GameStop: Community and Financial Chaos

On the internet there's practically a community for everything, but I have never seen something quite like this. Where do I begin? In early 2021, there was this giant mania that took the media by storm. There's no way you could have avoided this story over the past few days. Ordinary citizens from across the world had gathered to buy the shares of one particular retail store. What the hell is happening? with GameStop. Thousands are banding together, pushing the stock price way up. Cheers, everybody! Seem to shake Wall Street to its core. It was supposed to be this David versus Goliath story. The little guy has power. Hedge funds have lost billions. The world believed the story ended after that mania all those years ago. I believe the story ended all those years ago. There's just one problem. It didn't. It was only the beginning. I believe in GameStop as a company. I buy a share. Pretty much every single calendar day. We're here to make a lot of money. I wanted to know the truth. These people are fucking crazy. But what I thought would be a simple investigation. Yeah, it became a cult. Turned into something much larger than I could have imagined. His mind became just obsessed with the conspiracy behind it. This is insanity how corrupt everything is. Aren't you tired of the rich fucking you over? I googled GameStop is a cult. Ryan Cohen is taking over as GameStop CEO. Mean King Ryan! They made a cult around him. Like some sort of messiah figure. He secretly communicates with them and tells them what they need to be doing. People are losing their lives because of this shit. They're not only hurting themselves, they're hurting the people around them. It's basically the end times for capitalism. James, you don't know what you're getting yourself into. 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Doing so allows us to continue making bigger and better investigations and documentaries, which is what I love doing. That being said, I hope you enjoy the rest of the video. And so I just want to get it out there. You know what this is? It's about GameStop. GameStop. Can't stop, won't stop, GameStop. I'll see you around, millionaires. Marantz is part of a movement I've been looking into for months now. One that started three years ago in the midst of a pandemic. Hi, James. Good morning. Thank you guys again for having me on. My name is Marantz Rico. I'm from Southern California. I'm a senior operations manager at Costco, and I'm a YouTuber. The strangest stories begin where you least expect them. This one seems to begin with what most people considered a dying retail store, GameStop, an American retail chain that specializes in video games, electronics, and other game-related goods, which in recent years has been plagued by bad news. We're going to start with GameStop, the company reporting a loss of a penny per share revenue of $1.1 billion, falling short of the 1.5 billion. I was just a gamer. I just used to go to the store, stand outside, wait for the midnight releases. And that was my experience with GameStop before any of this ever got around. But in recent years, Moranza's relationship with the store has changed. Do you mind me asking how often you yourself invest in GameStop? I buy a share pretty much every single calendar day. A large portion of his time is spent sharing streams and videos to his 9,000 subscribers. Usually pertaining to or in some way related to his investment in GameStop. This is where I do most of my videos. The studio just happens to be a corner in my room where my wife let me videotape. GameStop shares are usually symbolized through its ticker symbol, which is written simply as GME. So whenever you see or hear GME, think GameStop. I'm all in on GME. You guys think I'm joking. I'm all in. I've been all in. Ask anyone who knows me. The amount of research I do. I'm probably good for about 20 to 40 hours a week on research, not just recording. I don't know when I sleep. I really don't. I work about 60 hours a week. So to add on to YouTube on top of that, I probably sleep about three to four hours a day. And it's been everything to me since the day I started looking into GameStop. This is connecting the dots part four. It's part eight. This is connect the dots part 53. Marantz began investing in GameStop in 2021, but perhaps the most interesting thing about him. is that he's not alone. He's part of a group of equally dedicated people invested in GameStop, spread across YouTube, Pitch them the idea of investing in GME. This stock should be way higher in value. Twitter, Reddit, there are hundreds of thousands just like him. Many of those GameStop investors post on a subreddit known as r slash superstock, where they share ideas and news about the company. They post their own research papers of sorts, which they call due diligence. I took over my 401k and just turned it all over to GameStop, and I would say I'm about 95% invested in GameStop. I like to throw money into GameStop every time I get paid. It's the only stock that I own outside of my 401k. Do you plan on selling your shares and if so, I guess when? I don't think I would at this point. I would just, out of principle, I don't think I would, you know? I don't plan on selling my shares, James. It would have to be an act of God for me to sell my shares. I know, I thought the exact same thing. GameStop is a company that, as far as I could tell, sold physical video games and consoles in stores along with other bits and pieces. It didn't sound impressive. Yet you're telling me there is a community of people investing their money into it. And even more interesting, they're either saying they never plan to cash out, or plan to cash out at insanely high prices. GameStop could be worth a thousand a share. 750,000 dollars a share. 900,000 dollars a share. GameStop is a nothing company. GameStop is almost up there with Apple and Microsoft. I would walk backwards and walk far, far away and find another company to buy. The mainstream media are a bunch of liars. Something just didn't make sense. I wanted to find out. Why? Where was this all coming from? That question would lead me down one of the most unusual rabbit holes I have ever encountered. But to begin answering that question, I had to go back. Back to when GameStop captured public attention in a way that has never been seen before. Back to... The Before 2021, GameStop was seen as a company on its last legs. The world's largest video game retailer announced plans to close 180 to 200 underperforming stores in the U.S. and abroad. At the time, the company was very much struggling. It experienced years of declining revenue. We were entering the pandemic during 2020, so that was a very big... a concern for a lot of physical retailers. My name's Richard Coffin. I work as a investment analyst slash portfolio manager here in Canada. In the world of finance, there are big institutions out there that looked at a company like GameStop and thought it won't be long before they go out of business. If a company is doing poorly, you usually see its share price start to fall. Institutions who looked at GameStop and saw a failing company decided to make a bet that the share price would continue to fall. This bet would be made through a process that is known as short selling, where you borrow shares of the company, sell it at the current market price with the promise to buy those shares back at a future date, profiting the difference. GameStop had been facing short selling from hedge funds like Melvin Capital. Hedge funds were seen as The big boys of the investing world, you know, sometimes they would manage billions of dollars on behalf of clients. Most people would have agreed with the hedge funds. GameStop was probably not going to last unless... Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome to Roaring Kitty. You were this guy. A former track and field star at Stonehill College, now working for an insurance firm, Keith Gill invested as a hobby and he shared his trades on his YouTube channel under the name... Roaring Kitty Yo, what up everybody? Sorry I was a little bit late today. My daughter skipped her nap, she kinda delayed everything. But uh, welcome to Roaring Kitty! We'll be doing some boring stuff on this stream, like analyzing financial statements, looking at spreadsheets and charts and all that. Hello to the one viewer, looks like I got one! Alright, that was the over-under, I was talking with my wife. She said it was gonna be more or less than that, so hello! Roaring Kitty would also post on Reddit, under the username DeepFuckingValue, or DFV for short. One of the places he would start posting about his trades was a subreddit known simply as r slash wall street bets. Wall street bets was, I guess to put it nicely, a forum dedicated to investing. It's a popular trading community, trading community on reddit. It's basically a community of gamblers, I mean investors, who make wild outlandish bets on stocks with the small likelihood of making a lot of money. So WallStreetBet is a community of retail investors that share the love for investing and the general gambling. It's a very active stock trading community on Reddit. It's full of memes, self-deprecating humor, trading, speculating, investing, and gambling on stocks. Mostly gambling, though. My name is Isaac. I go by LooseVentures online. That's how everyone knows me. I used to be a moderator of the WallStreetBets subreddit. I'm a simple vice. That's my Reddit username. And I'm a former WallStreetBet mod. WallStreetBets had a reputation for YOLOs. These huge bets people would make where they put almost all their money into a stock and shared it for the attention of the community. I saw people lose their life, their houses, their wives. I saw people become a millionaire overnight. The purpose of WallStreetBets is how stupid can you make a bet? It's called YOLO. So this guy, Keith Gill, he was about to make a YOLO bet of his own, but he had no idea what sort of movement he was about to begin. The first stock that I'm going to talk about is GameStop, and I know it's a polarizing stock. Some people won't even tune into the stream right now when they hear that I'm bullish on GameStop at the current price point of about $4 per share. The GameStop stock is, I mean, it epitomizes value investing. It's like value investing at its finest because it's such a classic. Keith Gill had a thesis. The hedge funds, you know, the big institutions with large resources managing sometimes billions in dollars? Well, they were wrong about GameStop. He felt like they were not accounting for the console cycle, that physical disks weren't yet being phased out. If Roaring Kitty was right, and the hedge funds shorting GameStop were wrong, he would stand to make a lot of money. Because you see, Shorting a company is very risky work. It can leave you vulnerable to something known as a short squeeze. If GameStop's share price were to rise instead of fall, the hedge funds that are betting against the company would need to close their short positions in order to prevent further losses. But here's the twist. Closing their short position helps the share price rise even further, which in turn forces other short sellers to close their position. In other words, it triggers a chain reaction. that squeezes out the short sellers, leaving them with substantial losses. And the share price of GameStop rises even higher. Roaring Kitty had put $53,000 of his own savings into GameStop. If he was right, he had the potential for enormous returns. And as he made his bet, he shared his position on Wall Street Bets. The Wall Street Bets community initially thought that Roaring Kitty had no idea what he was talking about. The people on the sub thought that Roaring Kitty was insane. There were just a myriad of negative comments on his thesis. They were making fun of him, like, what are you talking about, GMEs, that stuff, like there's nothing, there's no upside to it. When Gill first invested, GameStop was trading at around $5 per share. But as time went on, he continued sharing his position, but continued to be ridiculed. Until his thesis started to come true. As the stock price rose, his initial 50k investment started to balloon in value. And that's when people started to take notice. Game stops up about 5x from when I uploaded those videos over the summer, so. Roaring Kitty was becoming a celebrity, you know. Surprise! More importantly than that, they started to copy his investment. He was... regarded as a as a figurehead once the stock price started to move once he started posting uh celebration videos we are the champions cheers everybody i really started to listen to what he said and it kind of made sense it was he was saying hey