If you read some of the posts on WSB a huge number of people just really have no clue about capital markets, investing, or basic business sense.
I don't know how many times I saw people claiming GME would go to $1000 because the new CEO has a brilliant new scheme to turn the company around by going digital! Why "going digital" in 2021 means your company is worth 100X what it was a few months ago I'll never quite understand. I guess no one had yet discovered the opportunity of these computer machines and the World Wide Web!
Or "it's the short squeeze" By people who didn't even know what a short was 72 hours before, long after the shorts had covered their positions.
Sure some people acknowledge they are essentially gambling in equities, but tons of people truly think they have some stunning insight into a business because of some anonymous WSB shitpost they read this morning.
Would you say those same people who just learned the phrase “short” or “short squeeze” are likely the same kind of people going to the casino and thinking they can successfully count cards?
As mentioned elsewhere in here, it’s ultimately gambling. It’s putting money up, exposing it to risk that could completely wipe you out. If someone doesn’t understand that about stock investing, I think they’re very similar to someone not realizing a casino could wipe out your money. But making sure everyone fully understands this - educating people who are risking money - certainly seems like a thoughtful thing for countries to incentivize.
But unless all the financial websites have to be styled to look like a casino, or areas of a physical bank space put up neon lights and blinking signs to emulate Vegas casinos, I don’t know if we can ever drive the point home clearly enough.
There's also the thing where buying equity in a company can seem very simple because you see something like Apple where they made a cool thing and obviously their stock went up. People just have no idea about how complex the markets are.
They also don't remember the very smart people who claimed the Iphone would be quickly overtaken by Android and other cheaper alternatives (Clay Christensen predicted this a guy generally very smart on tech/business)
Hindsight always makes it seem like it was easy to pick the great companies that were OBVIOUSLY going to do well.
They don't understand how incredibly sophisticated professional investors are who dedicate their lives to it, and on average even THOSE people don't 'beat the market'.
But people should be allowed the freedom to choose to gamble. Even if it's bad for them - as long as they own the responsibility, and not create a burden on soceity for doing so.
Bit of a tangent, but: it’s absolutely possible to learn a relatively simple card-counting system and play with positive expected value in a casino. You can easily run simulations to prove this.
I think this reinforces the GPs point. It's not all that hard to learn some basic card counting but probably 99% of people who try it casually end up playing a -EV game, due to the fact that the edge is very small and requires practicing/playing with much more discipline than most people want to bother with.
> Why "going digital" in 2021 means your company is worth 100X what it was a few months ago I'll never quite understand.
Understand it or not, it happened. Going from $3 to $300 in under a year.
Just because some people stated seemingly silly reasons for their predictions doesn't mean everyone betting on it is stupid. They may be trying to encourage others, have an intuition, hope to detect the peak and quickly sell, or even not care about money and be playing it as a game. But at the end of the day, whoever makes money is not the stupid one. Today GME is $250. Plenty of them can be getting rich now.
I have a thought that understanding how the stock market works doesn't matter much. Most of the knowledge from that is already bakes into share prices and the movements are pretty much random. So you very well could win by not knowing what a short is.
Plenty of people get lucky by winning the lottery. This doesn't make lotteries a smart investment in general (and yes I'm aware of some exceptions to that).
Getting in on the GME short squeeze was smart.
More than that means you are thinking there is something other than the short squeeze going on. There doesn't seem to be much evidence for that.
GME is not bankrupt yet (it is indeed overpriced and comparable to HRTZ), but TSLA and BTC? They don't belong to the same categories. TSLA and BTC will see a lot of gains to come. Eventually without a definite date what goes up comes down but it'd be silly to not take a piece of the pie yourself and keep your savings in cash...
At the end of the day, people are betting on what they believe (or throwing away their money for the lulz).
I genuinely, no bullshit, think TSLA is more irrational than GME, and has been for years. I put my money where my mouth is and I'm up 5x in 2 weeks. I know it won't last, but hey TSLA is crashing too. Nothing lasts forever.
