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Because anonymous advice is still better than going it alone in family court.
Welcome to Divorce_Men. This is a sub where we can discuss the legal, financial and social issues men face in divorce. We are not necessarily lawyers; one of the first pieces of advice you will receive is to **consult with your attorney**.
If we could transfer all money, talents, and attention from one field/industry to another to accelerate progress, what is the most 'worth it' transfer?
How a short/gamma squeeze on Tilray is causing the ENTIRE cannabis market to moon and how to avoid becoming a bag holder when this all comes crashing down
Obligatory: SIR, THIS IS A CASINO. This isn't financial advice in any way shape or form. TLDR: This run is going to end with the cannabis stocks back down 50-80% or more from the levels they are at. $CRLBF is the real play here for the smart players that want USA exposure to the legislation. We just like the stocks now, not later. Ok, listen up normies. Yeah I'm talking to the newbies specifically because the OGs here already know everything I'm about to share, but your insufferable groupthink and movement mentality shit pissed me off enough to make a post. Don't post DD if you have no clue. Ask someone for help and take your ridicule until someone comes along to help you. I used to post weekly DD on Sunday here a couple of years ago before one of you literally contacted my wife IRL. Not even kidding. So I made a new account. This is my first contribution back and I'm going to try and ensure some of you don't blow your chance at massive gains here by explaining what is actually going on. CNBC and anybody telling you that this is just 'momentum' and 'sentiment' is lying to you. The hedge funds are playing these right along with us. Don't ask me for proof, this isn't Twitter. Reasons why they are playing with us:
When there is money to be made, hedge funds and HFT funds are there before you
The floats are so small on these they can take sizable positions on both sides and stand to have massive gains, all the while handing you guys the bags.
That's all you need to know. So in response to all you posting "real DD" with why these companies are the best and you're going to hold to the moon and never sell: I'm over it -- I can tell instantly how uninformed you are when I read some poorly thought out DD about why CGC or TLRY or APHA is a long term play because they're talking about USA legislation. These are Canadian companies. Get your head back on straight. You're here for the trade and the bet, not for the fundamentals, and if that's it, then fine, ignore the rest of this post and pick an exit, and if not, read on so you don't hold more bags. This place has never been one to care for fundamentals, but let me talk some sense into you so you can post some gain porn and I can tell you to fuck off instead of you guys all yelling "MaNiPuLaTiOn ShOrT LaDdErS" Let's take a look at some of today's gainers: (changed tickers for automod avoidance) $USMJay - Penny stock, worth absolute nothing for a reason $SNDL - Up ridiculous amount, have a billion shares outstanding, just diluted them all the other day $TeeRTeeC - Terra Tech, they grow weed, from all indications, do it poorly $OhGeeEye - lol $HUGE - Probably the only one in the lot worth a YOLO on the chance they get an acquisition like GW Pharma did but they don't have the same product portfolio or prospects GW has. Now, if you're simply playing this to get in and get out, great for you. The people saying (and believing) "$SNDL $10 EOW! HOLD THE LINE" and stuff like this are just absolutely brand new normies and are clueless, do not listen to them. If you yolo'd on cheap calls in Dec/Jan, congrats, take your gains and don't be like the $GME bagholders. If you're investing in any of the names I just posted above, expect any money you put in to at some point in the next 12 months be worth approximately 20% of what it is worth now. Literally. They're far worse than the main bunch (CGC, CRON, ACB, TLRY, APHA) but the main bunch is nothing to write home about either.
THIS IS WHAT IS REALLY HAPPENING:
Tilray had 40% short interest. It's not $GME level, but it's pretty high. When the stock crested $40 it really started taking off, why though? Notice this week's FD option chain: https://preview.redd.it/kyqeiwljeug61.png?width=917&format=png&auto=webp&s=0c1b48e12518515f09582289bd7f8a4f47a09629 Tilray has a 95M share float, those 42 calls represent roughly 1.5M shares held as a hedge just by themselves. Previous to this run up, that represents roughly 5% of the average daily volume of the stock, BY ITSELF. Those are shares that until Monday can be considered removed from the float because they're held as a hedge. They may get loaned out to be shorted, but that will only speed up the squeeze here. The important part: Today (2/10/21) the stock fell hard after open down to around 44 and found massive support all the way back to up 66. The most sold front week call? $40/$42 strikes. Premium when I screen shotted this? $22.20. Stocks going to pin above $60 for awhile likely, unless people are stupid enough to buy the OTM calls, in which case, it may squeeze itself higher. Smart hedge funds are going to pile into this, sell you the calls, shove the price up to keep selling you calls, then watch them all evaporate worthless in one of the future weeks in the chain, dump back the shares to help shove the price down, oh and did I mention? They shorted the top. https://preview.redd.it/ivy78woneug61.png?width=392&format=png&auto=webp&s=0604940c09126dc6d5b96a9cc5f17e4013ae5d9d It's just another plain old stock acting as a derivative of the option chain gamma squeeze. That's it, with a bit of short squeeze thrown in there and a WHOLE BUNCH of WSB fomo. The shorts are covering and pushing up the volume, likely re-shorting on the way up, and then you have WSB fomo'ing in to round out the total: a massive volume of 200 million shares today. You've got people that think this thing will skyrocket to 500+ (and it may) but the stakes get higher and higher each ladder up you take and the moves become more violent and more likely it comes all the way back down in short time the quicker it goes up. Might it get there? Sure. But be prepare to take profits when it does because...
ITS CALLED MEAN REVERSION. THIS CANT GO ON FOREVER.
