It was a weird, fun ride. My writing partner Lutz and I work in tech, but have a real passion for filmmaking. We lost some money on $GME, so we had to tell the story from our point of view.
The result is STONKS, a comedy/drama feature screenplay [0], fictional but inspired by the GME events, and a love letter of sorts to WSB. We queried Hollywood producers but were ignored; we shared on WSB itself but we were insta-banned and never told why (but given the founder sold the rights to his life story to Hollywood [1], we can make an informed guess).
Jaime Rogozinski is a grifter who repeatedly abused community trust to profit off WSB. This is why he was removed by Reddit admins in January 2020, a full year before the GameStop saga.
The only time he ever came to WSB after 2016 was if someone approached him with a way to make money off the community. It's laughable that anyone would buy the rights to his story when he wasn't around at all.
If WSJ cared about integrity, they would put "DISGRACED" ahead of the word founder.
Most discussion around $GME takes place on r/Superstonk these days anyways. Can't remember why it was banned from WSB. Something to do with the new mods I believe.
GameStop was never banned from WSB. It is the 3rd most discussed ticker in the past 30 days. (After SPY and TSLA) [0]
GME had it's own daily thread well into April, at which point it was still completely dominating with significantly lower quality discussion that extended outside the GME specific daily thread.
Once we ended the daily thread and asked people to move to r/GME or r/SuperStonk, people incorrectly assumed it was banned, and continued to repeat this narrative, despite our repeated mentions that it was not banned.
Also, the WSB mod team is more or less the same as it was in 2019 or earlier. The majority of the team has been around for 6+ years.
/r/superstonk used to show up in my feed on Reddit a lot, and it seemed like most of the highly-upvoted posts were elaborate explanations of how, any day now, there was going to be some sort of massive short squeeze that was going to cause $GME to hit a price of ten or twenty million dollars a share (at which point the outstanding shares of $GME would be worth more than everything else on earth combined), and everybody who bought in was going to be billionaires.
I was never clear if this was some sort of in-joke/meme, or some fringe idea that kept getting upvoted because it was hilarious, or if the people in there actually knew so little about stocks and economics that they thought something like that was possible.
I followed WSB for a couple of years before the GME thing kicked off. When it did, it was great fun for about a week, then I unsubscribed. It got very repetitive and boring.
WSB mods alleged the sub was suffocating with the GME and subsequent squeeze stock posts and shitty memes. I made couple memes myself but after the weeks to come WSB was inundated with all the memes centered around this one topic. WSB is a general investment subreddit that took a turn towards GME everything.
Another problem was GME's foundational investment theory, that it had high short interest. But if you look at DFV's way of investing he preached low valuation high potential stock. Just the mere short interest as a determinant wasn't true but an after thought. From that point on, many people who thought they were late in the GME game started to pile on other high short interest stock like Bed Bath and Beyond, WKHS etc. At that point WSB was becoming less of a shitty DD based stock to shitty meme based stock site. Mods clutched up modding but you can never know the difference between one pile of shit vs another pile of shit when it comes to a post. So post removal felt arbitrary.
Superstonk Side
The GME centered group left WSB because there was a new mod who didn't fit the WSB philosophy. There were some personal hypothesis about her(?). They even alleged I believe that mod made their adolescent child a mod of WSB who were also removing content left and right.
My post about cautioning people about GME which reached some magnitudes of thousand upvotes and plenty of agreeable comments was removed without notice.
There were several highly upvoted and good value posts removed which led to people believing that the real wall street might have infiltrated the WSB. So, in this cloud of distrust groups left and they started their own spinoff version of WSB.
I am in the process of reading it. I never understood the disclaimer at start, that "Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental." in works were I saw it. Is this usually written to defend one legally, even though the events have clear, non-coincidental resemblance to real-life events?
Precisely. There was a film early in the industry's history (Rasputin and the Empress, early 1930s) that depicted events from a real person's life in a very negative (and most importantly, false) way and the studio got the pants sued off them. Hence the disclaimer
I'm 10 pages in, it's engaging and taps into the whole 'GME is Occupy Wall Street 2.0' narrative that was widespread in late 2020-2021. It reads a lot like 'How to Sell Drugs Fast' to me.
