Gamestop GME is a rug, it really ties the room together

in the continuing Saga of GameStop we have some people that are very upset about what has happened recently so things got kind of quiet on the GameStop front uh recently there was a runup in the stock price uh in anticipation of the earnings report which came out favorable although there was expectations That Wall Street had that GameStop didn't meet particularly but they have successfully turned the business to profitable but at the same time they did something that I think a lot of people didn't expect although I'm not sure that they shouldn't have expected it where they are intending to raise more money and they're doing that by diluting the stockholders again and this has happened multiple different times uh in in pretty rapid succession and they're starting to be quite a bit of fatigue malays and general obset that that it seems like what GameStop is doing is instead of allowing all the people who have invested in GameStop to participate in this thing that's been col colloquially known as the moas to not participate in that and they're sort of raking all the cash in and then not doing anything it seems like I don't know if they're investing in t- bills or just sitting on this dragon's word of cash and and really not telling anybody what their plan is at all so it's it's kind of a interesting situation that uh is developing here and I think it'd be fun to run it down Lucas how well are you paying attention to what's going on with gamestock well not not maybe maybe fairly well uh but uh I haven't drank the tea what uh you said a moas what do they mean when they say moas the mother of all short squeezes oh that's right the mother of all short squeezes so so what is going on on with the shorting of GameStop have those have those uh uh market makers we you know we talked we talked about uh the the registering of stock and um possible perid that was going on with the uh with the with the shorting of GameStop stock uh back in 2020 and and then some of that coming due earlier this year back in June did those people get squeezed out or did they did they lengthen their bets there's been interesting price action very recently GameStop ran all the way up to $60 it it had this just insane run where the the stock price tripled within maybe a couple days and then it fell right back down and these are things that we've seen in GameStop before like we've seen this sort of weird price action and it always gets dismissed because the the media will say oh it's because roring Kitty posted or it's because Ryan Cohen posted or whatever as if retail had the ability to move the stock around like this um it's it's disingenuous it doesn't seem real so I would say likely the situation that GameStop find itself in with the short interest it has not been resolved and that's part of what is being discussed here is that GameStop and Ryan and the CEO and the chairman of the board seem to be letting these guys off the hook by continuously creating new shares and then selling it off and allowing them to unwind to their positions without having this mother of all short squeezes actually occur so the the interesting thing here to note or the thing that we should talk about first is just what happened with GameStop's Charter so the charter said that they were authorized to issue 1 billion shares of common stock and 5 million Shar of forred stock that is not a small number that is look at this so they had 300 million shares I think we're up to like 440 million at this point but this this is a this is a massive delution you know if you were holding a share and there were this many at the time when you had bought in and they put out a billion new shares you you were going to be massively diluted you're you're going to have like a third of your position and I mean games stop is going to collect up all that cash and they're sitting on right now which is an eye popping 4.2 billion in cash they have a price to cash uh price to earnings cash ratio that beats almost any company that exists in the S&P 500 there is no other company that has no debt this amount of cash and is profitable it's it's wild like there are so few companies that actually meet this profile and it's it's what they've said is that they are now going to raise even more money so if we just run down what's happened recently um I've got a few of these uh pulled up so on May 244th they completed an at the money offering where they raised $9.3 million then short on the heels of that in June they did another offering where they sold another 75 million shares and they raised another 2.1 billion this is where we got to the 4 billion and this is the the thing that's happened recently that has just got people up in arms because here we are uh just a little while after this right which we're in August so remember we are May June and now we're in August and there's another 20 million shares being offered out there so even though they said they were going to sell another billion this seems like What's Happening Here is is GameStop just keeps selling shares letting shorts close out by creating these shares that that they can use to close their positions and never allowing this this short squeeze to actually occur meanwhile they're said that they will never tell anybody what they're planning to do with the money what they're you know doing with anything and we've had cryptic tweets like this from uh the Roaring Kitty where it it seems to allude to throwing away chewy maybe like nobody really understands what what this particularly means and now he's going to get ready to to play with GameStop again and the the sentiment that's out there about the situation I think is pretty well summarized uh on this Reddit thread where under super stun people have been talking about GameStop for a long time and sort of the due diligence and things that they found and if you look at the sentiment here it's most mostly just people being very very mad about the situation and saying I'm kind of over this and I'm out of the you know being a long-term investor in this and and getting out well that's that's interesting um interesting you know when I when I see that graphic from Ro roaring Kitty and roaring Kitty is not part of management not part of GameStop is he he's just um yeah he was just an analyst and an investor the one that they did the the dumb money movie about the one that uh you know our our friend Ian Caroll is doing another movie about called the bear trap so yeah he's he's just an investor just a guy that saw