All this retail interest in meme stocks is gambling, plain and simple. More people entering the market creates a Ponzi effect where new entrants pay for the gains of holders, but by definition this is unsustainable. You can see this basically everywhere in the economy but the meme stocks are the most obvious.
Not financial advice, I thought Tesla was laughably over valued at $40 a share, never bet more than you’re willing to lose.
Gambling is when you take big risks with hope for a big payoff. It’s possible to invest in the stock market and limit risk by diversifying and hedging positions, but how many meme stock investors are doing that? It’s much more likely to see people yoloing their life savings on Tesla or GME and hoping to retire from the windfall. Not going to be pretty if stocks ever go down again.
GME is going back up right now. I don’t believe it’s disenfranchised Reddit young people anymore (if it ever was?).
I guarantee there’s hedge funds who infiltrated the group playing up this one. Fictional fresh faced MBA from Jamie Diamond‘s outfit, “too the moon homie. Hold forever. They can take my wife, but not my GME. We tards are bringing down Capatalism.” (I used the T word because that the vernacular they use.)
I find it sad that the Retail naive investors will get fleeced again, but by professional billionaire trading outfits.
No one from JPM or even big hedge funds was involved -- this is the one single thing that compliance and legal departments would be all over, so any well-regulated outfit with a compliance department would have staid well away from pump&dump. (The JPMs and Citadels made money from market making on stocks and options - there they made a year's worth of profits in a week.)
You are likely right that finance bros were (and still are) behind the polished 24/7 rocket memes, but they were likely small single-PM funds and non-regulated private players, posting behind 7 proxies to provide anonymity and plausible deniability against the SEC.
A bank going on reddit to try to influence public behavior and therefore the price of a stock so they can make money is definitely illegal. A competent legal department would reject an organized attempt to do this. This is why many people believe that it is "finance bros" doing this on their own in their spare time rather than somebody at JPM leading a team to do it.
TSLA is crashing because TSLA is not worth more than the rest of the top 10 manufacturers combined, as their market cap would suggest.
Other notable differences include actively building the largest and most advanced factories on every major continent, disrupting the entire automobile industry such that even jaguar is going full electric by 2025, mainstreaming self-driving, and cutting the costs of residential solar in half.
Meanwhile, gamestop is trying to make a profit out of a portfolio of dusty commercial real estate.
> actively building the largest and most advanced factories on every major continent
They are not the most advanced factories, not even close. Tesla uses much more human labor per vehicle than its competitors; the "alien dreadnought" never materialized. "Toyota remains well ahead of Tesla in terms of manufacturing efficiency, producing more vehicles per employee, while utilizing its fixed assets and inventory more effectively":
> disrupting the entire automobile industry such that even jaguar is going full electric by 2025
The industry shift towards electric vehicles is because it's finally becoming profitable to make them. This is largely due to a dramatic reduction in battery costs which is driven by R&D for smartphones, not cars. Personally I don't believe Tesla has much to do with it.
> mainstreaming self-driving
They are mainstreaming dangerous driver assistance technologies well before they are ready because they've been pre-selling "full self driving" for years. They are nowhere close to completing an autonomous cross-country drive, something they promised would be done five years ago. Waymo is far ahead of Tesla on self-driving technology.
> cutting the costs of residential solar in half
I'm not sure there's even any point in arguing this because solar is an insignificant fraction of their business. They are a car manufacturer, nothing more. But in my personal opinion, I think the SolarCity acquisition was a fraudulent bailout of Musk's family, the solar shingles were mostly a sham, and Tesla has no significant proprietary solar technology at all.
> The industry shift towards electric vehicles is because it's finally becoming profitable to make them. This is largely due to a dramatic reduction in battery costs which is driven by R&D for smartphones, not cars. Personally I don't believe Tesla has much to do with it.
As much as I agree with the rest of your comment, I have to disagree with this part. Yes, there is a shift towards profitability with electric vehicles now and that has a lot to do with battery advancements from smartphones. But EVs still aren't exactly profitable, and when they are it's usually because of tax credits (granted that still counts, but it's important to mention).
