefered a guaranteed payout to a tax-advantaged gambling account.

5/

Note: This thread is ‘Fictional’

Baki Aap Samjdar ho!

This thread is all about Bollyw**d, A grade actresses, ISI, Politicians, IAS officers, Judges, Journalists and Industrialists!

Duration 2004 to 2016

Pakistani ISI used their contacts in bollyw**d to bring many of A grade actresses to UAE, UK and USA.

They have paid them to spend nights with Big Pakistani Army officers, ISI officials and Pakistani Politicians

They have recorded this special moments and started to use that a grade actresses as per their agenda!

They have sent them to Ministers of that time, IAS officers, Journalists, Judges, big industrialists and other politicians (CM of States, Party Presidents) as honey trap!

ISI succeed in this and they have now clips of all of them!

New government established in 2014 and people thought that, corrupt people will be in the jail very soon!

But ISI have started to black mail IAS officers, Judges etc… to save culprits of scams and force them to work against India!

THREAD: What are some Posting Traders doing, and what do the federal securities laws say about it? A securities law professor tries to make it simple.

(Tl;dr? Some people on the Internet will be surprised when the SEC investigates them for market manipulation.)

Backstory: what's going on? GameStop sells video games (you've maybe seen their stores in strip malls). Its business model hasn't been doing so hot.

It's a public company, so you could go on your broker's website and trade its stock. Its price had been low for a while.

One very simple way to think about stock investing is that you can make two main types of bets: that a stock's price will go up, or go down.

Some big hedge funds (think BILLIONS) were betting that it'd go down. This is called a "short" bet.

The goal of a short sale is to sell high, buy low, and pocket the difference. Suppose you pay a small rental fee to borrow a stock, sell, and hope to rebuy it later at a lower price when you've said you'll give it back to the lender.

Note for later: "borrowing" is important.

The other kind of bet is a "long" sale, in which you buy a stock for its income (dividends) or the possibility of selling it for a higher price later (capital gains).

Compared with someone "short," someone "long" a stock actually has it (kinda).

THREAD: COUNTERFEIT STOCKS

There are four major players in the industry: Hedge funds, prime brokers, the DTCC, and the SEC.

Hedge funds and the SEC you know of, but the DTCC and prime brokers are important.

Prime brokers are relatively simple - they’re brokers that can clear their own transactions by way of moving actual shares between their clients.

The big prime brokers are ones you’ve heard of - Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bear Stearns, Citigroup, etc. - big, big companies.

These prime brokers in turn collectively own the Depository Trust Clearing Corp - DTCC.

The DTCC is an almost impenetrable, behemoth corporation that clears near a billion shares a day and accounts for a vast majority of the clearing house activity in the US market. This is the corporation that ACTUALLY holds physical shares - all your “shares” are on their books

The DTCC is (this will be important later) nearly impossible to get information out of, and it takes an act of Congress or a subpoena to get them to talk on anything.

1/ The Rebellion Begins

What happened with Robinhood and GameStop represents a rebellion against institutions, banks, and governments.

This is Bitcoin's moment.

A thread👇

Warren Buffet & Charlie Munger's wisdom on

- LTCM
- Circle of Competence (Q by @MohnishPabrai )
- Buy & Hold Strategy

Berskhire Hathaway AGM: 1999

@suru27 @ParikPatelCFA @ashishkila @ravidharamshi77 @_kirand @gauravgsgs @blitzkreigm @PuneetK009 @_anshulkhare

🧵👇

#investing

1). On LTCM:

Munger: What was interesting was how talented they were and then also got in so much trouble. It also demonstrates general system of finance involving derivatives is irresponsible.

Warren: Here you had extremely experienced people operating with their own money.

• They went broke. Why do people risk losing something very important to gain something that’s totally unimportant? The added money has no utility whatsoever.

If almost impossible to go broke without borrowed money being in the equation. No gain is good enough when there is no gain to offset the risk of loss.

2. Estimating Company’s IV

Warren: Investment is process of putting money today to get more money back in the future. The question is how far in the future, how much money and what is the appropriate discount rate to take it back to the present day and determine how much to pay?

Want to see two absolutely crazy, shady, frustrating charts? (warning: they're confusing, I'll explain)

These charts, which show stock price, volume, short interest, and short volume, tell the story of what happened over the past few days.

Left: $AMC, Right: $GME

On Wednesday night, Robinhood and several other apps limited trading of a number of tickers to just a few shares & options. You could sell as many as you owned, but you couldn't buy any more than a couple of each ticker. It included $AMC, $GME, and a few others…

They did this because their clearing houses increased liquidity requirements more than a hundred percent. A clearing house, if you’re wondering, is what settles all of the trades made during each trading day.

So, when you buy or sell a stock, you might see the cash or the stock in your account immediately. In the background, however, it’s a lot more complex: these clearing houses settle up the books between each other to make sure everyone is squared up properly.