GameStop thought it would had value and that it was being overlooked by Wall Street so yeah he's not part of the management team he's not involved in the company in any way other than he's just a very enthusiastic investor well so there's a there's quite a few things that are going on here that um it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out I think it's pretty obvious that GameStop um has a business model a traditional business model that no longer works I mean what you mean with just like selling brick and mortar uh retail video games yes and part of the narrative that you heard from Gamestop investors especially from 2020 was no this uh BR there's something still in brick and mortar there's Nostalgia there's uh there's real world but but uh you know PlayStation is coming out today does it have an optical disc drive no um do do we live in a do we live in a world of of uh of gas fees I mean it's it's it's as if there's a buds of Deens who are are yearning for ethereum and and buying eth and and yet the world is moving towards lower gas fees um and it would seem that that the management of GameStop certainly understands that and is looking for a new business model um to me uh when we have and when I when I talk about gas fees and traditional companies traditional Finance like this I'm talking about the fomc and the expectation of of lower rates um with meanwhile the an Ever growing amount of dollars that exist in the world that are being passed around for t- bills so so I would I would guess that uh the management of GameStop sees and understands that and is thinking we need to be pivoting and we need to be something more of a financial institution and you mentioned their Charter earlier I know that there were some votes and changes to the Charter did they did they give GameStop permission to uh to engage in I don't know but in financial Gaines of expectation with their massive war chest with all of the dollars that they hold they did they authorized GameStop to make investments according to what was written in the charter and we can pull that up but they absolutely authorized that sort of activity so they they they can do it and it's obvious that they're going to do it and I'll I'll pull up some evidence of that so we can uh take a quick look as far as new business models so GameStop has absolutely participated in a bunch of different things so for a little while they created a wallet they did some stuff with NFS during the nft uh craze they they wound that down they've been selling uh cards that uh have some tie to crypto so there are like these special cards that you can get that there are some of them that have like a whole Bitcoin in them which is pretty wild so people have been buying those they've also gotten into collectible cards and card grade in um and another thing that they've done recently is they they open these retro video game stores where what they're doing is is selling like old video games or some in some instances they're selling branded retro gaming consoles that are new so not just like Old Stock which they've been doing for a long time like you've always been able to go buy like an old video game system at GameStop but now they've specifically started branding stores as retro gaming stores and this has happened pretty recently um so there there have definitely been business models that they have explored things that they've tried to do and this is one of the most recent ones but you know famously Ryan Cohen has kept his his cards pretty close to his chest when we hear any information from Ryan Cohen it's usually pretty cryptic he posts some things to switter feed they notoriously have not provided any guidance during the the times that you would traditionally hear from a CEO or from the management team which would be at earnings time during press releases whatever they famously said go read our 10 Q's you know anything you want to know like we've already published it and you we're not going to say anything differently so it's it's not entirely obvious uh what they're planning on doing but amassing uh a horde of cash like this there seems to be some kind of a plan with respect to mergers Acquisitions or something that will cause GameStop to become a a larger aggregate business and you know to explode the whole thing out that's been the idea and the thesis and I and I don't know that that's in any way been put to rest as well as there's this timeline that has been put out where it seems like it's pretty clear that we're somewhere in this whole situation that we're you know nearing this what whatever this explosion in this clinking of glasses is it might be a little hard to see that but like the Emojis kind of run down like this that there's something to do with the dog uh and maybe that refers to this uh post where dogs's been dropped and you know maybe maybe that's where we're at and then something about you know the election maybe maybe that's what's going on here but yeah that we're somewhere around here in this whole you know mo ass timeline and that we're not quite at the point where we need to be now this is a little bit old on three months ago and this is just somebody's speculation about where we're at I've actually seen people say that we might be at the fire point or whatever so not it's not entirely clear exactly where we're at on this idea of this you know Emoji timeline but somewhere post 27 to 30 is generally the consensus of what people are thinking according to what roring Kitty posted with this very cryptic timeline I really I love the the community following of roaring Kitty I think roaring Kitty is also the the greatest mean Lord who exists on the internet today I know of No Greater um I love his post and I find it fun to it's he's the new Agatha Christie but um you know we keep mentioning Chia and and I'm sorry Chia chewy and this dog in Ryan Cohen and I think it's also important to consider what Ryan Cohen who is the CEO of of GameStop but before then before he was CEO of GameStop was the CEO of chewy which is which is why we keep mentioning that and he took chewy and and or he took and made a company that is I don't know how we abbrev or or describe it but is maybe the Amazon or maybe the patreon of uh across between patreon and Amazon um but but delivers dog food and so you know takes like some sort of notion of of recurring uh Grocery and and and so that's that's what he built in chewy and so when I think about what his instincts might be or or how he was able to make a very successful company with Chewy um that