ValueArb

RFK Junior is most famous in the US for being an anti-vaxxer, he believes they have egregious side effects that science is unable to discern. I was just using poetic license to compare his position on the Ukraine & Russia to his anti-vaccination stand. Like my college professor, you found my creative writing unclear, and like her, gave me a failing grade.

NATO is the vaccine to cure the virus of Russian expansionism, which is why RFK Inferior dislikes it.

MOMO

Credit where credit is due. The first Ukrainian “SAMbush” of a Russian A-50 Mainstay by a Patriot system was a German tactical innovation they trained the Ukrainians for. “According to Col. Clemente, the German soldiers tasked with training the Ukrainians on the mobile Patriot systems woke up the Ukrainian battery in the middle of the night, marched them to a location where they fought a simulated air battle, and then made them march again. “I was like, ‘Huh, wonder why they did that?’ And it was a month later, they conducted some of their first ambushes where they’re shooting down Russian Su-27s along the Russian border.” https://www.twz.com/land/u-s-army-officer-confirms-russian-a-50-radar-jet-was-shot-down-with-patriot-missile

OK, so he sold his options to buy shares, that math seems to work out pretty closely. 12M options at $10 approximately equals 4M shares. And it makes sense he's not dumping, he never has before.

That would pretty much sink my logical scenario. Its possible he borrowed a ton of money outside of his account and funneled it in for this trade, but seems unlikely as convincing someone to lend him as much against his E-Trade account seems way harder than just using margin. That would mean his account balance actually represents close to his net worth. So maybe he did make a 9 figure score in Solano? Or Solano in combination with a big GME trade in early May? Maybe he bought a ton of $10 calls in April, then sold them for after he posted his memes? I don't know how to get historical option pricing/volume for expired options but looking at the June 21 $10s on Yahoo there was huge volume spike at $1.50-$1.75 on April 21, and a ton of volume May 12-13 selling between $16 to $44 during the first spike. I imagine that May expiration $10 options were even cheaper in April and spiked even higher in May.

That's not his style, he's the ride or die leader of the movement and it seems unlikely he would nuke his reputation that way when his history is taking enormous risks and not bailing on his followers. He held his shares/options way far past the squeeze in 2021 and just bought more shares. CNBC had a story today that i think nailed what he'll do, he'll cashout the options and put proceeds directly into shares. At $26 he can get close to 3M more shares. All of this of course assumes he wasn't using margin/leverage to buy his current holdings. If thats the case then heck yea, he's got to be the seller, he panicked thinking he was on verge of a huge loss and decided he liked money more than adulation of a bunch of smelly apes posting from moms basement. That might provoke an investigation. The SEC can't stand by while companies sell stock in a pump then pay themselves massive dividends from the cash shortly afterwards. Cohen would have no credible explanation for why GME's capital allocation plans changed so radically so quickly other than exploitation. And Cohen's basis is over $25/share on 36.8M shares, after tax proceeds from a $5 dividend isn't moving the needle much for him and isn't reducing his risk. As long as he can keep Gamestop running at break-even by downsizing ruthlessly over time his downside will remain capped at $10/share in its net cash, and he keeps the optionality of an actual turnaround of GameStop bailing him out. He can also grow cash per share slowly over time with more well timed ATMs and interest earnings, or canny acquisitions (if he's capable of making any). It is sounds weird that he had GME sell 45M shares at $21 last month when his basis was significantly above that, but that first tranche was securing the safety of his investment. From now on he should just drop ATMs north of $25 so he can increase the value of his holdings. Until Keith reports he sold, I think Cohen's hands are tied till after Gill's options expire on the 21st. Ryan should want to keep Keith afloat and fanning the fire of his followers. He doesn't want to accidentally force Gill's account into liquidation (if he's heavily margined) or a huge loss, he wants to maintain Gill's appearance of invulnerability so he keeps the apes in a frenzy so GME can keep dropping ATMs at absurd prices for months more.

This is trainspotting at its finest.