this this thing's shorted to hell and if we just buy it and we hold it they're eventually gonna have to buy back And to me, that's like, it's a little too easy to be true. But, I mean, what the hell else am I spending my money on? During the height of the COVID, you know, a lot of small businesses, including mine, were shut down. So we had to look for online alternatives, and I found the Reddit community. So I was hoping that, you know, maybe with GameStop I can catch lightning in a bottle. I mean, there were... Non-stop posts, comments, just general excitement. Thousands, thousands and thousands to post. Every day you would wake up, there was a new news, there was a new theory. We'll be going over the short squeeze, we'll be going over Wall Street Bets. A big story on Wall Street Bets. is GameStop. The weapon of choice for these new traders are platforms like Robinhood. These smaller guys maybe that are trading on Robinhood. Robinhood. Robinhood. A lot of people are using the app Robinhood, for example, to trade GameStop stock. It was as easy as downloading the app on your phone, opening it up, selecting which stocks you wanted to buy, and purchasing them. Robinhood made it easy for pretty much any regular person to get involved in buying GameStop, and it was a particular favorite on Wall Street Bets. And as the stock price of GameStop rose higher, what started as one man's initial investment became something else. Somehow it became a movement. Uh, there were a lot of thoughts about, yeah, we need to stick together. Like, hey, we could make some money, and possibly even, you know, put one to the man. And this represented an opportunity for us retail investors to stick it to the 1%. This wasn't just about getting rich. It was about taking down Wall Street. Aren't you tired of the rich fucking you over? The plan was to buy and hold shares of GameStop. Don't sell. Let the share price of GameStop rise until you completely squeeze the life out of hedge funds by forcing them to exit their short positions. I understood that if GameStop survived, I would make money. And that short sellers would have to cover their positions and they'd need to buy my shares. It is a rebellion between Wall Street and internet traders. This is spilling over into the rest of the market. This GameStop situation is the craziest I think I've ever seen. People never heard of options or never traded once in their life. Now they're in on it somehow. Most of my friends do work in the finance industry, and the truth is it was all we could talk about, because once again, it was a great spectacle. By January 27th, GameStop had reached $348 a share. Roaring Kitty's initial $50,000 investment had grown to $47 million. Somebody rented a plane. and he drove around Robinhood headquarters for 45 minutes with a sign saying, buy GME. Major hedge funds like Melvin Capital were reporting heavy losses. Melvin Capital is now out of the stock. They got out of the stock yesterday afternoon. As far as anyone else could see, it was working. The big institutions were losing out to the regular folk. How much money did people think they were going to make on GME? All of it. All of it. There wasn't a ceiling. And then... A trading frenzy intensified yesterday when the popular trading app Robinhood blocked traders from buying the retailer's stock. GameStop shares tanking today. Robinhood and other brokers making it tougher to trade the stock. The buy button on popular brokerage apps like Robinhood, where most investors were buying their shares of GameStop, was shut off for a day. An official explanation was given, but the momentum was gone. What goes up did indeed come down. Stocks. boosted by day traders finally tumbling as far as the world understood the hedge funds had closed their short positions during the peak of the mania the short squeeze was done melvin capital would then later file for bankruptcy and the rest of the world moved on but for us this is no longer about Investing. This has changed everything. Realize how rigged the game was back then. That's where things were just beginning. Yeah, it was a great fun, but that fun turned into something bad. Hi guys, welcome back to Morant's Rants. Plenty of good information, a little bit of motivation, a whole lot of truth, no financial advice. I buy a share pretty much every single calendar day. Like I said, I wanted to know why after all these years, people are still buying shares of GameStop despite the price having fallen since that mania. To answer that question though, I realised I had to ask another. What exactly happened with the buy button on Robinhood all those years ago? The buy button going away was what really triggered me. You know, we were pissed off that the buy button got taken away. And I sustained heavy losses. Robinhood has gotten a lot of backlash for restricting share purchases in companies like GameStop. The outrage around the buy button being shut down led to a congressional hearing to investigate. Why did Robinhood restrict the buying, but not the selling, of GameStop? And why did folks get locked out on the buy side only? Ranking member McHenry, I appreciate the opportunity to address that. A lot of people, even with a lot of experience in the stock market, aren't really aware of kind of how the plumbing in the background works. The official explanation essentially boiled down to Robinhood having a risky business model that could not support the amount of trading that was happening on their platform during the mania. They effectively had no choice but to shut down the buy button. Of course, that explanation didn't stop people from being angry. In light of that you realize that the system is 100% rigged. Really angry. The general reaction to that happening was obviously one of extreme suspicion, if not cries of corruption. On Wall Street bets, alternative theories were being proposed for why the buy button was turned off. The community was livid and that confirmed their belief that Wall Street The executives there, the professionals, the hedge funds, the short sellers, pure evil. They're in cahoots with Robinhood and any broker that turned off the buy button. The GameStop investors on WallStreetBets started to believe that Robinhood was told to shut down the buy button by hedge funds and other financial institutions who were shorting the company in order to prevent them from losing more and going bankrupt. Albeit there wasn't any strong evidence really to suggest that. that had happened. We haven't had a whole lot of evidence of that. There's certainly conflicts of interest that line up with that story, but not much in terms of actual evidence. But the real question wasn't why did the buy button get shut down? The real question was whether or not the GameStop investors believed the official story. To tell me that there was no corruption, there was no dirty dealings going on, bullshit. They lied about the reason why they did it. I tend not to believe what mainstream media tells me because it's usually a lie. So all information that I got was from Reddit. Now, official reports show that the vast majority of hedge funds closed their short positions during the peak of the GameStop mania. And yet, do you believe that hedge funds closed their positions in 2021? I do not believe hedge funds closed their short positions. Shorts didn't close. Am I correct in understanding that you believe that the shorts did not close? Absolutely. The owner of Melvin Capital paid for a spot on CNBC and he said, oh, we closed. We closed our shorts. The only reason he was there saying that is because he didn't. Shorts didn't close. That was the fundamental idea that was proliferating on Wall Street bets in the aftermath of the mania. The prevailing Belief was they're just saying that they're just saying that to get us to to bow out and to sell our shares. That hedge funds and other institutions were lying about the fact that they had closed their short positions in GameStop in order to stop people from buying more shares and ultimately prevent themselves from going bankrupt. But if they're lying and shorts didn't close, then you know what that means, right? I still in my heart of hearts believe that GameStop It meant that what happened in January of 2021 wasn't the short squeeze that everyone thought it was. It was only the beginning. Despite what the official reports and what most experts were saying, GameStop investors still believed that they were lying. Dude, these people are lying to you. They are lying to you every single day. What are they trying to hide? Why are they lying? They even had a word for people who disagreed with them. Shills. GameStop investors believed that shills could be anyone. They could be anywhere. They could be in the media. They could be in major companies. They could even be the people you're speaking to online. It wasn't too uncommon for GameStop investors to believe that shills existed even in their own community. Kind of like a secret agent paid by the hedge funds to dissuade people from buying GameStop shares. If they did close their position, why are they putting out articles telling me to sell my GameStops? Why are these people so interested in how I waste my money? It's a paranoid hole to go down and I try to keep a healthy distance. Many of the GameStop investors started to believe that not only were the reports of short hedge funds closing their positions false, but in fact, more than 100% of the available shares of GameStop were still being shorted. Which might make you ask, how exactly would that even be possible? The GameStop investors had an answer to that question. Naked shorting. Naked short selling is this idea that you can sell a stock short without first borrowing it. Naked short selling was an illegal practice. Like Patrick said, it meant short selling shares without even borrowing them in the first place, essentially creating phantom or synthetic shares that didn't even exist in the market. GameStop investors went on to theorize that hedge funds were naked shorting GameStop so much that the number of shares being shorted was significantly higher than the actual amount of shares available. None of this makes sense and the only solution is naked shorts. It blew my mind how they can get away with this. Obviously, the tricky thing with saying that short positions are being hidden is that it's very hard to prove or disprove. I think that this is utter nonsense, like there's no other way around it. And I think it would be very hard to hide such large activity, especially given that I don't know that hedge funds have much of an interest in maintaining that short position. Most. Big traders, most sophisticated investors want nothing to do with this. I think the real reason that the kind of people who are really excited about this stuff believe this is that they sort of need an enemy in order to maintain the narrative, right? I guess I would question whether hedge funds would think it's worth it to do all this back alley sort of these arrangements, these private arrangements, just to short one retail company. As the theories developed, you started to see a picture of people who felt they had been wronged, looking for a way to make it right. The main purpose of a GameStop investment is to hopefully potentially start a turn in the stock market to be less corrupt. If I can use my money to send a message to the rich assholes, I'm gonna do it. Like, fuck them. Like, seriously, fuck them. But the picture was incomplete. If the GameStop investors didn't believe the official story around the buy button, and that hedge funds still had short positions in GameStop, then you know what that means, right? To the GameStop investors, it meant that the short squeeze hadn't truly happened yet. That the mania of 2021 was just a glimpse of what was to come. They believed that another short squeeze, the real short squeeze, was still on the table. A short squeeze unlike anything ever seen before. What they started calling... The Moas. The Moas is the mythical mother of all short squeezes. The idea was simple. GameStop investors believed that all they had to do was continue buying and holding shares of GameStop. That eventually, their hedge funds, who they believed were the most important, were creating fake or synthetic shares of GameStop would need to close their short position by buying real shares back from GameStop investors. And as long as GameStop investors waited and didn't sell their shares, the demand for their shares would rise so high that they effectively could choose whatever price they could sell their shares at. Literally one share of GameStop could have been worth millions of dollars. Buy higher, buy higher, buy higher. What if there's nothing higher? What if