does have a business like you know that does provide a service and and provides value in in the world that we live in today of of people not wanting to go to a grocery store I mean think think about what chewy does in relation to a retro gaming store like do those don't seem to be very congruent to me um an understanding of people wanting things delivered to them and wanting things on the regular is is probably what uh what Ryan Cohen is going to be looking as at as a more successful business in the future so when you mentioned that uh that they've that they' ventured into crypto that they're exploring in crypto you know I also think about the again the the move towards gaming away from uh away from uh the physical physical media CDs DVDs whatever and drives and and maybe GameStop is positioning itself to be a Marketplace for games like something to rival steam um I don't know or or they could be they could be moving in in something more traditional like a more traditional finance company and being something more like a birkshire haway well that that's been speculated that they may be transitioning into something like that there are ties between Ryan Cohen's other businesses you you did mention chewy there was famously this time when Ryan Cohen was dabbling with bed and Beyond and had offered to buy it and wanted to take over the company and these are all like retail companies that had been targeted by the same folks that tried to gut GameStop and to destroy it and short it and then you know abson with the money they made I I thought that this was another interesting point to bring up and it it backs up what I had mentioned about the the price to cash this this is kind of unheard of in the world of most companies is that you usually don't have a drag sort of cash that you sit upon and you know start to build your business with and GameStop has successfully turned their business around in a in a very like shocking way I think to Wall Street in respect to how they've managed this entire situation they've taken the company from being net losing on a per quarter basis and having you know a substantive amount of debt in poor performing stores they've closed a lot of the poor performing stores they've retired all the debt they they have gotten out from underneath the restrictive covenants that they had with various Banks and they're now sitting on this Dragon Sword of cash that they can do whatever they want with there's speculation that uh you know Warren Buffett has sold off a substantial amount of stuff because he's anticipating that the entire stock market is going to go down like if you've watched his moves of recent he is substantively moved most of his uh treasury into a cash or cash equivalent sort of position and it's not obvious what his next move is unless he's anticipating a big Market shortfall or like a big drop in price in in the overall stock market and if that was the case then he'd be in a position to buy up things for pennies on the dollar dimes on the dollar whatever it ends up being and if Ryan Cohen is sort of following along with that then he might be positioning himself to go purchase quite a few things and do a lot of m&a work so it's speculated that actually might be the case and is absolutely authorized by the charter updates that happened uh with GameStop I think it was this year you know and maybe that's going back to those tweets and the American flag and the speaker maybe that has something to do with the election and and expectations with um how the stock market um is going to uh to to form up after the election with expectations as to what's going to happen you know we've seen a lot of uh we've seen a lot of talk about AI Nvidia Apple Google we've also seen threats in regards to antitrust cases with them you know something else that that comes to my mind is uh is patreon uh the patreon business model and um sort of like more General twins trends that we've seen in the last decade last 20 years um and I'm thinking about uh the sharing economy um and and moves more towards the sharing economy um Amazon has been King for quite some time but the Amazon that I fell in love with uh 15 years ago doesn't seem to be the same Amazon today uh the Google that I fell in love with in 2004 likewise you know what what used to be what what used to be a a search page that didn't throw a bunch of ads at me um around the search bar has become and and had text ad at the search results is now just like pages and pages of of AD driven results and and um you know when when I go to Amazon I don't get a whole bunch of options from from disperate sellers uh offering a whole bunch of options I get all of these uh I get all I get a bunch of Amazon related uh uh merchandise thrown my way so maybe maybe Ryan Cohen is looking at what has happened especially with Amazon and thinking about uh what he did with Chewy and um thinking also in terms of the entertainment sector with GameStop I I don't know um well I think one thing we could do to dissect this a bit and try to get out the mind of what Ryan Cohen's thinking about is just to look at his his exfeed like he definitely says stuff and as far as you know what they're hiring for he some times will post about job positions that you know he cares about wants people to apply to so here most recently on September 9th we had a posting about an omni Channel engineering lead and a Salesforce Commerce Cloud engineer then something about graphic designers but the one by you scroll by Biden's weekend at Bernie that was I I I did yeah it's funny I and then there's some more weird stuff in here about like this like what is this tweet supposed to mean I think he might be a trump fan um well these things are always super cryptic and they're weird to dissect because you can infer lots of meaning in these things and people sleuth them out the one that I wanted to call out though uh that I thought was pretty interesting was they had called for an investment person let me see if I could pull that one up quick that they were looking for somebody to help with managing their treasury or investment I thought it was higher up going take me a minute to find this one well it is actually interesting as you're scrolling through his feed I um I look I actually I like actually look up Waring Kitty's uh Twitter page every now and then and see what he's saying again because I think he's uh it's it's like reading reading Agatha Christie today for me um but uh he he's actually pretty um he he seems sort of authentic or in replete in what he's posting not some