$32 now. It would be obviously rational for Cohen to drop another ATM at any time its trading above $20, I doubt GME is worth $15 even with $10/share in cash. But I'm wondering if the soft factors will prevent him doing another ATM quickly. Dropping one more before the 21st is going to look bad from a PR perspective, not just to the apes, but to mainstream media it looks like taking advantage of clueless retail. And it looks like he's targeting Gill's option position and trying to bust him. But if it breaks over $40 again all bets are off. I think @whatstheofficerproblem nailed the long term goal. Ryan will invest GME in other businesses while just winding Gamestop down at break-even. He'll build his own mini-berkshire to run for the rest of his life, so any opportunity to increase his capital base he'll take. He's going to do more ATMs this year if the cult gives him the opportunity. My bet is GME has more than $15/share in cash by end of year.

I need to stop doing math in my head. IB's trading history page for GME tells me that 183M traded Friday, 101M traded Monday, and 55M so far today, which is just under 350M. And clearly they were able to start trading first thing market open Friday, that's why they rushed out their financial update and the ATM prospectus update/announcment pre-market. Otherwise they would have waited to announce after hours. The prospectus lists 426M as their likely outstanding shares post ATM offering, up from 300M before the May offering. Again I think its likely they'll do more, but assuming they stop after this one they'll have roughly $4.3B in cash (assuming a $30 average sales price for second ATM) or $10/share in cash and slightly more than that in book value. They could end up with 500M shares if they pop another ATM this month, at over $21/share that would be close to $6B, or $12/share in cash. Either way this is a pretty massive increase in share count, which should make it even harder to manipulate by that motley crew of reddit apes. And they'll all be sitting with egg on their face after this attempt went south, so their credibility should be significantly damaged just like Gills is now. The smarter ones have to realize that a short squeeze is now forever impossible as Ryan Cohen is just going to milk any pump for cash. But on twitter a bunch were complaining yesterday about "hedge funds" and "market makers" manipulating the stock because the first after hours trade was over $40, then the price rapidly returned back to $25. So it seems obvious that it was an ape still trying to manipulate (someone waited for low volume after hours to paint the tape with a tiny trade at a high price hoping it would spark a frenzy), and still blaming others for whacky conspiracy theories, so who knows what will happen when Cohen actually buys a new business with all that cash.

Volume has been so high that I would be surprised if they aren't close to done now, 310M shares traded over Friday/Monday. Price is still so high at $24 that I wouldn't be surprised if they announced another ATM.

Ok, my math was off a bit from an incorrect assumption. I thought the May 17 offering announcement was after hours, but it was before, so the actual percentage of shares sold over the 6 days was around 14%. And also the closing price the day before was $27, so it did seem to have a strong effect on the price over those 6 days (ending at $19).

First regulators broke trades to steal from those lucky enough to buy BRKA at $150 last week, now Schwab is screwing up once in a lifetime trades that would have made a customer millions.

In May they sold 45M shares in one week, which was about 25% of the total volume. It might have been less, the announcement of the ATM offering and announcement it was concluded were one week apart so I'm assuming it took the whole week. But they could have sold it more quickly and been a higher percentage. On Friday GME traded 182M shares, so 75M would have been around 40% of the volume. They did not announce conclusion of the sale on Saturday, so it seems likely they still have shares left to sell. But at 25% of the volume they should be done today. My guess is they had very few shares left before today because when they sold 25% of the volume that week in May the stock price only dropped from $23 to $19, while the stock price was utterly crushed on Friday, which implies they sold higher than 25% of the shares traded. What should be scary to DFV is that the 45M share sale netted $21/share, so clearly management is happy to sell shares above $20, and nothing stops them from doing additional ATMs if the price increases again. He paid over $5/share for put options for 12M shares with a June 21 expiration, so it looks very likely he's going to take a big loss and is at significant risk of having them expire worthless for a $65M loss. Establishing a huge option position that was barely in the money and expires in 3 weeks to bet on a short squeeze in a company that just demonstrated that they are now ready to drop ATM offerings at a days notice seems like one of the dumbest trades in world history. But I still have to wade through numerous tweets on my timeline proclaiming Keith Gill is really an incredible actor who faked everyone out playing an idiot on livestream while he's actually playing Putin level 5D chess.