I think we really should have a monthly screen-writer post on HN, throughout the years here I've read a few things that seemed like it had potential if it were fleshed out but usually fell on deaf ears. I have a few pilots and screen plays I go back to when I have down time.
Who knows maybe a FAANG worker has an in at Netflix?
Edit: Just finished it, the last act seems really rushed, like it was meant to meet a page threshold more than finding the protagonist's resolution.
The overall arch was solid, with typical banter and some inside jokes that could still be relatable to the uninitiated.
I like the script but you might want to tone it down at the start. I think it was good up until the christmas tree, and the wishing star was a little over the top. The emotions being expressed are clear already, and you don't need to translate it into symbolism for the audience to understand. :)
Lutz / Co-writer here. Thanks for your feedback! I'm mostly to blame for the excessive use of symbolism as I'm personally a big fan of visual storytelling as opposed to focusing on dialogue to explain the set-up in a scene. But I agree with you, maybe it was a little too much considering the context was already set very early into the scene!
On page 7, it seems that IVANOV is the one that tells ANTHONY to short WeDeliver, but on page 31 it seems that IVANOV is mad at ANTHONY that he (IVANOV) lost money. I understand how a perceived egotistic person that IVANOV seems to be would feel this type of anger, but why would ANTHONY accept this?
Great observation. I don't have a clear answer for this. The relationship between Ivanov and Anthony reflects the power relationship between their respective hedge funds (and later when Feng shows up, Feng > Ivanov > Anthony). Could say that Anthony was responsible for executing Ivanov's plan, so he's blamed when it fails, or that Ivanov is the kind of person who blames everyone but themselves when things go wrong, and Anthony is weak and/or afraid of Ivanov, so he just takes the blame without pushing back. But again, great observation, will try to improve in future drafts.
$GME was always going to be a "Revolution That Wasn’t." Almost everyone playing knew it.
IMO, it was kind of an exemplifier of postmodernism, used colloquially. All the "beat down hedgies" stuff was just part of the game, just like "fuck the fundamentals" was part of the game.
IMO it has had an influence. A neurotic, dramatic lens through which we can look at financial institutions, more abstract economics. What is capital? What is money? Etc. Obviously, it all happens within a context with crypto, a long term bull market, and such. I think one of the features of being a basket case, meme-ish phenomenon is a sort of openness to ideas. Mentality-wise it allows exploring concepts with the vigour of a believer, but without really being bought into the position long term. Meme trading, and maybe trading generally, kind of lends to this. You can believe a "case" a hold the position with caveat.
As is typical of "movements" today, there is no expectation of winning... just as there is no expectation that market rationality "wins." Everything, in our times, is a "just so story," in economic rhetoric terms.
WSB started as a canard to get more drunk tourists to the small stakes poker tables, in this analogy the poker table is low volume options where you can get a handful of robinhood investors to move the price and make a quick thousand bucks. It’s still that today, but larger players with more money figured out that they could do that too, and potentially on a larger scale. That’s what this has always been about. There’s no movement, there’s no postmodern narrative, it’s just a bunch of people pumping and dumping and using the “movement” thing as a fig leaf.
I think it should started a discussion about some excesses of the stock market. Rich people can look for battered companies and severely profit from their accelerated demise which some people wanted to fight against for once. Out of their own motives for profit or just for fun to be able to at least once stick it to speculators looking for easy profit. That trading was halted and "corrected" proved they had an impact.
I don't think the stock market serves a public function with these mechanisms in place and needs further regulation.
> people can look for battered companies and severely profit from their accelerated demise
Gamestop is one of those companies where the demise has been severely delayed IMO; they could've seen the future years ago but chose to stay with their legacy business of selling games in physical stores. Online game stores do what they do but with much lower costs and a much better business model.
There are two ways forward for Gamestop IMO but neither is very positive:
- They try to compete with the giants in the online gaming market, like Steam. I can't see them bootstrap their way into that, Steam and the others have too much network effect going on and GME has not shown any real talent in the online/tech domain.