It's important to remember traditional automobile manufacturers have decades of accumulated knowledge from spending hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars, on R&D for the internal combustion engine. Their processes are set up for it. Their tooling is set up for it. And more importantly, their business model which almost always focuses on maintenance costs is set up for it. It's like how Kodak invented the digital camera, but decided to continue with their legacy business because they were already set up for it.
There are many things I dislike about Tesla. But I genuinely believe they are responsible for bringing EVs to market ~3 years before it would have happened without them.
> There are many things I dislike about Tesla. But I genuinely believe they are responsible for bringing EVs to market ~3 years before it would have happened without them.
This feels vaguely ahistorical. The best-selling electric car platform in Europe today is the Renault Z-E platform (or at least it was; VW may have overtaken by now). That platform was announced in 2009 or so, with the first cars in 2011, and the first Zoe (the popular car based on the platform) in 2012. The Nissan Leaf came out in 2010. The Tesla Model S came out in 2012.
So given that, it's hard to see what Tesla had to do with it, really. Some of the most popular models came to market BEFORE Tesla (if you ignore the roadster, a contemporary of the Z-E concepts, which you almost certainly should).
Honestly if either the brand or charging were as big a deal as all that, I'd expect them to be doing better in Europe. The US seems to be the only remaining territory where they're the market leader, and they may be a bit stickier there, but it's not clear that EU sales of, say, the Zoe or id3 would be any different in the parallel universe where Tesla never existed. Those sell because they've hit a price/range point, and that's more due to the relentless slow progress of battery technology than anything else.
Not to say they're not a significant electric car manufacturer, but "coming third in the biggest western market, behind Renault, who apparently still exist" is not a great argument for them being either a market leader or having a particularly sticky brand.
I don't see how that works as an analogy _at all_. The iPhone lead to a complete change in what a phone _was_, with the Nokia view of a phone (and even of a smartphone) fading out.
By contrast, a Leaf or Zoe that you buy today is just a better version of the Leaf or Zoe you could have bought before the Model S came out.
You know what else "their tooling is set up" for? Being changed in a short period of time for whatever the next hotness is.
But I genuinely believe they are responsible for bringing EVs to market ~3 years before it would have happened without them.
How do you reconcile that statement with the fact that while folks were waiting for Tesla to fill their Model S pre-orders, we were already driving a Nissan Leaf? The Leaf was going to happen whether or not Tesla ever built a single car, or even if Tesla never existed. I mean it's nice that Tesla fans jumped on the EV bandwagon, even if a little late, but let's not pretend Tesla wasn't late to the production EV game.
Find another factory which produces something as advanced as a car, which also produces its own battery cells, produces its own motor, and I'll consider it as advanced of a factory. Giga factory is a revolution in manufacturing that cannot be encapsulated in your efficiency metrics.
Also consider that the tesla gigafactory will build the entire frame and body of the vehicle as one part in under a second. Nothing close to this is being done, because the machines to do it are being invented for tesla.
If you'd like to discuss your other points with me, i'm down. But I don't like the "I disagree with every one of your points so here's a pdf" format
I agree that TSLA is irrational, and I think that this is true regardless of whether you think there are more gains to come. My impression of TSLA investors is that many of them just want to be a part of the future, and many others are trying to make money off the volatility & irrationality.
I think the cult of personality plays a part in it, too. Tesla makes cool, futuristic cars and has a rabid user base (and even a rabid fan base of people who can’t afford to be users) but even still I don’t think the valuation would be anywhere near where it is today without all of the Musk super fans & Musk initially fanning the flames with his war against short-sellers.
Yes. Weird effects in the stock market just reflect consumer interest in the stock market. If you think Michael Jordan is cool, you express that by buying his shoes. If you think Elon Musk is cool, you express that by buying his stock. But that's not a comment on the value of the stock. It's branding.
Indeed nothing lasts forever but TSLA at least has something to show while GME's business is passé. TSLA is overpriced but at the moment it crashed and will jump back to new heights. Why not take advantage of the notoriety and make a gain yourself?