His history is that he doesn't unload his positions early. Supposedly he held the last time for many months past the 2021 squeeze and as far as I know never announced he had sold. This is all consistent with his anointment as "leader of the movement" by the Reddit Ape crowd, he seemed to take their adulation and his responsibilities very seriously so I'd be shocked if he tried to pump and dump now. The big question I haven't seen an answer to is how did he get $$165M to establish this new position? If he had $48M in Jan 2021, he likely had significantly less later as GME traded down rest of year and also had to pay taxes. And then he bought a massive mansion and fleet of exotic sports cars. If he sold anytime in late 2021 or 2022 he should have netted less than $30M. There is a rumour he made a killing on Solano crypto, so maybe he's increased his bankroll substantially since then. But even if he doubled or tripled his portfolio since 2021 he would need to use margin to help establish his GME position. For example, lets assume he grew his portfolio to $100M in the last 2 years, and put it all into this trade + $65M in margin debt. If the flood of new shares causes GME to finish at or below $20 on June 21, the $65M he paid for those short dated options disappears. Now he's got $100M in assets and $65M in margin debt for a net value of $35M, a loss of $65M that reduces his net worth back to $35M. Worse, if GME drops to $18, his account gets automatically liquidated and all positions sold, and the price would get hammered as E-Trade dumps 5M shares on the market as quickly as possible. He could come out of it with his entire net worth zeroed out. I have no idea if he did use a lot of margin, but I do know he's a huge gambler. You don't turn $50,000 into $50M in a single trade without gambling massively. If he turned an after tax $30M into $100M the last few years it means he kept gambling. And this trade built on 3 week options shows he's still gambling. So it would be in keeping with what got him here to gamble his entire net worth thinking he could control the market without even understanding the changes that have occured since the first time. Keith Gill is like one of those guys who shows up at my local casino for the first time and starts on an amazing heater where he wins almost every day, which he mistakes for proof that he's gods gift to poker. I've seen it happen numerous times where after a few insanely good months someone quits their day job to play full time in high stakes games against the toughest players and it never ended well. Kind of like the Archie Karras story. Archie was a degenerate gambler who ran $10,000 into $40M in large part by beating the best poker players in Vegas. They kept playing him because he was objectively terrible at poker but he still kept winning (there are pretty good reasons to think he was cheating). They never won most of their money back, but he couldn't stop gambling and lost it all in casino games he couldn't cheat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_Karas#:~:text=Anargyros Nicholas Karabourniotis (Greek%3A Ανάργυρος,as The Run%2C when he

