A stock is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it at a particular moment in time. Sadly, this is a lesson that many GameStop traders are learning right now. Just a few days ago, GameStop had surged above $300 a share and a lot of investors that had gotten caught up in the frenzy thought that they were suddenly rich. But you only make money in the stock market when you get out. Those that sold at the peak of the bubble were extremely fortunate, but most GameStop investors are determined to hold on to the bitter end, and the end will definitely be quite bitter indeed.
I think that it is great that a horde of retail investors want to punish the short sellers, but GameStop is definitely not a long-term investment.
In fact, the fair value for a share of GameStop stock is probably less than a dollar.
So it was quite bizarre that “the Reddit army” was able to push the price of the stock to more than $300 a share. Ultimately, any really determined group of investors can temporarily pump up the price of any stock, but in order for it to stay elevated there must be buyers that are willing to purchase the stock at that level day after day.
Everyone knew that GameStop was going to come back down, and that has happened in dramatic fashion during the last two trading sessions…
Shares of GameStop sank further on Tuesday, with shares of the volatile retail-trader favorite sliding 60% to finish at $90 per share.
The tumble follows a more than 30% drop during the regular market session Monday after finishing at $325 per share on Friday. That brings the two-day loss to 72%.
For the sake of GameStop investors, I hope that the stock bounces back a bit on Wednesday, but it is just a matter of time before it returns to a level that is much closer to fair value.
Some investors such as Dave Portnoy got really excited about what Reddit traders were trying to do, and he got in at the very top of the bubble. Now that several of those stocks have cratered, Portnoy has lost approximately 700,000 dollars…
After the bell, Portnoy provided an update on his AMC, NOC, and NAKD positions. He said he bought them at the “absolute high” and sold them at the “exact bottom.” In total, he said losses amounted to $700k, something we noted earlier.
That has got to hurt.
Others have also seen the value of their stock holdings drop in precipitous fashion.
For example, Keith Gill saw the value of his holdings in GameStop drop by 13 million dollars on Tuesday alone…
Keith Gill — who goes by DeepF——Value on Reddit and Roaring Kitty on YouTube — says he suffered a loss north of $13 million on Tuesday alone from his GameStop bet, but he’s still not selling.
He’s the man who helped inspire the epic short squeeze in GameStop last week that sent shockwaves through Wall Street. Through YouTube videos and Reddit posts, Gill attracted an army of day traders who cheered each other on and piled into the brick-and-mortar video game stock and call options, creating a massive short squeeze as the shares jumped 400% last week alone.
I know that he says that he is doing this to make a point, but I have a feeling that someday he is going to look back and kick himself for not selling when he had the chance.
Golden opportunities come along very rarely in life for most people, and when they do it is important to take advantage of them.
Of course one of the big reasons why GameStop crashed was because Robinhood had restricted trading in that stock, and now that the stock has crashed Robinhood is rolling back the limitations…
Robinhood on Tuesday rolled back more of its trading limitations, now allowing clients to buy up to 100 shares of GameStop.
GameStop climbed off the lows as the Robinhood changes were announced.
Speaking of Robinhood, this whole episode has exposed the fact that they were never actually “looking out for the little guy” at all. The following comes from Senator Josh Hawley…
Enter Robinhood—as in, steal from the rich. Robinhood was the trading platform for the little guy. No fees, no hassle. It was Big Tech, once again, allegedly democratizing another sphere of American life captured by elite control. But like the tech platforms, Robinhood wasn’t really about its users. Its bread was buttered by selling the data on users’ trades to the big players—the elite guys, like Citadel—to give them inside tips on where retail investors were sending their money. And the Citadel guys, in turn, pay off their regulators—like treasury secretary Janet Yellen—in their years away from government for favors when they’re back in power.
What a crooked system we have, but our politicians will never have enough courage to actually try to change it.
And of course the so-called “guardians of democracy” in the mainstream media relentlessly defend our extremely corrupt system.
Sadly, it is just a matter of time before the entire house of cards comes crashing down for good.
The talking heads on television are preaching to us about the dangers of “the GameStop bubble”, but the truth is that our entire stock market has become one gigantic bubble.
If the market were to drop by 50 percent tomorrow, it would still be way overvalued.
Price to earnings ratios always return to their historical averages eventually, and it will be no different in our case.