Not to mention, the moves you are seeing are in completely overvalued companies, with horrible fundamentals, and poor prospects. Oh what's that? CGC got some CBD treats for Martha, seems fitting that something ill is going on in this industry considering she went to prison for insider trading. If the dog treats get you excited about the stock, Martha belongs here more than you do. 200M shares today means people who were long term bag holders cashed out and the shares have turned over the float two times in two days. That also means the shorts have turned over and are now short again. It means the HFT firms are feasting on all of you. It means Citadel is making a pile on the spreads. What to take away: An amount of shares equal to the entire float has changed hands, or in other words, fewer reason for people to bag hold. Fewer people that have to hedge. Fewer people that have to cover. Fewer people to help stabilize any of these upper price tiers, and keep the price stable by holding, and more reason it's going to collapse sooner (or later). But, this IS a casino after all...
Let's see what happened with TLRY last time this happened (oh, you're new here? Yeah, this isn't the first time):
https://preview.redd.it/p652mvgreug61.png?width=587&format=png&auto=webp&s=d95f2b0ccf946717859bffb28601dfd29e999e0b Looks eerily familiar to something else recently. Last time this occurred it traded between $100 and $300 in a single week timeframe. For those of you that are new: THIS IS NOT NORMAL. STOCKS DO NOT ALWAYS DO THIS. You are in the infancy of a new age of trading, but people still know, fundamentals matter a whole lot more than everyone is leading on, and these valuations are getting extremely overextended. Eventually, in the first squeeze Tilray bled off until the pandemic hit and it piled down to $2.43 a share. At $2.43/share, I would have bought it. Even at $10/12/14. At these levels? You're just ultimately out of touch but I look forward to the loss porn. So in short, again: Sir, this is a casino. Timeline of events, and how to not become a bagholder:
$APHA earnings are good, stocks pop a bit, and level off
Legislators pull a pump and dump since they probably have calls and say planning on some laws regarding changing the schedule of cannabis (notice: we will likely NOT get outright legalization, just re-scheduling)
$CGC earnings are actually awful, with the caveat they have profitability on the horizon
$TLRY gets a UK deal
$TLRY starts going insane - since $APHA is a reverse merger with a .81 value share to share, it starts pumping, people start buying the lower priced cannabis stuff and entire sector starts moving on "overall strength"
There's no strength, there's a gamma squeeze backed by investor momentum, and a short squeeze on Tilray.
This is going to come back down violently then plateau out like GME and pull a slow bleed the rest of the way back down, just like the second graph I posted. There is no fundamental or even POSSIBILITY of better fundamentals immediately on US legislation. The cost to enter the US market will most definitely cause capex and goodwill capital outflows, and set back their profitability since there are established MSO's in the USA already. The USA opening the market to these companies will only further degrade the actual balance sheets/income statements and slow down profits and you know what institutions and shareholders like? Yep. Profits.
Finally, how to not become a bag holder: The market can stay irrational way, way, way longer than you expect. So this may go on for a bit, but refer back to 7. It's coming back down eventually, set expectations and pick your exit, or start to shave off your position as it goes up and let a portion of it run. Eventually, you have to sell to actually realize a gain, don't forget that. Once you do, close the chart, remove it from your watchlist, check back in on it in a month if you want to get back in when you have a clear head.
The Canadian operators are literally the last companies I'd play off a US legislation play, and one of the only ones worth owning in $APHA for the arbitrage play on the shares. But if Tilray comes crashing back down, $APHA will as well along with all of them, and you have to hope you lose a lot less on $APHA crashing than you'll make on the arbitrage between the share price. THIS IS ALL JUST "SENTIMENT" BASED YOLOING BY THIS SUB. It has probably driven uneducated retail into the trades also - who will also become bag holders. Let me put this in big letters for those of you that can only read big font and use crayons:
NONE OF THESE COMPANIES HAVE REAL USA MARKET EXPOSURE, THEY ARE CANADIAN COMPANIES. THEY DO NOT HAVE MARKET POSITIONING AND ARE NOT POISED TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF US LEGALIZATION.
IF ANYTHING: IT WILL HURT THEIR BOTTOM LINE AND SET BACK EARNINGS BECAUSE OF CAPEX AND CASH OUTFLOWS TO GET A POSITION IN THE MARKET AND SOME OF THEM WILL GO OUT OF BUSINESS BECAUSE OF IT, WHILE OTHERS WILL FALL OUT OF PROFITIABILITY TO ENTER THE MARKET AND COMPETE WITH THE REAL PLAYERS. Who are the real players? (Cresco $CRLBF and Curaleaf $CURLF- do your own DD or wait for a post next week\***************)* Conclusion: Nobody should plan on holding these long term. Don't let someone else hand you bags like I did this morning at open on the pop unless you plan to hand your bags off and find the next play. You likely will not time the top. Pick a place you're ready to exit the trade, exit the trade or slowly shave your position, close the graphs and don't fomo back in. Just be done with the trade afterwards. You're likely not a cannabis multi millionaire and will not be one, unless you were loaded to the brim with low cost calls from last summefall or unless you literally yolo'd $10M into one of these a few weeks ago, and in that case, you belong here, congrats on your gains and fuck you. THIS IS A SECTOFOMO SQUEEZE. AND IT WILL END. THIS IS NOT SENTIMENT AND CNBC IS TROLLING US WITH IT LIKE WE HAVE THE POWER. And if you think WE are the ones driving the price up, the hedge funds are definitely watching and playing and they can bring these down at will at almost any time they want. You're holding a lit molotov, the only question is: will you throw it before it blows up? The rest of you? Plz fuck off with you 20 shares @ $2 on Sundial, fuck off with the "HOLD THE LINE SNDL $10 EOW", fuck off with your fomo, and fuck off with the "movement" and "lets push this to the sky" stuff and most importantly don't post DD if you have zero clue what is going on. You know what "lets push this to the sky" sounds like? Market manipulation. We're not in this together, I literally handed one of you a bag to hold this morning and even if they go up for another month, eventually, that bags gonna be heavy and I ain't coming back for it. I ain't tipping you either. These prices are insanely high for these companies. The multiples are out of control, and if you buy in at these levels, well, best of luck, I hope it works out for you. I'm fighting the fomo of extended gains, and will continue to put my money elsewhere.
