---
title: 'This is Financial Advice'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=5pYeoZaoWrA'
video_id: '5pYeoZaoWrA'
date: 2026-06-28
duration_sec: 0
---

# This is Financial Advice

> Source: [This is Financial Advice](https://youtube.com/watch?v=5pYeoZaoWrA)

## Summary

This video is an in-depth analysis of the GameStop meme stock phenomenon, focusing on the post-January 2021 Ape movement, its conspiracy theories (MOASS), and the psychological and social forces that sustain it. The narrator contrasts the 'real world' version of GameStop (a struggling retailer) with the 'Ape version' (an apocalyptic catalyst) and explores how the movement evolved into a cult-like investment community. Key themes include the mechanics of short selling, the development of the MOASS theory, the role of figures like Keith Gill and Ryan Cohen, and the eventual collapse of Bed Bath & Beyond as a case study.

### Key Points

- **The Two Versions of GameStop** [0:28] — The video distinguishes between the mainstream narrative of the GameStop squeeze (retail vs. hedge funds) and the deeper, darker story of a cult-like investment movement built on conspiracy theories.
- **Short Sale Mechanics** [2:25] — Short selling is defined as selling borrowed assets to buy back at a profit, with capped gains but potentially unlimited losses.
- **Ape Reality** [4:33] — Apes view GameStop not as a company but as an apocalyptic catalyst for a global financial reset, driven by a belief in massive naked short selling.
- **Confluence of Events in January 2021** [14:16] — The January 2021 squeeze was a once-in-a-lifetime event driven by multiple coincidences: pandemic, stimulus, Melvin Capital's overexposed short position, and social media hype.
- **Robinhood and the Buy Button** [16:56] — Robinhood's decision to disable buying on January 28 was due to liquidity stress from its 'instant deposit' margin model, not a conspiracy to protect hedge funds.
- **MOASS Theory** [25:14] — The 'Mother of All Short Squeezes' (MOASS) is a flexible conspiracy theory that there are trillions of dollars of hidden naked shorts that will force infinite prices.
- **Modularity of Ape Beliefs** [30:38] — Apes use modular beliefs: any specific theory can be discarded without harming the overall narrative, making it immune to debunking.
- **Securities Ownership and the DTCC** [40:08] — The centralized depository model (DTCC) and beneficial ownership are explained, showing how legitimate market complexity can be misunderstood as conspiracy.
- **DRS as a Cult Ritual** [51:54] — DRS (Direct Registration System) started as a way to prove fake shares exist but became a loyalty ritual, hindering investors' ability to sell.
- **Keith Gill's Role** [64:50] — Keith Gill (DFV) was a rational investor who made money on GameStop but was later retroactively recruited into the MOASS narrative despite his departure.
- **The Nature of Ape DD** [78:05] — Ape Due Diligence (DD) is performative mythmaking, not research: it starts with the desired conclusion and works backward, rewarded by social validation.
- **Bed Bath & Beyond's Demise** [138:20] — Bed Bath & Beyond's bankruptcy in April 2023 illustrated the movement's collapse: its death spiral financing and eventual zeroing of shares were ignored by Apes.
- **The Human Cost of Ape Culture** [144:53] — Apes are gambling addicts who lie, steal from family, and recruit relentlessly, all while believing they are righteous warriors against Wall Street.

## Transcript

Like, the thing is, people don’t appreciate
that this is, like, we’re in a war
[Upbeat music]
Diamond hands!
Infinite means infinite!
Infinite risk!
Infinite reward!
Sure my portfolio looks a lot of red, but
I’m in it for the long haul!
Lambos or Wendy’s I’m gonna get my tendies!
There are tens of thousands of hours of video
and text in existence all seeking to explain
what exactly happened with GameStop in January
2021.
There are explainer videos, unhinged rants,
congressional hearings, and Netflix-produced
documentaries all trying to tell the story
of this one weird moment in time and what
it might mean, what it says about us, our
society, and our economy.
The common version is that a band of plucky
retail investors put the screws to hedge fund
Melvin Capital in a historic short squeeze,
an unprecedented win for the little guy.
The nuanced read is that it was a confluence
of once-in-a-generation social forces, a short
squeeze but also a FOMO fuelled social media
phenomenon where just as many regular folk
got wrecked as made off like bandits.
That, however, is merely where our story starts.
This is a story about what happened next.
This is a story about finance, social media,
conspiracy theories, gambling, mortal men
elevated to mythological figures, and a mountain
of human suffering built of a thousand little
lies.
This is financial advice.
[Melancholy music]
And a cold wind is blowing in and the children
freeze and die
“Few subjects relating to exchange practices
have been characterized by greater differences
of opinion than that of short selling.”
A short sale involves borrowing an asset,
selling it at current market value, and then
returning it later, ideally at a lower price
then when it was sold.
Put simply, it’s selling borrowed goods
to buy back at a profit.
There are some things that we need to caveat
right off the top here.
First and foremost is that meme stock investors,
or Apes as they call themselves for reasons
we’ll get into later, aren’t engaging
with reality as you or I understand it.
You’ll hear of references to things that
you’re aware of, companies that exist in
your universe, but you and Apes aren’t talking
about the same thing.
Your version of GameStop is an unprofitable
mall retailer that was headed slowly but inexorably
towards bankruptcy due to societal shifts
and regular old mismanagement that in 2021
got something resembling a second chance via
once in a generation circumstances.
That second chance might pan out into some
form of future relevance, or at least existence,
maybe, but could just as easily be squandered
and result in bankruptcy anyway.
One way or another the price as it currently
stands is still floating well above GameStop’s
historical peak profitability during the heyday
of the Wii, PlayStation 3, and XBox 360, so
even a tremendous turnaround would still almost
certainly see the stock price continue to
decline.
The Ape version of GameStop is an apocalyptic
catalyst, the chosen vessel through which
the world will be reborn, a mythological entity
built, brick by brick, out of communal desperation,
delusion, and cope, obsessed with the financial
concepts of short selling and a short squeeze.
Their version of reality is, undoubtedly,
more interesting, more dramatic, and more
sensational, but the reasons for its existence
are complex.
It is tempting to say that the participants
are merely ignorant or incompetent but the
sticky truth is nuanced.
There are many elements of Ape lore that are
pure performance, overt pieces of fiction
that persist in the collective narrative simply
because it would be nice for Apes if they
were true.
The primary lens of ape culture, born as it
was on Reddit, is that of video games.
They have cast a variety of people, businesses,
and institutions as their matched opponent,
and will often post taunting letters addressed
to Ken Griffin specifically or hedge funds
broadly where they invoke their prowess in
MMOs.
“Bro I play runescape.
I literally grind for days to watch a number
go up 1.
Been playing 15 years and still not lost interest.
They think it’s going to be any different
now?”
“I just realized how fucked shorts are.
They picked a fight with the gaming industry.
The same people who will grind hours on end,
losing thousands of times in a row, to simply
get one win.
We refuse to end on a loss, we refuse to sell.
“I did one of the most degenerate grinds
that exists for this picture only”
This entire genre of post is profoundly sad,
not merely because of the implication that
a willingness to wander in circles for hours
clicking on virtual plants is somehow a transferable
skill to playing the stock market, but because
they all presume a very high degree of symmetry
and intentionality.
They are based in the belief that, like in
a video game, both sides are knowingly engaged
in a matched competition.
But when you back up and evaluate the whole
picture, their opponents aren’t aware of
the game at all, assuming the ape is even
talking about a group that actually exists.
On their forums they are winning epic battles
against automated trading algorithms specifically
tuned to drive GameStop out of business, they
are in a war with the “hedgies” who are
always, every single day, “getting desperate”
and “running out of ammo”.
In reality Apes are shadow boxing the random
noise of the market and losing.
It has become a layer cake of every genre
of magical thinking, newfaith religiosity,
reheated conspiracy theories, and general
superstition with an added extra-thick frosting
in the form of financial woo, get-rich-quick
culture, sunk costs, and gambler’s fallacy.
A lot of their language is rooted in the culture
of 4chan and Reddit.
They call themselves “Apes” partly in
reference to Planet of the Apes and Starship
Troopers, but also because the other words
they call themselves made them look bad when
the media started to pay attention.
It is a hazily defined movement dispersed
across all of social media and dozens of forums,
burdened with two years of petty drama, in-fighting,
and fragmentation.
Due to their extreme beliefs their culture
has grown more and more insular over time,
so their communication is predictably littered
with in-jokes, niche references, shibboleths,
abbreviations, jargon, and private definitions
of words borrowed from other disciplines,
which can make it understandably difficult
to follow along.
We can get there, I believe in us, we can
make this make sense, but boy howdy does the
journey require a journey.
The version of the story that you’re already
familiar with is one where a bunch of Redditors
tried to short squeeze some hedge funds and
get rich in the process by buying GameStop.
“Meanwhile the quote unquote meme stocks
turned over.
These companies pumped up by amateur traders
on social platforms like Reddit with the express
purpose of forcing certain hedge funds to
lose money, well, they plummeted today.”
The version of the story you’re not familiar
with is the one where, two years after the
squeeze, Heat Lamp Theory penned by Reddit
user 6days1week argues that financial service
provider ComputerShare’s operational algorithm
is being tricked by short hedge funds into
storing plan-held shares in the DTCC like
burgers under a heat lamp and also probably
someone made it illegal to report these heat
lamp shares as directly registered thus suppressing
the evidence that Apes own the float.
Although that post was low effort and the
speculation itself turned out not to be completely
correct, my hunch was still valid.
It was often attacked by what I believe were
bad actors asking me to “prove someone made
it illegal.”
The abuse of ComputerShare’s algorithm was
obvious to Apes who were paying attention:
ever since Ryan Cohen’s “I want to be
the Book King” tweet, it was clear that
Cohen was signalling for Apes to terminate
their plans, sell their fractionals, and book
their shares.
What was not obvious was the reaction of the
mods, who would attempt to bury the story
- revealing themselves to be paid shills,
clearly compromised by the hedgies in order
to distract from Heat Lamp.
“Censorship of Heat Lamp DD shows we are
heading in the right direction”
“What the fuck is this shit?
So we still get pushback for Heat Lamp at
other places, but someone can post a sponsored
DD that is literally the definition of FUD
and says in that comments that DRS is pointless
and MOASS will not happen.”
“THE HEAT LAMP THEORY dd to me is as impressive
as the house of cards dd.
It’s like the dd’s from the beginning
of super stonk.”
So, yeah, there’s a lot of ground to cover
before that makes any sense at all.
[orchestal music]
The wheels of finance spin beneath the surface
of the modern world.
Everywhere you look the impact can be felt.
The modern corporation consists of many moving
parts, from manufacturing to distribution
to communications.
Likewise the finances behind the corporation
are equally complex, a delicately balanced
dance of equity and credit that facilitates
the many wonders of the modern world.
One of the most misunderstood and contentious
mechanisms of this dance is what is called
a “short sale.”
“Few subjects relating to exchange practices
have been characterized by greater differences
of opinion than that of short selling.”
Though many characterize shorting as a toxic
modern practice, in reality it is quite old.
And it has polarized people for as long as
it’s existed.
But what is a short sale?
A short sale involves borrowing an asset,
selling it at current market value, and then
returning it later, ideally at a lower price
then when it was sold.
Put simply, it’s selling borrowed goods
to buy back at a profit.
Two things happen with this arrangement.
First is that the short seller gets to hold
the full sale value for a period of time until
the asset is returned, providing them with
capital that they can use in the interim.
Second is that when the asset is returned
this represents not the moment where the short
seller makes money, but merely when they lock
in their final profits.
The risk/reward proposition of short selling
is that gains are capped by the price at the
time of borrowing.
If an asset is borrowed at $5 then the absolute
maximum profit is $5 (discounting fees and
interest, of course.)
On the flip side is the risk profile.
The maximum losses of a short sale are effectively
infinite as the price of the asset isn't bounded
to 100% or even 10,000% of the original sale
price.
As the trend for the economy as a whole is
to grow, a stock going from $5 to $10 is far
more common than stocks going from $5 to $0.
In addition the borrower is expected to pay
the original owner a recurring fee based on
the value of the asset, similar to interest
paid on a loan, called the cost-to-borrow,
or CTB.
However unlike a personal loan that you might
already be familiar with, such as a mortgage,
where the payments encompasses both interest
and principal on a schedule where the whole
loan is eventually paid off, the cost to borrow
is paid every month, prorated by day, with
no cap, thus borrowing an asset for long periods
of time can quickly eat up profit margins
or even exceed the original value of the asset
itself.
For these reasons it is uncommon to hold a
short position for long periods of time.
Even though the name “short-selling” comes
from the bet that the asset will decline,
or “fall short,” it is coincidentally
appropriate that short plays tend towards
short time frames of weeks or months rather
than months or years.
However this short timeframe leaves the borrower
more exposed to short-term volatility.
Disruptions that might temporarily set a company
back without impacting the overall health
of the business can benefit short-sellers
greatly, while unexpected good news can generate
a surge of excitement about a company that
may leave short-sellers hurting, and lenders
pressuring them to return the asset or incur
further liability.
At the most extreme, lenders can compel the
borrower to return the asset in full, regardless
of the cost to the borrower.
When short sellers are impelled to return
large volumes of shares all at once this sudden
buying pressure can further potentiate upwards
movement on the price of the security, applying
further margin pressures to other existing
short positions.
This situation is commonly referred to as
a “short squeeze” as the short-sellers
are squeezed out of their positions by the
accelerating costs.
“I mean they can try, they can try as hard
as they want to demoralize us, but as I always
say: no cell, no sell.
I’m not selling.
Power to the player.
Power to the shareholders.
Power to the individual investor each choosing
for themselves a, a company they believe in.”
In late January 2021 video game retailer GameStop
became a media sensation as the value of their
stock rose from $20 to just shy of $500 over
the course of four days.
The exact confluence of events that led to
this have been thoroughly documented, so we
won’t drag the point out here, but the critical
takeaway is this: it was a once-in-a-lifetime
event that hinged off multiple specific coincidences.
The pandemic made the situation for brick-and-mortar
retail dire due to multi-valent impacts, so
many hedge funds had taken out short positions
against them anticipating a continued decline
in revenue and thus share price
Governments begin to distribute stimulus packages
in an attempt at offsetting the economic impact
of the pandemic
There was a zeitgeist of futility in the air,
that financially the average person was screwed,
the stimulus package wasn’t enough to fix
anything, so you might as well blow it on
something reckless
In specific, hedge fund Melvin Capital holds
a truly reckless short position in GameStop
that left the fund extremely exposed if the
price were to rise, and traders on Reddit
see this as an opportunity and begin promoting
it on YouTube, Twitch, and Twitter.
As the idea of getting in on a potential GameStop
short squeeze spreads through social media
in late 2020 the messaging gets flattened.
New people are flooding into Reddit’s Wall
Street Bets forum, they are bringing with
them their own ideas, their own politics,
their own expectations.
The thing that really speaks to people, and
thus works well for recruiting, is the idea
that this is a chance to hurt Wall Street.
As more and more people pile in the experienced
traders get tired of explaining things over
and over, thus new people are being on-boarded
by people who themselves have a stock-trading
career best measured in hours.
These are users who jumped onto forums and
explicitly asked “how do I get in on GameStop
as fast as possible?”
They’re not getting a lecture on risk management,
market operations, and exit strategy, not
that Wall Street Bets would ever be a good
place to get those, they’re getting a hype
speech about revenge for 2008 and a bare-bones
series of instructions on what buttons to
push.
Potentiating that, any large, leaderless movement
with foggy politics is going to attract a
whole slew of political opportunists from
all across the spectrum who hope to steer
the tsunami in their preferred direction.
These people, trying to transform it into
a coherent political movement, inject and
amplify a lot of narrative about solidarity
and making a difference.
Ape together strong.
That’s the kerosene that primes this whole
thing to turn into an apocalyptic investment
cult.
[match lighting]
This is a bold claim, and it’s basically
unfalsifiable, but I feel like I can point
to the match, the event that really, truly
allowed for conspiratorial thought to take
permanent root in Ape culture, and that’s
January 28th, 2021, mid morning, when Robinhood,
an app-based free brokerage, disabled the
buying of GME and a selection of other meme
stocks.
“Just this morning Robinhood, which is really
seen as the brokerage firm of choice for a
lot of those younger investors said that in
light of recent volatility they’re restricting
transactions for certain securities to position-close-only.
And to be clear that means you can sell names
like GameStop but you can’t buy them.”
That was the day the price hit its all-time-high,
and in Ape mythology that was when they were
on the cusp of, like, total revolution, the
entire system was about to collapse and Apes
were about to be crowned victors over Wall
Street.