guarded uh curated um conservative Twitter page here so I can't imagine that he would have deleted this tweet I know it was uh it was it was pretty big news for a little while that they were looking for somebody help with managing their treasury okay give me a second and I'll I'll find this like I know I have notes on this somewhere so give me a second I can't believe I didn't have this I thought it would be easier to find it cuz thought it was just right there on his uh on his feed well go ahead and go ahead and look for but yeah there's there's been some some fun stuff in here with respect to politics you know Ryan Cohen's definitely wearing his heart on his sleeve with respect to some of the things that are happening in the world of politics yeah that's also a maybe um also it's also nice and refreshing to see a CEO who has a sense of humor and is posting memes weekend of weekend of Biden's hey byy the way did you have you know now I I can't find this at all I wonder if this tweet was deleted well keep keep looking for it Rusty did you happen to see Biden put on a trump hat yesterday yeah I saw that it was uh you know just a real quick put it on he put it on with the hat that he was already wearing so I didn't think it was as as big of an incident people are making it out to be but uh yeah I definitely see that I and I could almost see it as he was even more confused and and and just going along with em motions than than really knowing what he was doing oh I think he knew what he was doing and I think it was a I think it was a a dig at Camala Harris um so but um anyway that was that was uh I was I was shocked I was shocked that he put the Hat on um and that he smiled for a picture when he when he did it well you know it would be interesting if uh Biden came out here towards the um you know end of the election or when the election getting ready to come out and starts to you know not become so proa and starts to become negative of her I remember there was a statement that Trump made in the debate that he said you know Biden doesn't even like you and uh and so it would be interesting if if a lot of new information started coming out where that became you know more mainstream yeah so so here it is I found it the reason I couldn't find it on it on a Twitter feed is because it wasn't on there it was uh actually posted to LinkedIn so yeah here here they had posted this um position for doing Global Treasury and you can see there's a couple skills that were listed off uh FX hedging sap Erp some other stuff that they had wanted in here so you know I I think that this post job that they wanted to fill was related to managing that Dragon Sword of cach that they've been able to amass so far because they they need to do something with it and put it to work while you know they wait for whatever sort of market conditions are ripe for doing whatever they're planning on doing with m&a or other mergers or things that they might engage on that have been speculated about and you said they had they had what size of a treasury billions and billions of dollars uh $4.2 billion doll I think is how much they've got in the coppers right now and if they complete this uh at the money share shelf offering which was authorized or that was discussed the other day and some have speculated that they're going to announc like within the next day or two that they've already completed that um that they'll then have four .6 to4 4.7 billion dollars something on the order of that you know it also would seem that there's there is an allegiance towards retail shareholders or to to I don't um smaller shareholders um so with the delusion of the shares um that large of a treasury and um and and uh I I would I would also say just like more largely like ass with both the with the election but also um we're coming into um in reality I mean look at the look at the Trump's talk about tariffs in the world about regrowth regrowth of the American economy and I do think that we are are moving to maybe a less globalist World a time in which we begin to make more things in the United States and become less of a of a finance-driven economy because we also see so many other countries who are getting out of the denomination of the dollar so um possibly they are looking to um again to be something more of a Burkshire hathway to be buying up various companies and or or a micro strategy I mean I honestly as somebody who's a fan of the whole Bitcoin treasury model I'm a little surprised that they're not going this Direction I mean it's an a fairly obvious play if you have a substantive amount of cash I don't know that putting your money into t- bills is the best idea it's certainly a short-term play you know over the course of a couple months it probably is going to be okay but you know long-term t- bills is probably not the right thing to do with the your treasury management and this post actually talks quite a bit about what might occur with the actual delution of the the shares that this might not be that bad or that this might turn out in favor and I mean certainly when they raise this money it's not like this money is gone it's not going into Ryan conen's pockets it's not like the board of directors of is absconding with the cash that's been raised at the expense of retail here it's more okay it's now on the balance sheet and everybody still owns the company so even if you've got a delution of your stock you don't have a proportionate amount that you did before you still have value with in the company with respect to that that money that's on the books is part of what you own as part of the company so if you're a shareholder in GameStop and you know they have $5 billion in cash which you know whatever point they complete this at the at the money offering the Shelf offering next 20 million that they're putting out there um they're going to be somewhere in that range of 4.5 to5 billion dollar depending on exactly what price they get for the shares and what have you um that that you own a proportionate amount of that and so if you just do the math on this it's something like N9 to$ 1010 per share is just in cash so if you look at the the true price of GameStop right now if you buy it for $20 $10 of that $20 that you're paying is just like buying money because that's how much money they hold on their balance sheet I mean it's not like you can get that money but it's there a way to think about it because that much cash is sitting there so what's the residual value of GameStop if you think about it from that perspective if you have