If you haven’t been paying attention to the massive battle between billionaires and greedy hedge funds, please read this.
Basically, hedge funds bet against GameStop (GME) and the goal was to drive down the stock price in an effort to possibly buy more stocks of the company at a very low price, thus screwing over individual investors and possibly the company itself. Well, Reddit got ahold of the info that they were going to do a short sale and they mobilized.
Here’s the outcome (per link above):
One of the biggest GameStop short seller “victims” is Melvin Capital, a hedge fund that started the year with $12.5 billion in AUM and lost almost 30% through Friday last week, according to The Wall Street Journal.2 It announced an emergency infusion of $2.75 billion from fellow hedge funds Citadel and Point72 on Jan. 25, and told CNBC today that it closed out its short position in GameStop on Tuesday afternoon.
That’s a lot of $$$ lost and shows what can happen when folks unite to fight greed. So how does this tie in to guns? Well, that‘s partially how Everytown’s largest financial backer, Mike Bloomberg, makes money and in turn, that money is used to fund Everytown’s activity. Here’s a brief example that’s relative to Gamestop:
Mike’s investments are not too easy to find, but the Intercept published an article that shined some light on them in 2020:
The Intercept has identified a number of firms that have been backed by Bloomberg over the years. The billionaire has not only invested his money in the oil and gas, insurance, and consumer finance sectors, but has also backed Sycamore Partners, a controversial private-equity firm known for buying out and downsizing retailers.
So, Mike invests in a group (Sycamore Partners) that is “controversial“ and they make money off of failing businesses. Well, guess who was recently interested in acquiring GameStop?
Video game and electronics retailer GameStop Corp is holding talks with private equity firms about a potential transaction after receiving buyout interest, people familiar with the matter said on Monday.
Sycamore Partners is one of the private equity firms that has expressed interest in GameStop, one of the people said.
There is no guarantee the talks will result in GameStop deciding to sell itself, the people cautioned.
GameStop and Sycamore declined to comment.
GameStop shares surged 12 percent Friday on a report from the Wall Street Journal that a deal for the struggling retailer could come as soon as mid-February.
Private equity firms interested in buying GameStop include Sycamore Partners and Apollo Global Management, people familiar with the matter told the Journal.
In the end, the deal didn’t go through, but it serves as an example on how this all works. Mike Bloomberg’s pal Bill Ackman knows all about it, as something similar happened to him:
The GameStop story is really just an accelerated version of these historical events. And it bears a close resemblance to the same thing that happened a few years ago when the billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman decided to short the stock—betting that it would fall—of Herbalife, the publicly traded weight-loss supplement distributor. Ackman announced that he had bet around $1 billion that Herbalife would collapse because he believed it was a corrupt pyramid scheme that preyed on defenseless immigrants who didn’t know better. At first Ackman’s bet seemed to be paying off. He is a bit of a market guru, and plenty of people followed his lead. They sold their Herbalife stock, and the stock fell. It looked like Ackman had made several hundred million dollars of profit, on paper.
Then two other billionaire hedge fund managers—Carl Icahn and Dan Loeb—decided to try to have some fun, and make money, at Ackman’s expense. They decided to buy hundreds of millions of dollars of Herbalife stock to squeeze him. Because the price of a stock is, in theory, nothing more than a function of supply and demand, by buying so much Herbalife stock, Icahn and Loeb were driving its price up. Ackman’s paper gains turned into paper losses. The fundamentals of the Herbalife business almost didn’t matter anymore. All that mattered were the forces pressing down on its stock. Soon enough Loeb took his gains and exited. Icahn stuck with it—he and Ackman had a blood feud at that point, some of which played out on CNBC for all to see—and kept buying, driving the Herbalife stock further up. He was Herbalife’s biggest shareholder and ended up with five board seats. Some five years after Ackman began his short bet, he threw in the towel, perfecting a loss of nearly $1 billion. Eventually, Icahn mostly sold out of Herbalife too, with a huge gain. Icahn had taught Ackman a valuable lesson. (Ackman says now he no longer shorts individual stocks. He did short the market in early 2020 and made around $2.6 billion in profit in three weeks when it collapsed that March, before recovering).
You see, people make money off of failing businesses at the expense of the companies and private “little guy” investors. Possible naked shorts, like what was going to happen to GameStop until an army of “autists“ got involved and exposed the hell out of it, serves no purpose other than make the rich richer at the expanse of the average investor. Many hedge funds stuff the pockets of their billionaire investors with the spoils, which part of the money is used to fund gun control organizations (which if done right can also be used as a tax write-off) and also gun grabbing politicians. This past election cycle, President Biden’s top donors were hedge fund managers.
A New Revolution?
We have entered a new era in fighting the wealthy elites who wish to push their politics on us. Keep an eye on these hedge funds and who runs them. You might be able to enlist in the fight by tossing a few bucks at it and while doing so, hurting the big money that tries to take our rights away. After all, if they try to short these stocks for no other reason than greed and the short fails, they’re going to be possibly on the hook to buy the stocks at the new price per share. Always remember though, the market is like a casino: never invest more in stocks than you’re willing to lose.
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