- They try to revitalize their offline presence. I don't see this happening either. There has been a decades long trend of everything moving from off- to on-line and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
For anyone who agrees with the above assessment, the conclusion would be that the future for Gamestop is not very bright. Depending on the timescale you think it is going to play out, being short is an entirely valid position to be in. Personally, I think the sentimental memories of the ~25-~45 years old generation will keep it alive for a decade or so more.
The purpose of stock markets is to find the "correct" price for a stock. To that end, it needs to be possible to express both bullish and bearish views. However, doing the latter is already more difficult because in order to short the stock, you need to borrow it first, and you need to pay for those borrowed shares for as long as you keep holding them. Furthermore, those borrows can be pulled at any time, forcing you to cover at the most inopportune of times. There are also things like Reg SHO Rule 201(b) ("Uptick rule") that further complicate shorting a stock. Regulators have even been known to ban short sales in certain names outright like they they did for financial stocks during the 2008 financial crisis.
If anything, selling short needs to be made easier as it represents an essential corrective. And this ultimately serves the greater good too as it ensures that the price of a stock is correct and investors don't overpay, which will inevitably lead to losses for them. A good recent example of what happens otherwise is Wirecard. In 2019 the German BaFin enacted a ban on short sales in the stock of the company after reports had been published that were essentially accusing them of fraud. In the end, those reports turned out to be true, and the company collapsed less than 18 months later. The stock fell from over EUR 150 to virtually zero and investors lost pretty much everything. They should have listened to the short sellers rather than fight them.
There are also no "easy profits" in short selling. They only make money if they are right. There are people who have been calling for the immediate collapse of Tesla for the last decade or so. Others have been trying to short Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, because they think that these companies are completely overvalues. Most of these people are probably bankrupt by now.
But GME isn't any of those companies. They are a failing brick and mortar retailer that is boxed in by Steam on one side and Amazon on the other. They have repeatedly attempted to transform the company over the last decade without success. The fact that their plan is to launch some NFT market place, a field in which they have no experience and that is already crowded by established players like OpenSea, demonstrates how much their management is completely out of ideas. And if the shorts make money from the GME stock, it just means they were right.
> I don't think the stock market serves a public function with these mechanisms in place
The purpose is precisely to zoom in on the correct value of a stock (via crowdsourcing and putting your money where your mouth is), and thereby allow investment to flow to the most advantageous opportunities.
There are still many retail investors who think the saga is far from over, and are now betting on direct registration (DRS) of their GME shares with the goal of triggering another, much bigger short squeeze than last year.
I made a little money of it last year when the squeeze squoze, and I don't see it happening again.
I was late to get in, but not too late; the next morning, the price had doubled, so I sold half. I held on to the rest just to be along for the ride, but I think that morning was the real squeeze. I think I bought some extra on a dip, sold half of that for double again, and sold the rest on a minor bump a few months later.
Hectic stock like this can be an easy way to make a quick profit as long as you remember to buy the dips and sell at any bump that comes along. I bet that's what the big guys on Wallstreet did to make way bigger profits than I'll ever be able to.
> There are still many retail investors who think the saga is far from over
I had the misfortune to encounter one of these on reddit the other week. I asked (what I thought was) a fairly simple question - are people still in it because they think the company has a reasonable chance of turning around and making good money, or is this now an idealogical thing about sticking it to the man, or a bit of both?
And I basically got a full-on hard sell as a response, massive amounts of details about business plans and any reservations I expressed were due to me being stupid and/or biased.
It does seem like a good idea on paper, though when you look at the reports of how many people have actually DRSed their shares it becomes painfully obvious that it's so few that it isn't likely to ever make a difference.
What reports have you seen that show the actual numbers? Genuinely curious.
As far as I know, there is only one report that has been released--that was by Gamestop itself for the 3rd Quarter (Aug 1-Oct 30). That number was 5.2 Million.
Now, the DRS movement, for lack of a better term, did not start to take off until late August/Early September. IOW, DRSing shares has not been going on since last January.
The next quarterly results (Nov-Jan) will be released around the end of March and, assuming that Gamestop continues to release the DRS numbers, will provide 2 data points.