nothing's up there? The price is... infinite because as long as we keep holding we don't sell they can't cover they can't close their position they need us to sell there's nothing logical behind that idea i think it's a fairy tale and i i would i would honestly like to answer that in a more professional way but i i think that's the best way to put it scale of it could be infinite um it could be you know personal impacts could be life-changing There's no thesis that says that's going to happen. There's lots of people that hope it does because it seems right that it should. A short squeeze can happen now, honestly. I think they're being squeezed right now, to be honest. It could be tomorrow. We don't know. No one knows when it's going to be, but they know it's going to happen. I can't tell you how that's going to happen. Do I think it's going to happen? Yes. If no one sells any shares, then the price will go to infinity. You see. GameStop investors believed that a MOAS would make the share price of GameStop rise to astronomical numbers, far too expensive for any hedge fund to be able to buy back. So the hedge funds would be forced to pay that money back in other ways, taking out loans, assuming more debt, whatever it takes. Because of the connections between so many major institutions, they believe that the debt caused by this MOAS would be reduced to a significant amount. would have a cascading effect that could topple markets, leading to a recession bigger than any the world has ever seen. And then even the government couldn't step in and bail out because suddenly everyone doesn't have the money. It would be Armageddon for financial markets. It'd be worse than any crash we'd seen ever because every single cent of every institution that had been put towards some other.... Venture would go to GameStop, all of it. In the event of a MoAS event, I think the world in the end would be a much better place. MoAS, mother of all short squeezes, is basically the end times for capitalism. So some people see it as a chance for wealth, some people see it as a chance for a revolution. If it doesn't happen in my lifetime, it'll probably happen in my nephew's lifetime. And they're the ones getting my stops. What's clear is that whatever this is, It's not just another squeeze, it's Doomsday. For a long period of time, the 99% of the posts on WallStreetBets were about GameStop. And it was getting out of hand. WallStreetBets changed in its roots. Before it was all about making money in investments and now we had all these people. screaming movement and screaming changes or whatever. The moderators, understandably, they sort of had enough. There needs to be a winner and loser and you need to know when to quit. That's something that a good investor needs to know. These people are losers. They don't know how to lose and that's their problem. The moderators on WallStreetBets decided to shut down conversation around GameStop on the subreddit. You know, some people would say it was compromised by chills. There was talk that one of the moderators who's really cracking down on GameStop-related posts was bought out by the hedges. I don't know if this is true. They infiltrated Wall Street Bets and they bought them out. The main accusations were we were paid shills, that we were shilling for hedge funds for the short sellers. We worked for them. There was a lot of hate towards the Wall Street bet mods saying they're shields, they're this, they're that. And so, a new subreddit was created by those who left Wall Street bets purely for conversation around GameStop. This was called r slash SuperStonk. Um, SuperStonk was really cool. It's like a whole family vibe. It's just a bunch of guys that just love the stonk. And girls. Guys and girls that love the stonk. How much? Time do I spend on Super Stonk and other places? Too much time. Any research made by the community was usually referred to as view diligence, or just DD, usually appearing as a regular post in the community, showered with Reddit awards and upvotes. Man, there's been so much good due diligence that's been produced, not only with GameStop, but just from like a macroeconomic standpoint as a whole. These posts were then compiled into what they called their due diligence library. Super Stonk began as everything that I wanted it to be. It was, you know, more hype, more up-to-the-second news, you know, just totally engaging for someone like me who really was invested in the story of GameStop, not just the company itself. For every action comes an equal and opposite reaction. So I first heard about these communities when my partner at the time was getting very wrapped up in the GameStop short squeeze that happened in January of 2021. I feel like it started to become a real issue when his mind became just obsessed with the conspiracy behind it and thinking that the whole entire market is about to collapse. I feel like it began to take over his life and all his spare time kind of went into... Reading Reddit and getting deeper and deeper into this conspiracy rabbit hole and becoming invested in these, what I think are absolutely crazy theories. So, he went to bed that night and I stayed up and I googled GameStop is a cult and that's where I found GME Meltdown, the subreddit. So the GME Meltdown subreddit started as people were getting pretty fed up with seeing constant spam posts to the front page of Reddit of people within these stock communities begging people to come and buy into the stock that they're all obsessed with. GME Meltdown is a subreddit pretty much just designed to laugh at and make fun of apes and point out all of their insane conspiracy theories. Apes are the diehard, hardcore, cult-like investors. Yes, I'm a proud member of GME Meltdown. The purpose of GME Meltdown's sub is to spread the word and spread the facts that cannot be spread in the echo chambers that apes have created for themselves. The content is usually one of two categories. Either it's laughing at somebody literally having a meltdown. That's why it's called GME Meltdown. It's an ape melting down over how bad their investment is doing. They made a meme out of me. And, you know, they took me, I wear a helmet, a space helmet. I have it over here somewhere. But I wear a space helmet during a live stream during the earnings report. And I'm cheering on the stock and I'm like, come on, baby. And then it just starts tanking. And you see the reaction of me. They lost how much? And then they made a meme. Oh, man. The other one is pointing out and laughing at the latest insane conspiracy theory that apes have come up with. Over time, it sort of grew into a community of people interested in the ongoing saga and lore and mythology of these conspiratorial communities. Meltdowners had started seeing the development of the theories around GameStop and felt like what they were witnessing was not real research, but instead a community obsessed with the stock of a dying company in the hopes of reliving a mania that had just gone by. We're trying to get some of the apes to see. the reality of the situation that they're in and we're trying to save them from the cult that they're in. Part of the conspiracy theories that Meltdowners disagreed with were the ideas around a MOAS happening or that shorts didn't close their positions in GameStop back in early 2021. The idea that the shorts never closed has become another one of those shibboleths. It's become one of those things that they say amongst each other to bolster their faith in MOAS. Everyone knows the shorts never closed. We also know that shorts must close, baby! It is demonstrably true that the shorts closed. You can look at the SEC report. They did. They believe that hedge funds are making kind of infinite profits off of shorting these companies into the ground. But if they knew anything about market returns, they would see that like the best hedge funds in the world routinely return like 14% or something year over year. Meltdown is a place where people hang out and they all have the same idea that GameStop's a failure, but I don't think they're going to have a place to stand real soon. Superstomp is a community, surface level. It is a place for people to talk about GameStop investing. Really what it is, is a hive mind echo chamber where these guys spout insane conspiracy theories. back and forth to each other and hype each other up and have really really really weird rituals and beliefs meltdowners also pointed to the failed predictions in the community in the year of 2021 super stonk began emphasizing the importance of an upcoming shareholder vote from gamestop the theory was that if enough gamestop investors voted the total vote count would exceed the total number of outstanding shares. In other words, it would prove their theories around naked shorting, there would be a shock in the markets, and the MOAS would be triggered. So, the day of the vote arrived. And unfortunately, it didn't quite pan out how they expected. The total outstanding shares of GameStop were, at the time, roughly 72 million. The number of votes casted were roughly 55.5 million. There was some initial confusion in the community. And then, the theory changed. People started saying that the vote count was never going to exceed the number of shares in the first place. But there's an interesting thing about communities like GameStop and other delusional groups. What happens is, people will make dates, the dates will come and go, and immediately, there's a small period where there's confusion, and then almost immediately the community goes to work re-evaluating the situation and- Re-formatting the narrative to take into account what just happened while still allowing them to maintain the same basic thesis. When it came to things like MOAS, there was this sense that it could be imminent at any point. Some of them talked about what they would do with their money after MOAS. If I got life-changing money, I'd probably help out the community here. A lot of homeless people here. I would like to build out a dedicated cross-country course in my state. It's not really about money. Money is just ice. To me, it's about principles. It's about, you know, stop fucking over Americans. The most unusual trait of this community is the savior complex, where they believe that if they get all the money that they are entitled to, they will change the world for better. But there was one name that, without fail, took a spotlight in the community. Someone I've avoided mentioning. So when it came to why he was investing and what he thought was going on, it really kind of all centered around Ryan Cohen. Something really interesting is their elevation of Ryan Cohen. I learned more about who Ryan Cohen was. Ryan Cohen is the number one factor for me to invest in the GameStop. He took a 13% stake in GameStop. His label of the meme king. It all actually started with Ryan Cohen. We need to hear from Ryan Cohen. In some ways, he has been as important for this movement as Roaring Kitty was. Ryan Cohen had been the founder of Chewy, an online retailer for pet-related products. The vision has been, you know, build the largest pet retailer in the world. He eventually went on to sell Chewy for 3.35 billion dollars. making it one of the largest acquisitions of an e-commerce brand. What is next on your docket? Because clearly there was a lot of passion that went into building this company. Yeah, I mean... In September of 2020, he bought a 9.98% stake in GameStop, shortly before writing a letter to the board criticizing their current direction and urging certain changes. In December, he increased his ownership of GameStop to 12.9%. Cohen believed that his experience with Chewy gave him a better insight into how to turn GameStop around, from a brick and mortar store to an e-commerce brand. By January 11th, 2021, they named him to the board of directors, and the rest was history. To the GameStop movement, he became this symbol of hope. Ryan Cohen is what transformed GameStop. I feel that he's the next up and coming. Everything. I think he will be the next Warren Buffett. He's on our team. Holy, holy shit. Ryan Cohen, if you hear me, you're fucking amazing. Without Ryan Cohen, there is no GME. Initially, Cohen was seen as just mainly a good business fit for the company. But as the movement progressed, some also started to see him as fighting for the same cause. Ryan Cohen is against these, I call monsters, right? These individuals who are manipulating multiple outcomes. Like he said, put your money where your mouth is, and he's doing that. That's why I love Ryan Cohen so much. have a great day. Cohen would make a point about criticizing overpaid executives, presenting himself as someone who genuinely cared about retail investors and