Robinhood turning off the buy button was,
from their point of view, an obvious sign
of targeted disruption.
The reality is far more mundane, Robinhood
runs a “disruptive” brokerage with a very
tech-bro “it’s better to ask for forgiveness
than permission” philosophy.
In a nutshell the idea is that they run all
their accounts by default as a kind of limited
margin account that they call “instant deposits.”
You make an account, start to transfer money
to your account, the money hasn’t technically
arrived yet, but Robinhood lets you act like
it has.
You want to buy a stock, Robinhood pays for
it up front, and then just takes your money
when it finally arrives.
This undeniably speeds things up and makes
them appealing to, say, a huge swath of people
who want to get in on this opportunity to
make wife-changing money right now before
it’s too late, but exposes Robinhood to
pretty substantial risk.
If a million new users all sign up on the
same day and all immediately try and buy GameStop
at $300 a share via “instant deposits”,
Robinhood might risk running out of money.
So the mundane reality is that the influx
of new users all making pretty aggressive
plays in a specific basket of stocks stressed
Robinhood’s credit and threatened its collateral
across the board, so they shut down buying
of those specific securities to protect themselves.
In the aftermath the CEO of Robinhood, Vlad
Tenev, denied that the company had, in fact,
basically run out of money which may or may
not have been true, but did confirm the fundamentals
of the threat.
“We’re really in unprecedented times,
and in order to protect the firm and protect
our customers we had to limit buying in these,
in these stocks, and to be absolutely clear”
“It sounds to me as though there was a liquidity
problem.”
Turns out giving everyone a margin account
is a good idea until it isn’t.
But that’s boring.
You know what’s exciting?
They turned off the buy button specifically
to kill the squeeze!
They want you to sell!
That’s an exciting idea!
The funny thing is that it didn’t even kill
the pump!
Sure, Robinhood and a few other app-based
brokers with a similar structure halted buying,
but cash-account brokers were trading just
fine, and GME still rallied pretty hard the
next day, peaking back over $400.
The buy button was maybe a wake up call, a
sign that the music was probably about to
stop and you should cash out while you can,
but what actually killed the momentum was
the weekend.
When the smoke clears there’s a congressional
hearing, there’s an SEC report, there’s
actually a ton of scrutiny in and around the
specific events.
Melvin Capital eats some truly staggering
losses and needs to turn to Citadel Securities
for a bailout to avoid closing entirely.
Regulators are worried about how well they’re
communicating with retail investors, Legislators
are worried social media influencers aren’t
accountable enough.
Everyone knows that a charismatic figure can
fleece individuals and pump and dump a single
stock, but do the events of January suggest
that influencers can pose a systemic risk
to the market itself?
Who, if anyone, was responsible for January?
Thing is that while a bunch of people made
a ton of money off GameStop in January, that
money has to come from somewhere.
In an actual short squeeze the idea is that
the money comes from the short sellers, they’re
the ones buying vastly overpriced GameStop
shares.
So if this was a squeeze that’s simple,
but, you know, was it actually a squeeze?
The SEC report didn’t come out until fall
2021, and while still pretty dry and technical
it does try to engage with the general public
who know a bit about the stock market but
aren’t deep in the weeds.
It’s not flawless, but the conclusions are
sound.
GameStop was a complicated mix of activities
that fed off one another.
There was a short squeeze in the mix, a bunch
of the traffic that saw GameStop starting
to pump at the beginning of the week was driven
by known short-sellers closing their positions,
but the main body of it all, the buyers who
pushed the price up to just shy of $500, that
was overwhelmingly retail buyers.
The people left holding the bag when the music
stopped wasn’t Melvin, wasn’t Citadel,
wasn’t Vanguard, wasn’t BlackRock, it
was Apes, and a lot of those Apes were new
recruits whose first day of stock trading
in their lives was from installing Robinhood
and buying GME that week.
The story of Apes post-squeeze is a bunch
of people standing around a trashed hotel
room at 5am asking when the party is supposed
to start, a bunch of newly minted bagholders
trying to manifest another even larger squeeze
because the only way they could possibly make
money off their $420 GME shares is if it somehow
goes even higher.
Everything becomes fodder for theories about
what really happened and why the price didn’t
just keep going up.
Direct share registration, naked shorts, RegSHO,
any of a dozen other arcane financial concepts,
none of these mattered to Apes at all in January,
but suddenly in February and March these ideas
get injected as explanations for why the squeeze
didn’t keep squeezing.
They will, in the months that follow, re-cast
January as “the sneeze,” both to suggest
that not only was it not the main event, it
was a tiny blip compared to the inevitable
true squeeze, the mother of all short squeezes:
MOASS.
“I’d like to welcome you all to the Bellagio
resort and casino in scenic Las Vegas Nevada.
We’re just enjoying some early tendies.
There’s some news on the wind that big things
are coming, big things are coming as early
as this weekend, and Bobby’s pumping.
I don’t think anything could really go wrong.
I think there’s a lot of people who want
to make it look like things are going wrong.
I hold for the infinity pool.
I just I buy I hold I DRS.
MOASS is a tricky thing to talk about.
First of all it is a pure financial conspiracy
theory.
We’re used to conspiracy theories that intersect
with finance, most get around to the subject
of international bankers eventually, but those
theories tend to start in sociology, science,
or politics and then expand to cover finance
as they grow.
MOASS starts in finance with the operations
of the stock market, so just from the word
go the subject is already inundated with unfamiliar
terminology, organizations, and acronyms.
This is all compounded by the fact that the
exact composition of the belief is mercurial.
MOASS is a vessel conspiracy containing many
other modular theories.
These theories are disparate, obtuse, self-referential,
and often contradictory if not outright paradoxical.
It is, as a whole, a theory that resists critical
thought at every turn.
If you try to formulate an all-encompassing
version of it you will find only frustration.
The jar, MOASS itself, is the belief that
for some reason or another GameStop or some
other meme stock company is going to skyrocket
in value and make everyone who times it right
unfathomably rich in the blink of an eye.
Everything inside the jar is the how and why.
Taken as a whole MOASS is many things: it’s
an apocalyptic event, it’s an infinite money
glitch, it’s revenge against Wall Street,
it’s salvation for those who gambled away
their savings, but above all MOASS is a story,
and that story goes a little something like
this.
”What you need to know before the MOASS,
during the MOASS, and after the MOASS!
So let’s start by chugging this bitch and
then get going.
We know we own the float.
So if they have to cover, that means that
they have to pay the price that we say.
Now if we hold to ten million, that’s what
they have to pay.
So if it goes to a hundred thousand, if it
goes to two hundred fifty thousand, if goes
to one thousand, if it goes to five hundred,
that ain’t the squeeze, baby, that ain’t
the squeeze.
What’s the squeeze is once it’s past ten
million.
Then we’re squeezing!
“Some point in the near future, in my opinion,
we have the MOASS actually happening where
we survived all the FUD, we survived the short
attacks, and then the MOASS happens, baby.
And then we pass our floor of 10 million or
20 million and we get up to a ceiling of,
let's say, $420 million a share.
And if you're raising your eyebrows, saying,
"That's not possible.
The whole economy will be ruined."
Shut up!
You don't know what you're talking about.
Do your research.!
“500 million per share is not a meme, I
am dead serious.”
Major financial firms, most notably hedge
funds such as Ken Griffin’s Citadel, owe
their profits to massive volumes of fraudulent
naked shorts sales, flooding the market with
phantom shares that suppress the price of
companies like GameStop, AMC Theatres, and
Bed Bath & Beyond.
This scheme has generated unfathomable amounts
of debt that Hedgies could never afford to
pay back, hundreds of billions of shares owed
that don’t actually exist and thus cannot
be returned adding up to trillions of dollars
of debt, so their only hope is if the victim
company goes out of business entirely allowing
the Hedgies to walk away with tax-free gains.
The risk is so extreme that it justifies every
employee at hundreds of financial institutions,
the media, the government, and the courts
all cooperating to keep the conspiracy under
wraps.
But if that scheme were to be revealed, if
Citadel were forced to buy back those hundreds
of billions of shares, it would trigger a
short squeeze that would send GameStop’s
share value into phone number prices and create
a cascade that could topple the entire global
economy.
Because there are so many fake shares Apes
have already bought more shares than are supposed
to exist, they own the float, and have thus
positioned themselves to be the beneficiaries
of that apocalyptic unravelling as long as
they can remain united and refuse to sell
their shares.
If no one sells then the supply is zero and
the price is infinite.
Then Apes can dictate not only the price,
but they can make demands.
If Ken Griffin isn’t sent to prison for
his crimes the deal is off: no cell, no sell.
As the evidence of the fraud ripples through
the economy, as the entire stock market is
revealed to be a sham, faith in institutions
will falter, and in an existential crisis
the government will be forced to make Apes
whole or else face their own extinction, precipitating
the greatest transfer of wealth in human history.
And then, when the flames of MOASS have cleansed
the earth, it will usher in a golden age of
humanity stewarded by the true diamond-handed
Apes who did not flinch in the face of paltry
1000% gains, did not become paper-handed bitches
over mere wife-changing money, but hodled,
hodled in the face of Fear, hodled in the
face of Uncertainty, hodled in the face of
Doubt.
“So what happens in theory when they can’t
get enough shares (even with the price in
the millions)?
“The price goes to the tens of millions.
Then hundreds of millions.
Billions if it has to.
Price is just supply and demand.”
“All I have to do is buy one stock
Buy one stock
GameStop
Feel good about it, and watch the world crumble”
A thing that’s kinda beautiful about a short
squeeze is that you don’t really need to
do anything, you just need to be in the right
place at the right time, and a thing that
marbles the whole subject of memestocks is
a sublime laziness.
This is a characteristic of all get rich quick
schemes, but it’s important to keep in mind
as Apes build this complex theory, as they
fill the jar, and as they become increasingly
irate when MOASS fails to materialize, that
all they’ve done, all they’ve actually
done, is press a “buy” button.
As Marantz said, all he has to do is buy one
stock, feel good about it, and watch the world
crumble.
It’s just Reddit’s version of the Rapture.
Now, in these sample narratives of MOASS we’ve
already made a mistake, which is trying to
pin down the specifics in some coherent way.
A critical element of talking about MOASS
is that the component beliefs are modular
- the jar, the part where Apes get rich, is
the only constant.
Any specific belief can be readily discarded
or swapped without posing a risk to the integrity
of the structure as a whole.
For example many MOASS theories cite the idea
that Citadel wouldn’t need to pay taxes
on any gains from short positions if the victim
company goes completely out of business.
This makes narrative sense but just isn’t
true.
Like, there’s not much else that needs to
be done to debunk that, it’s just false.
But removing it from the jar doesn’t really
do anything, and it also doesn’t matter
if you debunk it because Apes will just put
it back in anyway.
As a result the memestock belief system has
become an absolute rat’s nest of false threads,
misinformation, willful ignorance, and reheated
conspiracy theories from the nineties, all
of which has been constantly adjusted to compensate
for the fact that reality keeps disproving
it.
It’s a mess.
So how does a philosophy like MOASS develop?
That is actually a shockingly long explanation.
A major problem here, as I said, is that a
lot of this is contradictory and circular,
a pile of half-baked theories cooked up piecemeal
by Apes with no understanding of the underlying
subject working specifically to find a thing
that would need to be true in order to maintain
the conspiracy cascade.
The only reason they believe there are hundreds
of billions of fake GameStop shares in circulation
is because that’s the thing that needs to
be true in order to explain why they believe
shorts never closed in 2021, and they believe
shorts never closed in 2021 because it’s
the thing that needs to be true in order for
the squeeze to still be on the table and the
squeeze needs to still be on the table because
otherwise what are you doing?
Why are you here?
But also a lot of these specific ideas, they
got them from somewhere, and investigating
that somewhere just opens up a rabbit hole
where you spend months delving into other
pre-existing conspiracy theories that have
tried to graft themselves onto the memestock
movement.
February 2021, following the price of GameStop
crashing back to earth many Apes who bought
in late or held through it were extremely
salty and needed something or someone to blame
that wasn’t just, you know, making a poor
financial decision based on Reddit hype posts.
The fiasco with Robinhood turning off the
buy button initially floated to the top because
there are, even in our reality, some questions
about how that was handled and Robinhood’s
business model that are very much worth asking.
Apes of course care about none of that.
All the talk about market reform is just smoke,
they’re here to crash the system and get
rich.
So what they see in the Robinhood fiasco is
targeted disruption.
Someone pulled strings to turn off the buy
button and stop the squeeze, which means someone’s
scared, the whole thing must still be primed
to pop off again.
Apes declare that shorts never closed, the
squeeze never ended, it’s just in a bit
of a gully and it’s going to shoot back
up any day now if they can get the pressure
back up.
The second thing they latch onto is that Citadel
bailed out Melvin.
Now, in reality this wasn’t a philanthropic
gesture, it was a lot closer to a protection
racket shakedown because Wall Street are all
greedy assholes, and Melvin folded under the
pressure in 2022 anyway, but it gives Apes
a villain, Ken Griffin.
Apes assert that he must have personally called
Vlad Tenev at Robinhood and told him to turn
off the buy button in order to protect Citadel
and then lied to congress when he told them
under oath that he didn’t do that!
This seed narrative proves just sticky enough
to keep people emotionally invested, and from
there Apes crowdsource the explanations, tacking
on more and more oblique ideas lifted out
of the complexity and obfuscation of capital
markets in order to explain why this thing
is still primed to pop.
Part of what makes MOASS persuasive, why people
buy in, is that very complexity and obfuscation.
People come into the subject with well-founded
skepticism of Wall Street.
The narrative that Wall Street is corrupt,
reckless, and greedy is persuasive in no small
part because it isn’t wrong.
So memestock proselytes present themselves
as the ones who are cutting through the darkness,
exposing the deliberately obfuscated truth
of how the market really works, democratising
the ivory tower of finance.
Now, despite its reputation, finance, as a
subject, is in fact something that you, a
layperson, can learn, it is a lot less impenetrable
than it seems.
Wall Street is awash with B-minus students
who wrapped their heads around it, you can
too.
But we need to be careful here because just
because the subject is more accessible than
you might think, that doesn’t mean it’s
devoid of actual honest to god complexity
and nuance.
Understanding how to evaluate a mutual fund
or trying your hand at making money day trading
is not that complex.
Understanding loopholes in securities regulation
is.
So in the theory of MOASS we have a collision
of the rhetoric of the democratisation of
finance with the actual impenetrable stuff
that even the majority of the people on Wall
Street don’t bother to understand.
And the systems of the economy are so intertwined
and obtuse that it’s possible to sculpt
almost any story one can imagine through the
framing.
It is a perfect recipe for someone to very
confidently present you with extremely wrong
information that you have no reference point
to evaluate from.
And if it wasn’t already clear, MOASS is
almost totally devoid of any actual economics.
Like think about it.
Their theory is that Wall Street is so reckless
and greedy that they have created this powder
keg that will allow Apes to make unfathomable
amounts of money off of MOASS.
But despite this powder keg sitting in the
open where Redditors could stumble into it,
no one on Wall Street is greedy or reckless
enough to pursue it despite having substantially
greater resources at their disposal to do
so.
And the conspiracy Apes claim to be unravelling
is both incredibly vast and yet leaves no
material evidence, no memos, no emails, no
insiders, just ghosts in the trading data.
But also Apes will readily discard the data
if it tells the wrong story, they’ll just
claim the price is fake, the stock is manipulated,
bad news is deliberate misinformation, you
can only trust the numbers when the line goes
up.
Since you can’t trust news, data, or even
company filings the only thing to do is buy
at any price and hold for MOASS.
The Mother of All Short Squeezes is a lot
of things, but it’s not a trading strategy.
But please, if you think this is at all unfair
to the Ape thesis feel free to ‘do your
own research.’
Pursue the Superstonk Flipbook page, with
over 200 reddit posts dressed up to look like
books.
Enjoy such critically acclaimed works as the
Billionaire Boys Club by Bad-Ass-Trader, Trust,
Death and Divorce - The Parts of Ken Griffin’s
Life that Haven’t Been Published, and Infinity
War, The Final Exit DD Compilation… by gherkinit.
Regardless of the lack of actual finance underpinning
it, we do need to establish some basic literacy
in order to explain why it all falls apart
and to contextualise what’s so fascinating
about the community that has grown up around
it.
So real quick, what is a stock, anyway?
Stocks, or shares, aren’t a real thing,
they’re an intangible legal claim to some
portion of a company or venture.
They exist entirely in the realm of the social
contract and in some form or another are as
old as civilization.
Somewhere in ancient history a couple people
were like, “hey, let’s pool our resources,
dig a mine, and then split the proceeds, and
in that moment the share was born.”