another delution of 5% or whatever and now you have an additional one or two dollars of cash per share that you have a portion of it it gets muddied about whether this is a bad thing or a good thing or what's really happening here but it certainly doesn't seem like this idea that we were going to go into a situation where there would be phone number digit valuations on GameStop when or how that's going to occur if we keep selling shares into a billion share whole right like how much short interest is there really like if that's right and there's I don't know billions and billions of short sales that have occurred then then this is a drop in the bucket but if not then it it's building the company and you're a long-term investor and you believe in Ryan Cohen okay but if the idea is that you're going to have a moas i it it some people are starting to say well how can that occur if we keep allowing the shorts to buy up these shares and you keep making them like how how how is that ever going to happen and and if you had a I don't know would you rather be part of of a moas or are you more interested um in in a long-term company because I would also look at this this Narrative of moas and say we're we're we're headed towards again going back to the fomc we're we're headed towards cheaper uh interest rates with the dollar and so it would be harder to it it will be harder to squeeze out short sellers whenever um debt is cheaper for them to accumulate and and so I would I would imagine abandoning that expectation of moas should be what uh what investors are are are looking for and finding you know finding some other some other method of of or some other identity as a as a company um well in some ways a moas has already occurred like it like it maybe maybe not mother of all but if you look at the price going from something like a dollar to $400 there have been very few stocks that have ever occurred any kind of price action anywhere close close to that and this is the time when you know famously Robin Hood you know was shutting off the buy button and we had people going to Congress and all this stuff and if if you look at the the price action it's been kind of this steady decline until you had this kind of weird stuff that's going on which is what I was talking about where you know we see these massive spikes in price up to you know 50 something dollars like these are not retail interest this is you know weird situations where somebody is no longer able to hold their short position has to close out and then something weird occurs and you can see that sort of there was this upward action of just like massive things happening and it just so happens to coincide with that not really occurring because there was that at the Shelf offering here was that other at the Shelf offering and it seemed like it stopped these things from occurring and there's been speculation that maybe you know GameStops from working long term to sort of bring light to all the stuff that's you know been erently happening with this stock because they certainly have a purview around how much stock has been directly registered sort of what they see when votes happen and they haven't been real public about any of that stuff but we have started to see a lot of action from the SEC with respect to two companies that seem like they had a hand in everything that's going on with GameStop finally getting called to task about the current situation so it's not entirely clear uh what is really going on here and if there is maybe some cover being provided for some shorts or if Ryan Cohen is trying to provide cover saying hey we we didn't want a meltdown of the entire Financial system because that wouldn't be good for us or anybody and so we are in a position to capitalize on it but we don't necessarily want it to occur but this this situation that that occurred where you see the stock run up from like look at look at this from that to here like that's that's not a small change at all that's pretty big uh of of a runup you know and and so well actually I think I said yeah okay so anyway yeah um 10 to $25 uh after the [ __ ] the the I also think that um sort of the the the retribution uh that that somebody who was looking for moas um I I think you're right in saying it's not going to be good for the the broader ecosystem um for that uh that level of I don't know a collapse to occur so uh perhaps GameStop is looking at it or Ryan Cohen is looking at it and saying we have leveled the playing field to some degree um we are seeing changes in the in the institutions um in the in the in the finance World um you know look look also at the location of of G stock being in graine being in Dallas um we do know that uh that there is a new Stock Exchange that is going to have settlement on blockchain that is being built in Dallas as we speak so perhaps they're looking at uh as that as being part of the future I I don't know about that I think that that's being built by those who would probably have been traditionally the enemy of GameStop like I think that they were betting against them maybe that's turned around that I'm not sure that that's going to be the case because I think the the primary uh evil villain in this story who or has at least been canonically uh tied to being one of the evil villains in this story is the one who's working on that so I I don't think that that would be a likely scenario but who knows maybe well but that that Narrative of of the I don't know the the arc enemy etc etc like at some point it's a it's a system and you have to play with those players in the system and um that entity I don't I don't know that they that they thought um the the settlement window was ideal I I've certainly seen the CEO talk about it years and years in the past and saying this is a problem this is a problem that needs to be fixed and if if you know again like you can't um at some point you have to to work in reality and and and play the game um but but uh it looks as if they are especially with the with the the building of a new exchange and one that settles with blockchain they are looking to the Future and saying this is something that people want and we're g to make it it possibly I I know that the SEC has made certain moves in the direction of trying to track uh trading activity and what what have you so this was news that came out this year about the Consolidated audit Trail it's funny how many things that we end up talking about on this show that like are cat acronyms whether it's opcat on bitcoin or cat on cheer now Consolidated audit