the company itself. He looks out for the small retail shareholder. He doesn't take one dollar. Ryan Cohen, the CEO, chairman of the board, does not get paid one dollar. Cohen rarely does interviews, so the only way for most investors to hear his perspective is from tweets and his annual meetings. Back in the 2021 mania, they even coined a nickname for him, Papa Cohen. To add to why I was so concerned about it being a cult is because of the absolute worship of Ryan Cohen. They made a cult around him. Everything he does, whether it's fail or succeeding, I'm with him. Because if he fails, I feel he's young enough and rich enough to try again and try again and try again. Everyone can see themselves within Ryan. He is the symbol of everything they believe they are doing. They believe they are standing up to corrupt Wall Street short sellers, hedge funds, whatever. They think they're standing up for working class people, or at least they claim to. Ryan Cohen, who we all know, he is now executive chairman of GameStop. Activist investor Ryan Cohen is taking over as GameStop CEO. He's a Canadian investor. who in 13 years of doing business had one profitable quarter. Like what has Ryan Cohen done that you think makes him such a great business? And the furthest I ever get is people being like, well, he founded Chewy. And that's how he became a billionaire. A company that was never profitable under him. He didn't sell. a profitable business. He created a company to compete with larger pet food brands and pet-like supplier brands and undercut them while losing money to the extent that it became a better idea for another company to buy him out. People in the industry think he's a complete joke and he's fooled people into believing that because he was so successful at Chewy, he can be successful at these other things. We haven't seen any track record in terms of his ability as an activist investor to turn companies around, really. If you look at GME's numbers, they're awful. They shut down hundreds of stores. Sometimes you have to cut unprofitable locations, but that seems to be the only thing that he's actually doing to try to get them anywhere near profitability. He's been through numerous CEOs and numerous CFOs, and he can't seem to get anything done. That's irrelevant to them because they don't care about the person Ryan Cohen. They care about the mystical idea of Ryan Cohen that they've come up with in their head. Cohen keeps a low profile, so most of these criticisms go unanswered. He doesn't do interviews and he isn't very talkative. That is, with the exception of his Twitter account. During the 2021 GameStop Mania, Cohen amassed a large following. To the average person, Cohen's tweets don't seem that interesting or out of the ordinary. But to others, again, is how he secretly communicates with them and tells them what they need to be doing. Anything he tweets gets deciphered. Like one of Ryan Cohen's last tweets said, brick by brick. And this all ties right into that GameStop NFT platform. Would you say then Cohen is directly communicating with GameStop investors through his Twitter? I'd like to think so. The apes were trying to decipher the time when he posted the tweets how that affected the GME stock and what he was trying to say. One of Cohen's most well-known tweets was this picture of an ice cream cone, which some argued had a direct impact on the share price. People went back to the Ryan Cohen tweet and said, look, he tweeted an ice cream cone and that's why the stock went up. It's rallying because of an emoji of ice cream. Ryan Cohen famously does very few interviews, if any. One of the only ones he has ever done was with Joe Fonichello from GMEDD.com, which was a website dedicated to looking for further information about the GameStop short squeeze of 2021. You know, my tweets are just me being me. And I think there are a lot of bad actors in the meme stock world and they get, you know, spacesuit or whatever, and or they paint their face and they go talk about stocks. and they build this audience of people because they're telling them exactly what they want to hear i think gamestop's the most underrated company out there on the stock market the best value i can find and maybe they're collecting donations maybe they're selling t-shirts maybe they're selling merch they're gonna end up having made some money in the end while everyone else maybe not so much or maybe so it's not like i get paid a crazy amount off of youtube no way i think i made seven dollars yesterday i do more hours than dollars when it comes to youtube without a Amid all of this, I had one question that I kept coming back to. Do you think that Ryan Cohen is aware of the community that is surrounding him? I would, you know, believe that he's seen Super Stonk, he's seen r slash GME, he's seen these big subreddits about the company. But again, I think he's more interested in turning the company around. Ryan Cohen has to be aware of this on some level. Of course he is. He gets tweeted at like hundreds of times per day. And if he does know about the community, does he know the power that he has over them? So in total, I've probably invested around £150,000. I took over my 401k and just turned it all over to GameStop. I probably invested $30,000 into GameStop. In 2023, Yahoo Finance wrote an open letter to Cohen. about his time at Gamestop saying that he had failed at picking a management team, failed to keep selling collectibles, and had failed to push into NFTs. I think Ryan is disrespecting all these shareholders and they deserve better than what Ryan Cohen is giving him. But above all they criticized the fact that he wasn't communicating to the average investor community. No Q&A's, no detailed plan, nothing. Why? Do you think that Ryan Cohen benefits or Profits from having movements like we see around the stock. I certainly think that GameStop and Ryan Cohen too. degree of profited from the movement behind them. One of the things that the apes love to talk about when saying how great GameStop is doing is about the fact that they have a billion dollars plus cash on hand. Having all that cash on hand and then Ryan Cohen with the ability to invest with it, it's the best value stock that I could see. I mean, that sounds good, right? But when you really look into it, you realize that the reason this cash exists is because in June of 2021, Months after GameStop's share price had shot up thanks to the mania, the company issued more shares into the market, which you could reasonably assume had been bought up by other GameStop investors looking to buy more shares. In other words, GameStop's cash didn't come from the business making sales, it came from other GameStop investors. In fact, the company would have a negative book value if it weren't for that money that was raised by those new investors. If Ryan Cohen had any fucking clue of what to do to grow GameStop, he would be spending that money. He would also be leveraging debt to help grow the business. But he's not doing that because he doesn't know what he's doing. And really, a company can last as long as investors are willing to lose money with them. And then Ryan Cohen, you know, any investment he makes where he gets sort of that retail support behind. It's going to benefit him to some degree and there's always a chance that that gets abused or he's able to use that against People to some degree. I originally asked myself the question of why? Why people had been investing in GameStop after all these years? So far I could see that the claims of corruption, Ryan Cohen, the idea of a MOAS They all played a role in that answer. There was just one problem Moass. Do you personally believe a Moass-like event could happen? I don't think politically it would be allowed to happen. Yeah, I personally believe a Moass could happen. It could be tomorrow. We don't know. No one knows when it's gonna be, but they know it's gonna happen. I can't tell you how that's gonna happen. Do I think it's gonna happen? Yes. It seemed to me that there was a spectrum of beliefs in the community, that not everyone believed in Moass. and some focused on other areas like corruption. When I spoke to Morantz, for example, he seemed quite reasonable in his approach. He liked GameStop because he believed in the company on a fundamental level. Granted, his devotion to the company did strike me as excessive. But I was warned by some of the skeptics and meltdowners that that there had been a shift over time in the GameStop investing communities. I think the majority of the SuperStock community believes, or at least at one point believed in MoAS, but as dates have failed and goalposts moved, it has shifted into just believing that, no, GameStop is actually just a really, really good company that I want to invest in. People more like Marantz, let's say. who at least claim that it's not about MOAS, it's about these, these fundamentals that they'll gesture at, the balance sheet, it's looking great, blah blah blah. Despite not claiming to care about MOAS, it was pretty clear to me that Morantz did check the boxes for what seemed to be a MOAS-like belief. You combine the 2008 housing crisis, financial crisis, with the pandemic, and now you have something that's catastrophic, something you cannot contain. And it just so happens GameStop's one little pin to what that is. 100% of people that are invested in GME think that Moz is going to happen, but only a small percentage of them are brave enough to say it. It felt like I was being presented with two realities. In one, I'm being told that GameStop is a company with a lot of potential, that Ryan Cohen is turning them around, stamping out corruption, and about to trigger one of the greatest short squeezes of all time that could potentially topple America's economy. On the other hand, I'm being told that GameStop is a dying business, that most of the short positions had been closed after the 2021 mania, and that r slash super stonk and GameStop investors in general are operating in a cult-like fashion. That Ryan Cohen is no saviour, there is no squeeze, there is no reward. And as I continued my research, desperate to find out why nearly 3 years after it started, people were still spending their savings on GameStop, I found something even more shocking. GameStop wasn't the only community like this. The mania of 2021 set in motion this idea that perhaps GameStop wasn't the only short squeeze opportunity, that there were other companies out there, other seemingly failing companies with hidden potential, other vix- Victims of Wall Street corruption. Companies like Sears, Nokia, Blackberry, AMC. And for each of them, a similar if not identical movement had sprung up. Thriving communities with somewhat similar ideas, principles, and beliefs. MOAS, Naked Shorting, Shills, Corruption, The Potential. You realize, holy shit, this isn't just GameStop. There are groups of communities like this. But amongst them, There was one community that captured my attention the most. In March of 2022, while still a chairman for GameStop, Ryan Cohen sends a letter to the board of directors of a once successful, but now failing home goods store, Bed Bath & Beyond. In that letter, he disclosed that he had a 9.8% share in the business and criticised the leadership for not doing enough. This was just like he had done once with GameStop before the 2021 mania. What happened next? An idea started to form. I believe that he was trying to communicate that this is going to be the next GameStop. Bed Bath & Beyond, obviously, the Ryan Cohen news, sending that thing just absolutely skyrocketing. Like the Bed Bath people are a whole other level. These are the most extreme of the extreme. That what had happened before would happen again. The Bed Bath & Beyond community are the most insane. These people need help. And you cannot help them. People put their identities into a stock and can't let go. Just buy Bed Bath & Beyond. They put up my home address. They said, I'm home alone, come visit me. You're out here telling people this could hit $5. I don't know, you love making videos. Ryan Cohen, as far as I'm concerned, runs... pulled everybody. He published these children's books and in my opinion they're not written for children. What is Ryan Cohen trying to tell us you know what is the master strategy? He made money and everyone who followed him lost their ass. Chief financial officer of Bed, Bath and Beyond who died by suicide. Show me a proof of that he died. I've seen so many tweets talking about how like we're the flat earthers of the investing world and like all that. But you're crazy until you're not. Can you explain to me what happened with Bed Bath & Beyond? Things were about to become a whole lot more interesting.