Then the second dude was like “hey, I don’t
really want to run a mine anymore, I’m trading
my share of the mine for a goat farm” and
now you have invented an equity market.
Today’s equity markets are a vastly more
complex version of that, and the whole thing
is in a constant state of flux, but the core
concept is still there: a stock is an intangible
bundle of legal rights that you can sell.
But you’re probably thinking to yourself
“what about stock certificates?”
Hundreds of years ago if you wanted to sell
your share in a mine you’d need to go to
the company offices where they keep the ledger
of all the people that own a share in the
mine, tell them “I’m selling my share
to this guy here, take me off the list and
put his name instead.”
Upsides: the company knows exactly who owns
what portion of the company.
Downsides: huge pain in the ass.
To address the fact that this was a pain in
the ass, some companies decided to embody
the intangible rights into a tangible object,
a certificate, a piece of paper imbued with
legal magic that says possession of the paper
is identical to possession of the legal rights,
so that people who wanted to sell their share,
or even just a portion of their share, could
do so by handing over the certificates.
But that’s not a perfect system, you’ve
probably already thought of some flaws, and
once the telephone was invented it became
its own pain in the ass.
What do you mean I need to actually move a
box full of magic paper from Brooklyn to Manhattan?
What a waste of time.
Glossing over one hundred years of securities
regulations following the invention of the
telephone and then the computer, the model
that we currently use is what’s called securities
entitlements and beneficial ownership.
When you buy shares via Robinhood your shares
are kept in a central depository, the Depository
Trust and Clearing Corporation, or DTCC, with
Robinhood’s name on them, and then Robinhood
keeps their own list of which of their clients
owns what, forming a chain of beneficial ownership.
Now, the DTCC, the New York Stock Exchange,
NASDAQ, these are not government entities,
they’re private corporations that are overseen
by the Securities and Exchange Commission,
the SEC, which is part of the government.
They are designed as self-regulating organizations.
That’s a phrase that throws up some red
flags, but it is a term with a specific meaning.
Designating an organisation as self-regulating
gives them some slack to do their neoliberal
profit motive routine, subject to the approval
and oversight of the regulator.
If they want a new toy, they can have it,
but we aren’t paying for it.
None of this means that self-regulating orgs
or the SEC get automatic or unwavering faith,
but it means you can’t just claim self-regulated
is synonymous with unregulated to explain
why this vast conspiracy has invisibly rampaged
completely unchecked.
The actual stock market and its mechanics
suck in the worst possible way: the usual
way.
They carry literal centuries of bad habits,
cut-corners, and self-interest.
We didn’t end up with high-security bank
vaults full of jumbo-sized magic paper because
it was the best system.
The central depository model of clearing and
settlement has a lot of genuine flaws, the
kind of stuff that fuels beef between experts
in the Uniform Commercial Code.
“Perhaps Professor Coogan's criticism of
the amendments may really be due to the fact
that they transfer the provisions on creation
and perfection of security interests in uncertificated
securities from article 9 to article 8.
Practitioners under article 9 have been known
to harbor a jealous regard for that area of
practice which has traditionally been their
own.”
Savage.
All this is to say that criticisms of this
system are very easy to find, but it’s also
very easy to misunderstand what you’re looking
at.
The primary lens that Apes view this complex
market through is, of course, the short sale.
Because it is the one thing they know about
the stock market it is the only thing that
matters.
It is made compelling by the fact that short
selling is controversial well outside Ape
circles and has been for a very long time.
It’s been called “blatant thuggery”
by US Congressman Dennis Hastert.
The Malaysian Finance Ministry wanted to cane
short sellers, but “light, similar to the
punishment carried out on juveniles.”
During World War One, the New York Stock Exchange
imposed short selling regulations in part
out of fear that German spies would utilise
short sales to harm the economy.
But for Apes, who were introduced to the concept
by The Big Short, it’s a personal insult.
Short everything that guy has touched.
I want half a billion more in swaps.
Short sales have the unique quirk of putting
downward pressure on the stock price by increasing
supply, and in a sense short sales do contain
a self-fulling component.
Now, there’s a Nobel Prize in Economics
waiting for you if you can quantify that self-fulling
element, but for Apes the theory alone is
enough to overwhelm all other considerations.
For them it goes to the furthest possible
extreme: short sales can kill a profitable
company stone dead.
When taken in combination, short selling becomes
a literal conspiracy, the act itself becomes
financial terrorism.
“Quite literally, whatever Retail buys,
they short.
If an institution’s holding it, it’s not
going to get shorted.
Why do you think Amazon became the most overpowered
merchant there is?
I work for the company - I can tell you.
It’s because Retail wasn’t holding it.
So then their ticker can go up because institutions
are holding it!”
One of the truly revolutionary moments in
the development of MOASS as a theory came
when Apes dredged up a conspiracy theory favoured
by Dot Com companies who were convinced that
they were being targeted for destruction by
naked short sellers.
Naked short sales are kinda tricky to talk
about because the well of discussion is so
poisoned by these conspiracy theorists.
A naked short sale is when you generate a
short sale without actually borrowing a share
first.
It is a real thing, it is illegal and has
been for a while, people have gone to jail
for doing it, it was a historical problem,
but not for the reasons Apes and their ilk
claim.
The problem is compounded by the fact that
a number of legitimate market mechanics resemble
naked short selling if you squint.
So there’s the real thing off over in the
corner that people go to jail for doing because,
like, there’s evidence of their crimes,
and then there’s a fantasy version espoused
by cranks where shadowy figures destroy companies
for profit without leaving any evidence.
The infuriating thing is that it really kinda
doesn’t even matter because most Apes don’t
bother to distinguish between regular short
sales and naked short sales.
Apes start from “short sellers are the bad
guys,” and rail against anything that enables
short selling, like stock lending which is
obviously important to short selling because
you can’t borrow a share unless someone’s
lending them.
Apes only rope in a crank version of naked
shorts when they eventually need to explain
why there’s no evidence of the short position
that would need to exist in order for the
short squeeze to still be on the table.
So let’s walk through it.
In mid-March of 2021, a Reddit post on r/WallStreetBets
received 22 thousand upvotes, arguing that
the squeeze hadn’t truly ended.
“Anybody with a brain knows that GME is
not fundamentally worth its current price
of this post, at $215/share”
“The main talking point across all of the
investing subreddits and news outlets, was
the fact that GME’s short percentage reached
a height of 140%
But what does a 140% float mean?
Did the hedge funds short/borrow more shares
than even existed?
Well yes, that’s called naked shorting but
it’s more complicated than that.”
By the standards of present day theories,
this is rather quaint.
The redditor mistakenly believed that the
short sellers had survived the squeeze by
purchasing shares created by market makers,
whose job is to trade to customers regardless
of whether they own the asset at the time
- mandating something resembling naked short
selling at times.
To the author, the excessive short interest
was clear evidence of a naked short position
of at least 40% of the entire share count.
That isn’t sound, in fact it misunderstands
basic mechanics of how a short sale even works.
In this instance, we’ve exceeded 100% short
interest because buyers are blind to the intent
of the seller.
No new shares have been created.
A single share can be bought, lent, and sold
short as many times in a row as there are
parties willing to engage in the trade.
Mere days later, an article would be discovered
from the blog OilPrice.com - your number 1
source for your oil and energy news.
The article reframed the GameStop incident
not as a short squeeze, nor as a retail frenzy,
but as a skirmish between retail investors
and manipulative, illegal naked short selling.
GameStop was the victim of a malicious short
attack - the exact same thing that is happening
to the Canadian mining sector.
This article would validate the Ape’s anxieties:
The buy-button wasn’t some isolated incident
predicated on boring details about credit
and margin, this was systemic.
Wall Street has been doing stuff like this
to companies since the Dot Com bubble.
The squeeze needed to be killed because Apes
were on to something.
As a conspiracy theory these narratives of
naked short attacks endure because they’re
convenient, impossible to disprove, but there’s
also juuust enough truth to it that can’t
be ‘debunked’ like your typical conspiracy
theory.
To this end Apes become very concerned about
ideas of "fake ownership" and "fake shares,"
two separate ideas with their own implications.
You need to have real ownership of real shares.
As demonstrated earlier the subject of what
owning a stock even is is kinda a weird mess
built on centuries of jank, which makes it
really easy for Apes to simply describe it
as fake ownership.
Beneficial ownership via a broker is just
an IOU, and they’re probably lending your
shares out to short sellers, which means
The term "fake share" refers to numerous different
ideas and they can be used interchangeably.
The specifics are irrelevant.
It could be the dilutive effects of naked
shorts, mislabelled orders, rehypothecation,
the Obligation Warehouse, the ghost of the
Stock Borrow Program, or persistent failures
to deliver - doesn’t matter, they’ve churned
through a dozen different theories for where
fake shares might be coming from and might
be hiding.
For Apes, trading is like a video game, and
they’re all collectively hammering away
to find an exploit to steal Ken Griffin’s
phat loot.
The actual end boss that Apes are at war with
is reality.
GameStop at this point in March is still massively
over-valued and the participants in the January
2021 frenzy are either cashing out some sweet
gains or cutting their losses.
The Apes who are in really deep are convinced
that it’s going to shoot back up any day
now, but it doesn’t.
It’s volatile, it swings a lot on any given
day, but the ultimate trend is down, and the
explanation they come up with is that clearly
this is because of short attacks.
Normally short attacks are specific, identifiable
transactions made with the intent of spooking
investors and triggering a wider sell-off.
To Apes, they are persistent, invisible, and
need to be occurring in such high quantities
as to defy all reason.
Therefore, they must be occurring via naked
shorts, and the attackers are avoiding closing
the position… somehow.
So logically if the only reason the price
is going down is because of these short attacks
that must mean that GameStop is accruing more
and more short interest with each one.
The actual short Interest in GameStop peaked
at 140%, which is an astoundingly reckless
situation and is the reason Melvin ate dirt,
but once the Ape’s ran the numbers themselves,
they valued the “true” short interest
at over 9000%, and that number is pretty old
at this point.
Within a year, history would be rewritten
and it would be claimed that the catalyst
for the GME squeeze wasn’t FOMO or memes,
it was the discovery of fake shares.
So the idea is that there are a handful of
“real” shares lost in the slurry of fake
shares.
Apes need to get their hands on these “real”
shares, and how they go about this is very
funny.
As an example, there is a theory that stock
options require the broker to deliver a ‘real’
share - so some Apes try to exercise out-of-the-money
options.
They want to buy shares for more than their
current market value, deliberately losing
money.
That kind of behaviour is indicative of an
investor who has either made a mistake, is
trying to manipulate the stock price, or is
just incredibly stupid - possibly all three.
So intermediaries won’t let you do it.
When their request is refused, Apes go nuclear
at the customer support reps, making sovereign
citizen-esque arguments as to why it’s criminal
for them to infringe on the investor’s God-given
right to lose money on purpose.
But above all else, “true ownership” demands
the use of the Direct Registration System.
DRS allows the investors ownership of a security
to be recorded in their own name on the books
of the issuing company’s Transfer Agent.
It exists to make this circuitous mess more
palatable by giving investors an alternative,
and it has a few legitimate functions.
There’s nothing ‘wrong’ with DRS as
a concept, but Apes, again, distort it to
the point of being barely recognisable.
Apes gravitate towards it initially as a catalyst
for MOASS, a way that they can force the hypothetical
9000% short interest to close, and a belief
that there’s so many fake shares in circulation
that direct registration is the only way they’ll
be able to prove they have real shares during
MOASS, but it very quickly evolves into a
loyalty ritual.
“And you know it’s always tomorrow until
it’s today so I guess I’m just hodlin’
until I get paid and I DRS.
DRS.
DRS.
DRS.
DRS.”
The central depository model was built to
specifically enable transactions to occur
quickly, it was built to be brutally efficient
above all else.
DRS, by design, reintroduces inefficiency
in transferring ownership.
It makes selling your shares more expensive,
and it’s slow: many transfer agents require
you to send important requests by mail.
Like, with an envelope.
That makes it a kind of symbolic castration.
You’re proving your conviction to the cause
by hindering your ability to sell.
It’s community policy to keep your entire
stake in DRS - if you keep some portion of
it with your broker it means you’re enabling
them to lend your shares to short sellers
and commit financial terrorism, and the only
reason you would keep the shares with your
broker is if you were planning to sell.
You aren’t thinking of selling right?
Having opted into DRS, the shareholder receives
mail from the transfer agent as evidence of
their ownership.
These letters are regularly paraded on the
subreddits, posed alongside other sacred objects
demonstrating loyalty to the company.
God, a lot of these have firearms.
Somewhere within this process, the Ape ascends
to the status of a “bona fide shareholder.”
They hold real shares, entirely locked out
of the reach of Wall Street.
So I want you to visualize this.
You’re hooked on watching the price of GameStop
every day.
Whenever the price goes down, which it does
often, it’s because Ken Griffin, who orchestrated
to kill the squeeze, is illegally naked shorting
GME in order to suppress the price, so every
week GME continues to accumulate more and
more short interest.
That means that every day the theoretical
payout of MOASS gets larger and larger.
In fact the plausibility of Citadel ever willingly
closing, ever slowly winding down their position,
grows more and more impossible.
MOASS becomes inevitable.
Once the conspiracy is unveiled, something
like 99% of GameStop’s shares will be revealed
to be fake at the same time it’s revealed
that Citadel needs to buy back ninety-times
GameStop’s value worth of GME.
The short sellers now need to buy back “real”
shares, which are exclusively held by Apes.
This alone would be absurd, but it gets worse.
Under the “infinity pool” theory, Apes
will simply refuse to sell their shares.
The supply will literally be zero, so the
ticker might as well read infinity.
It’s just supply and demand.
The plan is to never let the short sellers
cover their position, and hold them hostage
in a basement and drip feed them one share
at a time, with each Ape making wife-changing
money with each sale.
The purported values are childish and totally
arbitrary - ranging from 10 to 500 million
dollars per share as we’ve seen.
The limiter on this is naturally, you know,
reality.
Citadel can't pay infinity dollars per share
nor can they pay 10 million a share.
But don't worry: Apes have already mapped
out how the dominos will fall.
““What if the unthinkable happens and
more than 60% decide to hold GME to at least
7 figures?
The DTCC can only cover 67 trillion.
What happens then?”
“Then it goes to the Fed, Rog.
The Fed has to turn on the printer.
“
Citadel will be vaporised the instant the
news breaks, and their obligations will flow
to the central depository itself.
A central depository has never defaulted before,
we don’t know for certain what will happen.
But Apes have done their research and all
agree that, in the event that the DTCC goes
bust, the first priority for compensation
will be bona fide shareholders, to the detriment
of all others.
Like that 67 trillion figure suggests that
the DTCC will liquidate your dad’s investment
portfolio to buy shares in GameStop.
Once the depository defaults we get something
resembling global financial collapse - but
the US government still has an obligation
to compensate the redditors for their losses.
In the pure version of MOASS, Apes take up
the mantle of God Kings of a whole new economy.
Their new market would be blockchain-based,
trading stock as NFTs, forcing short sellers
to track down and return specific identifiable
shares because Apes have a collective fantasy
about being personally contacted by short
sellers begging them to sell.
‘MOASS realists’ argue instead that the
US government, faced with this existential
crisis, will simply cut a deal with the Apes.
And whether Apes ought to squeeze the White
House is a point of contention within the
movement.
So, to sum up.
MOASS is an infinite money glitch, built on
the idea that Wall Street as a whole conspires
to smother dying companies through naked short
sales.
They do this through exploiting flaws in securities
ownership and stock lending, to produce “fake
shares”.
GameStop avoided its execution because redditors
intervened via a coincidence of destiny.
And that positions GameStop as a catalyst
to unravel the greatest fraud in history - with
a side-effect being that the US government
will hand the keys to Fort Knox to a bunch
of redditors… as a down payment for their
shares in video game retailer GameStop.
So, that’s the play.
All the Apes need to do now is find evidence
of some fake shares…
How hard can that be?
Yeah, I’m picking up more GameStop, I’m
picking up more Bed Bath & Beyond.
I’m super excited for Bed Bath & Beyond,
I’m seeing a lot of bullish sentiment online,
a lot of good peer reviewed theories, some
DD.
You know, Cohen’s still in this play, Icahn’s
in this play, we’re going to see some collaboration
between those two.
Icahn through Newell brands buys up Bed Bath
& Beyond.
Spins off Buybuybaby to Cohen, he merges that
with Teddy, and that forms the foundation
of GMErica, which lights the fuse on the rocket
for GameStop.
So, how do you prove that fake shares exist?
The company will tell you how many shares
they have issued, they will call it the total
outstanding share count.
