Quote:
Originally Posted by wustin
It started with Citron attempting to short and claiming GME would drop to $20. Remember the entirety of 2020 and still this year you've seen retro gaming prices go up, bitcoin, vintage pokemon and mtg cards, etc.
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Sure. There's a market demand for stuff like that because lol quarantine.
But the thing is, GameStop abandoned their retro positions years ago and while they've tried to restore that, it's limited to an online footprint. For the folks who're into retro enough to pay GameStop's prices for vintage stuff, that matters. It means that eBay is more transparent about the quality of the item than GameStop is; all you can do is purchase, and if it's substandard condition, return it to a store.
Being in gaming in general is a good thing right now, but longer term, once the lockdowns fade away, they're still not in great shape. They inhabit expensive mall real estate, for the most part, and they're flailing about looking for ways to connect with the market. There's a reason why, despite selling both new and used hardware/software for the two most recent generations, their stores are constantly adding collectibles, trading cards, and god knows what to augment revenues. They haven't the faintest how they're going to transform to meet the challenge when digital console sales surpass physical, and even the recent announcement that they'll get a cut of digital sales on Xbox consoles sold appears trivial from a revenue perspective.
So, I mean, this isn't about how sound GME is as a stock. It's about a bunch of people going "man, FUCK that guy; if we pump the stock up, we can force him into a position where he either loses his shirt or cuts his losses."
And once they've driven him from the battlefield one way or another, the underlying challenges that led Citron to proclaim - correctly, I think - that GME was headed to $20 or below will still exist.
He's almost certainly going to take a bath to some degree; if he has to buy more shares to cover his shorts, he's presumably doing it at current market prices and I'm not smart enough to see where he makes that money back.
But the Reddit crowd aren't, I don't think, going to universally walk away from this untouched, either. Some will. Maybe they won't walk at THE peak, but they'll walk at A peak - which I think happened today - and call it good. But some are gonna get stuck without a chair when the music ends, and how ugly that gets depends on how heavily people latched on.