Ordinary citizens from across the world had gathered to buy the shares of one particular retail store. What the hell is happening? with GameStop. Thousands are banding together, pushing the stock price way up. Cheers, everybody!

Seem to shake Wall Street to its core. It was supposed to be this David versus Goliath story. The little guy has power.

Hedge funds have lost billions. The world believed the story ended after that mania all those years ago. I believe the story ended all those years ago. There's just one problem.

It didn't. It was only the beginning. I believe in GameStop as a company. I buy a share. Pretty much every single calendar day.

We're here to make a lot of money. I wanted to know the truth. These people are fucking crazy. But what I thought would be a simple investigation. Yeah, it became a cult.

Turned into something much larger than I could have imagined. His mind became just obsessed with the conspiracy behind it. This is insanity how corrupt everything is.

Aren't you tired of the rich fucking you over? I googled GameStop is a cult. Ryan Cohen is taking over as GameStop CEO.

Mean King Ryan! They made a cult around him. Like some sort of messiah figure. He secretly communicates with them and tells them what they need to be doing. People are losing their lives because of this shit.

They're not only hurting themselves, they're hurting the people around them. It's basically the end times for capitalism. James, you don't know what you're getting yourself into.

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That being said, I hope you enjoy the rest of the video. And so I just want to get it out there. You know what this is? It's about GameStop.

GameStop. Can't stop, won't stop, GameStop. I'll see you around, millionaires.

Marantz is part of a movement I've been looking into for months now. One that started three years ago in the midst of a pandemic. Hi, James.

Good morning. Thank you guys again for having me on. My name is Marantz Rico. I'm from Southern California.

I'm a senior operations manager at Costco, and I'm a YouTuber. The strangest stories begin where you least expect them. This one seems to begin with what most people considered a dying retail store, GameStop, an American retail chain that specializes in video games, electronics, and other game-related goods, which in recent years has been plagued by bad news. We're going to start with GameStop, the company reporting a loss of a penny per share revenue of $1.1 billion, falling short of the 1.5 billion. I was just a gamer.

I just used to go to the store, stand outside, wait for the midnight releases. And that was my experience with GameStop before any of this ever got around. But in recent years, Moranza's relationship with the store has changed.

Do you mind me asking how often you yourself invest in GameStop? I buy a share pretty much every single calendar day. A large portion of his time is spent sharing streams and videos to his 9,000 subscribers. Usually pertaining to or in some way related to his investment in GameStop.

This is where I do most of my videos. The studio just happens to be a corner in my room where my wife let me videotape. GameStop shares are usually symbolized through its ticker symbol, which is written simply as GME. So whenever you see or hear GME, think GameStop.

I'm all in on GME. You guys think I'm joking. I'm all in. I've been all in. Ask anyone who knows me.

The amount of research I do. I'm probably good for about 20 to 40 hours a week on research, not just recording. I don't know when I sleep.

I really don't. I work about 60 hours a week. So to add on to YouTube on top of that, I probably sleep about three to four hours a day. And it's been everything to me since the day I started looking into GameStop. This is connecting the dots part four.

It's part eight. This is connect the dots part 53. Marantz began investing in GameStop in 2021, but perhaps the most interesting thing about him. is that he's not alone.

He's part of a group of equally dedicated people invested in GameStop, spread across YouTube, Pitch them the idea of investing in GME. This stock should be way higher in value. Twitter, Reddit, there are hundreds of thousands just like him.

Many of those GameStop investors post on a subreddit known as r slash superstock, where they share ideas and news about the company. They post their own research papers of sorts, which they call due diligence. I took over my 401k and just turned it all over to GameStop, and I would say I'm about 95% invested in GameStop. I like to throw money into GameStop every time I get paid. It's the only stock that I own outside of my 401k.

Do you plan on selling your shares and if so, I guess when? I don't think I would at this point. I would just, out of principle, I don't think I would, you know? I don't plan on selling my shares, James.

It would have to be an act of God for me to sell my shares. I know, I thought the exact same thing. GameStop is a company that, as far as I could tell, sold physical video games and consoles in stores along with other bits and pieces.

It didn't sound impressive. Yet you're telling me there is a community of people investing their money into it. And even more interesting, they're either saying they never plan to cash out, or plan to cash out at insanely high prices. GameStop could be worth a thousand a share. 750,000 dollars a share.

900,000 dollars a share. GameStop is a nothing company. GameStop is almost up there with Apple and Microsoft. I would walk backwards and walk far, far away and find another company to buy. The mainstream media are a bunch of liars.

Something just didn't make sense. I wanted to find out. Why?

Where was this all coming from? That question would lead me down one of the most unusual rabbit holes I have ever encountered. But to begin answering that question, I had to go back. Back to when GameStop captured public attention in a way that has never been seen before.

Back to... The Before 2021, GameStop was seen as a company on its last legs. The world's largest video game retailer announced plans to close 180 to 200 underperforming stores in the U.S. and abroad.

At the time, the company was very much struggling. It experienced years of declining revenue. We were entering the pandemic during 2020, so that was a very big...

a concern for a lot of physical retailers. My name's Richard Coffin. I work as a investment analyst slash portfolio manager here in Canada.

In the world of finance, there are big institutions out there that looked at a company like GameStop and thought it won't be long before they go out of business. If a company is doing poorly, you usually see its share price start to fall. Institutions who looked at GameStop and saw a failing company decided to make a bet that the share price would continue to fall.

This bet would be made through a process that is known as short selling, where you borrow shares of the company, sell it at the current market price with the promise to buy those shares back at a future date, profiting the difference. GameStop had been facing short selling from hedge funds like Melvin Capital. Hedge funds were seen as The big boys of the investing world, you know, sometimes they would manage billions of dollars on behalf of clients. Most people would have agreed with the hedge funds. GameStop was probably not going to last unless...

Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome to Roaring Kitty. You were this guy. A former track and field star at Stonehill College, now working for an insurance firm, Keith Gill invested as a hobby and he shared his trades on his YouTube channel under the name...

Roaring Kitty Yo, what up everybody? Sorry I was a little bit late today. My daughter skipped her nap, she kinda delayed everything. But uh, welcome to Roaring Kitty!

We'll be doing some boring stuff on this stream, like analyzing financial statements, looking at spreadsheets and charts and all that. Hello to the one viewer, looks like I got one! Alright, that was the over-under, I was talking with my wife. She said it was gonna be more or less than that, so hello! Roaring Kitty would also post on Reddit, under the username DeepFuckingValue, or DFV for short.

One of the places he would start posting about his trades was a subreddit known simply as r slash wall street bets. Wall street bets was, I guess to put it nicely, a forum dedicated to investing. It's a popular trading community, trading community on reddit.

It's basically a community of gamblers, I mean investors, who make wild outlandish bets on stocks with the small likelihood of making a lot of money. So WallStreetBet is a community of retail investors that share the love for investing and the general gambling. It's a very active stock trading community on Reddit. It's full of memes, self-deprecating humor, trading, speculating, investing, and gambling on stocks. Mostly gambling, though.

My name is Isaac. I go by LooseVentures online. That's how everyone knows me. I used to be a moderator of the WallStreetBets subreddit. I'm a simple vice.

That's my Reddit username. And I'm a former WallStreetBet mod. WallStreetBets had a reputation for YOLOs.

These huge bets people would make where they put almost all their money into a stock and shared it for the attention of the community. I saw people lose their life, their houses, their wives. I saw people become a millionaire overnight. The purpose of WallStreetBets is how stupid can you make a bet?

It's called YOLO. So this guy, Keith Gill, he was about to make a YOLO bet of his own, but he had no idea what sort of movement he was about to begin. The first stock that I'm going to talk about is GameStop, and I know it's a polarizing stock.

Some people won't even tune into the stream right now when they hear that I'm bullish on GameStop at the current price point of about $4 per share. The GameStop stock is, I mean, it epitomizes value investing. It's like value investing at its finest because it's such a classic.

Keith Gill had a thesis. The hedge funds, you know, the big institutions with large resources managing sometimes billions in dollars? Well, they were wrong about GameStop.

He felt like they were not accounting for the console cycle, that physical disks weren't yet being phased out. If Roaring Kitty was right, and the hedge funds shorting GameStop were wrong, he would stand to make a lot of money. Because you see, Shorting a company is very risky work.

It can leave you vulnerable to something known as a short squeeze. If GameStop's share price were to rise instead of fall, the hedge funds that are betting against the company would need to close their short positions in order to prevent further losses. But here's the twist. Closing their short position helps the share price rise even further, which in turn forces other short sellers to close their position. In other words, it triggers a chain reaction.

that squeezes out the short sellers, leaving them with substantial losses. And the share price of GameStop rises even higher. Roaring Kitty had put $53,000 of his own savings into GameStop. If he was right, he had the potential for enormous returns. And as he made his bet, he shared his position on Wall Street Bets.

The Wall Street Bets community initially thought that Roaring Kitty had no idea what he was talking about. The people on the sub thought that Roaring Kitty was insane. There were just a myriad of negative comments on his thesis.

They were making fun of him, like, what are you talking about, GMEs, that stuff, like there's nothing, there's no upside to it. When Gill first invested, GameStop was trading at around $5 per share. But as time went on, he continued sharing his position, but continued to be ridiculed.

Until his thesis started to come true. As the stock price rose, his initial 50k investment started to balloon in value. And that's when people started to take notice.

Game stops up about 5x from when I uploaded those videos over the summer, so. Roaring Kitty was becoming a celebrity, you know. Surprise! More importantly than that, they started to copy his investment.

He was... regarded as a as a figurehead once the stock price started to move once he started posting uh celebration videos we are the champions cheers everybody i really started to listen to what he said and it kind of made sense it was he was saying hey this this thing's shorted to hell and if we just buy it and we hold it they're eventually gonna have to buy back And to me, that's like, it's a little too easy to be true. But, I mean, what the hell else am I spending my money on?

