Hi Again,
GAMESTOP!! Whether on Wall Street or Main Street news, Gamestop was one of the number one stories last week! We have heard so much about Republicans and Democrats do not see eye to eye anymore but this situation got Ted Cruz and AOC/Sanders on the same page!
Ted Cruz retweeted AOC’s comments and added “I agree’. If you did not hear about Gamestop last week, you must have been living under a rock or something! Essentially millions of small time traders brought some of the most exclusive hedge funds like Melvin Capital close to insolvency! How did that happen? Have you heard of a “short squeeze”? When a heavily shorted stock moves up, the people who are short have to make a desperate effort to buy back the stocks they “shorted” (borrowed) or lose money in an unlimited manner. If you short sell a stock that has a market value of $100 thinking it is going down to 0 and then find that the underlying stock rose to $10,000, you most probably have to sell all your other assets to cover your “short sale”. New traders (sports gamblers etc. like Barstool people) that came in to the market in 2020, through social media (mainly Reddit) focused on heavily shorted stocks and kept on buying them to “sky rocket” those prices.
Gamestop has no intrinsic value and it was headed towards 0 as most people are buying games online. It was found that Gamestop was 130% “shorted”. How can that be? Big exclusive hedge funds get unfair deals from Wall Street. The focus of regulators and Wall Street should have been on how Gamestop got to be 130% shorted but their focus was on Robinhood traders who will end up bankrupting the last few traders who are not lucky enough to find suckers to buy their holding at a higher price than they bought them at. However it was evident from the volume that institutions and big computer driven programs were involved in it too. 100 million shares of Gamestop was traded in one day! This was not limited to Gaemstop; they were going after all the worthless stocks that are heavily shorted- Blackberry, AMC, Bed Bath and Beyond etc. If you look at the ticker tape after hours, you will see a lot of stocks that rose 25% to 100% in one day- Robinhood traders are at play!We have to keep this in perspective. Market cap of all US stocks come to about 33 Trillion and these speculative stocks only account for about 50 Billion. Many young people stated that they paid off their student loans and paid off their home loans with Gamestop profits. The old guard was asking the SEC to stop Robinhood traders and Reddit conversations. Robinhood stopped trading of these stocks and put severe limitations as they were running out of capital requirements.
That is when the politicians got involved on the side of the small traders. Old Guard was saying that these Robinhood/Reddit people were putting pension money at risk by bringing down big hedge funds. For centuries, where pension money was invested was heavily regulated. They should not be in 130% shorted stocks and if they are in the market, they should be prepared for all possibilities. On 1/27/21, Social Capital CEO Chamath Palihapitiya who defends the small traders was saying that this “regime change” on Wall Street and defending the rights of the people who drove the big hedge funds (Melvin Capital, Bill Ackman et al) close to insolvency. CNBC estimated that they lost over $50 Billion. Some of the arguments made by Chamath: (1) Reddit did online what exclusive hedge fund managers have done for decades at exclusive close door dinners (2) Why allow these hedge funds to short 130%? (3) Some of these exclusive hedge funds have ridiculous margin requirements as putting $5B and buying $50B worth. This is why the retail investors kept away from the market for so long as they believed it was rigged in favor of the “big guys”. Is this the end of this story? No, not by a long short. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, “This is not the end. This is not even the beginning of the end. This is just the beginning of the end”. Due to Robinhood, we all got commission free trading. Now if the regulators drive away those traders, we will all pay a price so big hedge funds can keep the status quo. However Robinhood people needs to get more educated and experienced. They are even trying to drive up the price of silver (ETF: SLV) as it is very shorted. They are way too young to remember how Billionaire Hunt Brothers lost everything by trying to corner the silver market and ended up living with their sister. Instead of closing out contracts with cash settlements, a common procedure on the commodities market, the Hunts took delivery on silver. They then stockpiled this silver and used their large cash reserves to buy up even more futures. The billions in demand triggered the rise of silver to more than $50 per ounce. Nelson Bunker Hunt (February 22, 1926 – October 21, 2014) was an American oil company executive. He was a billionaire whose fortune collapsed after he and his brothers William Herbert and Lamar Hunt tried to corner the world market in silver but were prevented by government intervention
Without a shadow of a doubt, the stock market is in a bubble. With each passing day, it gets worse but the end is not in sight. It becomes more and more scary. It never ends well and no one knows what will happen after it bursts. In the worst case scenario, as it happened around 1930 in the US, it could take another 30 years to get back to “normal:. If you had money in the Japanese bubble in 1990, you had to wait 30 years or till 2021 to get your money back. This is my biggest concern. Chanos, the expert at shorting stocks say that, “This is the golden age of frothiness”. So true! Herb Greenberg who provides research for companies that short stocks had this to say on CNBC on 1/25/21:
· We have never seen this much frothiness in our history
· We have gone beyond trading to speculation to gambling.
· Most people who drive stocks up do not understand anything about stocks or markets
· SEC and regulators should intervene for the benefit of the general public.
· During the shutdown most sports gamblers like “barstool” and “Robinhood naïve” investors are mostly responsible.
· This will end badly but do not know when that will happens
On 1/11/21, “The Bond King” Gundlach I respect was on CNBC and this is what he had to say:
· Inflation to exceed 3% in 2021.
· When inflation goes over 3%, most experts will have to discard the investment strategies they have had for the past few decades.
· Federal Reserve may find themselves in a position where they cannot help the economy/market. If inflation is not wiped out at the initial stages, it could grow in to hyperinflation and that is the worst for any economy or market. Remember 1965 to 1985?
· Feds will allow the 10year treasury to go up to 1.5% before they intervene.
· Feds will control the yield curve
· Right now 2% of all employment is in Techs but 38% of market cap of all publicly traded stocks are techs
· “Wealth Gap” between “wealth owners” and “wage owners” have gone “absurd” to “absurd square”
· Assets should be moved from the US to Asia
· Bitcoin was bullish but now it too is in a bubble.
Technicians Carly Garner and Larry Williams believe that there is too much bearishness in the bond market and in the US dollar so do not be surprised to see a rally in those areas. Larry Williams studying history states that 88% of the time, the market goes up during the first half of the year. Watch out for the 2nd part of 2021!
Did you hear about the worldwide computer chip shortage and GM and other auto companies are reducing their output due to these limitations? As they have been doing for decades, China has been trying to corner chip market. It is their intention to have a monopoly on all needed material by stealing intellectual property of all western countries for decades. As analysts say, “chips are for this economy what steel was for the economy decades ago”. Where this will end is unknown to anyone. Stay tuned!
Have a great month!
Fernando