I think it's obvious that I am holding a substantial amount of GME right now, and I think I should disclose that.
Ryan Cohen, the guy who founded Chewy, is on the board for GME and leading an initiative to transform Gamestop into an e-commerce store. In other words he wants to compete directly with Steam, and while many don't realize it yet, Amazon. And this is one of the only people in history who has successfully beat Amazon in a product category before. Chewy absolutely dominated the pet market for e-commerce.
What I think Gamestop should do is compete directly with twitch, and set up an online game store on top of that. Basically do what twitch is doing but better, because twitch is shockingly bad for an Amazon acquisition. Then Gamestop could host online game tournaments, and they could even draw attention at local brick-and-mortar stores. They've got the real estate, they've got the brand recognition, and they've got the goodwill of the public right now (which is something you can't even buy, Amazon doesn't have that even with a trillion dollar market cap).
I don't think this will happen. But if it did, GME would be ridiculously undervalued right now.
Do you mean you don't think they'll compete with Twitch, or you don't think they'll compete with Steam and Amazon?
Personally I think investing in GME today is no different than investing in Blockbuster ten years ago. Competing with Steam is a terrible idea. EA tried it with Origin and despite having huge exclusive franchises, they're essentially throwing in the towel by abandoning the Origin branding and moving their newest titles back to Steam. There are also few physical goods to ship anymore so the experience in selling pet supplies online is irrelevant. Something like 80% of PS5s sold are the digital-only model; they don't even have a disk drive (and 99% of modern PCs don't have one either.)
Most of GameStop's profit was on used games. A game would get purchased, completed in a few days, then sold back to GameStop. When GameStop re-sells it as used, that's pure profit; the original publisher doesn't get a cut. Rinse and repeat a few times and within a few weeks of the launch of a game, GameStop has made more money off of it than the game developers. This is no longer possible with digital game sales. These games are locked to accounts and cannot be individually transferred. (And if you think GameStop's digital storefront will support game resales to try to capture this profit, no publisher in their right mind would publish their games on it!)
This is just crazy though as GameStop has no demonstrated capabilities or plan to compete with Steam. They don’t make good software, they don’t have content or publishing experience.
I mean they can say they want to, so can McDonalds. But their plan is magical thinking and not sure why folks fall for this.
The worst but though is that they have a terrible reputation with gamers. Every gamer I know hates them. Some shop there like some tolerate Comcast, but they don’t have a fan base.
Competing with Twitch is not realistic and I’m surprised you think it’s bad. Facebook and Microsoft have both spent huge sums of money trying to and failed. And both those companies have deep engineering talent which GameStop does not and it will not be trivial to compete with those companies for engineers. Plus livestream is just really expensive in terms of compute and network costs. Finally and most importantly, Twitch has more network effects than people realize with its follower/subscriber ecosystem. Streamers spend a lot of time building that audience and make more money than you might expect when they do it, so it won’t be easy to pull them away.
Everybody I know that uses twitch hates it. Like seriously, it's really bad. The conversations streamers have on discord are very different from what they'll say while streaming. They use it because there is no alternative. I am well aware that others have tried to compete and failed.
But there is a market and nobody likes the only player. Eventually somebody is going to figure it out. And I am extremely confident it won't be Amazon. I'd short twitch in a heartbeat if it weren't propped up by the most valuable company on Earth.
This is a very poor assessment. I'd suggest watching some Devin Nash videos. Whoever you're talking to on discord is not giving you a complete picture.
Twitch is essentially a hardcore user's platform. Engagement is extremely high vs other platforms. That's what keeps content creators on twitch, even if they're making the bulk of their income from putting the VODs on youtube: they can't create the same content and interactions on other platforms.
Again, as explained in a sibling comment, competing against twitch is a terrible opportunity. It's a miserable business to try to make a profit margin on, and your #1 competition doesn't care if twitch loses money all day. The ad market for streamers is all wonky because so much of the content is radioactively toxic.
What in particular do they hate about twitch and what type of streamers are they? (top, emerging, casual, etc).