SIR, THIS IS A CASINO.
Positions: I had the meme stocks like you literally all of them minus ACB and CGC. I took gains and bought 500 shares of Cresco prob increasing to 1,000 tomorrow, and kept the rest off the table to pay my wife's boyfriend's rent. Disclaimer: I have Tilray puts I'm prepared to average down on and diamond hand like a real boss because this is coming back down. Edit: You know what I forgot to add? Some of the biggest holders, the cannabis ETFs and funds, you know what they did today? They trimmed their positions. And they will continue to do so because of fiduciary responsibility and when you de-concentrate shares into the retail's hands, the moves will get more and more finnicky and more and more violent. Edit 2: Some normie tried calling me out like I never saw this trade coming or am a hedge shill, https://imgur.com/a/asAVkiC - I had thousands of shares, these are just the trades from this month, and I'm not advocating a buy, I sold mostly all of them this morning except for adding Cresco back in. You want the gain numbers? You do the math, I'm not your math tutor, I sold like 6 minutes after open for most of them. I have Tilray puts for next week and will be buying a few months out at various strikes as it continues to climb. Yeah, I think these are coming back down in price sooner rather than later, that isn't extraordinary information for a common sense person. Edit 3: I'm getting piles of messages from people who used to follow my DD back in 2018/2019. Yes, it's the real SoRefreshing, proof:https://imgur.com/a/Pn5LqCe Edit 4: Eh don't request me with "What should I do with XX" be a big adult grown up and decide your own risk tolerance and exits. I responded to the first 10 or so. Now I have 100. I can't. I disabled chat messages. Edit 5: jesus with the awards go buy TSLA calls this is WSB not fb/twtr disclaimer: have TSLA calls Edit 6: Oh look, they're pinning it around the $42 strike. Go figure.
I’m not a financial adviser and this isn’t financial advice. I just have a knack for explaining things and lots of people have asked about this topic so I thought I’d share my own personal thoughts.
The bull thesis
To date, the GME play has been pretty simple: buy and hold and wait for the squeeze, whether that comes in hours, days, or weeks. Try not to have a heart attack during the intermittent gamma squeezes, keep your hands diamond strong during the manipulated downward spikes, and buy baby buy. It’s rapidly becoming apparent that we will soon enter the GME endgame. Before you can come up with an exit strategy or, if you’re still on the fence, decide whether to jump in, you need to form an opinion about the GME bull thesis, without considering the short squeeze. Your thoughts on the bull thesis will dictate how you play it from here on out. One braindead simple way to calculate a fair stock price for a company is to use a "times-revenue" valuation. You take the company's revenue ($6.466B in 2020) and multiply by some magic number (often 0.5 for low-growth companies and 2 for high-growth companies), then divide by the float (number of shares available to trade, 50.65M). A times-revenue multiplier of 0.5 gives a GME stock price of $64, while a multiplier of 2 gives $255. This isn't a particularly sophisticated method but whatever, I'm not a particularly sophisticated investor. Working backwards, if Melvin Capital thinks that GME is overpriced at $20 then a times-revenue valuation would suggest a multiplier of 0.16. That's extraordinarily low for a retail business. If you applied that multiplier to Best Buy ($43B revenue in 2020, 231.59M float) you would get a stock price of $30. Best Buy currently trades for $115, which works out to a much more reasonable multiplier of 0.62. What multiplier is correct? Well, the bulls point out:
Ryan Cohen (13% stake in GME, sits on the board) has a great e-commerce success story with Chewy, his previous company.
Three new successful e-commerce board members from Cohen's firm were added to the board in 2020.
Despite being a brick-and-mortar business and the pandemic, Gamestop's balance sheet isn't bad. They have approx. $550M in debt, but more than that in cash (net cash positive). They have minimal risk of default or bankruptcy in the near future, even without any change to company direction.
Their traditional core business of game and console sales is not shrinking as fast as many people expected, with major new consoles still supporting optical discs and digital game downloads not accelerating as fast as feared, possibly due to stagnation in the ISP industry. So even if Cohen and his board seats take a long time to roll out new changes, the company is in little danger of any sudden spiral.
So is Melvin right and GME is a dead-end company with no growth potential and should be valued with a times-revenue multiplier vastly below its competitors? Or is it more appropriate to think of it as a brand new business, being spring-boarded off the healthy books of an existing brand by a successful e-commerce businessman alongside a revamped board? How you judge that determines your exit strategy.
Exit strategy 1: Just along for the ride
Maybe you don't care at all about GME's balance sheet or Cohen's planned turnaround, you bought a couple shares on a whim to be part of a unique movement. You don't intend to be a long-term Gamestop shareholder nor do you really care if you miss out on the highest peaks, so long as you make a few dollars and get to say you were part of the squeeze. If I were this person, what would I do? I'd pick a number between 0 and 3 that I feel represents my confidence in the retail market's current expectation for Cohen and GME, and multiply it by 128. I'd submit a limit sell order for all my shares at that share price.
Exit strategy 2: Pants-shitting fear
You've got a handful of shares and maybe some options and you're up big. You don't know much about squeezes or fundamentals or greeks and every time there's a dip and the stock gets halted you shit your pants and your finger hovers over the sell button. But then the price jumps up and you wipe the drenching sweat off your face and promise to hold firm next time. If I were this person, what would I do? I'd sell all my options that expire sooner than 30 days at market open to reduce the number of pairs of pants I'm going through. I'd keep all my shares and longer-dated options until the news comes out that the shorts are being liquidated. And I'm not watching hedge fund managers get on Fox Business or CNBC or whatever, I'm following WSB and Twitter for rapid fire updates about short volume. If the short volume as reported by WSB posters drops below, say, 50% I'm selling everything and getting out. I might also pick a maximum times-revenue multiplier (something pretty high, like 4 or 5) and use that for a limit sell for shares.