During the height of the COVID, you know, a lot of small businesses, including mine, were shut down. So we had to look for online alternatives, and I found the Reddit community. So I was hoping that, you know, maybe with GameStop I can catch lightning in a bottle.

I mean, there were... Non-stop posts, comments, just general excitement. Thousands, thousands and thousands to post. Every day you would wake up, there was a new news, there was a new theory.

We'll be going over the short squeeze, we'll be going over Wall Street Bets. A big story on Wall Street Bets. is GameStop. The weapon of choice for these new traders are platforms like Robinhood.

These smaller guys maybe that are trading on Robinhood. Robinhood. Robinhood.

A lot of people are using the app Robinhood, for example, to trade GameStop stock. It was as easy as downloading the app on your phone, opening it up, selecting which stocks you wanted to buy, and purchasing them. Robinhood made it easy for pretty much any regular person to get involved in buying GameStop, and it was a particular favorite on Wall Street Bets.

And as the stock price of GameStop rose higher, what started as one man's initial investment became something else. Somehow it became a movement. Uh, there were a lot of thoughts about, yeah, we need to stick together. Like, hey, we could make some money, and possibly even, you know, put one to the man. And this represented an opportunity for us retail investors to stick it to the 1%.

This wasn't just about getting rich. It was about taking down Wall Street. Aren't you tired of the rich fucking you over? The plan was to buy and hold shares of GameStop.

Don't sell. Let the share price of GameStop rise until you completely squeeze the life out of hedge funds by forcing them to exit their short positions. I understood that if GameStop survived, I would make money. And that short sellers would have to cover their positions and they'd need to buy my shares. It is a rebellion between Wall Street and internet traders.

This is spilling over into the rest of the market. This GameStop situation is the craziest I think I've ever seen. People never heard of options or never traded once in their life.

Now they're in on it somehow. Most of my friends do work in the finance industry, and the truth is it was all we could talk about, because once again, it was a great spectacle. By January 27th, GameStop had reached $348 a share.

Roaring Kitty's initial $50,000 investment had grown to $47 million. Somebody rented a plane. and he drove around Robinhood headquarters for 45 minutes with a sign saying, buy GME. Major hedge funds like Melvin Capital were reporting heavy losses.

Melvin Capital is now out of the stock. They got out of the stock yesterday afternoon. As far as anyone else could see, it was working.

The big institutions were losing out to the regular folk. How much money did people think they were going to make on GME? All of it.

All of it. There wasn't a ceiling. And then... A trading frenzy intensified yesterday when the popular trading app Robinhood blocked traders from buying the retailer's stock. GameStop shares tanking today.

Robinhood and other brokers making it tougher to trade the stock. The buy button on popular brokerage apps like Robinhood, where most investors were buying their shares of GameStop, was shut off for a day. An official explanation was given, but the momentum was gone. What goes up did indeed come down.

Stocks. boosted by day traders finally tumbling as far as the world understood the hedge funds had closed their short positions during the peak of the mania the short squeeze was done melvin capital would then later file for bankruptcy and the rest of the world moved on but for us this is no longer about Investing. This has changed everything. Realize how rigged the game was back then.

That's where things were just beginning. Yeah, it was a great fun, but that fun turned into something bad. Hi guys, welcome back to Morant's Rants. Plenty of good information, a little bit of motivation, a whole lot of truth, no financial advice.

I buy a share pretty much every single calendar day. Like I said, I wanted to know why after all these years, people are still buying shares of GameStop despite the price having fallen since that mania. To answer that question though, I realised I had to ask another. What exactly happened with the buy button on Robinhood all those years ago?

The buy button going away was what really triggered me. You know, we were pissed off that the buy button got taken away. And I sustained heavy losses.

Robinhood has gotten a lot of backlash for restricting share purchases in companies like GameStop. The outrage around the buy button being shut down led to a congressional hearing to investigate. Why did Robinhood restrict the buying, but not the selling, of GameStop? And why did folks get locked out on the buy side only?

Ranking member McHenry, I appreciate the opportunity to address that. A lot of people, even with a lot of experience in the stock market, aren't really aware of kind of how the plumbing in the background works. The official explanation essentially boiled down to Robinhood having a risky business model that could not support the amount of trading that was happening on their platform during the mania. They effectively had no choice but to shut down the buy button.

Of course, that explanation didn't stop people from being angry. In light of that you realize that the system is 100% rigged. Really angry.

The general reaction to that happening was obviously one of extreme suspicion, if not cries of corruption. On Wall Street bets, alternative theories were being proposed for why the buy button was turned off. The community was livid and that confirmed their belief that Wall Street The executives there, the professionals, the hedge funds, the short sellers, pure evil. They're in cahoots with Robinhood and any broker that turned off the buy button. The GameStop investors on WallStreetBets started to believe that Robinhood was told to shut down the buy button by hedge funds and other financial institutions who were shorting the company in order to prevent them from losing more and going bankrupt.

Albeit there wasn't any strong evidence really to suggest that. that had happened. We haven't had a whole lot of evidence of that. There's certainly conflicts of interest that line up with that story, but not much in terms of actual evidence. But the real question wasn't why did the buy button get shut down?

The real question was whether or not the GameStop investors believed the official story. To tell me that there was no corruption, there was no dirty dealings going on, bullshit. They lied about the reason why they did it.

I tend not to believe what mainstream media tells me because it's usually a lie. So all information that I got was from Reddit. Now, official reports show that the vast majority of hedge funds closed their short positions during the peak of the GameStop mania.

And yet, do you believe that hedge funds closed their positions in 2021? I do not believe hedge funds closed their short positions. Shorts didn't close.

Am I correct in understanding that you believe that the shorts did not close? Absolutely. The owner of Melvin Capital paid for a spot on CNBC and he said, oh, we closed.

We closed our shorts. The only reason he was there saying that is because he didn't. Shorts didn't close. That was the fundamental idea that was proliferating on Wall Street bets in the aftermath of the mania. The prevailing Belief was they're just saying that they're just saying that to get us to to bow out and to sell our shares.

That hedge funds and other institutions were lying about the fact that they had closed their short positions in GameStop in order to stop people from buying more shares and ultimately prevent themselves from going bankrupt. But if they're lying and shorts didn't close, then you know what that means, right? I still in my heart of hearts believe that GameStop It meant that what happened in January of 2021 wasn't the short squeeze that everyone thought it was. It was only the beginning.

Despite what the official reports and what most experts were saying, GameStop investors still believed that they were lying. Dude, these people are lying to you. They are lying to you every single day. What are they trying to hide?

Why are they lying? They even had a word for people who disagreed with them. Shills.

GameStop investors believed that shills could be anyone. They could be anywhere. They could be in the media.

They could be in major companies. They could even be the people you're speaking to online. It wasn't too uncommon for GameStop investors to believe that shills existed even in their own community. Kind of like a secret agent paid by the hedge funds to dissuade people from buying GameStop shares.

If they did close their position, why are they putting out articles telling me to sell my GameStops? Why are these people so interested in how I waste my money? It's a paranoid hole to go down and I try to keep a healthy distance. Many of the GameStop investors started to believe that not only were the reports of short hedge funds closing their positions false, but in fact, more than 100% of the available shares of GameStop were still being shorted.

Which might make you ask, how exactly would that even be possible? The GameStop investors had an answer to that question. Naked shorting.

Naked short selling is this idea that you can sell a stock short without first borrowing it. Naked short selling was an illegal practice. Like Patrick said, it meant short selling shares without even borrowing them in the first place, essentially creating phantom or synthetic shares that didn't even exist in the market.

GameStop investors went on to theorize that hedge funds were naked shorting GameStop so much that the number of shares being shorted was significantly higher than the actual amount of shares available. None of this makes sense and the only solution is naked shorts. It blew my mind how they can get away with this.

Obviously, the tricky thing with saying that short positions are being hidden is that it's very hard to prove or disprove. I think that this is utter nonsense, like there's no other way around it. And I think it would be very hard to hide such large activity, especially given that I don't know that hedge funds have much of an interest in maintaining that short position.

Most. Big traders, most sophisticated investors want nothing to do with this. I think the real reason that the kind of people who are really excited about this stuff believe this is that they sort of need an enemy in order to maintain the narrative, right? I guess I would question whether hedge funds would think it's worth it to do all this back alley sort of these arrangements, these private arrangements, just to short one retail company.

As the theories developed, you started to see a picture of people who felt they had been wronged, looking for a way to make it right. The main purpose of a GameStop investment is to hopefully potentially start a turn in the stock market to be less corrupt. If I can use my money to send a message to the rich assholes, I'm gonna do it.

Like, fuck them. Like, seriously, fuck them. But the picture was incomplete.

If the GameStop investors didn't believe the official story around the buy button, and that hedge funds still had short positions in GameStop, then you know what that means, right? To the GameStop investors, it meant that the short squeeze hadn't truly happened yet. That the mania of 2021 was just a glimpse of what was to come. They believed that another short squeeze, the real short squeeze, was still on the table.

A short squeeze unlike anything ever seen before. What they started calling... The Moas.

The Moas is the mythical mother of all short squeezes. The idea was simple. GameStop investors believed that all they had to do was continue buying and holding shares of GameStop. That eventually, their hedge funds, who they believed were the most important, were creating fake or synthetic shares of GameStop would need to close their short position by buying real shares back from GameStop investors.

And as long as GameStop investors waited and didn't sell their shares, the demand for their shares would rise so high that they effectively could choose whatever price they could sell their shares at. Literally one share of GameStop could have been worth millions of dollars. Buy higher, buy higher, buy higher.

What if there's nothing higher? What if nothing's up there? The price is... infinite because as long as we keep holding we don't sell they can't cover they can't close their position they need us to sell there's nothing logical behind that idea i think it's a fairy tale and i i would i would honestly like to answer that in a more professional way but i i think that's the best way to put it scale of it could be infinite um it could be you know personal impacts could be life-changing There's no thesis that says that's going to happen.