For example, here’s GameStop’s 10Q from
June 2021 reporting 71 million, 815 thousand,
131 outstanding shares.
But that is the number that is supposed to
exist.
If you think fake shares are being introduced
into the system, that number is only useful
to check your work.
You have to do a share count.
True, rigorous investigations of share counts
occur so rarely that there isn’t really
a good comparison to draw from.
At minimum, it’s a hugely disruptive process
that involves cooperation from basically every
branch of the stock market.
It’s something GameStop lacks the authority
to do themselves, and the mere mention of
it might foster uh, ‘bearish sentiment’
- you know, suggesting to investors that their
shares may be compromised - with no basis
for that belief.
So it shouldn’t be surprising that, to be
the best of our knowledge, GameStop hasn’t
acknowledged any part of the MOASS conspiracy…
directly, wink wink nudge nudge.
This means the Apes are on their own to expose
the conspiracy from the outside.
The method Apes first latch onto is via shareholder
votes.
We’ve already seen the issues that can arise
from counting shares directly from the market.
Totally normal business transactions can resemble
illusionary shares, and it’s not possible
to work backward to solve for the initial
share count - especially when the number you’re
after contains an unknown amount of fake shares.
When a shareholder loans their share for a
short sale, they are owed a share, they still
consider themselves a shareholder, but they
lose access to their voting rights - otherwise
you’d have one share providing two separate
votes, if not more.
That gives you a hint of where this is headed.
One share translates to one vote.
So if every shareholder is involved in a vote,
the vote count should total precisely 100%
of the outstanding share count.
If the number exceeds 100%, that has to be
the product of naked shorts, phantom shares,
or dodgy voting.
Over-voting is a real thing in Corporate governance,
and it's a whole complex topic that neither
of us want to endure.
Thankfully the Ape theory is extremely simple.
They aren’t trying to reveal a moderate
discrepancy in the share count - they believe
there are dozens of times more shares in circulation
than intended, and that Apes have already
bought far, far, far more than the 72 million
“real” shares.
As the phrase goes “Apes already own the
float”.
“We know we own the float!”
Let’s set the scene here a little.
It’s April/May 2021, MOASS as a theory is
still evolving rapidly, and GameStop has a
corporate vote coming up on June 9th.
Apes spend weeks whipping up support for the
vote, promoting it all over Reddit, explaining
how to submit your vote to your broker, and
proclaiming it as an opportunity to really,
truly, finally stick it to Wall Street, expose
the criminal naked short attacks on GameStop,
and trigger another squeeze.
This was such a big deal that numerous Apes
travelled to Texas to attend the shareholder
meeting in person, and thousands of Apes tuned
in to the influencer live streams that treated
this banal procedural vote with the gravitas
of a major political election, waiting, in
suspense, for the results.
[Rensole] Present– more than majority of
all shares.
Confirmed, more than majority
[Atobitt] So there were more shares!
[Elle] Yes!
They confirmed there are more shares than...
[Atobitt] That's 100%
[Elle] no no no, they confirmed there are
more VOTES than shares
[Atobitt] That's what I'm saying, that's more
than 100%.
If that's a direct quote, if you have that
and that's sourced that's it
Because if we're saying "more than majority",
majority's just 50%
[Elle] No no no, it wasn't majority, they
said "more votes than outstanding
shares"
[Atobitt] Oh ---- that's huge!
I'm waiting for that 8-K to come out and say
We had hundred percent...
hundreds of percent more than what
we expected
I'm literally expecting hundreds of percentage
more than...
[Rensole] But then in that aspect ‘more
than a majority’ if it outsatands the float,
it’s still more than a majority, that’s
legalese.
[Atobitt] But it was more than a majority
last year, too.
[Rensole] Yeah.
So, it didn’t work, GameStop didn’t announce
that nine times as many votes were cast as
should have even been possible, they just
kinda nodded at the fact that voter turnout
was high.
This is actually how DRS entered this story
in the first place!
Dr. Susane Trimbath, or Queen Kong as the
Apes nicknamed her, has been promoting DRS
to retail investors for thirty some odd years,
and the utility here is the same as the vote:
since the number of shares that Apes presume
exist is some cartoonish multiple of the actual
number it should be trivial to demonstrate,
and unlike the vote this would cut brokers
out of the picture entirely.
Thus began an even more intense campaign to
DRS GME and get GameStop to begin reporting
the number of direct registered shares.
This, this was a lock.
Apes own the float after all, the crime is
so vast that even mediocre participation will
expose some truly unreasonable numbers, 80
million, 90 million, 300 million directly
registered shares in a company that only has
72 million shares to begin with, and then…
then comes the reckoning.
Yeah, that one didn’t pan out, either.
Okay, so the headband, maybe I should explain
this.
It’s an homage.
Really everything that I do is an homage to
my hero DFV, or Deep Fucking Value.
And at this point we need to talk about a
man named Keith Gill, an instrumental figure
in all of this who those familiar with the
story probably feel has been conspicuously
absent up to this point.
This is Keith Gill aka DFV aka Roaring Kitty.
He is simultaneously extremely important to
the Ape movement and utterly inconsequential
to our story, and for that reason it is worth
profiling him in order to illustrate that
contradiction.
To some he basically invented meme stocks,
while to others he is merely the mouthpiece
through which MOASS made itself known to the
world.
The reality, in contrast, is almost unrecognisable.
In our reality he is a registered securities
broker who was working by day at the insurance
broker MassMutual.
In his spare time he streams investment tutorials
on YouTube under the alias Roaring Kitty and
posts on Reddit under the handle DeepFuckingValue.
Next slide.
It is 2019 and Keith’s hope is to become
something of an investment influencer based
on his “roaring kitty” investment philosophy
which, as the name suggests, is a small-but-aggressive
strategy.
Next slide.
As the working subject for this Keith has
a theory, inspired by a blog post written
by Dr. Michael Burry, that GameStop is under-valued.
The idea is pretty straightforward and honestly
rather modest: GameStop has been trending
downwards for several years, but has historically
always seen a significant bump in value at
the start of a new console generation, and
the ninth gen consoles are on the horizon.
Next slide.
While consumer habits are shifting away from
malls in general and aggressively to digital
distribution for games in specific, and while
GameStop’s relationship with manufacturers
and developers is no longer what it once was,
Gill’s opinion is the market is overly pessimistic
about how much life is left in physical media.
Long term, his view is that GameStop still
has multiple opportunities to pivot the business
to something more forward-looking, especially
if they can expect a significant spike in
revenue in the near future.
This is an argument that GameStop is trading
at $4 to $8, he feels it should be trading
at $8 to $10, and has the capability of going
reasonably higher as the ninth gen consoles
carry the 2020 holiday season.
That's what I think I think about game stop.
I think it is it is at least a double I think
it is probably a triple but it legit could
be a 45 bagger It could be looking out.
I don't know looking out six to 18 months
or so
Next slide.
Of course he couldn’t have seen the coronavirus
pandemic coming, and how that would both decimate
brick and mortar retail, with malls getting
hit particularly hard, and stress supply lines
for both the retailers and their vendors.
Next slide.
Gill chips away at this thesis for over a
year, streaming about it regularly, posting
stream highlights as standalone videos, and
defending and refining the thesis in discussions
with other traders on Reddit, even as the
situation looks ever more dire for GameStop
as the ninth gen console launch is set to
be hammered by problems all the way up and
down the chain from raw materials to shipping
stoppages.
Next slide.
However as the meme stock craze takes root,
and in particular identifies GameStop’s
unusually high short interest as a possible
squeeze play, Keith is already pretty deep
in on GameStop and willing to ride it out,
for which he is rewarded pretty handsomely.
Here is Keith on Christmas Day, 2020 discussing
GameStop breaking his original optimistic
price target of $20.
Hey, what's up everybody?
Cheers!
Happy Friday, happy holidays.
I hope everyone's having a great week.
Surprise!(...)
Game stops up about 5x from when I uploaded
those videos over the summer, so that's great
to see.
When you have a thesis and by and large it
unfolds as you hope that it could.(...)
That's nice, so it shouldn't be taken for
granted.
It doesn't always happen, so that's great.
And yeah, it's just to clear up some potential
misconceptions.
This was a true YOLO for me.
When I was building this position last year,
we had nowhere close to a million dollars.
I certainly do not drive a Lambo.
We rent this house that you see, so it's been
a wild ride for us as a family.(...)
And it has been just so much fun to experience
that with you over the past couple of months.
I hope you had some fun as well, and maybe
if you even picked up on some educational
elements along the way, all the better.
But it has brought me tremendous joy to just
share in this what has turned out to be a
bit of a case study, as some of us feel, and
it has brought me tremendous joy.
And if you have had a good time as well, that
makes me feel great.
Next slide.
When all was said and done at the end of January
Keith quit his job and took home an estimated
$25 million, for which Maxine Waters hauled
his ass in front of congress to answer some
questions about what the hell happened and
if, you know, he maybe did a bit of a pump
and dump.
Next slide.
Keith, accurately in my opinion, insisted
that while he was a higher profile member
of the wave he was ultimately just another
member of a decentralised movement and, demonstrably,
had been personally advocating GameStop as
a potentially profitable move for well over
a year.
“I also want to say that I support retail
investors’ right to invest in what they
want when they want.
I support the right of individuals to send
a message based on how they invest.
As for me, I like the stock.
I’m as bullish as I’ve ever been on a
potential turnaround for GameStop, and I remain
invested in the company.
Thank you.
Cheers everyone.
Next slide.
Apes read literally all of this as coded messaging.
“I like the stock” became a shibboleth
to signal commitment to the cause of MOASS.
Next slide.
Gill read the room and wisely peaced out.
While he continued to participate in the scene
at an arm’s length, tweeting vague nonsense
mostly in the form of movie clips, the length
of that arm grew longer and longer as Apes
grew increasingly disconnected from reality.
Realizing that he was being elected to the
role of cult leader, that anything he said,
any company he commented on, would be baked
and decoded as directions for the Apes to
take action on, and that such a position posed
a substantial threat to both his newfound
wealth and his personal safety should he fall
afoul of either the SEC or the Apes themselves,
in late June of 2021 he unplugged his social
media entirely and disappeared from the public
eye.
Next slide.
Gill has been retroactively recruited into
every twist and turn in the evolving Ape lore.
Everything that Apes convinced themselves
about naked shorts, married puts, the importance
of failures-to-deliver, the need to DRS, has
been imposed on Gill in-absentia.
Here, for example, is a post from 2023, just
shy of two full years after Keith’s last
public post, that outright advocates for conspiratorial
baking, “refine your tinfoil until it’s
pure gold”, and assumes absolute homogeneity
between Keith’s thesis and their own, which
is to say that this poster believes DFV believes
what they believe.
Next slide.
The poster signs off, of course, with “follow
the white rabbit.”
Next slide
Although he almost certainly sold most if
not all of his stake in GameStop and rode
off into early retirement to raise his family,
Apes remain convinced that he’s still out
there hodling to this day, cheering them on
from afar, if not guiding them from the shadows
via Reddit awards.
“Can you verify that that’s a thing?”
“Can I prove that DRS works?”
“Yeah”
“Well DRS has never been disproven.
We just gotta, we just gotta trust the plan.”
One of the things that gets litigated repeatedly
in all this mess is the definition of what
makes a meme stock.
I’ve actually got a conspiracy-laden email
in my inbox that hinges off this.
In January 2021, there was no such thing as
a 'meme stock.'
Despite the SEC itself putting out a report
(where they directly state that price movement
was not related to shorts closing), there
continues to be no definition of what a 'meme
stock' really is.
However, examples of meme securities apparently
include GME, AMC, and BBBY.
The term 'meme stock' in reference to GME
seems like a tactical decision to deride GME
investors without directly singling out a
single company, ostensibly in order to avoid
bringing more attention to the company whose
success is immediately threatening to financial
institutions.
On one hand “meme stock” is basically
the new name for stocks that behave like penny
stocks even if they aren’t penny stocks,
which is useful to a degree, and on the other
hand is an attempt at identifying the why
of meme stocks via a definition.
Bed Bath and Beyond, in an April 2023 court
filing, list a couple characteristics of a
meme stock and why they felt it applied to
them.
The two characteristics that they identify
are a general narrative of an imperilled company,
and nostalgia value.
That’s kinda a workable definition, but
to cut through the noise part of the problem
with trying to pin down what a meme stock
is is that it’s changed.
A meme stock in May 2023 isn’t the same
substance as a meme stock in 2021.
The original meme stocks in the fall of 2020,
AMC, Nokia, GameStop, are defined by a gleeful
contrarianism.
It’s not that there’s a narrative of a
company in trouble, though that is present,
and it’s not the nostalgia value, though
that’s present too.
Those were not the leading motives; what makes
a meme stock is that aggressively, publicly
buying stock in a failing company past its
relevance is funny.
The thing that truly separates a meme stock
from every other garbage ticker is that the
act of buying in and of itself becomes the
meme, a combination of absurdist performance
and inherently gamified exercise.
As more and more people start piling in it
causes the price to go up, and that basic
cause and effect, as simple and abstract as
it is, can be deeply entertaining.
In 2023, though, that wave has crested and
broken, the joke is over, but the investors
are still around, and, as we’ll see, the
gleeful contrarianism is gone, replaced with
stone-faced dedication to a perceived cause.
So what is a meme stock?
It’s a stock whose play rests entirely on
a concocted narrative of a storied American
company under assault that serves as a proxy
battleground for the fate of the American
economy, the vessel through which the true
believers will manifest their apocalypse and
rebirth the world into a golden age.
It is a stock that is a candidate for MOASS.
While any stock with a high short interest
potentially meets this criteria, ultimately
three businesses would rise to the top to
become the canon meme stocks: GameStop, AMC
Theatres, and Bed Bath and Beyond.
Now, companies tend to have high short interest
because they’re in bad shape: declining
market share, lacklustre product, poor reputation,
loaded with debt, and, probably the number
one reason, they’re unprofitable and not
making money.
So it’s important to note that the self-selection
process here, the thought process created
by the theory of MOASS, is going to intrinsically
lead Apes to invest in bad companies.
“Yeah, so I’ve thought about putting one
of these together, I’ve thought about writing
a DD.
I mean, like, check out all of these awards
that you get.
It’s pretty long, but that’s good, right.
The longer it is the more due the diligence.”
Following the vote, the Apes were faced with
their own fork in the road.
Either they accept the results of their own
test, and acknowledge the prospect that they
made a mistake, or they preheat the oven and
prepare to bake justifications for why the
overvote didn’t occur.
You don’t need to be told which way they
went.
After the June 2021 shareholder meeting there
was a seismic shift in the tone of Superstonk
- the goalposts shifted and damage control
was engaged.
Immediately it began to circulate that an
overvote was never going to be unveiled by
the meeting, and it was in fact foolish to
expect it to.
Conspiracy theories formed to explain the
lack of evidence of the conspiracy theory.
Some Apes were prevented from voting, brokers
normalized their vote counts before providing
them to GameStop.
GameStop isn’t allowed to admit the overvote
occurred.
Whatever explains away the negative test result.
The previous months of research became shockingly
malleable, being rewritten the instant it
produced an unfavourable result.
And within a few months history had just been
straight up rewritten.
The experiment did demonstrate the overvote,
but nothing came of it.
This is Ape “research”, and it’s worth
an examination in its own right.
Due diligence is the process of gathering
a folio of data on a potential investment
that explores the whole package: the company’s
financials, the state of their competition,
likely technological or societal changes in
the near future that could impact the course
of the company for better or worse, how many
people on the planet even theoretically want
their product, it can get as intense as hiring
someone to drive out into the woods just to
make sure a mine actually exists.
Because this is a real thing that real investors
do with a very fancy sounding name it quickly
became an entire genre of post on Ape forums.
There is a delicate line for us to walk here.
Learning and collaboration are… good.
I would love to stand here and tell you that
Apes came together and taught themselves how
to invest and better each other’s lives.
It’s a great story, indeed that’s how
the Apes tell it.
But this is not that, this is something very
different.
Making money on the stock market isn’t ‘difficult’
- a fish can do it, no one going long on biotech
has a plan.
But Apes don’t want portfolios that outperform
the market, they want to manufacture events
that cripple financial institutions while
flipping off regulators.
Ape Due Diligence, or DD for short, is uh,
it’s rough.
It is mythology cloaked in the veil of research.
At the base layer the first generation of
Apes have self-selected as victims of a pump
and dump.
It’s a bad starting point, because these
people have demonstrated a lack of familiarity
with the subject matter and poor judgement.
Like a lot of victims of stock scams, many
of them were denied a good education, and
many have a poor grasp of English.
As a collective group they were weaned on
Keith Gill’s YouTube channel, daily discussion
threads on WallStreetBets and very simple
rhetorical signals.