Trail for stocks and and GameStop uh this this here was an effort which has largely I think not produced the results that people anticipated but it made have precipitated a lot of that that that SEC actions which have recently occurred where they're now dragging people in front of uh the regulatory bodies and saying you've been engaging in Behavior which was not what was you know authorized or not supposed to be doing this kind of stuff so it it may have been precipitated by this I don't know I'm not I I guess I do remember the discussions about the consolid audit Trail but um um also with cat as you mentioned that I I kept thinking perhaps cats as mentioned in the debates is a metaphor for other things but probably not um we do talk a lot about cats I the the the settlement the settlement issue um going on in the stock market right now is is to me one of the the greatest problems I mean um there there was we used to see the settlement issue in in Banks and and how it was abused the um uh we that that got closed down in what the late 90s that's sort of the Nar so one of the narratives of banking through through the early 2000s uh they turned to fees um they've made more money on fees even though that they complained that that was uh that was more problematic I don't um I don't know this when when we got when we got in earlier in June into what was going on with the the settlement of stocks I was sort of taken a back at the the um at what a problem it is and and how it's abused uh it seems that if you're in the SEC uh or in the finance um in the finance world people are aware of it and it's a problem so um I I I don't know I I'm I'm also the most excited about blockchain because taking taking it out of the consideration of the SEC seems to me to be a better fix um so I don't know I don't know what to say about GameStop except that it seems to be reading some of these te leaps and trying to trying to position itself for for a big change up well it's still an unresolved situation it seems like these uh these these raises that have occurred have put GameStop into a tremendously strong position no debt profitable it's just a lot of good things to say about it whether all of this Bluster that's happening is the result of new accounts being created shills people trying to get retail shook off of this there's a lot of sentiment that I've stayed with this for a long time I trusted Ryan Cohen I'm going to keep doing it that's overwhelmingly a narrative that's out there as well so it's it's hard to say what's really going to happen but I would say this situation is not over it's far from over and I I don't understand how GameStop could possibly say they were going to sell a billion shares if there wasn't the possibility of them selling a billion shares and if that gives you any indication of what's going on here then it seems to me that there's at least a billion dollars worth of appetite for buying these shares and there's no way that's coming from retail there just is not enough retail money that is out there to buy up a billion shares GameStop so who's going to buy it it's got to be the shorts closing so if that gives you any indication of what these guys might have some access to because they they think that that's actually possible that then you've got to ask who exactly is going to be buying those shares and then what is that what does that mean for you know what gam up ultimately ends up being worth and whether it's a good investment you got to kind of do your own research and do your own math but um it's it's an interesting situation for sure that does not seem to be resolved I I mean and every time we do a show I think that that's kind of my conclusion on this is that this situation isn't resolved and it'll be fun to see uh Ian Carroll's bear trap movie come out which I don't think we we don't mention that enough I got to plug it you know because uh they I don't think Dum money did the the situation Justice and they're hoping to do better on that um and and maybe we can check up and see what's what's going on with the bear trap you know are there any other are there any other narratives or or companies that you've been following that um come close to to uh exposing the shorting issue um exposing the settlement issue is this happening anywhere else um to to a lesser extent or or is is GameStop really driving this narrative driving this attention I I I really can't think of any right off the top of my head I it's a little unprecedented in you know Financial history that people have been saying that this this really hasn't ever happened like this before that somebody um turned around a company that was trying to be shorted into Oblivion there there's just been so many that have gone the other direction and this this is one of the few times where it seems like it's not going the way that traditionally has happened which is you find a company that's kind of on its way out you destroy it through some means and we've seen this in in recent time even with companies like Red Lobster where private Equity comes in and it sure looks like it wasn't the result of them selling too much shrimp that caused that to happen but rather it was Private Equity coming in and doing what private Equity normally does which is to gut the company of all of its assets uh bet against it CH it into Oblivion let that thing declare bankruptcy and then walk away with all the money which has happened to you know Bed Bath and Beyond which happened to a variety of brick-and-mortar retailers and you know happened with this restaurant chain and they tried to do it to GameStop and I you know if you look at other companies where this has occurred the only other one that really comes to mind that I can remember was Tesla and Tesla was kind of the playbook for this because there was a massive bet against Tesla and rightfully so because there's never been a car company a US car company that's been started in a really long time they all failed and it looked like Tesla was just going to join them but sort of this same type of situation happened where retail got behind the company backed it bet against the shorts and and they turned it around and it became a massive success because of the way that they were able to turn the cash position around so I guess to answer the question like has this ever happened before in recent I would say Tesla is still that that poster child that I would point to that something similar occurred and you and we've talked about retail investors versus private Equity you bring up private equity