Of course we should hope that the eventual crash can be put off for as long as possible, because the collapse of the stock bubble will severely hurt millions of people financially.
But as sure as you are reading this, it will happen.
So I really don’t want to hear any more babbling from the sanctimonious idiots in the financial community that are trying to tell us that GameStop investors “had it coming”.
Yes, everyone could see that the GameStop saga was not going to end well, but everyone should also be able to see that things are not going to end well for the market as a whole.
If you can make some money in the short-term by playing the stock market, that is great.
But as our friends at Zero Hedge like to say, “on a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero”.
Experts are calling for President Joe Biden and his administration to appoint a task force led by a “reality czar” focused on dictating and mitigating the dissemination of certain types of information, and the New York Times is eating it up.
In an article published on Tuesday, one Times author made it his goal to seek out experts who could “help fix our truth-challenged information ecosystem” filled with “hoaxes, lies and collective delusions” created by people such as QAnon supporters, One America News watchers, and YouTube conspiracy theorists.
One of the solutions proposed by the professors and employees at anti-extremist activist organizations is for the Biden administration to take action following the deadly Jan. 6 mob riot at the U.S. Capitol to establish a “truth commission” to investigate the siege. Other experts, the author wrote, took it further, proposing that Biden and his team appoint a “reality czar,” a term that some pointed out is very similar to George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, to oversee a committee on the quest for general truth instead of just focusing on the riot.
“Several experts I spoke with recommended that the Biden administration put together a cross-agency task force to tackle disinformation and domestic extremism, which would be led by something like a ‘reality czar,’” the New York Times author wrote.
This ultimate-truth official who would work for the government, the author suggested, would be responsible for dictating and mitigating the spread of information in the United States and could engage with the ever-truth-wielding Silicon Valley giants such as Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple, and Google to implement new policies and evaluate which information should be disseminated.
“This task force could also meet regularly with tech platforms, and push for structural changes that could help those companies tackle their own extremism and misinformation problems,” the author suggested, completely ignoring the fact that these same Big Tech overlords already coordinated to censor and deplatform certain people, groups, and companies that they deemed “dangerous,” such as former President Donald Trump.
Involving these internet oligarchs in a government-led crackdown on “disinformation,” the author excitedly suggests, “could become the tip of the spear for the federal government’s response to the reality crisis.”
Collusion with Big Tech or the establishment of a government-controlled veritas, however, “could not bring back the millions of already radicalized Americans” by themselves, the Times writer warned. A federal intervention that spurs people to “community-based activities that could keep them engaged and occupied” and the creation of ads “targeting high-risk potential violent extremists with empathetic messages about mental health and mindfulness” might do the trick, though.
“Enact a ‘social stimulus,’ and fix people’s problems,” the Times subhead reads.
Just a day after President Biden huddled with 10 Republican senators to discuss a compromise COVID-19 relief package, Senate Democrats advanced a budget resolution designed to pass the legislation without them as the White House signaled it would not back down from its desired $1.9 trillion price tag.
“It was civil. It was constructive,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said of the bipartisan meeting at Tuesday’s press briefing. “This is how democracy is supposed to work.” She then expressed support for using the reconciliation process, which would allow Senate Democrats to move the package without Republican defections — with the help of Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote.
It was also a stark illustration of the tensions between Biden’s talk of unity and his commitment to delivering a Democratic legislative agenda with his party in narrow control of both houses of Congress, befitting both the strategy that won him the White House and his decades trying to balance Capitol Hill deal-making with being a party loyalist before that.
To win the presidency, Biden assembled an electoral coalition that stretched from centrist suburbanites who frequently voted Republican before former President Donald Trump won in 2016 all the way to the hard Left typified by Bernie Sanders, the socialist who now chairs the Senate Budget Committee, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the young Democratic congresswoman from New York who leads the “Squad.”Recommended For You The COVID-19 restrictions in every state
It worked.
Biden was elected because he did better than Hillary Clinton in turning out Sanders voters and other elements of the liberal base. He returned Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin to the Democratic column and flipped Arizona and Georgia by making inroads among white, college-educated voters in the suburbs.
But it set up the possibility he would disappoint one group of supporters or the other — and that choice may have come earlier in the Biden administration than expected.