That’s the kind of material they’re trained
to take in, and they still largely took it
in by declaring “I’m just a smooth brained
ape, can someone with a few wrinkles explain
if my tits should be jacked?”
Rhetoric and the broad strokes are what matter.
You need to understand that shorts never closed,
you gotta book rather than plan, and you need
to hate Ken Griffin with every atom of your
being.
But paradoxically, Apes sincerely believe
they are collectively the Michael Burry in
a sequel to the Big Short that has yet to
be written.
So while the details are irrelevant, they
are driven to not just research, but produce
their own original research.
The majority of this early ‘seminal DD’
was written by Apes who joined the community
well after January - many being verifiable
bagholders.
People who would be writing essays on securities
fraud within two weeks of making their first
trade.
We know this because the authors will just
flat out say it - posts will often open with
a short summary of why the author shouldn’t
be trusted.
They will often admit that they barely understand
the documents they’re paraphrasing, but
have attempted it anyway for the benefit of
the community.
The pitfalls are obvious.
Like your standard breed of crackpot, Apes
are educating themselves to specifically solve
a big problem.
They are pursuing their chicken tenders.
When they skipped the first 3 textbooks on
Finance and went straight to short squeezing
Melvin Capital, they skipped over some fundamentals.
But you won’t find Ken Griffin’s secret
strategy in an open access course on risk
management.
Rather than backtrack, Apes forged ahead into
increasingly complex and obtuse material looking
for “the truth”.
Like, some of the crap we had to read.
“Furthermore the lender is being asked to
accept a new type of security interest, not
the simple pledge, but one which perforce
has to be a security interest in intangible
property.
The history of developing new security interests
in purely intangible property is one that
might give pause to even that rara avis, the
adventuresome lender.”
When dealing with documents this intense,
written by and for professionals, the only
way a layman can deal with it is through decoding
techniques.
You pull out a fragment of a lecture or thesis
that you can make sense of and treat it as
the diamond in the rough.
The rest is interpreted through speculation
rippling out from that fragment.
It’s a very unsound way to approach research
- and these people then immediately present
to the class.
Analogy is a favourite of the Ape Author.
Analogy in academia is used to bolster the
substance - but since the Apes were introduced
to these ideas through the Big Short, analogies
are load-bearing.
Essentially using the same language as Margot
Robbie, but you’re expected to act on it.
It’s not just lightly-informative entertainment,
it is in fact financial advice.
If the rocket is launched without preparation
it will bring down the whole fucking base.
While the small explosives are going off and
smaller players are going under, GME will
have a lot more volatility.
The powers that be will try to dampen that
volatility as much as possible since even
a small ignition could set this bitch off.
I believe the plan is to do controlled detonations
until GME is the only explosive left to set
off.
ComputerShare works a bit like a heat lamp,
and what that actually means is an exercise
for the reader.
Their thought process is so shamefully reverse
engineered that they need to make a joke out
of the confirmation bias just to guard against
that very real criticism.
And it needs to be repeated; an unbelievable
amount of the primary sources for the mechanics
of clearing and settlement come from random
emails to the SEC from 2003.
Like, even if you presume that material is
accurate - consider all the obvious ways that
a public comment on an upcoming piece of legislation
could be unreliable twenty years after the
legislation has been introduced.
That is how you get the Apes frothing over
long-retired systems.
They jumped in a time machine from the 2020s
back to 2004 when we had the last hysteria
about naked short selling, which itself was
built off a half-baked understanding of the
subject from the 80s.
This leaves… gaps.
The result of all of this is a truly specular
rate of generational decay in the Ape’s
collective understanding of the thing they
have devoted their lives to understanding.
Despite becoming an increasingly ambitious
ploy, MOASS devolved into an incredibly simple
scheme in just a few weeks.
You just buy GameStop shares and hold until
MOASS - and the infinity pool will ensure
you become a gorillionaire.
Ape DD can only function to reproduce existing
ideas, or to develop new mythology in reaction
to new issues.
Even the papers that look like they’re doing
the maths boil down to ‘buy and hold’.
It's bad practice to cite a date or price
for the MOASS, so the only accepted values
are 'soon' and 'infinite'.
And all of this is regulated by the mechanism
of social media.
Some of this may be evoking memories of QAnon,
and while the overlap between the two movements
is non-trivial, for the most part it is simply
that as a social media driven phenomenon,
its ideas are shaped by populism and Reddit’s
algorithm.
DD that the community approves of is showered
with Reddit awards, praise, and clout, so
there’s an incentive, emotional and in some
cases monetary, to, you know, have more DD.
Atobitt was a late-arrival to the squeeze,
the account’s first post was on the 10th
of March, and by the 14th he posted his first
amateur securities fraud essay.
By April 22 he posted the first in a series
called “House of Cards” that Apes pumped
to the point that it was temporarily the top
post on Reddit.
And naturally it is almost entirely gawking
at emails from 2003.
Atobitt was conferred a level of status that
would see him named alongside the Queen Kong
herself as among the movements most prestigious
thinkers.
He became something of an influencer, complete
with his own perpetually unfinished magnum
opus, which tragically we will never get.
He didn’t acquire this reputation through
good work, he did that by giving the Apes
what they wanted.
For DD to be accepted, it needs to be simple.
It can be long, but the whole thing needs
to be fully summarised in 100 words, max.
Because the most important thing is that it
needs to reinforce the existing belief system
- and no one will read your DD if you don’t
tell them you agree with them at the outset.
All of this is enforced through the upvote
button.
DD that meets the community's criteria gets
elevated, DD that muddies the water, or worse,
spreads fear, uncertainty, and doubt, is aggressively
suppressed.
Regardless of the rigour of any individual
essay, this is academia via populism.
It is the ideal circumstances for critical
thought to be suspended.
The Apes get to pick and choose what facts
shape their thesis - and in doing so, they
create mythology.
This is why the MOASS theory can stand tall
on a foundation of sand and vapour.
The actual mechanics are interchangeable.
Initially they misunderstood how 140% short
interest could occur, that led them to the
Stock Borrow Program, and while it proved
their original theory wrong, it gave them
a better alternative.
Even though the stock borrow program is baked
into the core thesis, it doesn’t matter
- they can substitute it with at least half
a dozen different things.
The failure of the overvote just proves how
rigged the system truly is.
Each theory is just a stepping stone to the
next.
They can never be proven wrong if they never
sit still long enough for someone to debunk
them.
Real due diligence is as much an argument
to stay away from an investment as it is an
argument to buy in.
Good due diligence will argue the worst case
scenario, what if things go completely wrong,
what if a new product just sucks ass and no
one wants it, can the company weather bad
news or will it fold in half?
Ape DD exists to keep MOASS alive.
As time went on, decoding became a more and
more explicit form of DD.
This started innocently enough initially.
Keith Gill, Ryan Cohen and Michael Burry were
subtweeting Apes very explicitly.
Whether it was Ryan Cohen’s official statements
thanking retail investors for their support,
or Gill communicating with Apes through gifs
- these were thinly veiled messages to Apes,
but they weren’t substantive.
There was not a deep meaning to Ryan Cohen
tweeting a fist emoji or reposting an Ape
meme about himself.
But this normalised the idea that these figures
communicated with Apes through secret messages.
And since these guys were never available
to clarify or disprove theories, it cultivated
decoding techniques that grew more and more…
let’s say ambitious.
“DFV Roaring Kitty tweet Deciphered!!
1627 has to do with Naked Shorting Options
Derivative cases, which ties directly in which
SEC rule 10b-21”
“Can you explain the connection just so
my dumb ass can follow?”
“All I am coming up with is a couple of
legal cases, beyond that, I dunno.”
“Are we saying this painting is from 1627?
“This painting is from a Wes Anderson movie.”
“But the roman numeral on the right side
is for 1627.”
“How’s that tied to naked shorting?
“GME, Rick and Morty.
How the show might be hinting at us about
the financial system and the collapse of citadel
via their own greed.”
“This is how the 1% sees us.”
“Candidly I’ve seen no evidence so-called
fake or synthetic shares exist.
But many of you disagree…”
“I love it.
Basically saying, “Who am I to say the hedge
funds are creating shares out of thin air?
I guess we’ll just pull back the curtain
to see”
“Adam Aron saying there’s no evidence
of synthetics is actually genius.
Just think about it, when he does pounce,
they can go after him for market manipulation.
Because he’ll have evidence of the exact
opposite…”
“To a person with @uti$m, words mean something.
Every word does.
Every symbol.... every unwritten, suggestive
wink or nudge.
We're really good at giving clues and seeing
deeper meaning (I say we because I have a$perg's).
We notice patterns and algorithms that normal
people don't.
And cryptic language is often our bread and
butter.
Yes, DFV, MJBurry, even Papa Cohen are communicating
with apes the only way they can... through
cryptic means.
And their messages are important.
Remember...
every word means something to an @uti$t.”
No surprise that by June, Keith Gill stopped
tweeting all together.
It got to the point where AMC CEO Adam Aron
dropped his phone and tweeted out a single
“M”, and Apes became fixated on decoding
it.
Despite Aron’s efforts to dispel the fervour,
Aron’s statements just fed into the idea
that the M was significant.
“Yesterday I tweeted an “M” by mistake,
but many of you thought I was being less than
candid in the denial, and that the M must
have meant something.
Nope, just a tweeting error.
But today I am tweeting this, and it does
mean something: “Y””
“Question for the tin-foils: why did he
leave that much space (what is it, 10?) between
text and "Y"?”
“I think it’s 11.
Can’t figure it out.”
Ryan Cohen, the chairman of the board of GameStop,
took one photo with notorious corporate raider
Carl Icahn, the guy Oliver Stone based Gordon
“greed is good” Gekko off of in 1987,
which immediately cast Icahn as a saviour
figure in dozens and dozens of DDs.
As conspiratorial techniques like this became
more popular and more dominant on these boards,
the line between ‘vetted DD’ and ‘speculation’
began to blur.
Now, the “solid AF DD” was already often
built on the same foundation of sand as outright
speculation, but there was a clear shift over
time.
After the failed shareholder vote, naturally
more and more radical explanations were required.
All of these exist to answer the same question,
where’s the evidence of the fake shares?
Why aren’t we seeing the answer we expect
to see?
The answer is almost always that the debt
or shares were shifted into some new form
previously unknown to Apes.
Since the Ape understanding of the market
is rooted very firmly in the realm of googling
“wrinkle brain explains short squeeze”,
that is most things.
So we start to see more and more out-there
instruments being introduced, they start talking
about dark pools, options, ETFs and so on,
folding that material into a more and more
pure thesis based on the naked short conspiracy.
Maintaining a stable community built entirely
out of conspiracy, insecurity, and resentment
is tricky.
To get them through this Apes police sentiment
like few others.
Even crypto, a product wholly at the mercy
of sentiment, is more tolerant of bad news
than Apes because they are nominally willing
to engage with reality as it exists.
They’ll spin bad news like the collapse
of FTX as good for the ecosystem as a whole,
pretending that it’s culling out bad actors,
but they don’t deny that FTX has gone sour.
Since MOASS is basically a fantasy untethered
from any real business fundamentals, the reasons
to not buy in get longer and longer as time
goes on, and so the restrictions on what is
and isn’t permissible to talk about also
grow longer and longer.
MOASS is, when you break it down, market manipulation
via the prisoner’s dilemma.
The big, theoretical payout only works if
literally everyone holds the line, but simultaneously
everyone involved has both the personal incentive
and ample opportunity to screw over the others,
and knows that everyone else has that same
opportunity.
It is a philosophy that demands extremely
strict orthodoxy.
You buy and you hold.
Discussing exit strategy is derided as “price
anchoring.”
Remember, the gains are not theoretically
infinite, they are literally infinite.
This leads directly to unhinged memes about
Apes becoming “gorillionaires” from selling
one single share.
It leads to stories about the post-MOASS world
where Apes don’t actually need to sell any
shares at all ever, they just live off the
dividends from GameStop for the rest of their
lives, and for the lives of their children,
and their children’s children, a future
where one, single share confers wife-changing
generational wealth.
Sharp eared listeners may have noticed that
I said “dividend” in there, and they may
be asking the logical follow up question “where
does the money for these dividends come from?”
Don’t worry about it.
In fact, why are you so concerned with what
other people do with their money?
Are you just here to spread FUD and undermine
GME?
I’m just an individual investor who likes
the stock and the company that is debt-free
and cash-flow-positive backed by an unprecedented
movement from shareholders to direct register
their shares in order to combat corruption
in the DTCC.
FUD is literally anything that casts any amount
of doubt on any part of the plan.
“I don’t believe that GME will be worth
an unlimited amount of money per share, that
doesn’t seem possible.”
FUD!
“Why wouldn’t the price peak and then
come back down?”
FUD!
“I should probably set an exit threshold
because I’m pretty sure other people are
going to be selling, too, and I don’t want
to miss the opportunity.”
FUD!
“No, but for real, where does the money
for these dividends come from?”
FUD FUD FUD FUD!
Direct registration mutated extremely quickly
from an attempt at proving the existence of
concrete crimes with objective numbers, a
thing it failed to do, into a loyalty ritual,
a spell that if executed correctly would create
the conditions that would allow MOASS to happen.
A specific quirk of the narrative of MOASS,
the idea that the Apes are engaged in a phantom
war with the short hedge funds, leads to various
delusional, but logically consistent outcomes,
like the belief that anyone who is not on
board with the play is a hired agent of the
opposition.
The rubberneckers mocking Apes on r/GME_meltdown
aren’t merely trolls, contrarians, or naysayers,
but hired “shills” planted in Ape communities
as part of an elaborate psyops to undermine
them and convince them to sell their shares
so that the shorts can cover, which is of
course predicated on the belief that there’s
no real shares available, which is predicated
on the belief that there’s some truly unfathomable
amount of undetectable naked shorts, which
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
This is a clever word inversion.
An actual shill is someone who stands off
to the side of a grift and acts as an unrelated
hype man.
They posture as just a random independent
passerby while actually having an undisclosed
interest in the thing that they are helping
to sell.
A shill wants you to buy something.
Naturally, SuperStonk and the other derivative
forums are deeply infested with shills literally
telling people to buy and promoting the virtue
of never, ever selling for any reason, ever.
Here’s a DD post literally structured for
recruitment from Reddit’s front page.
The reason the DD posts have so many awards
is because Apes believed they could abuse
the system to shill GME to r/All.
They’re not coordinating, though.
They’re all just individual investors coming
to their own conclusions about what to do
with their Reddit awards.
In light of the community being 98% shilling
by volume, it became culturally expedient
to re-define the word so that all the shills
would stop being accurately called shills.
So in Ape circles a “shill” is any unbeliever.
Predictably this arrangement where anyone
who isn’t frothingly committed to the cause
is a hired shill fosters an air of paranoia
and has a rather extreme chilling effect on
the idea of, you know, asking very reasonable
questions that would be extremely normal in
any other investment forum.
This paranoia extends to policing maintenance
of the illusion that this is all just an organic,
uncoordinated series of individual decisions.
“Everyone’s like ‘I wanna make a lot
of money let me do a bunch of research’
And it’s like aye here’s what I found’
and like ‘yeah me too’ yeah me too yeah
me too yeah me too - and then like we realise
oh crap all the predictions we made as a group…
individually then as a group confirmed and
vetted and picked apart and the best rose
to the top and that’s how you get research,
it’s like the perfect experiment…”
This both feeds the narrative that their behaviour
is not a “mass hypnosis” but is instead
the product of genuine rigour.
And this has the added bonus of providing
a basis to deter accusations of market manipulation.
Now, while it’s true that it’s unlikely
that we’ll see a RICO filed with 20,000
John Doe defendants- Apes seem aware that
they're playing close to the fire.
They are looking to collectively engineer
an artificial price movement which would absolutely
get you in trouble if you did it solo, so
they lean into the decentralised nature of
the movement as best they can, and it’s
- it’s very funny.
[100:02] “Edit 2: Removed some “we”s etc from
my exit strategy after concerns were raised
[100:07] that phrasing my exit strategy like I originally
did might be construed as attempted market
[100:12] manipulation.
[100:13] In the end, anyone reading this is just an
individual ape doing whatever they want with
[100:17] their own money.”
[100:19] Users will incant “this is not financial
advice” and “I just like the stock”
[100:23] with the same energy as “no copyright infringement
intended” in the description of a complete
[100:29] upload of Dances With Wolves to YouTube.
[100:31] “This is not financial advice, legal advice.
[100:33] For entertainment purposes only.