Exit strategy 3: Diamond hands
You've got bigger balls than most, and this isn't your first time dumping a significant fraction of your net worth into a company whose financials you've never looked at. You want to ride it to the peak, if at all possible, and you want to impress the pants shitters and the weak-kneed with your maximum gains. You are ok with increasing your cost basis to squeeze out extra tendies on the way to the top. If I were this person, what would I do? I'd sell my weeklies on open tomorrow and immediately plow every dollar of those 20-bagger returns into shares. If my longer-dated options were purchased at extreme IV I'd do the same for them, otherwise I'd let them ride. I wouldn't sell a single share until the final squeeze, when news comes out that Melvin is done, and then I'd unload (in my pants). See you on the moon, brother.
The best way to judge this is by looking at the exit strategies. Which person are you? If you're (1) then sure, buy a share or two to be part of a once-in-a-decade event, but think of it as a fun expense - a ticket to ride the squeeze train - not an investment. If you're (2) then hell yeah buy those shares baby but avoid options unless there's a dip. If you're (3) or (4) then you're already in and lying to your wife about how deep.
FAQ 2: Was that the squeeze?! Is it over?
This must get posted every time there's a gamma squeeze. It's midmorning and price suddenly launches into the stratosphere, trading halts, and it crashes back down. No, that wasn't the squeeze. Gamma squeezes occur when options prices are rising (due to sudden increased options buying or volatility) faster than market makers can hedge. They're good to get your heart racing but a short squeeze is slower and more stable.
FAQ 3: How high will it go during the squeeze?
Who knows. $500? $1000? $2000? There's really no way to know. If you have the stones to get those max tendies then you should focus on listening to the emerging news about Melvin Capital and Citadel rather than watching the price. Sell when they're covering and not a moment before. That will be the peak.
FAQ 4: How long will this take?
Could be tomorrow morning, could be tomorrow afternoon, could be next week. At the rate that shorts are losing money it won't be much longer than that. If you're not in yet, this is the final boarding call.
FAQ 5: Who will buy our shares at the peak?
The idea behind selling at the peak isn't to sell your shares to another retail trader, but to sell your shares to the desperate short sellers who are forced by their prime brokers to liquidate their positions at any cost. That's the difference between a perfectly legal and time-honored short squeeze and a pump-and-dump. This isn't about irrationally driving the price upwards with the hopes of selling to a bigger idiot, it's about buying and holding and waiting for the shorts to crack and beg us to sell to them.
FAQ 6: What is the next stock?
Get this thought out of your head. Yeah you just joined WSB and made a few bucks and now you think you found yourself an investment club. No. This is a forum for folks to share their risky trade ideas, not a place to coordinate to manipulate the market. Yes, at the moment the consensus is that we can make a boatload of money off of dumbass hedge funds, but think of it less like a pack of draft horses following a path and more like a room of angry, shitting monkeys who happen, for the time being, to be throwing their shit in the same direction.
FAQ 7: Am I gay?
Many of us grow up to assume that we’re straight only to find out, later, that we’re not. Sometimes, we realize this because we have sex dreams, sexual thoughts, or feelings of intense attraction toward people of the same gender as us. However, none of those things — sex dreams, sexual thoughts, or even feelings of intense attraction — necessarily “prove” your orientation. There are a few different forms of attraction. When it comes to orientation, we usually refer to romantic attraction (who you have strong romantic feelings for and desire a romantic relationship with) and sexual attraction (who you want to engage in sexual activity with). Sometimes we’re romantically and sexually attracted to the same groups of people. Sometimes we’re not. For example, it’s possible to be romantically attracted to men but sexually attracted to men, women, and nonbinary people. This sort of situation is called “mixed orientation” or “cross orientation” — and it’s totally OK. Bear this in mind as you consider your sexual and romantic feelings. Edit: - Thank you for all the awards and comments! - I didn’t write the gay part at the end. Read more here if you’re... ahem... curious. - For the new folks who keep trying to fondle my balls, I’m not some genius or WSB autist-in-chief, I’m a bit player. I can’t get intercede with the mods or whatever you want me to do. - Stop messaging me asking what you should do. Yes, Melvin Capital has been reported to have covered. You have to decide for yourself whether the squeeze is underway or complete and you should exit or whether you want to hold out for more, or take some profits and hold, or whatever. I just gave you a rough guide and some explanation of different thought processes, you have to make the call for yourself. Important: This post is very outdated now but it’s still getting comments, so if you’re just seeing this for the first time make sure you’re caught up on the current state of the market and all the other, more recent posts about GME.