The last point I would like to make is that the total number of shares outstanding for Gamestop is only 76.5 Million. 12 Million of those shares are Insider shares. Even if you Ignore institutional holdings and individual investor shares held in brokerage accounts, 5.2 Million is 8% of 64.5 Million. I would say that is not an insignificant percentage, even if the DRS movement stagnated after October.
It's just a matter of time before some company insider is paid to manipulate their employers' stock through the power of the /r/WallStreetBets self-defined autists.
Companies use social media for astroturfing and viral marketing, why not market manipulation?
John Mackey himself used a burner account on Yahoo finance message boards to talk trash on Wild Oats to try and lower their stock price before Whole Foods acquired them in the mid 00s.
On the last day of the spike I saw in the pre-market the GME price to go over $500. Figured that this is good enough for me and as everything related to order processing was very slow I set a limit sell order for $490, figuring that it probably hits $500, but wanted to be sure it goes through. Once the price spiked at 483 and started rapidly dropping I was f-ed. Cancelling the sell-order took like an hour (couldn’t add a new sell order without releasing shares from the old one). By that time the price was in the dust.
Thanks for sharing an honest story about your loss. If more people did this people would have a more balanced understanding of how risky these bets truly are.
Because of my GameStop stock play, I am finally debt free for the first time in my life (after 35 years of paying). No car loan, no college loans, no mortgage.
It actually felt good to pay over $10k in taxes for short term gains.
Do you think it's important to acknowledge that you got lucky with a gamble? If you have kids, would you advise them to make a similar move as you did, in the hopes that they also get lucky and win big? If not, advertising only the benefits of your choice just lures desperate people who will statistically lose their investments.
Yes. Insofar as trading helps reveal the "true" value of a stock and thereby helps solving the allocation problem, it creates public benefit. And the companies financed by the equity markets create huge value, of course (parts of which they distribute by dividends or stock buy backs). But if you look narrowly at the gains and losses of trading, it's strictly a zero-sum game (well, negative sum, as the exchanges and market makers take their cut - though that cut in the good old equity markets is minuscule and far, far smaller than in the fancy new crypto exchanges which charge outrageous fees.)
That’s a really interesting mix of questionable prudence with total responsibility. Obviously things didn’t work out so well for the people in the other side of your trades.
Shorting as a retail investor is mostly a suckers bet that will bankrupt you. I feel nothing for institutional investors as the entire system is heavily tilted in their favor.
Readit News
The result is STONKS, a comedy/drama feature screenplay [0], fictional but inspired by the GME events, and a love letter of sorts to WSB. We queried Hollywood producers but were ignored; we shared on WSB itself but we were insta-banned and never told why (but given the founder sold the rights to his life story to Hollywood [1], we can make an informed guess).
Anyway, here it is. Feedback welcome.
[0] https://gabrielgambetta.com/files/STONKS-2022-02-02.pdf
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/reddits-wallstreetbets-founder-...
The only time he ever came to WSB after 2016 was if someone approached him with a way to make money off the community. It's laughable that anyone would buy the rights to his story when he wasn't around at all.
If WSJ cared about integrity, they would put "DISGRACED" ahead of the word founder.
Deleted Comment
GME had it's own daily thread well into April, at which point it was still completely dominating with significantly lower quality discussion that extended outside the GME specific daily thread.
Once we ended the daily thread and asked people to move to r/GME or r/SuperStonk, people incorrectly assumed it was banned, and continued to repeat this narrative, despite our repeated mentions that it was not banned.
Also, the WSB mod team is more or less the same as it was in 2019 or earlier. The majority of the team has been around for 6+ years.
[0] https://www.quiverquant.com/wallstreetbets/
I was never clear if this was some sort of in-joke/meme, or some fringe idea that kept getting upvoted because it was hilarious, or if the people in there actually knew so little about stocks and economics that they thought something like that was possible.
You can only read "Reporting in from Kazakhstan with 2 shares, stay strong apes HODL" so many times....
