And there goes that…

The last few days have been absolutely brutal for those of us who were stupid enough to buy GME near its last week high. Of course, we knew that such a precipitous decline was a possibility, if not a probability, all along. Robinhood’s freeze on buying may have been the most dramatic blow, but the bizarre last minute changes in the short numbers that came out on Sunday from S3 Analytics likely did the most damage, IMO. This was a bet and a bet against the house and that is how these things usually go. Did the house cheat to get us here? Of course! That’s why they call them the house! But by being complete idiots and diving into shark infested waters with our hard-earned money, we nevertheless did accomplish some things:

1. Even though we may have “lost” (in the sense of not having made the stock price a totally notional number and completely bankrupting the short HFs) I think that the battle may have been well worth it in the sense of tempering finance capital’s appetite for shorting in the future. Too often, this predatory practice has been able to benefit from its own self-fulfilling prophecy. Once a company is targeted for short sale, this cripples the company’s liquidity which then limits the company’s ability to innovate or increase production. This pressure from finance capital touches nearly every aspect of industry and ultimately results in a significant downward pressure on wages (for, after all, the easiest way to increase profits is to lower costs and labor is one of the largest expenses in most industries).

2. We might have saved GameStop from going under. Even though they are a corporation that pays their employees like shit, on balance, I see this as a social good. Retail around the country was already decimated pre-Covid and this fucking virus has taken out much of what was left over after decades of ever-increasing rents, insurance premiums, and interest payments. I want there to still be places to go when—or perhaps I should say if—we ever get out of this godforsaken viral timeline. Moreover, for many of us, some of our fondest memories are of going to the video game store as a kid. For me, and I think for a lot of us, the idea of today’s kids not having that option provokes a deeply visceral response.

Now how exactly is GME going to turn its peculiar new role as a parking space for protest dollars into long term profit generation? It’s unclear. Some have suggested that the company could benefit from taking a deeper position in e-sports but I can’t really comment on that because I’m too old to know much about that industry. Nevertheless, I think that they will be the recipients of an enormous amount of public good will after this episode and unless they are as stupid as us they will find ways to capitalize on that. Maybe they could even go into game development and partner with reddit to make a WallStreetBets game where you try to organize a herd of 8 million moronic apes to fight the interconnected web of hedge fund managers, brokers who let you buy stock only when they feel the prices are acceptably low, and boomer talking heads who will come up with the most outlandish nonsense and apologias for the latter two. I’d love to play that game in simulation! It’s been pretty darn fun IRL too!

3. We probably made Robinhood go under. I see this as a social good. Even before they orchestrated Thursday’s flash crash, RH’s business practices were questionable. For instance, Vice points out that just back in December—which does already feel like more than a year ago—”Robinhood was fined $65 million by the Securities and Exchange Commission for ‘misleading statements and omissions in customer communications’ about its revenue, but specifically around its payment of [sic] order flow process.” The lawsuits over what happened on Thursday (and there was plenty of fuckery on Friday and Monday as well—document all of this!) will most likely go on for years to come, so it’s quite possible that what we thought was a short-term bet will actually end up being more like the boomer investments that many of the WSB crowd mock so roundly.