There's lots of people that hope it does because it seems right that it should. A short squeeze can happen now, honestly. I think they're being squeezed right now, to be honest. It could be tomorrow.

We don't know. No one knows when it's going to be, but they know it's going to happen. I can't tell you how that's going to happen. Do I think it's going to happen? Yes.

If no one sells any shares, then the price will go to infinity. You see. GameStop investors believed that a MOAS would make the share price of GameStop rise to astronomical numbers, far too expensive for any hedge fund to be able to buy back. So the hedge funds would be forced to pay that money back in other ways, taking out loans, assuming more debt, whatever it takes.

Because of the connections between so many major institutions, they believe that the debt caused by this MOAS would be reduced to a significant amount. would have a cascading effect that could topple markets, leading to a recession bigger than any the world has ever seen. And then even the government couldn't step in and bail out because suddenly everyone doesn't have the money.

It would be Armageddon for financial markets. It'd be worse than any crash we'd seen ever because every single cent of every institution that had been put towards some other.... Venture would go to GameStop, all of it.

In the event of a MoAS event, I think the world in the end would be a much better place. MoAS, mother of all short squeezes, is basically the end times for capitalism. So some people see it as a chance for wealth, some people see it as a chance for a revolution. If it doesn't happen in my lifetime, it'll probably happen in my nephew's lifetime. And they're the ones getting my stops.

What's clear is that whatever this is, It's not just another squeeze, it's Doomsday. For a long period of time, the 99% of the posts on WallStreetBets were about GameStop. And it was getting out of hand. WallStreetBets changed in its roots.

Before it was all about making money in investments and now we had all these people. screaming movement and screaming changes or whatever. The moderators, understandably, they sort of had enough.

There needs to be a winner and loser and you need to know when to quit. That's something that a good investor needs to know. These people are losers. They don't know how to lose and that's their problem.

The moderators on WallStreetBets decided to shut down conversation around GameStop on the subreddit. You know, some people would say it was compromised by chills. There was talk that one of the moderators who's really cracking down on GameStop-related posts was bought out by the hedges.

I don't know if this is true. They infiltrated Wall Street Bets and they bought them out. The main accusations were we were paid shills, that we were shilling for hedge funds for the short sellers.

We worked for them. There was a lot of hate towards the Wall Street bet mods saying they're shields, they're this, they're that. And so, a new subreddit was created by those who left Wall Street bets purely for conversation around GameStop.

This was called r slash SuperStonk. Um, SuperStonk was really cool. It's like a whole family vibe. It's just a bunch of guys that just love the stonk.

And girls. Guys and girls that love the stonk. How much? Time do I spend on Super Stonk and other places?

Too much time. Any research made by the community was usually referred to as view diligence, or just DD, usually appearing as a regular post in the community, showered with Reddit awards and upvotes. Man, there's been so much good due diligence that's been produced, not only with GameStop, but just from like a macroeconomic standpoint as a whole.

These posts were then compiled into what they called their due diligence library. Super Stonk began as everything that I wanted it to be. It was, you know, more hype, more up-to-the-second news, you know, just totally engaging for someone like me who really was invested in the story of GameStop, not just the company itself. For every action comes an equal and opposite reaction. So I first heard about these communities when my partner at the time was getting very wrapped up in the GameStop short squeeze that happened in January of 2021. I feel like it started to become a real issue when his mind became just obsessed with the conspiracy behind it and thinking that the whole entire market is about to collapse.

I feel like it began to take over his life and all his spare time kind of went into... Reading Reddit and getting deeper and deeper into this conspiracy rabbit hole and becoming invested in these, what I think are absolutely crazy theories. So, he went to bed that night and I stayed up and I googled GameStop is a cult and that's where I found GME Meltdown, the subreddit. So the GME Meltdown subreddit started as people were getting pretty fed up with seeing constant spam posts to the front page of Reddit of people within these stock communities begging people to come and buy into the stock that they're all obsessed with. GME Meltdown is a subreddit pretty much just designed to laugh at and make fun of apes and point out all of their insane conspiracy theories.

Apes are the diehard, hardcore, cult-like investors. Yes, I'm a proud member of GME Meltdown. The purpose of GME Meltdown's sub is to spread the word and spread the facts that cannot be spread in the echo chambers that apes have created for themselves. The content is usually one of two categories.

Either it's laughing at somebody literally having a meltdown. That's why it's called GME Meltdown. It's an ape melting down over how bad their investment is doing. They made a meme out of me. And, you know, they took me, I wear a helmet, a space helmet.

I have it over here somewhere. But I wear a space helmet during a live stream during the earnings report. And I'm cheering on the stock and I'm like, come on, baby. And then it just starts tanking.

And you see the reaction of me. They lost how much? And then they made a meme. Oh, man. The other one is pointing out and laughing at the latest insane conspiracy theory that apes have come up with.

Over time, it sort of grew into a community of people interested in the ongoing saga and lore and mythology of these conspiratorial communities. Meltdowners had started seeing the development of the theories around GameStop and felt like what they were witnessing was not real research, but instead a community obsessed with the stock of a dying company in the hopes of reliving a mania that had just gone by. We're trying to get some of the apes to see.

the reality of the situation that they're in and we're trying to save them from the cult that they're in. Part of the conspiracy theories that Meltdowners disagreed with were the ideas around a MOAS happening or that shorts didn't close their positions in GameStop back in early 2021. The idea that the shorts never closed has become another one of those shibboleths. It's become one of those things that they say amongst each other to bolster their faith in MOAS.

Everyone knows the shorts never closed. We also know that shorts must close, baby! It is demonstrably true that the shorts closed. You can look at the SEC report. They did.

They believe that hedge funds are making kind of infinite profits off of shorting these companies into the ground. But if they knew anything about market returns, they would see that like the best hedge funds in the world routinely return like 14% or something year over year. Meltdown is a place where people hang out and they all have the same idea that GameStop's a failure, but I don't think they're going to have a place to stand real soon. Superstomp is a community, surface level.

It is a place for people to talk about GameStop investing. Really what it is, is a hive mind echo chamber where these guys spout insane conspiracy theories. back and forth to each other and hype each other up and have really really really weird rituals and beliefs meltdowners also pointed to the failed predictions in the community in the year of 2021 super stonk began emphasizing the importance of an upcoming shareholder vote from gamestop the theory was that if enough gamestop investors voted the total vote count would exceed the total number of outstanding shares.

In other words, it would prove their theories around naked shorting, there would be a shock in the markets, and the MOAS would be triggered. So, the day of the vote arrived. And unfortunately, it didn't quite pan out how they expected. The total outstanding shares of GameStop were, at the time, roughly 72 million. The number of votes casted were roughly 55.5 million.

There was some initial confusion in the community. And then, the theory changed. People started saying that the vote count was never going to exceed the number of shares in the first place.

But there's an interesting thing about communities like GameStop and other delusional groups. What happens is, people will make dates, the dates will come and go, and immediately, there's a small period where there's confusion, and then almost immediately the community goes to work re-evaluating the situation and- Re-formatting the narrative to take into account what just happened while still allowing them to maintain the same basic thesis. When it came to things like MOAS, there was this sense that it could be imminent at any point.

Some of them talked about what they would do with their money after MOAS. If I got life-changing money, I'd probably help out the community here. A lot of homeless people here.

I would like to build out a dedicated cross-country course in my state. It's not really about money. Money is just ice. To me, it's about principles. It's about, you know, stop fucking over Americans.

The most unusual trait of this community is the savior complex, where they believe that if they get all the money that they are entitled to, they will change the world for better. But there was one name that, without fail, took a spotlight in the community. Someone I've avoided mentioning. So when it came to why he was investing and what he thought was going on, it really kind of all centered around Ryan Cohen. Something really interesting is their elevation of Ryan Cohen.

I learned more about who Ryan Cohen was. Ryan Cohen is the number one factor for me to invest in the GameStop. He took a 13% stake in GameStop. His label of the meme king.

It all actually started with Ryan Cohen. We need to hear from Ryan Cohen. In some ways, he has been as important for this movement as Roaring Kitty was. Ryan Cohen had been the founder of Chewy, an online retailer for pet-related products.

The vision has been, you know, build the largest pet retailer in the world. He eventually went on to sell Chewy for 3.35 billion dollars. making it one of the largest acquisitions of an e-commerce brand.

What is next on your docket? Because clearly there was a lot of passion that went into building this company. Yeah, I mean... In September of 2020, he bought a 9.98% stake in GameStop, shortly before writing a letter to the board criticizing their current direction and urging certain changes. In December, he increased his ownership of GameStop to 12.9%.

Cohen believed that his experience with Chewy gave him a better insight into how to turn GameStop around, from a brick and mortar store to an e-commerce brand. By January 11th, 2021, they named him to the board of directors, and the rest was history. To the GameStop movement, he became this symbol of hope. Ryan Cohen is what transformed GameStop. I feel that he's the next up and coming.

Everything. I think he will be the next Warren Buffett. He's on our team.

Holy, holy shit. Ryan Cohen, if you hear me, you're fucking amazing. Without Ryan Cohen, there is no GME.

Initially, Cohen was seen as just mainly a good business fit for the company. But as the movement progressed, some also started to see him as fighting for the same cause. Ryan Cohen is against these, I call monsters, right? These individuals who are manipulating multiple outcomes. Like he said, put your money where your mouth is, and he's doing that.

That's why I love Ryan Cohen so much. have a great day. Cohen would make a point about criticizing overpaid executives, presenting himself as someone who genuinely cared about retail investors and the company itself. He looks out for the small retail shareholder. He doesn't take one dollar.

Ryan Cohen, the CEO, chairman of the board, does not get paid one dollar. Cohen rarely does interviews, so the only way for most investors to hear his perspective is from tweets and his annual meetings. Back in the 2021 mania, they even coined a nickname for him, Papa Cohen.