Two folds to the story -
WSB Side
WSB mods alleged the sub was suffocating with the GME and subsequent squeeze stock posts and shitty memes. I made couple memes myself but after the weeks to come WSB was inundated with all the memes centered around this one topic. WSB is a general investment subreddit that took a turn towards GME everything.
Another problem was GME's foundational investment theory, that it had high short interest. But if you look at DFV's way of investing he preached low valuation high potential stock. Just the mere short interest as a determinant wasn't true but an after thought. From that point on, many people who thought they were late in the GME game started to pile on other high short interest stock like Bed Bath and Beyond, WKHS etc. At that point WSB was becoming less of a shitty DD based stock to shitty meme based stock site. Mods clutched up modding but you can never know the difference between one pile of shit vs another pile of shit when it comes to a post. So post removal felt arbitrary.
Superstonk Side
The GME centered group left WSB because there was a new mod who didn't fit the WSB philosophy. There were some personal hypothesis about her(?). They even alleged I believe that mod made their adolescent child a mod of WSB who were also removing content left and right.
My post about cautioning people about GME which reached some magnitudes of thousand upvotes and plenty of agreeable comments was removed without notice.
There were several highly upvoted and good value posts removed which led to people believing that the real wall street might have infiltrated the WSB. So, in this cloud of distrust groups left and they started their own spinoff version of WSB.
edit: it was Rasputin! Here's a Slate article describing the events: https://slate.com/culture/2016/08/the-bizarre-true-story-beh...
edit2: Here is a secondary source from Stanford, which is drier, but also less subject to hyperbole: https://web.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/HistoryWired/Davis/DavisAu...
I'm 10 pages in, it's engaging and taps into the whole 'GME is Occupy Wall Street 2.0' narrative that was widespread in late 2020-2021. It reads a lot like 'How to Sell Drugs Fast' to me.
I think we really should have a monthly screen-writer post on HN, throughout the years here I've read a few things that seemed like it had potential if it were fleshed out but usually fell on deaf ears. I have a few pilots and screen plays I go back to when I have down time.
Who knows maybe a FAANG worker has an in at Netflix?
Edit: Just finished it, the last act seems really rushed, like it was meant to meet a page threshold more than finding the protagonist's resolution.
The overall arch was solid, with typical banter and some inside jokes that could still be relatable to the uninitiated.
WSB is not, and has never been, the place to promote your art, especially when you're explicitly trying to raise awareness so you can sell it.
OP did the same thing with a gamedev book a year prior.
Easy ban.
"not bad for a day's work"
Interesting definition of work. I see Kyle's future having morphed into Ivanov..
Who knows, maybe this is the origin story of Kyle as a hedge fund supervillain? :)
IMO, it was kind of an exemplifier of postmodernism, used colloquially. All the "beat down hedgies" stuff was just part of the game, just like "fuck the fundamentals" was part of the game.
IMO it has had an influence. A neurotic, dramatic lens through which we can look at financial institutions, more abstract economics. What is capital? What is money? Etc. Obviously, it all happens within a context with crypto, a long term bull market, and such. I think one of the features of being a basket case, meme-ish phenomenon is a sort of openness to ideas. Mentality-wise it allows exploring concepts with the vigour of a believer, but without really being bought into the position long term. Meme trading, and maybe trading generally, kind of lends to this. You can believe a "case" a hold the position with caveat.
As is typical of "movements" today, there is no expectation of winning... just as there is no expectation that market rationality "wins." Everything, in our times, is a "just so story," in economic rhetoric terms.
1. WSB was created before Robinhood was released.
2. WSB started as a place for people to discuss more risky strategies than what was being discussed on r/investing
3. Yes. There is no movement. WSB is not your personal army.
I don't think the stock market serves a public function with these mechanisms in place and needs further regulation.
Gamestop is one of those companies where the demise has been severely delayed IMO; they could've seen the future years ago but chose to stay with their legacy business of selling games in physical stores. Online game stores do what they do but with much lower costs and a much better business model.
There are two ways forward for Gamestop IMO but neither is very positive:
- They try to compete with the giants in the online gaming market, like Steam. I can't see them bootstrap their way into that, Steam and the others have too much network effect going on and GME has not shown any real talent in the online/tech domain.