[100:34] Anything I say is my personal opinion please
do not make any financial decision based on
[100:38] anything I say in these videos that being
said hit the like button, subscribe button,
[100:45] all that the YouTube algorithm stuff so you
get the vids when I put ‘em out…”
[100:52] “GameStop is operating smarter than ever
before.
[100:55] And that’s what people just don’t understand
yet, and it’s because of all the mainstream
[101:01] media FUD - and that’s just why I think
the Mother of All Short Squeezes is inevitable.
[101:06] Of course, this is just my opinion.
[101:08] You literally should take my opinion with
a grain of salt.
[101:11] I’m telling you a stock is gonna go way
up because a lot of people like it - and I’m
[101:15] literally just a guy on the internet, why
would you believe me?”
[101:18] They don’t collude, instead there’s an
abstract “infinity pool” that happens
[101:23] to describe the abstract notion of shares
that will never be sold.
[101:27] It speaks to their insecurity on whether they’re
safe to be doing this, and that concern is
[101:32] probably well-founded.
[101:33] Because sure, the US government wrote off
the GME squeeze as a one-off viral event and
[101:38] let everyone off the hook, but if the Apes
get their wish and really do deliberately
[101:43] risk collapsing the US or global economy after
several years of organising - yeah I think
[101:51] the US federal government would sooner make
that RICO filing then give u/hoplias literally
[101:57] billions of dollars for his shares in GameStop.
[102:00] The whole of Ape culture is persuasive in
no small part because of how it plays off
[102:04] existing social anxieties.
[102:06] We are collectively primed for these narratives
by a complicated soup of messages, a combination
[102:13] of distrust in financial institutions married
with a mythologization of the stock market
[102:18] and a financial reality of stagnant wages
and greedflation that make it feel like playing
[102:24] the market is the only possible way to build
any kind of wealth or comfort.
[102:29] And that’s just the stuff that’s rooted
in reality.
[102:32] Ape motivations are ultimately pretty simple.
[102:34] Their lore is complex, but their reasons are
not.
[102:37] They’re gambling addicts who are starved
for social attention.
[102:40] The whole meme stock ecosystem actually makes
a ton of sense for why it’s as motivating
[102:45] as it is, since it combines all the addictive
highs of gambling with all the energy of a
[102:50] soap opera.
[102:51] Every day there’s something new, there’s
the constant drama of the price action ups
[102:56] and downs, though mostly downs.
[102:59] If it’s not price action then it’s new
theories, new DD, new moderator drama.
[103:05] It’s very easy to compartmentalize as entertainment,
to forget that what’s at stake is, you know,
[103:12] the family finances.
[103:14] Money is really easy to abstract away at the
best of times, and it only gets easier when
[103:20] it’s reduced and gamified and when so much
of it is irony-poisoned performance.
[103:25] Apps like Robinhood have already come under
criticism for their gamification of playing
[103:30] the market, but even if that weren’t a factor
the Apes are more than happy to gamify things
[103:35] for one another and frame everything in the
language of video games, the language of boss
[103:41] fights, grinding, and completionism.
[103:44] That’s already addictive, and it just upgrades
to weapons-grade bad times when combined with
[103:50] conspiratorial mindsets and the attendant
narcissism, paranoiam and over-confidence.
[103:55] Gordon Pennycook, an associate professor at
the University of Regina, in his pre-publication
[104:01] paper Overconfidently Conspiratorial, argues
that the actual defining trait of the conspiratorially
[104:07] minded isn’t narcissism or a need to feel
special, though those are observably common
[104:12] traits in conspiracy circles, but excessive
over-confidence.
[104:17] This is anecdotally intuitive to anyone who
has spent significant time in conspiracy circles,
[104:23] but it is this overconfidence that leads to
the refusal to reevaluate beliefs, the assumption
[104:29] that they accurately understand complicated
systems better than others, and, this is to
[104:34] me the most interesting claim of the paper,
a counter-intuitive belief that their opinion
[104:39] is, in fact, in the majority.
[104:42] The entire thing with Apes policing negative
sentiment is actually a pretty good example
[104:46] of that, in the way that they have an itchy
trigger finger for calling anyone, even long
[104:51] time DD writers, a paid shill if they say
anything negative or disagree with a favoured
[104:57] theory.
[104:58] In the Ape mind the only possible reason to
express doubt that GameStop is being attacked
[105:03] by short sellers who are trying to kill the
company in order to prevent MOASS is because
[105:09] you’re being paid to.
[105:10] The Ape thesis is, to them, so self-evident,
so persuasive, that it’s just common sense,
[105:18] everyone already believes it.
[105:20] Inevitably this leads to pinnacle echo chamber
behaviour: no one outside the bubble can be
[105:25] trusted, anyone talking about Apes is engaging
in psychological warfare to wear Apes down,
[105:32] because why else would you care about Apes
or find this interesting or newsworthy?
[105:39] The inevitable synthesis of this thinking
is a warped worldview where companies no longer
[105:43] go out of business for any reason other than
targeted destruction.
[105:48] Sears, Blockbuster, Toys R Us, hell, Enron,
get retroactively cast as the victims of short
[105:56] sellers.
[105:57] This is a lens on the world necessary to recast
Ape behaviour, their quest for infinite wealth,
[106:02] not as self-serving greed, but altruism.
[106:07] Virtue has been a part of the rhetoric since
the GameStop squeeze itself.
[106:11] Investors were engaged to buy and hold to
‘get revenge for 2008’ and ‘finally
[106:17] let the little guy have his fair share.’
[106:19] We won’t say that people didn’t genuinely
believe that - but you can imagine how useful
[106:23] that narrative would be to convince Apes to
hold while you personally divest your entire
[106:28] stake at $400 a share.
[106:31] The continuing escalation of the antagonism
of Wall Street has fed the Ape’s sense of
[106:36] morality.
[106:37] They are very much the good guys who are saving
the world by holding shares in GameStop.
[106:43] But at the same time, they have, you know,
ulterior motives - they want destructive amounts
[106:49] of money.
[106:50] They do that vile thing where ‘every share
is a tribute’ to certain deceased individuals.
[106:56] You know, a tribute that involves doing the
thing that they already wanted to do: hold
[107:01] GameStop shares.
[107:02] This sandwich?
[107:04] This is a tribute to my grandpa.
[107:06] Rest in peace, Jack.
[107:10] This creates fascinating and harrowing conflicts
in the Ape mindset.
[107:14] Some Apes are here just for the money, and
find the activism or philanthropic elements
[107:19] to be cringeworthy.
[107:21] But in the fiction, they are literally involved
in an invisible war against the most powerful
[107:26] entities on the planet - and are in order
to free us from our oppression.
[107:31] When they take the reins of the economy - they
are going to ‘do it right’, and be just
[107:37] sovereigns.
[107:38] It’s a full blown saviour complex.
[107:40] “We will make the world better, whether
it be locally, state-wide, nationally, or
[107:45] globally.
[107:47] We are here to fix the world that Wall Street
and the (bad) Boomers broke.
[107:52] We will use our tendies for good.
[107:54] And, perhaps, get a Lambo in the process (or,
in my case, a mother fucking Cybertruck).”
[108:02] But at the same time, they see the immense
payout of MOASS as the reward for the tribulations
[108:07] they have endured, billions of dollars in
remuneration for the disappointed side eyes
[108:11] they catch at family gatherings.
[108:13] They resent the fact that no one takes them
seriously, and their philanthropy exists in
[108:18] tension with a very intense urge to rub all
our noses in it when they’re eventually
[108:22] proven right.
[108:24] Because we all had our chance.
[108:26] “Beyond the toys you are going to buy, who
are you going to help?
[108:29] That’s what matters.
[108:30] Because there are plenty of people to help.
[108:32] Now you can’t help everybody, you can’t
save everybody from working a nine-to-five,
[108:36] they had their chance, okay?
[108:37] They coulda got in, they could have done their
DD, they could have done their research - we
[108:40] tried to tell them over dinner we tried to
tell them, they didn’t listen - WHATEVER.
[108:45] They had their chance.
[108:46] (laugh)”
[108:47] Because Apes are so disconnected from actual
fact, reality has been happy to deliver them
[108:50] an endless supply of Great Disappointments,
week after week after week of failed catalysts,
[108:56] missed hype dates, deconstructed gamma ramps,
and falling stock price as the stock price
[109:01] of these unprofitable companies continues
to decline from their short-squeeze peaks.
[109:05] It’s just, it’s kinda really, really funny
to watch this mass of people so deeply convinced
[109:12] that a drop in the value of GameStop is a
direct attack on them when GameStop is currently
[109:18] valued well above even their most profitable
years ever.
[109:23] As with any other apocalyptic belief placed
under cognitive strain, this leads to aggressive
[109:29] fragmentation.
[109:30] One group says that DRS is the way, but Apes
just haven’t been doing it properly, and
[109:36] an argument breaks out about Plan accounts
vs Book accounts.
[109:40] Another group says that Plan vs Book doesn’t
matter, all that matters is Apes need to DRS
[109:46] harder.
[109:47] Both groups accuse the other of being paid
shills employed to distract, fragment, and
[109:52] mislead the community.
[109:53] A late game DD theory is the belief in a turnaround
play, that MOASS won’t happen, per se, but
[109:59] Bed, Bath, and Beyond or GameStop or, hilariously,
some speculative merger of the two will achieve
[110:05] MOASS-like valuations based entirely off strong
fundamentals.
[110:10] “And the MOASS is irrelevant because what
GameStop is building is a great company”
[110:15] GME purists hold to a pure form of MOASS that’s
firmly rooted in spiritual loyalty to GameStop.
[110:22] Which rapidly turned into a spiritual loyalty
to Ryan Cohen.
[110:26] “Yeah, I didn’t, I didn’t actually buy
until March but, you know, I was reading the
[110:31] DD, then Ryan Cohen, he makes this play into
Bed Bath & Beyond and everybody on the boards
[110:38] just gets super hype about it.
[110:41] And yeah anything the man touches is gold.
[110:44] Like, he’s, he’s a kingmaker.
[110:46] He’s the book king.
[110:47] So, who is Ryan Cohen?
[110:50] Ryan Cohen is a bored billionaire who fancies
himself an activist investor, and a fixer
[110:55] of failing companies.
[110:56] He made his money selling the online pet food
store Chewy dot com to PetsMart which he founded
[111:01] with a combination of venture capital and
daddy’s money.
[111:04] The official story of Chewy admits that they
didn’t get outside investment until 2013,
[111:09] but they hired a bunch of executives from
Amazon and PetsMart right out the gate, and
[111:13] those suckers aren’t cheap, so logical deduction
is that, you know, there was already some
[111:18] money there.
[111:19] Next slide please.
[111:20] Ryan Cohen ran Chewy as a tech company, burning
venture capital and running at a loss until
[111:24] they were bought out for $3.35 billion in
2017.
[111:29] When the company went public in 2019 the company
disclosed a $268 million dollar loss for fiscal
[111:34] year 2018, Cohen’s final year as CEO.
[111:37] Next slide.
[111:38] In September 2020 as the meme stock wave was
gaining steam he disclosed that he held a
[111:43] 10% stake in GameStop, believing that the
company could be turned around.
[111:47] Cohen wrote an open letter to the GameStop
board in November, proclaiming his immense
[111:51] faith in GameStop’s potential if they would
only take his advice.
[111:56] On Thursday December 17th, 2020 he increased
his stake to 12.9%.
[112:01] All three of these events were catalysts for
GME.
[112:04] In August, GameStop was trading below $5,
by the end of the year, it would be around
[112:08] $19.
[112:10] Next slide please.
[112:11] An activist investor is an investor who buys
stock off the open market and then throws
[112:15] their weight around and tries to take an active
role in the running of the company, despite
[112:19] the fact that they didn’t actually give
any money to the company.
[112:22] Next slide.
[112:23] On January 11th, 2021 it was announced that
Cohen would join GameStop’s board of directors,
[112:28] and then in April Cohen was made the chairman.
[112:31] Cohen made bold promises of a transformation
into “the Amazon of gaming.”
[112:36] Next slide, please.
[112:38] Objectively Ryan Cohen isn’t good at actually
running companies or generating shareholder
[112:42] value.
[112:43] GameStop’s “turnaround” has resulted
in a large amount of capital wasted on fulfilment
[112:46] centres that were closed shortly thereafter,
a further retraction of the company from their
[112:50] global operations, and the launch of an NFT
marketplace that the company describes in
[112:54] its 10-K annual report as “not material
to the consolidated financial statements for
[113:00] fiscal 2022.”
[113:02] Next slide.
[113:03] Ryan Cohen’s one material impact on any
business he is involved in as an activist
[113:06] investor is that he is followed by Apes who,
based on his limited role in the January 2021
[113:11] run, have elevated him to a messianic role,
believing that he is working “behind the
[113:16] scenes” to engineer MOASS, and thus follow
his investments.
[113:20] Next slide.
[113:21] This irrationally passionate fanbase has succeeded
in keeping GameStop hovering at an absurd
[113:26] valuation well above the company’s actual
financial performance, but they’re also
[113:30] highly annoying, a burden for management to
deal with, and a possible threat to employees.
[113:34] “So what I’m going to do right now is
I’m going to go to this store here and ask
[113:40] if they are hiring.
[113:42] “That’s Ryan Cohen Strategy.”
[113:45] “Yeah, I like the guy.
[113:47] I Don't know if you like him, but I like him
so much.
[113:52] You know who I'm talking to.
[113:54] You know who I'm talking about right?
[113:56] No, you never heard about Ryan Cohen.
[114:01] If you're working in GameStop that name should
ring every bell.
[114:07] So right now what I notice is a lot of layoffs
in Bed Bath and Beyond and a lot of recruiting
[114:16] aggressively recruiting people in GameStop
Yeah, most likely there will be a merger between
[114:23] GameStop and Bed Bath and Beyond”
[114:25] “Wow.
[114:26] I, I don't even know how that works because
GameStop sells games
[114:30] and Bed, Bath & Beyond...”
[114:31] “The whole the whole thing is gonna change”
[114:34] All right, so That's the plan.
[114:38] So GameStop is merging with Bed Bath and Beyond(...)
and Ryan Cohen, he's not joking.
[114:46] He's not sitting as a chairman in This company
GameStop playing with his balls.
[114:53] No, he's not he's hiring, aggressively hiring
retail people and the merger is coming when
[115:02] the only one who knows this answer is Ryan
Cohen”
[115:07] Apes have taken to decoding any and all communication
from Cohen for any “Cohencidences” that
[115:12] they can point to as indications that he is
doing what they claim he is, because it would
[115:16] be very bad news for Apes if he were, in fact,
just some rich loser who enjoys the attention.
[115:23] Next slide please.
[115:25] No one wants to work with him.
[115:26] Given the poor material performance of GameStop
relative to its inflated share value, retailers
[115:31] Bed Bath and Beyond and Nordstrom both told
him to go take a hike after he attempted to
[115:35] buy his way into power.
[115:37] “You know, really, at the end of the day
hedge funds, they should have seen this coming.
[115:41] Like, they targeted gamers.
[115:42] We, we know what it means to just grind a
boss fight and grind reputation in a video
[115:56] game.
[115:57] So, like, locking the float.
[116:01] We can grind that out.
[116:02] We know what that takes.
[116:03] DRSing everything?
[116:05] You know, all of it?
[116:08] We can do that.”
[116:10] Compared to GameStop and AMC, companies with
products for kids and teens that at least
[116:14] have some connection to the nostalgia of youth,
Bed Bath and Beyond seems like a curveball,
[116:19] until you realise that the Apes just followed
GameStop’s “saviour” to his next project.
[116:25] When Cohen first disclosed his stake in Bed
Bath, the resulting Ape frenzy triggered Bed
[116:29] Bath’s largest intraday percentage price
increase since its initial public offering.
[116:35] Some investors bought in due to uncritical
zealotry towards Cohen, or belief that the
[116:39] Bed Bath play was a MOASS master stroke.
[116:43] Others believed he would genuinely rescue
the company, while others just wanted to get
[116:46] in early on the next pump and dump.
[116:49] Whatever the specific reason, we’re only
talking about Bed Bath and Beyond because
[116:53] of Cohen.
[116:54] Cohen bought into Bed Bath, because it was
a dying company he thought he could save - it’s
[116:58] cut and dry.
[116:59] Likewise, there is no nuance to Bed Bath’s
troubles.
[117:02] It’s a brick and mortar retailer that was
struggling for all the obvious reasons.
[117:07] Already declining sales, a failed pivot to
private label goods, the pandemic and subsequent
[117:11] supply chain disruptions, poor relations with
their vendors, and a disastrous stock-buyback
[117:16] program loading the company with debt created
a negative feedback loop where the company
[117:20] couldn’t stock its shelves.
[117:22] The company reached the point of allegedly
turning off the air conditioning to save money.