and and this to me is also I guess the the other part of the equation that we have talked about um private Equity loves they they when I was talking about again cheat money uh cheat debt um private Equity lives and loves that but private Equity is to me part of a problem in that it is it is one thing to live in a world where there are there are businesses who are looking for inefficient companies and going to go break them up and sell them for parts or to to figure out a better business model but uh when when I look at what private Equity has become um when I think about uh what they've done with the likes of Bed Bath and Beyond I don't know what happened to AMC um but private Equity seems to get its hands into all sorts of you know Toys R Us um uh any any number of of of businesses and it doesn't seem to be coming up with better business models it's seems to um be breaking them up and making them cannibalistic um by you know selling off the the the actual brick and mortar businesses and renting them back to the company and and uh sucking all of the money off of uh the investors and and out of one company and and making off of that cash so well actually that's a good point they brought up like AMC is in maybe a similar type of situation although people have said they're not that similar because of the way that GameStop had the amount of short interest that it had had at one point that they weren't really Apples to Apples comparisons but certainly AMC has gone through similar types of things where they've issued a massive amount of new shares they've managed to turn their business around largely because of the the weird situation that occurred where there were bets that were placed against the short Sellers and that that managed to turn the company around in some sense and they the the stock price of AMC and and GameStop still track each other down whether they're correlated whether they have similar bets against them or for them you know that might be part of what's going on there but uh it it would be maybe another one that easily comes to mind that is thought about there there have been other weird situations that have happened I think recently uh there was price action on cost which was very very weird like that's a it's a stock that should not have had uh the kind of price action that it did and so there there have definitely been really weird things that have been going on in the stock market and it seems like uh you know some of this is related to just the shenanigans that are enabled by having the market makers and and whatever other players have these powers to be able to create shares synthetically that they've traditionally had in the past to Aid settlement but that now seems to just be being abused us to do these other nefarious types of actions to destroy companies you know something else that could be going on is the private Equity firms are turning their eyes again towards uh like Tech sector firms that have uh been performing so well Amazon Google Apple Nidia because um again we've seen we've seen the government talking about antitrust regulations um and and and also probably possible un unrealistic expect with almost every single one of those companies is in some sort of legal trouble right we saw apples double Irish getting shut down I think you're the one that pointed that one out oh yes then we have Nvidia that there were you know rumors that there was some kind of a doj action against them which turned out to be false that one's a weird one don't know which way it actually is but Nancy Pelosi I think got out of Nvidia so if you're following the best stock Trader of all time she's no longer participating in that one kind of made off with all the money she was going to make and the Insiders at Nvidia have been selling like crazy which is different from what's happening at GameStop like no insiders have been selling on GameStop and usually they've been acquiring additional shares now there's some Nuance there because I think some people had some tax situations occur where they had to sell some but like most of the people that are insiders at GameStop haven't been selling but uh uh the the top people including the CEO at uh Nvidia have been selling off and then we've got Google that is now being looked at uh for an antitrust violation through the doj I believe right so yeah all the big Tech firms seem to be in in some sort of legal trouble or going through you know various different inforcement actions against them you know there's also the um I saw that the the NFL owners uh voted to allow some private Equity firms to buy 10% of the NFL and that really caught my eye too because um because we haven't seen private I I hadn't seen private Equity you know so I had seen it traditionally or for the last several years aimed at at uh businesses that were affected by the internet you know the the internet bubble and all these brick and mortars Barnes & Noble um the the the all all of the old familiar names that we knew from walking up and down the mall um and so perhaps they are um beginning to look at and there's also going back to the political to the politics of what's going on in this election it and the um the a change in how the world operates if the dollar is no longer the denominator for the world's currencies and their options I think that we are definitely going to see um some sort of return to manufacturing we I not have um as good of options and and goods here in the United States or um as cheap of options but uh it is that's going to um change the businesses that are are what's possible for businesses to be profitable here so maybe again they're looking at at um not just the the business model of GameStop but as you put it uh or or as you pointed out the the the character of the investors in that company too and saying um there's a punch there's a bunch of di hard people here there is going to there's a a different kind of Institutional Investor in um in companies that have been much more stable in the past but are about to be shaken up so well we're certainly in a world of some of the most expensive money that we've seen in a long time the Yen carry trade still seems to be unwinding like that situ ation if if you're not tracking it the the yen is still uh going through the the cycle that everyone had feared so you know the the margin calls and whatever other types of loan and and weird shenanigans that was happening when they were able to borrow at zero against Japanese Yen and go put that money to work in much more lucrative markets still seems to be