The real DD on SLV, the worlds biggest short squeeze is possible and we can make history
Update 2/4 - someone went ahead and spelled out the mechanics of the squeeze quite well and I would like to give their post attention https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/lc8vgo/slv_is_not_going_to_get_squeezedslv_is_the_trojan/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf Update 2/2 - I am able to comment again. I messaged several mods on Reddit and the mod account on Twitter. None of them responded but it appears I am able to comment again so I assume one of them lifted my ban Update 2/1 - I have been banned from posting on WSB. I guess they aren’t yet deleting my post here given the media attention. If this was a rogue mod I’d appreciate being restored the ability to post on WSB. I’m open to talking to any mods Update 1/31 - there have been tons of 'what to buy' questions so I added a clarity post, hope it helps. It's also getting downvoted to hell because its not about GME so that's discouraging. The speed at which the downvotes flew in makes me think someone made bots to crush new posts related to SLV (or maybe anything not GME). It makes no sense for this post to have 93% upvotes and my new one to have 28%. I have not sold my GME to buy SLV. I had a small pre-existing position in leaps I bought months ago. Created an official Twitter handle not sure if I’ll use it, but didn’t want anyone to impersonate me on there Here is the longer DD for the short squeeze case for SLV, a follow-up from my shorter post a few hours ago. Note that I talk in first person as this is something I’m going to do. Everyone is free to do as they individually please and copy my trade if they’d like to. I think it’s absurd that forces at be think this forum is manipulating by posting publicly but that’s where we are at right now. First things first, I'm not doing this until the GME rise is done. I am long GME but am going long SLV immediately after. Update 1/29: due to the manipulation and collusion of citadel, hedge funds, and brokers to change the rules and rig the game in their favor. Who likely knew ahead of time and bought puts right before and calls at the bottom, GME is too important to abandon still. SLV is still my next play but GME needs to go to $1000 and these people need to go to jail. If you just want to know what to buy skip to the end I present 2 investment DDs in this post, the short squeeze and the fundamentals. If you want to see what to buy The short squeeze: Buy SLV shares and SLV call options to force physical delivery of silver to the SLV vaults. Also buy physical silver bullion. The best possible thing would be to take physical delivery in the futures market if you have access to do so. The silver futures market has oscillated between having roughly 100-1 and 500-1 ratio of paper traded silver to physical silver, but lets call it 250-1 for now. This means that for every 250 ounces in open interest in the futures market, only 1 actually gets delivered. Most traders would rather settle with cash rather than take delivery of thousands of ounces of silver and have to figure out to store and transport it in the future. The people naked shorting silver via the futures markets are a couple of large banks and making them pay dearly for their over leveraged naked shorts would be incredible. It's not Melvin capital on the other side of this trade, its JP Morgan. Time to get some payback for the bailouts and manipulation they've done for decades (look up silver manipulation fines that JPM has paid over the years). The way the squeeze could occur is by forcing a much higher percentage of the futures contracts to actually deliver physical silver. There is very little silver in the COMEX vaults or available to actually be use to deliver, and if they have to start buying en masse on the open market they will drive the price massively higher. There is no way to magically create more physical silver in the world that is ready to be delivered. With a stock you can eventually just issue more shares if the price rises too much, but this simply isn't the case here. The futures market is kind of the wild west of the financial world. Real commodities are being traded, and if you are short, you literally have to deliver thousands of ounces of silver per contract if the holder on the other side demands it. If you remember oil going negative back in May, that was possible because futures are allowed to trade to their true value. They aren't halted and that's what will make this so fun when the true squeeze happens. Edit for more detail: let’s say there’s one futures seller who gets unlucky and gets the buyer who actually wants to take delivery. He doesn’t have the silver and realizes it’s all of a sudden damn difficult to find some physical silver. He throws up his hands and just goes long a matching number of futures contracts and will demand actual delivery on those. Problem solved because he has now matched the demanding buyer with a new seller. The issue is that the new seller has the same issue and does the exact same thing. This is how the cascade effect of a meltup occurs. All the naked shorts trying to offload their position to someone who actually has some silver. My goal is to ensure that I have the silver and won’t sell to them until silver is at a far higher price due to the desperation. The silver market is much larger than GME in terms of notional value, but there is very little physical silver actually readily available (think about the difference between total shares and the shares in the active float for a stock), and the paper silver trading hands in the futures market is hundreds of times larger than what is available. Thus when they are forced to actually deliver physical silver it will create a massive short squeeze where an absurd amount of silver will be sought after (to fulfill their contractually obligated delivery) with very little available to actually buy. They are naked shorting silver and will have to cover all at once and the float as a percentage of the total silver stock globally is truly miniscule. The fundamentals: The current gold to silver ratio is 73-1. Meaning the price of gold per ounce is 73 times the price of silver. Naturally occurring silver is only 18.75 times as common as gold, so this ratio of 73-1 is quite high. Until the early 20th century, silver prices were pegged at a 15-1 ratio to gold in the US because this ratio was relatively known even then. In terms of current production, the ratio is even lower at 8-1. Meaning the world is only producing 8 ounces of silver for each newly produced ounce of gold. Global industry has been able to get away with producing so little new silver for so long because governments have dumped silver on the market for 80 years, but now their silver vaults are empty. At the end of WW2 government vaults globally contained 10 billion ounces of silver, but as we moved to fiat currency and away from precious metal backed currencies, the amount held by governments has decreased to only 0.24 billion ounces as they dumped their supply into the market. But this dumping is done now as their remaining supply is basically nil. This 0.24 billion ounces represents only 8% of the total supply of only 3 billion ounces stored as investment globally. This means that 92% of that gold is held privately by institutions and by millions of boomer gold and silver bugs who have been sitting on meager gains for decades. These boomers aren't going to sell no matter what because they see their silver cache as part of their doomsday prepper supplies. It's locked away in bunkers they built 500 miles from their house. Also, with silver at $23 an ounce currently, this means all of the worlds investment grade silver only has a total market cap of $70 billion. For comparison the investment grade gold in the world is worth roughly $6 trillion. This is because most of the silver produced each year actually gets used, as I have mentioned. $70 billion sounds like a lot, but we don’t have to buy all that much for the price to go up a lot. **If the squeeze happens, it would be like 40 years worth of their gains in 4 months ** The reason that only 8 ounces of silver are produced for every 1 ounce of gold in today's world is because there aren't really any good naturally occurring silver deposits left in the world. Silver is more common than gold in the earth's crust, but it is spread very thin. Thus nearly every ounce of silver produces is actually a byproduct of mining for other metals such as gold or copper. This means that even as the silver price skyrockets, it wont be easy to increase the supply of silver being produced. Even if new mines were to be constructed, it could take years to come online. Finally, most of this newly created silver