I too hear a lot of complaints about Twitch too but I feel that most of them have nothing to do with the product, but the zero-sum and competitive nature of gaming streaming. It's just difficult to succeed as a gaming streamer (or content creator more generally) and the vast majority of people who try will never make any meaningful amounts of money, so frustrations tend to be attributed to the arbitrary quirks of the platform, even though that's just the nature of any content business.
> What in particular do they hate about twitch and what type of streamers are they? (top, emerging, casual, etc).
Everything and everyone. Seriously, even the people making literally millions on twitch hate the DMCA takedowns, the completely capricious bans, the ridiculous barrage of forced ads which twitch has straight up lied about, the fact that Amazon streamed anti-union ads on twitch and then pretended it was an accident, the fact that titty streamers get special priveleges...and that's what I thought of in just 30 seconds off the top of my head.
twitch is fucking awful because it's owned by Amazon. It was great before the acquisition and shortly thereafter.
I never said it was easy. I'm saying twitch fucking sucks and when somebody makes something that doesn't suck it will instantly be an 11 digit market cap company. Right now the most likely contender is Gamestop, even if I'd only put that at about a 1% chance of happening.
> even the people making literally millions on twitch hate the DMCA takedowns, the completely capricious bans, the ridiculous barrage of forced ads which twitch has straight up lied about, the fact that Amazon streamed anti-union ads on twitch and then pretended it was an accident, the fact that titty streamers get special priveleges..
Why would GameStop not do these things? They wouldn't be immune to copyright problems. They'd surely need to implement automated ban systems. They'd surely need to advertise. They'd surely want to make money on "titty streamers".
I don't see how any of these are deal-breakers for the viewers and if the viewers are there, the streamers aren't going anywhere. The network effect is real - it doesn't matter how good your streaming platform is if no one is using it.
You're talking about the streamers? As I mentioned, streaming is a tough business, it's going to have a lot of churn. In terms of viewership, there's publicly available data and it's not going down:
What kind of data do you have? Do you work at one of these companies and know that the data is fudged? Do you run an analytics company? There could be some measurement errors or biases but it's virtually impossible that it's directionally incorrect when we're talking about 67% growth y/y.
>> Facebook and Microsoft have both spent huge sums of money trying to and failed.
That does not mean it is not possible, it is not shocking to me that large institutions like Facebook and MS could not compete even with their deep pockets.
you seem to have conflated Money with creativity, and/or vision.
it will not be a Microsoft of Facebook that will topple twitch or you tube, it will be a startup of some kind that is completely removed from Corporate culture and the extreme chains on innovation that large companies have
How does any of this change GME's valuation? Any company can decide to get into anything - the existence of an opportunity that everyone is aware of doesn't impact the company's valuation unless the company's uniquely suited to exploit the opportunity. I don't see how GameStop is particularly well-situated to take advantage of e-commerce or streaming opportunities. They don't have any unique offerings or substantial online presence. They obviously don't have any real tech or product talent or expertise. They also primarily deal with console games and all new consoles lock you into their own online store. They are suddenly going to compete for 2nd place for PC games?
And, Ryan Cohen has no operational role at the company and changing an existing company is very different from building a new one. It's not just having some grand vision, but having the culture and talent to execute on it at every level. And it's unclear Ryan Cohen himself would have any particular expertise here - selling digital goods is very different from selling physical goods.
>I don't see how GameStop is particularly well-situated to take advantage of e-commerce or streaming opportunities
I don't massively disagree, but perhaps you underestimate the prevalence of their brand right now. Gamestop is salient in the gaming and internet communities.
Twitch in essence is a giant ad for Prime. That's it. It's doing exactly what they want. It's a terrible business to try and make profitable as its own silo, which is why mixer et all have failed.
The only thing happening with GME is some opportunistic behavior around their sudden unexpected ability to raise speculative capital. Jeff Bezos himself could take over GME and there is zero chance it's going to become some sort of online ecommerce competitor to steam. They have absolutely no comparative advantage for that. All that's happening is GME management finding every way they can to redirect this influx of cash into their bonuses.