- They try to revitalize their offline presence. I don't see this happening either. There has been a decades long trend of everything moving from off- to on-line and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
For anyone who agrees with the above assessment, the conclusion would be that the future for Gamestop is not very bright. Depending on the timescale you think it is going to play out, being short is an entirely valid position to be in. Personally, I think the sentimental memories of the ~25-~45 years old generation will keep it alive for a decade or so more.
If anything, selling short needs to be made easier as it represents an essential corrective. And this ultimately serves the greater good too as it ensures that the price of a stock is correct and investors don't overpay, which will inevitably lead to losses for them. A good recent example of what happens otherwise is Wirecard. In 2019 the German BaFin enacted a ban on short sales in the stock of the company after reports had been published that were essentially accusing them of fraud. In the end, those reports turned out to be true, and the company collapsed less than 18 months later. The stock fell from over EUR 150 to virtually zero and investors lost pretty much everything. They should have listened to the short sellers rather than fight them.
There are also no "easy profits" in short selling. They only make money if they are right. There are people who have been calling for the immediate collapse of Tesla for the last decade or so. Others have been trying to short Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, because they think that these companies are completely overvalues. Most of these people are probably bankrupt by now.
But GME isn't any of those companies. They are a failing brick and mortar retailer that is boxed in by Steam on one side and Amazon on the other. They have repeatedly attempted to transform the company over the last decade without success. The fact that their plan is to launch some NFT market place, a field in which they have no experience and that is already crowded by established players like OpenSea, demonstrates how much their management is completely out of ideas. And if the shorts make money from the GME stock, it just means they were right.
You’re describing accelerating creative destruction. It’s painful but good. Prevent it entirely and you cause stagnation.
We can make the human impact more compassionate. But trying to stop it is folly.
The purpose is precisely to zoom in on the correct value of a stock (via crowdsourcing and putting your money where your mouth is), and thereby allow investment to flow to the most advantageous opportunities.
I was late to get in, but not too late; the next morning, the price had doubled, so I sold half. I held on to the rest just to be along for the ride, but I think that morning was the real squeeze. I think I bought some extra on a dip, sold half of that for double again, and sold the rest on a minor bump a few months later.
Hectic stock like this can be an easy way to make a quick profit as long as you remember to buy the dips and sell at any bump that comes along. I bet that's what the big guys on Wallstreet did to make way bigger profits than I'll ever be able to.
As long as the dip is not permanent, say, due to a permanent change in the fundamentals. Then it might just keep dipping.
I had the misfortune to encounter one of these on reddit the other week. I asked (what I thought was) a fairly simple question - are people still in it because they think the company has a reasonable chance of turning around and making good money, or is this now an idealogical thing about sticking it to the man, or a bit of both?
And I basically got a full-on hard sell as a response, massive amounts of details about business plans and any reservations I expressed were due to me being stupid and/or biased.
So that's me told.
Now, the DRS movement, for lack of a better term, did not start to take off until late August/Early September. IOW, DRSing shares has not been going on since last January.
The next quarterly results (Nov-Jan) will be released around the end of March and, assuming that Gamestop continues to release the DRS numbers, will provide 2 data points.
The last point I would like to make is that the total number of shares outstanding for Gamestop is only 76.5 Million. 12 Million of those shares are Insider shares. Even if you Ignore institutional holdings and individual investor shares held in brokerage accounts, 5.2 Million is 8% of 64.5 Million. I would say that is not an insignificant percentage, even if the DRS movement stagnated after October.
Companies use social media for astroturfing and viral marketing, why not market manipulation?
chron.com/business/article/Whole-Foods-CEO-used-fake-name-to-knock-rival-1830788.php
It actually felt good to pay over $10k in taxes for short term gains.
I used to be a trader (series 7 and 63) and knew what I was doing.
Deleted Comment
I am averaging about 16% YTY return for the last 20 years (and much better than that the last 5, obviously).
The trick... undervalued or momentum stocks that suddenly have big interest. Spot the trend and go with it (swimming in the big fishes wake).
It's OK to exit AFTER the movement breaks... never be greedy. Never cry about the profits you never got.