Sanders vowed to “make sure that Biden becomes the most progressive president since FDR.” But former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a Republican who got more speaking time at last year’s Democratic convention than Ocasio-Cortez, told jittery voters who worried that Biden “may turn sharp left and leave them behind” that their concerns were unfounded. “I don’t believe that,” Kasich said. “I know the measure of the man. Reasonable. Faithful. Respectful. And no one pushes Joe around.”
How that dilemma applies to the coronavirus spending package was made clear by Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat. “I think the Republican offer is sincere, but Biden and Republicans have VERY different ideas for how we address this crisis and voters very deliberately chose Biden’s agenda,” Murphy tweeted on Monday. “Some compromise is always warranted, but we have an obligation to see the voters’ intent through.”
That doesn’t mean Biden might not prefer legislation be passed on a bipartisan basis. “President Biden’s years in the Senate have conditioned him more than other presidents towards engagement with Congress,” said Kevin Madden, a political strategist who has advised GOP candidates. “The first meeting was a positive sign, and it was long enough and substantive enough that it went beyond just the pageantry or optics of bipartisanship. So many tests still remain, though. For bipartisanship to really work, meetings like these have to be standard operating procedure. We should have so many of them that they’re actually not news.”
Democrats know Biden’s success hinges on how well he is seen as dealing with the virus and its accompanying economic devastation. “In the last resort, voters will judge the new president more on results than rhetoric,” said Democratic strategist Brad Bannon. “To quash the pandemic and fix the economy, he must go big. If that means alienating Republicans to get the nation back on its feet, he is willing to accept the situation.”
Even without Republicans, Democratic coalition management hasn’t always been easy. Sen. Joe Manchin, a centrist Democrat from West Virginia, took issue with Harris giving an interview with a local television station in his state to tout the COVID-19 package, about which Manchin has some misgivings, without giving him a heads-up. “We’re going to try to find a bipartisan pathway forward, but we need to work together,” he told a Huntington, West Virginia, news channel. “That’s not working together.”
“Not only is he a key partner to the president and to the White House on this package, but on his agenda,” Psaki said of Manchin by way of cleanup in Monday’s press briefing. “We will remain in close touch with him.”
In eight years as vice president, Biden was often former President Barack Obama’s point man for working with congressional Republicans due to relationships formed during 36 years in the Senate. But the Obama years were short on successful bipartisan compromises, as Obamacare and the 2009 stimulus package were passed on largely party-line votes.
Democrats nevertheless sense some momentum. “Early polling shows that almost all Democrats and most independents support his aggressive executive orders even though Republicans disapprove,” Bannon said. “As long as Biden can keep the support of independents, he will enjoy more unity than Donald Trump did.”
The false narrative branding the GOP as the party of sedition will, if it succeeds, be a 21st century ‘bloody shirt’ that will determine the future of American politics.
The second impeachment trial of Donald Trump will begin next week. But there’s more at stake in the proceedings than Trump’s legacy.
The overwhelming majority of Republicans are determined to resist impeachment regardless of their personal feelings about Trump. Perhaps some still think a conviction would be worth it if it would definitively end his political career. But even they may understand that it would be political malpractice and a breach of faith with their voters to join with the Democrats seeking Trump’s scalp.
But Trump’s future is not what is really at stake in the debate about the events of Jan. 6. As disagreeable and criminal the behavior of the few who made it inside the Capital that day was and as imperfect as Trump is, like any other human, the point of impeachment isn’t wholly about punishing him or even whether it would be legally possible for him to run again for president in 2024. It is the future of the entire Republican Party that is currently up for grabs.
As their choice of language, the broad scope of their accusations, and the measures beyond impeachment that they are considering as a response indicate, Democrats have more ambitious goals than further shaming or disqualifying Trump from a future presidential run. The rhetorical inflation of a dangerous riot by a mob to a full-blown “insurrection” is more than political hyperbole.
By retroactively transforming the riot at the Capitol into an armed rebellion conducted by white supremacists and then linking it to not just Trump but to everyone who attended his Jan. 6 rally, supported his questioning of the 2020 election results or even those who voted for him, the goal to the exercise is more far-reaching than most GOP officeholders still seem to understand.
What Trump’s opponents have done is to launch a campaign that seeks to treat the “insurrection” as not just the fitting culmination of the Trump administration but the prism through which to view the Republican Party as disloyal, authoritarian, and violent. By this means, all those members of the House and the Senate who voted to challenge the Electoral College results can be labeled as accessories to insurrection. By painting with such a broad brush, the same can also be retroactively applied to those who raised questions about the election results even if they opposed the Jan. 6 challenge in Congress.