> Chewy absolutely dominated the pet market for e-commerce.
Indeed, I think we get as many Chewy boxes as Amazon boxes. Of course three dogs and three cats will do that.
Chewy used to send every customer a handwritten personalized Christmas card each year. I think they had every employee spend some time writing these cards when they weren't busy.
Later they switched to printed cards using a handwriting font, but those early years of handwritten cards certainly left an impression.
You're basing the valuation on Gamestop being able to build, market and compete with twitch/amazon, when they've expressed 0 plans to do so, and are unable to even maintain a website?
https://www.gamestop.com/ (down all morning)
I mean, there's an argument for viewing Tesla and Gamestop similar to bitcoin; they clearly have _some_ underlying value, but it seems largely secondary to hype-induced valuation.
Like most stocks BTC's value depends on the buyers hope of a rise of the value. Buy low and sell high.
For the original function of stocks, support a company and get a share of the profit, you are right about BTC.
The "original function" of stocks hasn't gone away. The S&P 500 paid out half a trillion dollars in dividends last year, and performed another half trillion or so in stock buy-backs.
Trading happens on the pure derivative of stock prices, yeah, and people get rich off of it, sure, but ignoring the trillion dollars a year that flows from the profits on the economic activities of the S&P 500 back to the investors in the stock is ... oversimplifying things.
The sum of all monies lost trading S&P500 shares should be negative, since the index as a whole was up. Which isn't to say it'll be up forever, but over a scale of years it has historically always been up. Even if you lost money trading S&P 500 shares, somebody else made more, which is why the index is up.
Even so, that figure isn't really relevant to the GP's point. Their point was that in addition to the price of the stocks, people who owned those stocks got cash money paid into their pockets, via dividends. That amounts to about 1.1% interest on money you spend buying the shares[1].
(That's not actually a great number. 2% is more common over the last 20 years. It suggests that as of right now the market is overpriced. But that's also for 2020, which is not a typical year. So far for 2021, it's more like 1.5%)
When you factor in stock buybacks -- which are sort of but not quite the same as dividends -- it's "sort of" like 3%.
(My vague understanding is that for complicated and silly reasons, many more companies have preferred stock buybacks to dividends in recent decades, but it's still money flowing back from companies to investors.)
There are two factors. The tax code favors one form of compensation and low interest rate money means it is actually possible to execute this strategy. When companies borrow money to skip taxes you know that the central bank isn't doing its job properly.
That’s not really an accurate comparison. Stocks are ownership in a company, which is still subject to all of the realities of operating a company. We can’t simply continue trading Hertz stock as a speculative gamble when the company goes under.
Yes, cycles of hype and supply and demand do distort stock prices, but it’s still a capital allocation market. GameStop can choose to sell shares into the hot market, much as AMC did, to raise money. Buyers of those shares are allocating capital into the company.
One of the draws of Bitcoin as a speculative instrument is that there are no fundamentals. Without fundamentals, there is no mechanism to suggest if it’s undervalued or overvalued. The only thing a Bitcoin purchase funds is more energy expenditure on mining.
I don't mean to quibble but I would say that even though bit coin is not a quote unsuited real currency you can apply purchasing powrr parity valuation to it and compare purchasing power of bitcoin compared to other currency like instruments additionally the cost to mint a bit coin is not meaningless, just easy to neglect.
That's trading the stock certificates, not the stock itself. Nowadays there aren't any stock certificates anymore so that point is kind of moot. I doubt you can still trade enron shares, for instance.
The certificates still exist; the fact that you don't get one when you buy stock just reflects the fact that you don't technically own the stock. US stocks were not dematerialized.
Production costs don't equal value of the product. You can certainly spend more on making something than it is worth. BTC has no intrinsic value. It has some utility, but mostly in the realm of illegal activities. But that is not the same thing as intrinsic value.
crypto is still bubblish.. new field, massive returns ... everybody with a bit of mileage know it will feel bad for the last week buyer before the top. musical chair.
That seems like a bit of a simplistic view spurred on by people who don’t know what Chapter 11 is.