To add to why I was so concerned about it being a cult is because of the absolute worship of Ryan Cohen. They made a cult around him. Everything he does, whether it's fail or succeeding, I'm with him. Because if he fails, I feel he's young enough and rich enough to try again and try again and try again.

Everyone can see themselves within Ryan. He is the symbol of everything they believe they are doing. They believe they are standing up to corrupt Wall Street short sellers, hedge funds, whatever. They think they're standing up for working class people, or at least they claim to. Ryan Cohen, who we all know, he is now executive chairman of GameStop.

Activist investor Ryan Cohen is taking over as GameStop CEO. He's a Canadian investor. who in 13 years of doing business had one profitable quarter. Like what has Ryan Cohen done that you think makes him such a great business?

And the furthest I ever get is people being like, well, he founded Chewy. And that's how he became a billionaire. A company that was never profitable under him.

He didn't sell. a profitable business. He created a company to compete with larger pet food brands and pet-like supplier brands and undercut them while losing money to the extent that it became a better idea for another company to buy him out.

People in the industry think he's a complete joke and he's fooled people into believing that because he was so successful at Chewy, he can be successful at these other things. We haven't seen any track record in terms of his ability as an activist investor to turn companies around, really. If you look at GME's numbers, they're awful.

They shut down hundreds of stores. Sometimes you have to cut unprofitable locations, but that seems to be the only thing that he's actually doing to try to get them anywhere near profitability. He's been through numerous CEOs and numerous CFOs, and he can't seem to get anything done.

That's irrelevant to them because they don't care about the person Ryan Cohen. They care about the mystical idea of Ryan Cohen that they've come up with in their head. Cohen keeps a low profile, so most of these criticisms go unanswered.

He doesn't do interviews and he isn't very talkative. That is, with the exception of his Twitter account. During the 2021 GameStop Mania, Cohen amassed a large following.

To the average person, Cohen's tweets don't seem that interesting or out of the ordinary. But to others, again, is how he secretly communicates with them and tells them what they need to be doing. Anything he tweets gets deciphered.

Like one of Ryan Cohen's last tweets said, brick by brick. And this all ties right into that GameStop NFT platform. Would you say then Cohen is directly communicating with GameStop investors through his Twitter?

I'd like to think so. The apes were trying to decipher the time when he posted the tweets how that affected the GME stock and what he was trying to say. One of Cohen's most well-known tweets was this picture of an ice cream cone, which some argued had a direct impact on the share price.

People went back to the Ryan Cohen tweet and said, look, he tweeted an ice cream cone and that's why the stock went up. It's rallying because of an emoji of ice cream. Ryan Cohen famously does very few interviews, if any.

One of the only ones he has ever done was with Joe Fonichello from GMEDD.com, which was a website dedicated to looking for further information about the GameStop short squeeze of 2021. You know, my tweets are just me being me. And I think there are a lot of bad actors in the meme stock world and they get, you know, spacesuit or whatever, and or they paint their face and they go talk about stocks. and they build this audience of people because they're telling them exactly what they want to hear i think gamestop's the most underrated company out there on the stock market the best value i can find and maybe they're collecting donations maybe they're selling t-shirts maybe they're selling merch they're gonna end up having made some money in the end while everyone else maybe not so much or maybe so it's not like i get paid a crazy amount off of youtube no way i think i made seven dollars yesterday i do more hours than dollars when it comes to youtube without a Amid all of this, I had one question that I kept coming back to.

Do you think that Ryan Cohen is aware of the community that is surrounding him? I would, you know, believe that he's seen Super Stonk, he's seen r slash GME, he's seen these big subreddits about the company. But again, I think he's more interested in turning the company around.

Ryan Cohen has to be aware of this on some level. Of course he is. He gets tweeted at like hundreds of times per day.

And if he does know about the community, does he know the power that he has over them? So in total, I've probably invested around £150,000. I took over my 401k and just turned it all over to GameStop.

I probably invested $30,000 into GameStop. In 2023, Yahoo Finance wrote an open letter to Cohen. about his time at Gamestop saying that he had failed at picking a management team, failed to keep selling collectibles, and had failed to push into NFTs.

I think Ryan is disrespecting all these shareholders and they deserve better than what Ryan Cohen is giving him. But above all they criticized the fact that he wasn't communicating to the average investor community. No Q&A's, no detailed plan, nothing.

Why? Do you think that Ryan Cohen benefits or Profits from having movements like we see around the stock. I certainly think that GameStop and Ryan Cohen too.

degree of profited from the movement behind them. One of the things that the apes love to talk about when saying how great GameStop is doing is about the fact that they have a billion dollars plus cash on hand. Having all that cash on hand and then Ryan Cohen with the ability to invest with it, it's the best value stock that I could see.

I mean, that sounds good, right? But when you really look into it, you realize that the reason this cash exists is because in June of 2021, Months after GameStop's share price had shot up thanks to the mania, the company issued more shares into the market, which you could reasonably assume had been bought up by other GameStop investors looking to buy more shares. In other words, GameStop's cash didn't come from the business making sales, it came from other GameStop investors. In fact, the company would have a negative book value if it weren't for that money that was raised by those new investors. If Ryan Cohen had any fucking clue of what to do to grow GameStop, he would be spending that money.

He would also be leveraging debt to help grow the business. But he's not doing that because he doesn't know what he's doing. And really, a company can last as long as investors are willing to lose money with them. And then Ryan Cohen, you know, any investment he makes where he gets sort of that retail support behind. It's going to benefit him to some degree and there's always a chance that that gets abused or he's able to use that against People to some degree.

I originally asked myself the question of why? Why people had been investing in GameStop after all these years? So far I could see that the claims of corruption, Ryan Cohen, the idea of a MOAS They all played a role in that answer. There was just one problem Moass. Do you personally believe a Moass-like event could happen?

I don't think politically it would be allowed to happen. Yeah, I personally believe a Moass could happen. It could be tomorrow. We don't know. No one knows when it's gonna be, but they know it's gonna happen.

I can't tell you how that's gonna happen. Do I think it's gonna happen? Yes. It seemed to me that there was a spectrum of beliefs in the community, that not everyone believed in Moass.

and some focused on other areas like corruption. When I spoke to Morantz, for example, he seemed quite reasonable in his approach. He liked GameStop because he believed in the company on a fundamental level.

Granted, his devotion to the company did strike me as excessive. But I was warned by some of the skeptics and meltdowners that that there had been a shift over time in the GameStop investing communities. I think the majority of the SuperStock community believes, or at least at one point believed in MoAS, but as dates have failed and goalposts moved, it has shifted into just believing that, no, GameStop is actually just a really, really good company that I want to invest in.

People more like Marantz, let's say. who at least claim that it's not about MOAS, it's about these, these fundamentals that they'll gesture at, the balance sheet, it's looking great, blah blah blah. Despite not claiming to care about MOAS, it was pretty clear to me that Morantz did check the boxes for what seemed to be a MOAS-like belief.

You combine the 2008 housing crisis, financial crisis, with the pandemic, and now you have something that's catastrophic, something you cannot contain. And it just so happens GameStop's one little pin to what that is. 100% of people that are invested in GME think that Moz is going to happen, but only a small percentage of them are brave enough to say it. It felt like I was being presented with two realities.

In one, I'm being told that GameStop is a company with a lot of potential, that Ryan Cohen is turning them around, stamping out corruption, and about to trigger one of the greatest short squeezes of all time that could potentially topple America's economy. On the other hand, I'm being told that GameStop is a dying business, that most of the short positions had been closed after the 2021 mania, and that r slash super stonk and GameStop investors in general are operating in a cult-like fashion. That Ryan Cohen is no saviour, there is no squeeze, there is no reward.

And as I continued my research, desperate to find out why nearly 3 years after it started, people were still spending their savings on GameStop, I found something even more shocking. GameStop wasn't the only community like this. The mania of 2021 set in motion this idea that perhaps GameStop wasn't the only short squeeze opportunity, that there were other companies out there, other seemingly failing companies with hidden potential, other vix- Victims of Wall Street corruption.

Companies like Sears, Nokia, Blackberry, AMC. And for each of them, a similar if not identical movement had sprung up. Thriving communities with somewhat similar ideas, principles, and beliefs. MOAS, Naked Shorting, Shills, Corruption, The Potential. You realize, holy shit, this isn't just GameStop.

There are groups of communities like this. But amongst them, There was one community that captured my attention the most. In March of 2022, while still a chairman for GameStop, Ryan Cohen sends a letter to the board of directors of a once successful, but now failing home goods store, Bed Bath & Beyond.

In that letter, he disclosed that he had a 9.8% share in the business and criticised the leadership for not doing enough. This was just like he had done once with GameStop before the 2021 mania. What happened next?

An idea started to form. I believe that he was trying to communicate that this is going to be the next GameStop. Bed Bath & Beyond, obviously, the Ryan Cohen news, sending that thing just absolutely skyrocketing.

Like the Bed Bath people are a whole other level. These are the most extreme of the extreme. That what had happened before would happen again. The Bed Bath & Beyond community are the most insane.

These people need help. And you cannot help them. People put their identities into a stock and can't let go.

Just buy Bed Bath & Beyond. They put up my home address. They said, I'm home alone, come visit me. You're out here telling people this could hit $5. I don't know, you love making videos.

Ryan Cohen, as far as I'm concerned, runs... pulled everybody. He published these children's books and in my opinion they're not written for children.

What is Ryan Cohen trying to tell us you know what is the master strategy? He made money and everyone who followed him lost their ass. Chief financial officer of Bed, Bath and Beyond who died by suicide.

Show me a proof of that he died. I've seen so many tweets talking about how like we're the flat earthers of the investing world and like all that. But you're crazy until you're not.

Can you explain to me what happened with Bed Bath & Beyond? Things were about to become a whole lot more interesting.

Transcript for:GameStop: Community and Financial Chaos

Transcript for:
GameStop: Community and Financial Chaos