[117:28] Why Ryan Cohen thought he could right this
ship is anyone’s guess.
[117:32] But it’s fair to say that he didn’t have
much tangible impact one way or the other.
[117:37] Presumably he intended to rapidly work his
way up the chain as he did with GameStop.
[117:42] Instead, the board resisted Cohen’s influence
and within weeks Cohen and the company had
[117:47] settled on an agreement to prevent a hostile
takeover attempt.
[117:51] Cohen was fixated mainly on Bed Bath’s baby
supplies subsidiary buybuyBABY - insisting
[117:56] that “under the right circumstances, BABY
could be valued on a revenue multiple, like
[118:01] other ecommerce-focused retailers, and justify
a valuation of several billion dollars.”
[118:07] The claim, already loaded with caveats, was
based on a years old internal evaluation by
[118:12] Bed Bath, and we know now that it was hogwash,
Baby was incapable of standing on its own
[118:18] without the subsidisation of Bed Bath’s
supply chain, but this number is still cited
[118:23] by Apes over a year later.
[118:25] So, in August he decided to divest his interest
in Bed Bath - but did so in a way that the
[118:29] kids might call…
[118:31] Sus.
[118:33] Cohen initially bought a 9.8% stake in the
company - which needs to be disclosed via
[118:38] the filing of a Schedule 13D.
[118:40] But in the time following Cohen’s purchase,
Bed Bath was in the process of carrying out
[118:45] a share buyback, which reduced the number
of outstanding shares and increased Cohen’s
[118:49] ownership to 11.8% without him personally
trading.
[118:54] As a seemingly irrelevant preamble, on the
12th Cohen tweeted “at least her cart is
[119:00] full moon emoji” in reply to a scathing
CNBC article about Bed Bath.
[119:05] He was required to update all the paperwork
on his ownership by the end of April 2022,
[119:10] but didn’t file the necessary Form 3 indicating
a 10% or greater ownership until after the
[119:16] close of trading on August 15.
[119:19] By now it should be clear that Apes… aren’t
very good at all this.
[119:22] So when they saw this, they either thought
Cohen bought more shares, or that, in concert
[119:27] with the tweet, he was signalling to them
to buy more, to fill up their carts, moon
[119:33] emoji.
[119:34] On the following morning, before trading opens,
Cohen then updates his Schedule 13D to reflect
[119:39] the new number.
[119:40] Apes again, see this as bullish AF, and go
crazy - driving up Bed Bath’s share price
[119:46] by 70% over the course of August 16.
[119:49] Cohen then submits a Form 144 to the SEC,
stating that he hadn’t bought or sold any
[119:55] Bed Bath shares in the last 3 months but was
maybe intending to.
[119:59] After this submission, Cohen then divests
himself of all of his Bed Bath shares, reportedly
[120:05] pocketing $68 million in profit on his initial
investment.
[120:09] The Form 144, stating Cohen’s intention
to sell, goes public the following day on
[120:14] the 17th.
[120:15] This spreads mass Ape confusion.
[120:17] Finally on the 18th, Cohen amends the Schedule
13D and Form 4 to reflect his sale of Bed
[120:23] Bath two days earlier.
[120:25] And that ends Cohen’s “long-term” involvement
with Bed Bath after about 9 months.
[120:31] Now, whether this constituted misconduct from
Ryan Cohen is not a question we can answer,
[120:36] but it is a question worth asking.
[120:39] Unfortunately we may never get an answer,
because while a lawsuit against Ryan Cohen
[120:43] on this matter is ongoing, it’s a mess.
[120:46] A self-represented Ape raced to the courts
in less than a week, to file a class action
[120:51] lawsuit that put forth an unhinged account
of this situation.
[120:56] According to the Complaint, Ryan Cohen had
been planning this from the beginning as part
[121:00] of a conspiracy with Bed Bath’s CFO, who
the complaint misnames repeatedly, and also
[121:05] JP Morgan was in on it for some reason.
[121:08] It’s bad.
[121:09] The Complaint is littered with factual errors,
applies the wrong laws and is just a trainwreck
[121:14] from end to end.
[121:16] The case was wrestled off the Ape and an “amendment”
was submitted that looks like this - but there’s
[121:22] only so much the new team can do to alter
the original complaint.
[121:27] So it’s unlikely that anything meaningful
will come of it.
[121:30] If a jury were to find that Cohen’s behaviour
was a deliberate effort to inject misinformation
[121:35] into the market, it would be a textbook example
of actual market manipulation.
[121:40] It would be a situation in which retail investors
would be compensated for damages caused by
[121:45] said manipulation.
[121:47] Yet remarkably, despite this being a lawsuit
focusing on giving the Apes money - the loyalty
[121:53] of many Apes remains with Cohen, so they cheer
against the success of the class action.
[121:59] This is the end of Ryan Cohen’s involvement
with Bed Bath and Beyond.
[122:03] We aren’t aware of him so much as mentioning
it in the time since a one off interview in
[122:08] November of 22
[122:10] “My views changed, of the business, and
ultimately I sold.”
[122:16] And yet, rather than Apes accepting what’s
just happened to them, that their supposed
[122:20] genius activist investor who would make them
all rich lured them into buying shares in
[122:25] a dying retailer, Ape’s started to bake.
[122:29] The decoding goes up a whole new level.
[122:31] At this point there is absolutely no communication
from Cohen regarding Bed Bath and Beyond,
[122:37] so they need to both uncover the secret messages
and then decode them.
[122:42] Cohen said he was in Bed Bath for the long-term,
and then bailed inside 9 months.
[122:46] Did he lie?
[122:47] Did he rapidly pivot when things didn’t
go his way? or was that initial statement
[122:53] always intended to reassure Apes that he was
in on the play, regardless of how it appeared?
[122:59] The myth quickly became that Cohen didn’t
abandon the Apes or give up on Bed Bath.
[123:03] Instead, Cohen had to work from the shadows,
to outmanoeuvre both the Bed Bath board themselves,
[123:09] who didn’t want anything to do with him,
and the short sellers.
[123:13] This is when we get that Carl Icahn tweet.
[123:16] Apes took this to be definitive evidence of
a partnership between Cohen and Icahn - whose
[123:21] endgame was to merge GameStop and Bed Bath
into a competitor to Amazon.
[123:26] “Deal’s already done.
[123:28] We still don't know where Icahn's son is at.
[123:31] RC's yet to reveal himself, Icahn has to be
involved himself
[123:35] Oh yeah, look at IEP falling, man, the timing
of everything man
[123:39] come on, they, like These people who don't
believe in this shit, they wanna try to psych
[123:43] you out and gaslight you into shit, but honestly
man, the timeline matches up, so honestly
[123:47] man I'm
taking the gamble, personally, so there it
[123:50] is
[123:51] And then… and then in November of ‘22
Cohen publishes a series of children’s books
[123:56] called Teddy.
[123:57] These are mediocre pro-capitalist pablum,
basically exactly what you’d expect from
[124:02] a billionaire libertarian who is bored out
of his mind and desperate for the approval
[124:06] of others.
[124:07] Apes, of course, fired up the industrial ovens
and got ready to bake like they’d never
[124:14] baked before.
[124:15] “Ryan's Children's books are actually hidden
messages for us!
[124:20] Just look at those titles!
[124:22] China?
[124:23] Money?
[124:24] Running the world?
[124:25] Words can't hurt you(FUD)????
[124:26] It's the only way he can legally communicate
with us…”
[124:30] “My daily tin foil...
[124:31] What up with the pattern on Teddy's signature
shirt?”
[124:34] "I know people think these easter eggs are
wrong, but I believe the deal was closed on
[124:39] the 10th (Teddy Day) and the 13th (Teddys
Belt Buckle) is when the filing will drop.
[124:45] Also Merger Monday.”
[124:46] China is an anagram of Icahn, Teddy goes to
China?
[124:50] That means Ryan has approached Icahn about
a lucrative partnership!
[124:54] The books teach literal children to not put
all their eggs in one basket, which of course
[124:59] means that GME holders should also buy Bed
Bath and Beyond.
[125:03] When it’s 1:50 the clock hands point to
10 and 2, which means that any alignment of
[125:08] 10, 2, 12, 1, and 50 become valid readings
of the hidden code.
[125:13] If you save your money you can buy ice cream,
which clearly means if you HOLD then you get
[125:18] your TREATS, which is another way of signalling
TENDIES.
[125:22] “I want to be the book king” - clearly
he wants us booking our shares!
[125:27] General TSO’s chicken!?
[125:28] Tokenized Security Offerings!
[125:31] It was rumoured that Cohen was going to be
buying a stake in Alibaba, the Amazon of China.
[125:36] But then also Cohen tweeted about James Cameron’s
Titanic, one of the most popular and successful
[125:41] films in the history of human existence, and
Apes took this as an obscure reference to
[125:45] a potential announcement, and wouldn’t you
know it, February (2) tenth (10) 2023 is both
[125:53] National TEDDY bear day, and the re-release
of Titanic, there are too many Cohencidences!
[126:01] This is it!
[126:02] This is Teddy day!
[126:03] Ryan Cohen is going to be announcing an acquisition
of Bed Bath and Beyond with his good friend
[126:08] China, read Icahn, where he’s going to spin
off BuyBuyBaby and merge with GameStop to
[126:13] form GMErica.
[126:14] “Exactly.
[126:15] And the shills call it all crazy conspiracy
theories.
[126:19] Fucking r—-s.
[126:20] RC can’t just come out and say oh hey guys
I’m working on a M&A deal with buy buy baby
[126:24] - get ready to be rich on a specifically called
out date.”
[126:27] He said all he could say through the books.
[126:29] if you are really patient, one day you will
have money to eat all the ice cream you want
[126:35] while taking care of your family and friends.”
[126:38] “As I see it guys, these guys are expanding
their catalogue, but without throwing up the
[126:45] flare - ‘hey, we’re getting
bigger’.
[126:48] So now what can happen for GameStop, GameStop
can absorb Teddy at any time and in verse
[126:55] they have it all set out the map is there.
[126:58] He’s been building it in secret behind everything
else.
[127:02] And now you have a partnership.”
[127:04] Let’s take a moment and just marinate on
this, on just how far all of this has come.
[127:11] We’ve gone from vaguely-legitimate if poorly
understood and ill-defined theories on market
[127:17] mechanics to staring at illustrations of an
old man fumbling a turkey in order to extract
[127:23] coded financial advice from the patterns on
his shirt.
[127:28] There’s really only one way this can go.
[127:30] “It is a reality that business often make
poor decisions, misdirecting company resources
[127:36] to wasteful pet projects or failing to adapt
to changes in taste, technology, and society.”
[127:43] So we’ve reached a point where Apes are
convinced that Ryan Cohen is going to swoop
[127:47] in and buy out Bed Bath and Beyond.
[127:49] Their evidence for this is overwhelmingly
based on secret messages delivered to them
[127:53] via literal children’s books.
[127:55] Their grasp on reality has totally frayed
at this point.
[127:59] Every Bed Bath statement was a coded message,
all bad news was just to throw off the short
[128:05] sellers.
[128:06] This meant that as Bed Bath continued to decline,
the Apes looked at it with distrust and confusion.
[128:11] In January, 2023 Bed Bath and Beyond defaulted
on a loan payment, and on February 1st they
[128:17] missed an interest payment on three tranches
of bonds.
[128:20] This is bad, this is “we are completely
out of money” levels of bad.
[128:25] In response to this they were approached by
a firm, Hudson Bay Capital Management, who
[128:29] presented them with a deal that was completely
insane.
[128:33] The deal is commonly referred to as “death
spiral financing” - and if Lucifer appeared
[128:38] alongside Hudson Bay at that moment and offered
Bed Bath an alternative deal, it’d be the
[128:43] same.
[128:44] These deals are the last resort, where the
investor will offer a shockingly small amount
[128:49] of capital up front, and in exchange they
get to decimate the stock price to whatever
[128:54] extent is necessary for them to earn their
return.
[128:58] A company signing a deal like this is the
unambiguous signal that they’ve exhausted
[129:03] every alternative.
[129:05] The basic arrangement of the deal is that
Hudson gets preferred convertible shares from
[129:09] Bed Bath for a lump sum of money, then these
preferred shares can be converted into common
[129:14] shares that Hudson can immediately sell on
the open market, with the number of shares
[129:18] generated based on the lump sum divided by
the recent average value of a share with a
[129:23] sweet discount just to make sure that Hudson
always has a profit margin.
[129:28] These are called “death spiral financing”
because they’re a recipe for massive share
[129:32] dilution.
[129:33] The financer buys preferred shares for a fixed
sum, converts those into a variable number
[129:37] of shares, and then dumps those shares on
to market, almost certainly lowering the share
[129:42] price via dilution alone if not compounding
negative sentiment and massacred investor
[129:47] confidence.
[129:48] The share price going down means that the
next preferred share they convert will convert
[129:53] into even more common shares, which will further
lower the price, which will convert the next
[129:58] block into even more shares, and over and
over.
[130:02] In a mere six and a half weeks Hudson more
than quadrupled the number of Bed Bath and
[130:07] Beyond shares in existence.
[130:09] Apes’ diamond-handed buy-at-any-cost irrationality,
their stubbornness, the very thing that Apes
[130:15] tout as their secret weapon against the hedgies,
is the exact thing Hudson was counting on
[130:21] to turn their profit.
[130:23] The grim irony that Apes are so predictably
irrational in their made up war against hedge
[130:29] funds and short sellers that it leaves them
open to all manner of unique and awful exploitation
[130:36] at the hands of hedge funds and short sellers,
the irony is so deep you could drown in it.
[130:42] The capital Hudson Bay offered was used to
pay down debt, there was nothing left to fix
[130:46] any of the structural problems with the business,
so the only thing the deal bought them was
[130:50] time.
[130:51] The Hudson Bay deal was terminated after less
than two months, as Bed Bath’s stock price
[130:56] fell under a dollar and showed no signs of
recovery.
[130:59] And through this, the whole time, Apes denied
that dilution was happening, denied that it
[131:04] was the cause of the decline in the share
price, denied that Hudson Bay Capital was
[131:08] the buyer, mocked the Wall Street Journal’s
use of inside sources “familiar with the
[131:13] matter”, and denied that Bed Bath and Beyond
was even in the precarious position that Bed
[131:17] Bath was actively warning them of.
[131:20] “We need the proceeds from the Transactions
to pay our outstanding obligations under our
[131:25] Credit Facilities and Senior Notes and to
operate our business, and we expect that we
[131:30] will likely file for bankruptcy protection
if the Transactions are not consummated.
[131:34] The issuance of the securities in this offering
will significantly dilute the ownership interest
[131:40] of the existing holders of our common stock
[131:43] Trading in our securities is highly speculative
and poses substantial risks to investors.”
[131:48] This is the context in which Heat Lamp is
produced.
[131:51] A conspiracy whose every element is reverse-engineered
to offer a semblance of hope.
[131:56] Critically in-curious, Heat Lamp is baseless
speculation that squares the circle and explains
[132:01] away the continued failure to Apes to crash
the global economy after two full years.
[132:06] Okay, so, so get this.
[132:09] What if.
[132:10] What if we assume ComputerShare has an algorithm
that manages their operational efficiency,
[132:17] and this algorithm works like a heat lamp
in a diner?
[132:22] The algorithm moves shares into the DTCC in
anticipation of imminent transactions.
[132:27] So, what Wall Street is doing is rolling up
a bus full of people into the parking lot.
[132:31] The staff start making hamburgers and putting
them under the heat lamp.
[132:35] But wouldn’t you know, the customers are
all vegetarians, and I guess aren’t hungry.
[132:40] So now the DTCC can borrow the hamburgers
and use them to create synthetic hamburgers
[132:46] which can be used to cover Citadel’s illegal
hamburger sales and then return the counterfeit
[132:51] hamburgers to the diner as if they were the
originals.
[132:55] The perfect crime.
[132:57] But this wasn’t the part of Heat Lamp that
made it stick.
[133:00] That hamburger metaphor was buried inside
a 5,000 word rant so incoherent that we can’t
[133:07] even pull any usable soundbites, it’s just
walls of nonsense.
[133:11] The author’s prior attempts at sharing this
“thesis” had been met with criticism and
[133:17] mockery, resulting in mods putting the threads
in the trash.
[133:19] So the core of Heat Lamp is this beautiful
story of self-actualisation, as the Ape learned
[133:25] that his ideas are important and deserve to
be read - no matter what anyone tells him.
[133:31] The bulk of Heat Lamp is scathing accusations
of “censorship through intimidation” by
[133:36] the mods - claiming that this banger of a
DD is being suppressed by the mods to protect
[133:42] the interests of ComputerShare, and therefore
the interests of the enemy.