It’s not “we don’t have any more money” or “we aren’t making any money”, it’s “we need a little court-mandated breathing room (from our creditors) to change x, y, and z, and then we’ll be ok”.
Well, in this case perhaps. The shareholders may be screwed, but at least it gives them (Hertz as well as shareholders) a fighting chance, rather than just saying “yep, we had a good run” and washing their hands of everything.
> That seems like a bit of a simplistic view spurred on by people who don’t know what Chapter 11 is.
> It’s not “we don’t have any more money” or “we aren’t making any money”, it’s “we need a little court-mandated breathing room (from our creditors) to change x, y, and z, and then we’ll be ok”.
It really depends on which "we" you're talking about:
1. What you said is probably true, from the perspective of the organization itself (which includes its officers).
2. It's almost always false, from the perspective of the current shareholders. They're going to get wiped out.
What do you mean by "not enough to incentivize mining"? Mining works on a system where the fewer miners there are the larger a portion of the total transaction fee share each miner gets. Even if the there were no exchanges or people sending transactions, I'm sure there would be at least a few nerds who would mine on their desktop computers for shits and giggles.
A better criterion would be "when transaction fees aren't worth enough to incentivize enough mining to keep the network secure". But even that isn't a very clear concept because you can always just wait longer for more blocks to confirm.
Well if the hash rate drops far enough all that unused ASIC firepower could easily fork the network a million different directions and transactions would take forever to get through, I don't think waiting would produce that much more security because the real chain getting mined on the desktops would be a lot shorter than the ASIC mined ones.
There is a particular risk, unlikely but theoretically possible, that I'm thinking of here.
In case of a sudden huge decrease of BTC price for a whatever reason, the cost of electricity for mining would become much larger than the cost of all the expected reward (the newly mined part plus the txn fee part). If such a situation would cause major miners cease mining, then there's a gap where there's a lot of unprofitable [proof of] work too be done until the next hash difficulty adjustment, which happens every 2016 blocks - which usually should be roughly every two weeks, but if there's a large sudden hash rate decrease, then it can take months to mine those blocks, the adjustment won't happen until (unless!) someone sacrifices something like 100 million dollars in electricity costs to mine the remaining blocks while the difficulty rate has made it unprofitable at the unexpectedly lowered BTC price - and, of course, the impact of that hashrate drop would make BTC transactions very slow and act as a further downward push on BTC price.
TL;DR - there's a mechanism where a sudden large, rapid drop in BTC price might perhaps cause a sustained collapse of BTC price.
> There is a particular risk, unlikely but theoretically possible, that I'm thinking of here. [...] TL;DR - there's a mechanism where a sudden large, rapid drop in BTC price might perhaps cause a sustained collapse of BTC price.
This scenario is known as the "chain death spiral". When BCH forked from BTC, the BCH backers hoped to cause a death spiral on the BTC chain, so that it would die and be replaced by the BCH chain, the later having a modified algorithm which adjusted the hash difficulty faster. IIRC, they failed for two reasons: first, there was a large enough group of miners which didn't defect and stayed on the BTC chain even while the BCH chain was more profitable, keeping the hash rate high enough that the difficulty adjustment kept working; second, the faster difficulty adjustment of the BCH chain led it to oscillate between long periods without any block and periods in which many blocks were mined very quickly, most of them empty. IIRC, this ended when the BCH chain hard forked again to change its difficulty adjustment to one which didn't oscillate as much; however, the hype caused by all this mess (whoever had Bitcoin had doubled the amount of coin they had! Of course, half of it was BTC and half of it was BCH) led to an increase to the price of Bitcoin (and a few more forks).
No, GME has a failing business. They were losing money on their physical stores before the pandemic.
They basically have to pivot into ecommerce and somehow compete effectively with Sony, Microsoft, and Valve. I don't give them good odds of success there, even with Ryan Cohen.
The company was bankrupt.
People who bought HRTZ after bankruptcy had to have known it was a game of financial musical chairs, much like GME, TSLA or BTC.