supply each year is used for productive purposes rather than kept for investment. It is used in electronics, solar panels, and jewelry for the most part. This demand wont go away if the silver price rises, so the short sellers will be trying to get their hands on a very small slice of newly minted silver. The solar market is also growing quickly and political pressure to increase solar and electric vehicles could provide more industrial demand. The other part of the story is the faster moving piece and that is the inflation and currency debasement fear portion. The government and the fed are printing money like crazy debasing the value of the dollar, so investors look for real assets like precious metals to hide out in, driving demand for silver. The $1.9 trillion stimulus passing in a month or two could be a good catalyst. All this money combined with the reopening of the economy could cause some solid inflation to occur, and once inflation starts it often feeds on itself. What to buy: Edit 2/24: I now advocate buying PSLV for shares, physical metal if the premiums come back down, and if you want options then SLV is still ok for that. I will be putting 50% directly into SLV shares, and 50% into the $35 strike SLV calls expiring 4/16. This way the SLV purchase creates a groundswell into silver immediately that then rockets through a gamma squeeze as SLV approaches $35. Price target of $75 for SLV by end of April if the short squeeze happens. Edit: for the part of your purchases going into shares, some people recommend PSLV because they think SLV might start lying about having the silver in their vault. Or that the custodian will be double counting, ie claiming that the same silver belongs to multiple people (banking on the fact that people wont all try to get their silver at once). So if you buy SLV shares and calls, that's great. But I think it could be prudent for us to buy options in SLV (no options on PSLV) and shares in PSLV. It all depends on how paranoid you want to be. There is a lot of paranoia in the precious metals world. Alternate options: - buying physical silver; this also works but you pay a premium to buy and sell so its less efficient and you take fewer silver ounces off of the market because of the premium you pay - going long futures for February or March; if you are a rich bastard and can actually take physical delivery of 1000s of ounces of silver by all means do so. But if you simply settle for cash you are actually part of the problem. We need actual physical delivery, which is what SLV demands and is why SLV is the way to go unless you are going to take delivery - miners; I don’t recommend buying miners as part of this trade. Miners will absolutely go up if SLV goes up, but buying them doesn't create the squeeze in the actual silver market. Furthermore, most silver miners only derive 30-50% of their revenue from silver anyways, so eventually SLV will outperform them as it gets high enough (and each marginal SLV dollar only increases miner profits by a smaller and smaller percentage) Details on SLV physical settlement: When SLV issues shares, the custodian is forced to true up their vaults with the proportional amount of silver daily. From the SLV prospectus: "An investment in Shares is: Backed by silver held by the Custodian on behalf of the Trust. The Shares are backed by the assets of the Trust. The Trustee’s arrangements with the Custodian contemplate that at the end of each business day there can be in the Trust account maintained by the Custodian no more than 1,100 ounces of silver in an unallocated form. The bulk of the Trust’s silver holdings is represented by physical silver, identified on the Custodian’s or, if applicable, sub-custodian's, books in allocated and unallocated accounts on behalf of the Trust and is held by the Custodian in London, New York and other locations that may be authorized in the future." Join me brothers. Lets take silver to the moon and take on the biggest and baddest manipulators in the world. Please post rocket emojis in the comments as desired. Disclaimer: do your own research, make your own decisions, everything here is a guess and hypothetical and nothing is guaranteed, not a financial advisor, I have ADHD and maybe other things too. Bear case: silver does tend to sell off if the broader market plunges so it’s not immune to broad market sell off. It’s also the most manipulated market in the world so we are facing some tough competition on the short side
GME EndGame part 3: A new opponent enters the ring
Wow - what a week. This is an extension of my DD series on GME. If you haven’t read them and have time, they will provide some background on my previous predictions, some of which have already come true.
Previous Important Posts
EndGame Part 1 (DTC Infinity) covered the short positions, the float, and potential snowball impacts of increasing prices, and argued that part of the reason that shorts haven’t closed was that it was pretty much impossible for shorts to close
EndGame Part 2 covered Cohen, fair market cap analysis, and potential investors, in which I talked about the amazing mid-to-long term potential for GME.
The story here is more complex than paid media articles would like you to believe. GME has been driven up by 3 different forces:
Organic buying
There is a mixture of growing positive sentiment in the investor world (not just WSB) about GME’s future
There’s been a lot of good due diligence shared not just on WSB but even outside (for example, see gmedd.com)
The Citron Backfire
Shorts were on the ropes and kept looking for hail mary’s. They went to Citron and coordinated a dump to try to bring the price down.
However, this backfired. Citron is so disliked in the industry that new wealth poured into GME in the face of Andrew Left’s pleas. Even when Benzinga brought Andrew Left on air, minutes after he leftthey bought shares live on their show.
Once the organic buying started, we rolled into a gamma squeeze. Many people written about the gamma squeeze so I won’t repeat, see this post for an example.
Ultra low liquidity - In EndGame part 1, I talked about how the actual actively traded shares are much lower than the reported float, and share availability has been reducing driven by lots of diamond hands, not just among smaller guys like us but the larger folks too.
I believe there were some short covers on Friday, but Ortex was still estimating 71M shares short at the eod.
However, not many people have talked about why it went down
Why did GME come down?
Here’s where things got interesting for me, and something I think happened again today (Monday) when GME climbed up over 100% but then had a rapid reversal, closing 20% above yesterday but closing below open. So Friday looked like a slam dunk - gamma squeeze, no shorts available to short, puts were getting exceedingly expensive as a short tactic. What happened? This is my fan fiction, based on what I saw. I believemarket-makerstook a non-neutral stance and began actively shorting the stock after the second halt. Market-makers are responsible for maintaining liquidity and functioning in the stock market, but they also have abilities that others don’t - for example they are legally allowed to naked short for “liquidity purposes”. They also have the ability to halt trading. There were two halts in the day on Friday: First, when GME was up 69% (heh heh), and then a few minutes later when it kept climbing after the first halt was relaxed. Note that at the time of the first halt, the bid-ask spread was $10 on the underlying a huge signal that there just were not enough shares to buy. However, after the second halt, something strange happened. Whereas a few minutes prior, there were no sellers willing to sell their shares below $75, within 15 minutes after the halt there were sellers at 70, 65, 60, and 56. Where did these sellers come from? Incredible momentum reversal on Friday 1/22 to push the price not too far above the 60c strike price. My speculation? This was a coordinated naked short ladder attack. In this type of attack, short seller A sells to short seller B, who then turns around to short seller A at a lower price, etc. and with a very small amount of capital you can wreck the momentum of a stock and make people think that others are running for the exits. Notice how the stock dropped from a high of $75 on Friday to below 60 - the highest expiring SP for the 1/22 options, and stayed tight in range for the rest of the day. Now, for compliance reasons, MM are required to be neutral by EOD, so 20 minutes before close, MMs had to buy back all their short positions, which led to the strong close above 60. All this led me to believe that the real fair market price for GME was above $65. Without the market makers interference, GME would have closed higher.
