An overview of opinions and observations for the month.
Sunday, 31 January 2021
Saturday, 30 January 2021
GME WSB DFV 💎🙌🦍🚀
What a time to be alive. What a difference a week makes. My last post spoke about how depressingly mundane life has been under lockdown. Then GME happened.
Reddit shitposter autists united to take on Hedge Fund billionaires in all out war over short stocks of GameStop. A week ago I knew nothing about trading or investing. Now I'm engrossed. It's much more entertaining watching GME stock price graphs than Covid infection graphs.
The long and short of it is this. A hedge fund called Melvin Capital bet against GameStop. They borrowed shares they didn't own, sold them to retail traders (every day folk) with the intention of buying them back for cheaper when their value fell lower. Then they could return them to the lender, and net a nice bit of profit from the difference. But wait. What if the retail traders refused to sell them back?
Well, ponder no longer. We are seeing it unfold right in front of our eyes. The retail traders liaised on Reddit and Discord, and decided to "stick it to the man" by holding onto the shares. This leaves Melvin Capital in deep shit when the time comes to return the borrowed shares... because they don't have them. As demand rises for the shares, the value increases making it even more painful for Melvin to buy them back. Currently the number floating around is that it's costing Mevlin around $19,000,000,000, and making them insolvent. This news inspires the retail traders to hold even tighter, despite the astronomical increase in the value of their shares which would motivate people with "paper hands" to sell whilst they can to make a fast buck. It seems a large proportion of the traders have "diamond hands" which means they're riding the meme stock to it's conclusion. Many of them are accepting they're going to take personal losses, but they consider it worthwhile if they bleed out a few hedge fund billionaires along the way.
What is more interesting is that trading apps such as Robinhood (RH) started to prevent the purchase of GME stock through it's platform. This rallied the retail traders even harder with accusations that RH was enacting market manipulation to intentionally prevent them from continuing their mission to bleed out the rich. The allegation continues that RH was allowing hedge funds to trade, but limited retail traders to only being able to sell GME so that the hedge funds could recuperate some of their missing shares leading to many funny memes, along with much justified anger. Even politicians got involved in the judgement.
To put the level of leverage into perspective, Reddit user DeepFuckingValue is making an absolute killing from the shares on paper.
It's interesting watching this shitshow unfold, and I even tried to get in on the action myself however FreeTrade failed to verify my identity (because I make myself difficult to find) meaning my account is stuck in limbo, possibly until this is all concluded.
So I will sit at the sideline, and watch for the short squeeze, hoping to see many of the /WallStreetBets guys fly their rockets into the sun for the tendies. Hold boys with those diamond hands, apes stronk together.
Because you know as well as I do; we like this stock.
Tuesday, 26 January 2021
Carpe Next Year... Maybe?
What is there to say so far for 2021? Not much to be fair. January is almost over already and nothing has happened.
Lockdown continues to keep us all handcuffed and chained to a proverbial radiator. The global vaccine efforts have ramped up significantly, but the advice is that there is no evidence it reduces hospitalisations, deaths or forward transmission, so I remain bewildered about what the point of it even is? Cases have been falling for three weeks and deaths are just now leveling off. I cannot stand much more of this stop/go, open/close shithousery. I want to live my life, not merely "exist".
Given that the risk of this virus is so negligible for my age bracket, I'm unlikely to bother being vaccinated either since there have been no long term studies into the potential side effects (how could there be when the vaccine was produced within 10 months?). The idea of having experimental mRNA injected into me (the first such type of vaccine) in response to a virus that has a high survival rate seems absurd. Most people I know are like lemmings off a cliff, naively believing that if they just "take their damn medicine", they can have their lives back. It's pitiful; life as we know it will never return because the power creep is already apparent. Increased surveillance and removal of our civil liberties, enforced by a mob handed police force.
2021 already looks bleak. I'm admittedly becoming so numb to it all; completely desensitised to the fear porn statistics and the reality that all my plans for the future are on indefinite pause whilst the economy collapses around me. Is this what being on anti-depressants feels like? Just complete neutral. No joy. No misery. Just a perpetual state of "okay". Bland. Mundane. Emotionless. Nothing to look forward to. Nothing to be optimistic about. Go to work and go to sleep. Repeat. Ad infinitum.
I remember when people used to say "Carpe Diem". These days, "seizing the day" is a distant memory. Instead it has become "Carpe Next Year... Maybe?"
Wednesday, 6 January 2021
2021 a.k.a. 2020 v.2.0
What better way to kick off the year than by reliving the highlights of 2020 with another strict, handcuffing of liberties under the new buzzword "Lockdown".
Within just a few short days, after everyone had breathed a sigh of relief at seeing the back of what will be remembered as The Worst Year Of Our Lives, the UK Government are right back on the horse, hammering down morale with ham-fisted sledgehammer policies as they plunge the entire country back into lockdown. I pray to our Covid overlords that this doesn't become Groundhog Year.
The new "mutant strain" of Covid-19 has allegedly been running rampant over UK, despite the existing Tiered restrictions, and the associated regulations that accompany it. The latest iteration of lockdown resembles the original one from back at the outset of this debacle; namely you must STAY AT HOME unless it's unavoidable. You can exercise outside once per day, alone. You can go to the shop for essential rations. You can go out to collect medication. And you can still go to work assuming you are lucky enough to still have a job and are considered a keyworker. Otherwise, sit at home losing money, precious days of life, and your sanity until the Government decide otherwise. And as it stands, there is no end date. It's just left open ended, at their mercy.
Education is back in suspended animation with substandard teaching returning in an online format, tutored by beleaguered parents who are not trained teachers. If teaching kids is that simple that it can be offloaded onto parents effortlessly, why do teachers even need to get qualifications for it, and why is it illegal to keep your child off school without good reason? Another round of examinations have been cancelled, and another term of University education disrupted (though the students must still pay for it). Again, with the way the country is headed, there wouldn't be any jobs recruiting anyhow.
Economically the country continues it's swan dive at breakneck speed. Rishi Sunak has announced another raft of concessions and support for flailing businesses and employees in the form of grants and furlough. Any of the population who are still awake are again questioning where all this funding is magically being conjured from (heads up, it's being written on IOU's that our taxes will be paying back in the coming years). Economic forecasts are predicting the deficit for this financial year could hit £450bn. To quantify that for you, it's: 450,000,000,000.00 which is roughly £6,700 per person in the UK. Oh well, those lot in their ivory tower don't care, because it won't be them paying it back.
We are told that once the miraculous vaccine has been administered we can be
And as for the magical vaccine? Pfizer & BNT must think their Christmases have all come at once, along with AstraZeneca; as it stands currently they have been absolved of all liability, allowed to rush the vaccine through without any long term studies into adverse events, and have not even completed full term trials yet - and here we are, injecting these chemical compounds into the elderly and vulnerable. What a time to be alive. Well. If this counts as life at least.
I am so fatigued with Covid, but I guess as James Buckley summed it up best;
"I'd rather be sick of Covid, than sick with Covid."
I have added a lockdown-sceptic themed design (at the top of this post) to my newly launched Redbubble shop that is available on a wide range of products. Feel free to pop over and check it out - any purchases would help greatly!
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