The conservative focus on Big Tech censorship and mainstream media bias in the wake of Jan. 6 is at least in part a recognition of the stakes involved in the current debate. The silencing of Trump and others on the right by Twitter, the deplatforming of Parler, and the increasing calls for “deprogramming” of Republicans as well as for driving Fox News off the air are all ominous. So too are Democratic attempts to use the riot to justify a vast expansion of efforts to spy on American citizens, which seems aimed at discrediting dissent with a broad brush of domestic terrorism.
Inflating the events of Jan. 6 into an insurrection involves transforming the few hundred rioters into a full-fledged domestic terrorism conspiracy even if there’s little evidence to back up that charge. Hence, the effort to claim, as The New York Times recently asserted, that Trump and the Republicans wrongly focused attention on the threat from Antifa and the violence committed in the name of the Black Lives Matter movement rather than on the supposedly more serious white supremacist threat.
Given the far greater toll of injuries and damage done during hundreds of BLM riots when compared to the one impulsive charge at the Capitol, this allegation falls flat. Yet by associating Republicans with terrorism, the claim still does the needed damage to Democrats’ opponents.
But what many are missing is that if the defining issue of American politics becomes a defense of democracy against Trumpist insurrection, that, rather than fears about demography or even Internet censorship, may be the factor that will lock Republicans into a permanent minority position that will determine the outcome in 2024 and beyond.
Democrats know they can’t count on running against Trump or COVID (with a candidate in hiding and thus protected from gaffes) in the future. But the transformation of the riot into an “insurrection” and skeptics about the election results into seditious rebels would allow them to do just that.
Seen in that light, the impeachment trial isn’t just an act of revenge. It is a vehicle for making the culture war about Trump a permanent feature of American politics.
The riot provided Trump’s opponents something that could justify the hysterical rhetoric they had been employing for four years. Democrats had been claiming that Trump’s administration was the first step toward tyranny since before he was elected.
That their rights were intact throughout his time in office never stopped them from employing outrageous claims about him being a Nazi and an authoritarian. But it was not until the Capitol riot that they had anything that could make it appear as if their fears were based in anything but hyper-partisanship. That is why the effort to milk genuine public outrage about the riot into a national trauma on the level of the 9/11 attacks is so crucial to the future of American politics.
Running against an insurrection is the sort of opportunity that doesn’t come along very often. Republicans did it throughout the second half of the 19th century as their efforts to weaponize continued resentment against Democrats who had either supported the Confederacy or opposed the Union war effort and reconstruction. The specter of the “bloody shirt” of the cost of that actual insurrection kept the GOP in power for 44 out of 52 years until the Republican schism between Theodore Roosevelt and William Taft elected Woodrow Wilson in 1912.
In the month since the riot, the false narrative of an “insurrection” has become the Democrats’ “bloody shirt” for the 21st century. What matters now is how Republicans respond to the challenge it poses for their future.
That is why it is imperative that the response to impeachment not be merely a procedural argument about wrongly punishing a president with removal after he leaves office. Nor can Republicans hope to evade this problem by joining with Democrats to convict Trump, even if they believe his conduct is worthy of censure. Not only will that not work, the divisions it will promote within the GOP will be just as fatal to their future electoral hopes.
Instead, the only possible response to the Democrats’ attack is to refute the charge that what happened on Jan. 6 was anything like an insurrection or sedition. Even if the challenge to the Electoral College result was poorly reasoned and constitutionally impossible, the pro-Trump protest that the president addressed was neither illegal nor a threat to democracy, however misguided or intemperate his remarks might have been.
The minority of those who came to support Trump who violated the law—as opposed to merely exercising their right to protest, like those who took part in “mostly peaceful” BLM protests that turned into riots and looting—deserve severe punishment. But their conduct cannot be treated as something that can discredit everyone who applauded Trump that day or wished for a different outcome last November.
One needn’t think well of Trump’s post-election conduct or condone all the exaggerated claims of fraud he promoted to understand that transforming a protest, no matter how ill considered, into a rebellion is an act of political mischief aimed at discrediting legitimate opposition, not a defense of the Constitution. If Republicans fail to refute these false charges, they will be paying the political price for handing the Democrats a “bloody shirt” with which to assail them for many election cycles to come.
fox files 
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