going in in the wrong direction from what people had hoped it would which is to to keep the the the Yen uh very weak it seems to continuously be gaining strength which is not what anybody had wanted when they're operating in the carry trade and then uh you've got the Federal Reserve in the United States which has kept rates High which means you know money is is at a premium right now it's the hardest it's been to get uh money to do m&as and and whatever else and so you know if you look at a strategy like what GameStop is doing where they're raising a massive amount of money that that really would have put them into a pretty pretty precarious situation if they had tried to borrow it so raising it the way they've done has put them into this this class of being able to buy things that uh many other companies will not be able to mimic that given their cash situation well and who who knows what H well we we also have uh Congress talking about a continuing resolution for funding the government too which would be creating more debt to be monetized um I I I know that a lot of investors or probably almost all investors are looking for for a cheaper cheaper uh rates from the Federal Reserve um cheaper interest rates but I think that is yeah but even those cheaper interest rates are not talking about cutting two or three points they're talking about cutting a quarter point or something we're still at like you know well and yeah you you mentioned you say like uh it's exp it's expensive money right now but I mean the Central Bank of AR Ina the rate is at 40% and we're at five so it's all it's all relative we've been living with relatively cheap money for a long time like we have had really low interest rates and that precipitated everything from people being able to get mortgages at 2.5% you know like that that kind of thing is just not on the horizon again anytime soon like I just don't I don't foresee the era of super cheap money like what we experienced during that decade coming back anytime soon like the rate cuts that will occur over the next you know six to 18 months is not going to be three percentage points to get us back to something like that like if they do rate Cuts it'll be a quarter point here a quarter point there and we're we're going to be living under you know this expensive money for quite some time I I just don't see any one or any analyst who's saying the return to cheap money is going to come back and and again you're right it's not throughout the entire world but in the United States this is a situation that we haven't seen in in quite some time it's been a long time since we've seen interest rates this High well and i' I've also seen um I've seen this affecting the real estate market um very very low home sales and and and meanwhile um yeah because who wants to get settled with a with a s to 10% mortgage rate well but when I when I look at the you know this is also something that Trump and Harris both talked about a little bit and I've talked about in their plans but they seem to want to uh create more government debt to give what $25,000 $6,000 to first home home buyers um meanwhile there's no there's there's no Authority for the president to do that that would have to be Congress right I mean there's no way Congress no no the the the department uh well it it's it's it's actually how they structure it um but no the department of agricultural U has a lot of firsttime home buyers but they what they do is they rob you from the future but it um they they you know they give you a loan and and you have to pay it back when you sell the house in the future but what that does is allow the the prices of homes to continue to rise so that the tax base for um especially the local and state governments continues to rise too so you're saying what comma has said she would do for firsttime home buyers or or whatever like that $25,000 you're saying that that the programs are already authorized and they're in existence oh yeah absolutely go to um you know the the USDA and it might seem weird that HUD is under the USDA but a lot of these programs started because of uh Aid to rural houses and and as we play with interest rates with the Federal Reserve um the velocity of money is very important and when you live in a city a dollar might exchange hands you know hundred times in a day but when you live in a rural area I and and think about how this also correlates to homes like uh you're you when you're when you're evaluating the value of the home according to the comparables of all the sales that have occurred around it when you sell a lot more homes the Val the price goes up a lot more quickly and because that happened it was important to um um to to provide incentive or to you know provide cash for rural areas so that they could catch up with the rest of the country and so uh the USDA has a couple of different um um uh programs for for helping people you know buy houses and they they give you money now and the deal is is that you have to pay the money back to them when you sell the house in the future so they rob you from the future um but it but it creates money now if you if you think about how that's working and it creates money for uh the government and and for the whole system immediately and so that's that's how that program would probably be carried out yeah it's a it's a big part of the economy is just making sure that that velocity of money keeps happening because everybody's getting a little piece every time a transaction or Money Changes hand so it's it's important that they they keep the money flowing through the economy in between hands because if everybody just sits tight then then everything comes to a crashing halt anyway this has been interesting discussion it's been a while since we've we've looked at what what's really happening with the GameStop I think it's been a few months since we've looked at it so it's fun to take a look at it and if uh if there are new developments we'll we'll take another look but as of this point I'd have to say that uh my opinion is that the title of this this space is is wrong I don't think it's a rug but certainly some weird stuff that's going on here but I don't I don't think anything that they've done is is rugging the stock particularly it seems like they're building a a fantastic cash position and what they end up doing with it will ultimately determine the success of the company it needs it it needs a semicolon and then to say it really ties the room together nice all right well we'll uh talk tomorrow all right see you tomorrow