These clearing houses have "liquidity reqs" which are set by regulations and other partners; they literally need to have a certain amount of cash on hand for different securities.

On Wednesday night, the requirements for certain extremely volatile stocks like GME skyrocketed.

So I've followed DFV's $GME journey from beginning and think it says a lot about what's going on here. How do u go from $50k to $40ml deep value screening in about a year which btw beats $nflx and $amzn growth return holding for decades? A

1)
As someone who tried the blockbuster rinse and repeat short (unsuccessfully btw) on $gme almost a decade ago I'm quite familiar with the name. Burry's re-emergence at the end of 2018 & roughly $5ml gme position disclosure then put the stock on the deep value radar.

2)
$gme dropped like 50% in h1 2019 and his q2 disclosure indicated he had exited the name. It was at this time DFV emerged onto WSB with an essentially i'll take this shot at half MB's cost basis with the console refresh a year out thesis.

3)
I don't recall him fully articulating the thesis then, but that really didn't matter as MB remerged with a 3-4% activist stake by the Aug 2019 about 70% lower than his year end 2018 cost basis. MB wanted a buyback immediately & criticized mgmt past capital alloc failures.

4)
To be clear the thesis did not provide deep dive analysis on $GME or the industry. MB simply seemed to be of the view that the console refresh meant things were not ending anytime soon, and that simply buying back stock in size was the right move for mgmt.

This is your daily pension announcement. The Travis goes balls to the wall edition! It has been a busy week in pensions, so I will again dive into the dung heap with an open mouth. First up Mark (AIMCO Chair) makes a statement...#ABLeg #handsoffmypension

Read it carefully, because most of what he wrote is true.

"These factors define the success of the Canadian model of pension management." True. But he needs to acknowledge that ATRF had for generations contributed to the success of the Canadian pension model. #ABLeg #AMCOfail

The real humdinger is:
"The terms and conditions included in the Ministerial Orders are in the best interest of both AIMCo and its clients and clearly align interests."

Nope. That is why 0 out of 4 pension plans have signed an agreement. Take that to your MLA. #ABLeg #handsoff

The terms and conditions contained are egregious and irresponsible. They erode the responsibility of ATRF. But AIMCO doesn't give a shit because they knew if they run out the clock Travis will make it law anyway.

Mark knew that Travis is AIMCO's lackey. #ABLeg

Mark should have learned from his predecessor. Stay out of Alberta politics. Getting involved will lead to no good.

These investment management agreements need to be written on a commercially reasonable basis. Which would include the ability to fire them if required. #ABLeg

THREAD

Goldman Warns If The Short Squeeze Continues, The Entire Market Could Crash (Zero Hedge Premium)

Last Friday (Jan 22) we advised readers who thought they had missed the move in Gamestop (they hadn't), to position appropriately in the most shorted Russell 3000 names:

which included such tickers as $FIZZ, $DDS, $BBBY, $AMCX, $GOGO and a handful of other names, as it was likely that the short-squeeze was only just starting.

We were right and all of the stocks listed above - and others - exploded higher the coming Monday,

and all other days of the week, with results - encapsulated by the WallStreetTips vs Wall Street feud - that have become the only topic of conversation across America, while on WSB the only topic has been the phenomenal gains generated by going long said most shorted stocks.

To wit, the basket of top shorts we compiled on Jan 22 has tripled in the past week.

And while some are quick to blame last week's fireworks on the "dopamine rush" of traders at r/wallstreetbets who seek an outlet to being "copped up with little else to do during the pandemic"

while also blaming widespread lockdowns and forgetting that it has been Bloomberg that was among the most vocal defenders of the very lockdowns that have given us the short squeeze of the century), the reality is that at the end of the day

Peter Lynch is a great investment manager of all time. He is famous for introduction of PEG. (P/E growth)

According to Mr. Lynch the faster the company grows, the higher the P/E ratio you should pay for that company

Here is a Thread - Peter Lynch thoughts & my interpretations.

1. Investing is fun, exciting & dangerous if you don’t do any work

Fun becoz we tend to learn so many things

Exciting becoz it give great moments of celebration because of unimaginable wealth

Dangerous becoz it can be addictive due to greed & people may start finding shortcuts

2. You can outperform the experts if you use your edge by investing in companies or industries you already understand.

Study businesses, apply common sense and invest into something which you understand.

No need to adventure & no need to be part of anything or everything.

3. The stock market has come to be dominated by a herd of professional investors. You can beat the market by ignoring the herd.

Stay away from noise & crowd to come out as a winner.

4. Behind every stock is a company. Find out what it’s doing

The underlying entity of a stock is business. Choose to ignore everything else, but never ignore to study business.

Company includes few more things in addition to business like management, etc.