Theoretically space launch could get as cheap as commercial air travel IF 1) 100% reusability was a thing 2) Cadence allowed flight hardware to fly nearly every day. 3) refurbishment was only necessary every few months. If that happened then it’s possible that prices would reach as low as 5x fuel costs, like commercial airlines. So Starship, which is bigger than a A380, could be priced at $5M per flight. Now it’s unlikely we can pack 800 people into a Starship launch. Even if passengers won’t require pressure suits they need more space and heavier seats to deal with both high acceleration and zero gee, but maybe we could fit 250-300 passengers, making ticket costs for orbital flights around $20,000, which would also make large space stations hugely useful. $20k to spend a week or two in orbit seeing incredible sights and experiencing zero gee would be a hugely popular adventure. But to get anywhere near there is going to take decades. 1) Starship needs hundreds if not thousands of flights demonstrating it can consistently land safely using retropropulsión before it’s going to be certified for passenger flights. 2) Starship isn’t remotely near its payload target yet, it’s overweight and will need to be lightened (and maybe stretched) over the next few years of development. 3) The fastest SpaceX has turned around a Falcon 9 booster is 12 days IIRC. Starship & Raptors have been designed for rapid reuse and minimal refurbishment from the beginning, unlike F9 & Merlin’s, but we still need to see it demonstrated. 4) The re-entry tiles still fall off, and flaps nearly burn off. Less of a problem than it was for Shuttle given Starships steel skin but they need to demonstrate that it’s re-entry shielding has a substantial margin of safety before even astronauts would get on it. Right now starship prototypes are like the DC-1 test articles, they are showing what is possible and working out the kinks. In a couple years the production versions will be like the DC-2, good enough for mass production for a few years, but I’ll be surprised if they get launch costs lower than $20M, let alone launch prices. But I would not be surprised to see it provide commercial passenger service to orbit in the 2030s, probably at a price of around $200k/seat. Ultimately it’s likely to be a step on the way to the first “space DC-3”. A version that incorporates everything learned from first decade of Starship launches to improve turnaround, reduce refurbishment and extend service life to get launch costs close to $5M/launch. I expect SpaceX to start retiring now obsolete Falcon 9s next year. SpaceX contracts allow them to shift payloads to Starship, so as soon as it’s consistently landing back at its pad they’ll start using it for payloads. Probably 20-30 launches next year, close to 100 in 2026, and increasing till they are launching daily before end of decade. That will provide a huge number of launches to iteratively improve its safety and performance within a relatively short period.

Video of SuperHeavy landing in gulf.

It doesn't have a future, it has a pile of cash. Ryan Cohen still has to show he can actually turn it around, or develop a profitable new business. Its not charisma, its not "running the street", its track record. You can be the slickest, glibbest, handsomest CEO on the street who relentlessly takes advantage of every public appearance, but that's only going to help on the margins. Your stock has to perform or no one will give a crap. To quote the great screenwriter Bill Goldman, "nobody knows anything". 99.99% of retail have no clue about how to value a business, and neither do 99% of professional investors. All they can do is assume that what went up is going to keep going up and to keep betting on the horses that won the most prior races. Roaring Kitty just took a huge L that's going to make some of his worshippers start to question his judgement, Elon hasn't taken a huge loss yet, but a few more Twitters and Boring companies and that inflow of eager capital is going to dry up.

Too many new shares for it to rip. And if it pops at all buyers risk Cohen dumping more new shares in an ATM next day. Its over. Keith Gill is going to hold on to his shares again, and lose big this time. His $20 calls are melting away, two weeks left before they expire and odds are they'll be worth less than what he paid ($5.68). In a few months his shares (basis $21.27) will almost certainly be underwater. There will be little to hold this up over $5 a share when all the burned retail buyers flee, it's going to trade down close to its cash value. GME is no longer a business, it's a stock sale machine. It's ironic how much Gill praised Cohen on the live stream as Cohen was burning down Gill's position. Gill should have taken Buffett's most important quote to heart before this. He's going to end up losing a lot of money and something even more valuable to monetize, the love of millions. He'll be a pariah in the future.

Ryan Cohen and Keith Gill, the Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid of selling stock in unprofitable businesses at obscene prices.

Hilarious to listen to him babble incoherently as the stock price behind him continues to drop. So far what I'm getting is that he's betting big on Ryan Cohen, the guy who has never run a profitable business in his life, to turnaround Gamestop.

OMG he looks like he's on all the drugs.

GME must have run out of shares, its popped up to $38 after a brief halt. The Reddit crew of stock pumping apes is over, at least in GME. Every time they get it to pop, the next day GME is gonna drop another ATM to take advantage. Impossible to have a short squeeze when new shares are dumped on the market every day.

$32 now. The MOAS is over and apes are done, never to be tried again. Borrow with 75M fresh shares is going to be wide open again, and if the share price pops again GME will be right there to drop another ATM offering and cool it off. Keith Gill's kryptonite was never the shorts, it was always the company itself. "The call is coming from inside the house"!!!!!!