A repeat on Monday
The short ladder attack repeated on Monday. GME opened strong above $90, and quickly climbed to a high above $155 before it was halted, immediately after the halt, a short ladder attack again drove the price down Dejavu - Incredible Momentum Reversal after trading halts. Both days, there were rapid and significant reversals in momentum. Now, I kept wondering - why would MM’s take the side of the shorts? What’s in it for them? One theory was that they were not adequately hedged, with the low liquidity of the stock meaning that the price was moving up too fast for them to acquire the shares they needed to. But then the news hit today:
Shorts have pulled new dirty tactics each time they’ve been pushed to the edge. Paid media attacks, Citron’s fluff tweet + coordinated shorting, and now they’ve got the actual people who get all the order flow on their side. On the other hand, GME is still up over 20% and now trading at $88.00 after hours, which is well above the previous day’s high. https://preview.redd.it/rr5qet4ipkd61.png?width=724&format=png&auto=webp&s=96d28bf446a714906712503726f5903a681d5368 What this tells me is that GME’s true price is still being suppressed. They are using every tactic possible, even changing the bid-ask spread rules on options to specifically target retail’s buying of options. We’re now playing the game against the folks who write the rules of the game. Some shorts may have covered today - with prices below $60 at one point they had some great opportunities to. However, there is no way all of the shorts who need to exit covered today. The short position still lost 20% from yesterday. They’ve got more fingers in the dam, but it’s definitely cracking. Also, every call option purchased prior to 1/25 is ITM and profitable, while every put option purchased prior to 1/25 is OTM. And, for some reason, the SEC still doesn’t want to enforce the threshold securities list for GME, where it’s now been on for more than 30 days in a highly covered “short squeeze”. https://preview.redd.it/rbrf6khjpkd61.png?width=936&format=png&auto=webp&s=7e4f432ff02dbf475a03cc68c54a5a0f5f0de429
Margin impacts:
Note that at this point, most brokers have increased margin on GME. This means that people that are long or short on margin will need to put up capital to hold their positions. This also means puts will get more expensive as people who sell puts will have to maintain 100% of the notional in their accounts to secure the put, so MMs will have fewer retail sellers of puts to absorb the demand. That means it’s not a bad idea to sell puts to acquire shares if you’re aiming for the long-term and not the squeeze, but keep in mind you’ll need the exact same capital as if you’d bought the shares, so it’s up to you on this. For shorts, a margin increase while the price is moving against you (even with retracements) is no good.
My speculation
Cohen and the GME board have been strangely silent this entire run. It’s possible they can’t say anything at all during the pre-earnings quiet period, but I’m sure they can see what’s happening.
MMs will continue to play dirty, but at the same time they will need to continue to need to buy GME shares to delta hedge 1/29 and later ITM options as we get closer to expiry.
Things to be careful about
As you can see, this is no easy win. I've been in GME for a few months but I've seen almost every trick in the book. In addition to the suggestions I wrote about in this post, here’s some things to be careful about.
Be careful about swapping ITM calls for OTM calls: it can be tempting to trade-up your options for higher return, but be mindful of the delta impact. You may actually be driving the sale of shares by MMs when you don’t mean to. For example, if you sell a .5 delta call for 2 .2 delta calls, that’s net reduction of 10 shares that MMs have to hold long as leverage.
Be careful about being short any calls this week: Not only do you limit your upside (which is dumb in the prospect of a squeeze), you could end up in a nightmare scenario. A call that ends OTM on Friday could end up ITM after hours if you didn’t sell it, and you may get assigned while the underlying continues to go up.
There are a few other dirty tactics shorts can play. I’m not specifically going to share them here because I don’t want to give the ideas circulation, but
Choose your own limit sells based on personal sell points. Don’t copy others and don’t try to be memey. Make your own decisions.
Stop sharing your positions publicly. I know this is anti-wsb, and I think sharing them is great for this community, but in the case of GME it’s an attack vector for you.
Be careful of holding weeklies until expiration. Remember the multiple trading halts? What if trading gets halted on Friday at 2pm and doesn’t resume for the rest of the day? All your 1/29 calls would expire worthless. Depending on your broker and your cash positions, maybe even your ITM ones. Roll (or sell, if you’re taking profits) your weeklies well before expiration.
Be careful about buying on margin. Brokers are rapidly increasing margins. If you bought on margin with 2:1 leverage, and the stock went up 100%, you’d be in margin call even without a margin change. If the broker moves margin against you, you’ll get to margin call faster.
Don’t bet more than you can afford to lose. I’ve been in GME long enough to know that just when you think going up is a sure thing (remember last Monday with the short sale restriction?), you can be surprised by a new trick. If you bet it all on weeklies all at once, you may not be able to recover from being wrong on the timing. Consider longer expiry or spreading your purchases out. I’ve held through multiple 30-40% drawdowns in the underlying; and held through a 50% drawdown today, so you need to be ready for the volatility.
Watch out for stop loss hunts. It’s common practice for shorts to hunt for stop losses for cheap shares. If you’ve set a stop loss, be really sure about it.
This is not financial advice; do your own DD. I’m holding over $1M in shares and calls.
1/26 Update
Hi everyone. Sorry for not posting or replying to comments. I was auto-banned from WSB when this post was auto-deleted by the auto-mod. Thanks to u/zjz to reversing the auto-deletion of the post though as it looked like it was helpful to the community. Hope you all made a ton of money today! Quick Notes:
At an after-hours price of $209 a share, every call option, for every expiry, for every strike price is in-the-money. This is the third time this has happened for GME recently. Amazing. What this means now is that market makers will need to buy a lot of shares to hedge for the calls expiring this week. Heed my above warnings.