[133:46] It’s full blown McCarthyism.
[133:48] And that rhetoric is what the Apes took from
Heat Lamp.
[133:52] The Ape influencers find themselves more and
more in the same dilemma as conservative YouTubers
[133:57] who nurtured fascist audiences.
[133:59] They need to play to the crowd or risk being
turned on.
[134:03] During the scripting of this video, Atobitt,
one of the key figures in the Ape community
[134:08] who you’ve been seeing constantly, deleted
his account in response to harassment brought
[134:14] on by expressing waiving faith in the ability
of Apes to defeat Ken Griffin.
[134:19] Atobitt, like so many other DD authors before
him, evolved into his final form.
[134:25] u/[deleted].
[134:27] The soap opera conspiracy twists and turns,
that’s the fun stuff.
[134:31] The really sinister element of all this is
that it’s not just socially engaging, it’s
[134:37] addictive.
[134:38] Ape forums are littered with statements and
sentiments that are stereotypical of gambling
[134:43] addicts.
[134:45] Apes are constantly talking about their plans
to buy more, how they wish they could afford
[134:49] more, how they can’t wait for their paycheque
so they can get more shares of Bed, Bath,
[134:54] and Beyond.
[134:55] They use contrarian sentiment to justify their
habit.
[134:58] The price goes down?
[135:00] Buy more.
[135:01] The price goes up?
[135:02] Buy more.
[135:03] Bad news?
[135:04] Buy more.
[135:05] Good news?
[135:06] Buy more.
[135:07] Thanks for the tasty dip.
[135:08] They suppress the price, I buy more out of
spite.
[135:10] They hide their habit from friends and family,
complain that partners try to limit how much
[135:14] GameStop they buy, and brag about going behind
their partners’ backs.
[135:18] They take money from friends and family while
talking up the “college degree worth of
[135:23] DD” they found on Reddit and pour it all
into this slate of poorly run companies that
[135:29] they believe have been elected as the candidates
for a mythological short squeeze.
[135:35] The entire idea of dollar-cost-averaging,
an actual investment strategy, has been warped
[135:40] into pure delusional cope of “averaging
down” as the stock price keeps plummeting.
[135:46] In their minds it’s a sure play, so of course
it makes sense to lower your cost basis and
[135:50] thus improve your return, but even then, within
the whole mythology of MOASS, if the stock
[135:55] is supposed to go to phone book numbers, then
it really doesn’t matter what your average
[136:00] was.
[136:01] It’s just an exercise in sunk costs, catching
a falling knife.
[136:05] “As for me, after holding from $350 to $40,
price drops only get me more excited.
[136:12] Every price drop is a discount and another
opportunity to buy.”
[136:16] The performative aspects are irony-poisoned
and insincere in a genuinely sickening way.
[136:21] A lot of the Ape lore is easily discarded
by their podcasters and DD authors because
[136:26] they ultimately know it’s not true.
[136:29] The hype, the tinfoil, the Cohencidences,
the wife-changing money, the lambos, these
[136:35] are the social performances needed to maintain
the veneer wrapped around the pathetic core
[136:40] of a gambling addiction whose only hope for
recovery is recruitment.
[136:44] It’s the justification and distancing, the
things that need to be true in order for the
[136:49] vast amounts of time, energy, and money dumped
into these shares to not be a waste, but Apes
[136:55] will still always keep one foot grounded where
they can say “oh, of course Teddy Day wasn’t
[137:02] going to happen!
[137:03] That was just hype!
[137:04] For fun!”
[137:06] The thing that January 2021 demonstrated was
that the price can go to the moon for no coherent,
[137:13] sensible, sane reason beyond a bunch of people
on a forum willing it into existence by convincing
[137:19] enough other people to believe, and if it
happened once then maybe it can happen again.
[137:26] But that constant double-think, the constant
cognitive dissonance of hyping up knowingly
[137:31] fake ideas purely to maintain energy in a
failing stock play to put on an outward facing
[137:37] performance to lure in new participants because
if you don’t, if you flinch, if the irony
[137:43] armour cracks and you admit out loud that
you don’t actually believe, then it all
[137:48] falls apart, reality becomes true, and then
it definitely won’t happen again, that takes
[137:55] a toll.
[137:56] The illusion must be defended at all costs,
because the illusion is all that there is.
[138:12] [Sentimental music]
[138:20] On April 23, 2023, Bed, Bath, and Beyond filed
for chapter 11 bankruptcy.
[138:45] Despite the staggering dilution deal, the
company simply couldn’t raise enough capital
[138:49] to get ahead of its debts, most of which were
incurred in a stock buy-back program that
[138:53] only ended in late 2022, long after the start
of the company’s decline.
[138:58] Over the course of May and June they sold
off the company piecemeal, favourable lease
[139:02] obligations here, a building there, inventory,
shelves, desk chairs, computers, basically
[139:08] anything a price could be attached to was
sold off and the proceeds sent directly to
[139:12] their creditors.
[139:13] Apes, of course, willfully immune to reality
at this point, considered all of this to be
[139:18] bullish.
[139:19] This would be painful but necessary, but when
all was said and done even if MOASS never
[139:24] happened, Bed Bath would still pay off handsomely.
[139:28] This was founded on absolutely nothing, rooted
entirely in word games based on theories that
[139:33] the company failed to directly deny.
[139:36] The company itself had been warning them since
January that in the event of bankruptcy holders
[139:41] of the common shares would receive nothing.
[139:43] Even in Bed Bath’s initial bankruptcy petition
any sort of restructuring that would salvage
[139:45] current equity was simply off the table.
[139:46] Critics who predicted that the Hudson deal
would merely upgrade the company’s forced
[139:49] liquidation in chapter 7 up to a managed liquidation
in chapter 11 were right, and Apes were wrong.
[139:56] Literally nothing that Apes predicted came
true, because they aligned themselves into
[140:01] a movement that refused, categorically, to
accept reality as it exists.
[140:06] “Trading prices for our securities may bear
little or no relationship to the actual recovery,
[140:12] if any, by holders of our securities”
[140:15] Bankruptcy proceedings plodded along and the
mythological Ryan Cohen reverse-triangle-merger
[140:20] Teddy Icahn partnership NFT dividend reward
for loyal shareholders never emerged.
[140:25] In early June the deadline for the stalking
horse bid kept getting kicked back a few days
[140:30] at a time, from the 1st to the 8th to the
11th to the 13th.
[140:34] Since the stalking horse bid sets the tempo
for further liquidations, rumours in reality
[140:39] were that the bids submitted were all relatively
small grabs at specific assets rather than
[140:44] any move for the company itself and the company
wanted more time behind the scenes to try
[140:49] and rustle up a better offer.
[140:52] Rumours in the Ape universe were that the
offers were in fact so good that Bed Bath
[140:57] needed more time to properly evaluate the
true value of complicated share-for-share
[141:02] offerings of GameStop and Icahn Enterprises
L.P. for BBBY.
[141:07] Again, Icahn’s sole actual involvement in
all of this is that he let Ryan Cohen take
[141:14] a photo with him.
[141:16] The actual stalking horse bid, selected on
June 13th, was Overstock, a $900m company,
[141:22] offering $21.5 million for the company’s
name, logo, website, mobile app, and relevant
[141:28] databases.
[141:29] Chalk another W for the Wall Street Journal
and their sources familiar with the matter.
[141:34] Finally, September 29th, 2023, the company
formerly known as Bed Bath and Beyond “cancelled,
[141:39] released, and extinguished” all shares in
the company.
[141:42] Those intangible legal rights, the actual
thing shares represent, ceased to exist.
[141:48] And you might hope that that would be the
end of all of this, but, well, you know it
[141:54] isn’t.
[141:55] See, there’s always something to grasp on
to.
[141:58] The shares may be legally void, but it’ll
take years for every last broker on Earth
[142:03] to remove the worthless husks from Apes’
accounts because of boring reasons like record
[142:08] keeping laws and just low priority.
[142:12] So that’s years and years where an ever-dwindling
core of increasingly entrenched Bed Bath Apes
[142:17] can hold out hope that Ryan Cohen will swoop
in and give them absurdly valuable shares
[142:23] in a company that doesn’t even exist.
[142:25] The apocalypse is always just one more day
away.
[142:29] Apes are in a lot of ways the funhouse mirror
version of the stock market
[142:33] They’re not anti-Wall Street.
[142:35] They’re tsundere for Wall Street.
[142:36] They want to be scrappy, important, savvy
underdog traders who saw an opportunity and
[142:42] seized it.
[142:43] They quote The Wolf of Wall Street and The
Big Short because that’s who they see themselves
[142:47] as.
[142:48] Sure, they say they hate Wall Street, but
then they spend all their free time obsessing
[142:53] over funnelling more and more of their money
into the stock market.
[142:58] There’s a desire, an instinct, to try and
tease Apes apart from the rest of the stock
[143:03] market, to invalidate their approach as a
perversion of the market, if not something
[143:07] entirely separate.
[143:09] It can be said that the Apes aren’t engaging
with stocks as an intangible signifier of
[143:15] a claim to some percent of the company, but
as a wholly distinct thing, an entirely abstract
[143:21] vessel of value.
[143:24] Given the overlap between crypto apes and
memestock apes, whether it’s GameStop or
[143:28] DogeCoin, it’s really the same behaviour.
[143:31] An accurate criticism of the Ape system is
that this behaviour entirely decouples the
[143:35] price of the shares from the value of the
company, to the point that companies like
[143:39] Bed Bath & Beyond are saying as much in their
filings.
[143:43] The Ape counter-criticism is that this is
just how the stock market works, that they’re
[143:48] just doing what the big players do.
[143:50] And this is a compelling conflict of ideas,
because it’s wrong, but not entirely wrong.
[143:56] There is an argument to be made that in one
sense all stocks are meme stocks, that narrative
[144:02] and story are the driving forces of the stock
market, that talk of fundamentals is all lip
[144:09] service, that fundamentals only matter insofar
as they can be woven into the story.
[144:15] After all, the whole exercise is a game of
trying to predict the future, trying to price-in
[144:19] things that haven’t happened, but you believe
are going to, and that is, really, just complicated
[144:25] storytelling.
[144:26] Both groups are telling a story and just sort
of lightly gesturing at something external
[144:31] to the narrative that justifies its conclusions,
in that regard Apes are, in fact, a reflection
[144:37] of the system.
[144:38] Really the only major difference is that the
things they are gesturing towards are not
[144:41] merely wishful thinking based on suggestive
data, but entirely confabulated nonsense.
[144:48] Nothing in Ape psychology is new: addiction
to gambling, the pressure of social control,
[144:53] we are all vulnerable to these in some degree,
but when you get deep into these places it
[144:59] takes on whole new forms.
[145:01] Apes are, as a result of their conflict with
reality, particularly vulnerable to being
[145:05] further targeted by confidence men and other
grifters.
[145:09] Some of them grift the Apes for low-stakes
fame and prestige, some to wash their pet
[145:13] theories and gain support for their political
policies, and some for plain old hard cash.
[145:18] It can be difficult to have empathy for Apes
because, frankly, a lot of them suck.
[145:23] They are conspiratorially minded and, thus,
prone to all sorts of terrible beliefs, many
[145:28] of which dovetail into express antisemitism,
making them ripe for recruitment into even
[145:33] mere extreme ideologies.
[145:35] As addicts they regularly make terrible decisions
that hurt others.
[145:39] They talk often about stealing from their
spouses, or at least hiding their addictions
[145:43] as they spend all the money in the shared
account.
[145:45] Many are profoundly unhappy in their relationships,
joking through gritted teeth about "wife-changing"
[145:51] money and how much they resent their partners.
[145:54] Of course it's easy to see how that resentment
might form.
[145:58] They lie, they steal, they recruit relentlessly,
and they insist that others simply fail to
[146:02] recognize their brilliance.
[146:04] They stress every relationship they are involved
in and routinely hurt their families with
[146:09] their reckless gambling; it’s no mystery
why the wife isn’t too happy with them these
[146:15] days.
[146:16] These groups and movements appeal to entitled
personalities, and the entire structure of
[146:19] their psychology and socialization is addictive
and retentive.
[146:24] The narrative of participation flatters them,
it makes them savvy, important forward-thinking
[146:29] investors who are beating the system at its
own game.
[146:31] They cannot leave, quit, or even mentally
check out because then they’ll miss the
[146:36] window of the next big play.
[146:39] When the Due Diligence and Quantitative Theory
are made up out of mythological nothingness
[146:43] it’s easy, even logical, for the upsides
to be so overwhelmingly valuable that any
[146:50] behaviour, no matter how craven or irrational,
becomes permissible.
[146:54] It’s tempting to see apes in their full
performative hubris bragging about “buying
[147:00] the dip” and thanking Ken for “the discount”
and think
[147:03] “you know what, they brought this on themselves.”
[147:06] But no one deserves to be exploited like this.
[147:12] No one deserves to get shaken down by grifters
to the point that they have no other choice
[147:14] but to become grifters themselves and shake
down everyone else around them.
[147:18] No one deserves to have their ego and security
ground down to the point that there’s no
[147:23] escape, no reason to step back and admit defeat,
no reason to reflect.
[147:29] Ironically the biggest winners in all of this
have been hedge funds.
[147:33] Sure, Keith and a few others made bank off
the GameStop run, but half of them gambled
[147:38] their gains away.
[147:39] Hedge funds on the other hand have been able
to play against Apes and their predictable
[147:44] irrationality.
[147:45] Melvin ate dirt in '21 and closed up shop
in '22, but Citadel started using Wall Street
[147:51] Bets as a recruiting ground and Hudson Bay
made a tidy profit by assuming that Apes wouldn't
[147:56] just buy and hold through massive dilution
but would outright thank them for the tasty dip.
[148:03] It is, as a phenomenon, an incredibly fraught
subject for regulators because, just, how
[148:08] do you respond to this?
[148:10] Setting aside bigger, broader questions about
what markets even should be, how do you respond
[148:16] in the immediate term to a group of investors
with enough collective inertia to move prices
[148:23] but a fundamentally flawed understanding of
what they’re even doing?
[148:28] The grim irony of Ape culture is that it has
the operative mechanisms of a gambling addiction
[148:33] without actually gambling.
[148:35] See, if it were a gamble, if they were truly
betting on something, then there would be
[148:39] some actual odds of winning.
[148:42] Apes like to talk about “high risk and high
reward” as a coping mechanism as the mismanaged
[148:47] companies they’re betting on continue to
slide out of business, but all framing devices
[148:52] like that assume that the thing you’re betting
on can actually happen.
[148:57] The weakest team in the league can, theoretically,
pull out a dark horse run and take the cup.
[149:04] That’s a high risk, high reward bet.
[149:06] Apes, on the other hand, with their theories
of MOASS, with their Cohencidences and Icahn
[149:12] secret reverse triangle mergers, with their
fundamental misunderstanding of how a short
[149:17] sale even works, they’re sitting around
a blackjack table convincing each other that
[149:21] there’s a secret rule, that if you hit 31
then the dealer has to give you their entire
[149:26] tray.
[149:27] So hit me.
[149:31] Hit me.
[149:33] Hit me.
[149:35] Hit me.
[149:38] And a cold wind is blowin’ and the children
freeze and die all all right.
[150:08] For the record, I have read the entire United
States Bankruptcy Code, written by the 95th
[150:13] American Congress, November 6, 1978.
[150:16] It has given me an incredible understanding
on how to factually interpret information
[150:21] filed on Kroll, given understanding to previously-omitted
information that I disregarded in the past
[150:27] and I will be referencing United States Law
to factually prove that Ryan Cohen remains
[150:33] involved with this company.
[150:35] Plus we clearly have figured out the game
these people are playing and thave their balls
[150:40] in a vice.
[150:41] If it’s not this play we move to the next.
[150:44] The honey hole has been exposed.
[150:46] It feels like we’re driving backwards really
fast at a wall, and just before we hit it
[150:52] the secret level in Ready Player One is going
to open up and let us pass by the entire race
[150:57] and win.
[150:58] The fact that so many shills spend so much
of their time endlessly replying to us, yelling
[151:03] at us to explain what assets are left, how
we’re soon going to zero, I’ve never seen
[151:09] so many humans spend so much time on something
that doesn’t concern them, and it’s quite
[151:15] bullish.
[151:16] The short hedge funds biggest mistakes in
my opinion is they tried to burn this company
[151:20] to the ground which they succeeded but that’s
been a known move all along by an activist
[151:26] investor “know your enemy”, now they are
trapped in bankruptcy court.
[151:31] So now Apes can buy really low and the upside
is so high.
[151:36] If you like this prediction, I also have a
free NFT giveaway.