At this price, shorts will start to get liquidated. Combining the 400% weekly gain with the margin requirements increasing across the board, brokers will force close short positions. Starting maybe with the small guys, but it will cause a ripple effect. Things could move fast. Some funds may get additional bailouts this week to hold out.
You need to decide your own exit. Only you know how much $ you're playing with, how much you're willing to lose, how important the $ is to you, etc. Minimize you're regret, don't maximize your profits. If you are thinking about taking profits this week, spread out your sells so you don't kick yourself over timing things poorly. Personally, I think we are in unprecedented territory and that there's no way all of the shorts have exited already, so we're not done. I could be wrong. See EndGame part 1.
Close spreads. With every call ITM, you are at the risk of early-assignment. If you don't watch closely, you could be hit with sky-high hard-to-borrow fees and get killed on what you thought was a profitable trade.
Watch for ripple effects. This is already happening. When funds get liquidated, they have to buy back all their other shorts (see AMC, BBBY) and sell their longs (look at BABA after-hours). Want to play GME without playing GME? Maybe throw a little $ at BBBY. You do you.
In EndGame Part 2, I talked about potential investors, and how the higher price is gonna attract the bigger $. Today we saw Chamath, Winklevoss, and others. And then Elon tweeted and simultaneously stimulated the buying frenzy and scared the crap out of shorts. I'm just gonna copy what I said about this potentiality
Elon: (Least likely, completely improbable, but cataclysmic event). Elon hates shorts. Elon, with TSLA, went through the pain that GME is going through. TSLA almost went bankrupt because shorts were pushing the price down so it was difficult to raise the cash they needed to survive. Sound familiar?Elon’s wealth swings more in a day than GME is worth in entirety.Elon couldbuy all the fucking float of GME with what he makes in 8 hours. One call from fellow entrepreneur andaspiring twitter-meme-godwould absolutely wreck the game.
If you are short gamestop, you are one meme purchase by the richest man in the world away from a fucking cataclysmic event. "Hey son, I heard you like games. So I bought you gamestop. All of it." 🚀
There is a prevailing mis-understanding among people fresh to the market that you can buy and sell as much as you want at the "market price." This is false. You are buying and selling from real people or algorithms that believe they can scalp your order. The idealized scenario is that GME rallies, Melvin covers, and everyone at reddit gets out at the top. This represents a misunderstanding of market mechanics. Melvin will cover before we truly know it, and the crash will happen as quick as the rally. So with recent events, you must ask yourself:
Who is Your Counterparty?
Nothing is a sure bet. How confident are you that your counterparty is who you think it is? Thousands of redditors & new traders beyond have been buying stocks fully confident that Melvin Capital hasn't exited their trade. This is also supported by some analysis provided by two different firms, although their estimates differ some amount. Confounded in this is the interpretation of the data: Does this include market makers and dealers that are short stock but covered with calls or options deltas? Is their information fully accurate in an event the likes of which has never happened? It's tough to know for sure.
Know Everyone's Hand
Your guess on how much they've covered and when they covered has a massive effect on how you perceive the value of this trade. Buying if you think Melvin has $10b notional to cover is a much better bet than if they only have $2b to cover. You also have to consider how much notional the rest of the market has bought in anticipation of a squeeze. The difference between the two represents your effective edge. Remember, we don't actually know Melvin's current position. We don't know what's going on behind closed doors. We only know the hand they're showing us via media. Has their clearing firm taken over? Has a much bigger collection of firms absorbed the position? Have they been buying since Monday? Have they covered and have new funds entered the space at a much better level? You are fighting Goliath at a poker table in the city of Gath. The pot is worth $25 billion dollars. Ken Griffin has never lost. Melvin's prime brokers Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche are not used to losing (well, Deutsche is). They will do whatever it takes to take the pot from you and leave you holding the bag. They will not blink twice because there is a lot of fucking money on the line.
Know What Can Go Wrong
Nobody could have guessed everything that happened this week. Prepare yourself for the unexpected. Your brokerage will undoubtedly close out your position at the worst possible time. The stock could be halted for days. You could be assigned on ITM options. Your stock could get delisted. Your stock may get diluted.
Only Spend What You're Willing to Lose
This one is self explanatory. Your investment could go to zero. Even if you think you make money on every trade, if your bet size is 100%, the long term value of your portfolio is zero.
Don't Take Out Loans on Emotional Capital
If you are new, you really don't know the gut-wrenching, stomach-turning feeling of seeing the possibility of your net liquidity hitting zero or negative. It fucking sucks. You just know the highs. You're buying along the speculative frenzy and frantic rallies, wrapped in anti-billionaire & pro-underdog themes. It may even feel good to think that a guy who cut his teeth at a firm notorious for an insider trading scandal is getting his comeuppance. We love the feeling. If you are fully invested financially & emotionally, you are completely overleveraged and will pay the price. Make feeling good your goal, and set limits that you can stomach. There are several feel-good stories of people making life-changing money to pay off their student loans or their family members' surgeries. Please think twice about this, and only spend what you can afford to lose. If placing a bet makes the difference between your pet living or dying, you may have a gambling problem. These were success stories because they got in at a much better level and could have had a much sadder ending. Secondly, don't take it personal. There are people on the other side of your trades, your brokerage support line, the subreddit, the media. They are all playing their own hand to the best of their knowledge. It's easy to blame a broker, yell at their support desk, hate-tweet at a company, or even rage-text that guy you know who develops APIs at ETrade. A lot of people across the industry are rooting for you. Fuck, even Ted Cruz and AOC are rooting for you, because this transcends politics. If you're mad at Melvin Capital or Ken Griffin or the guys who crashed the economy in 2008, keep it that way. They will try and misdirect your anger in every single direction: brokerages, the media, and reddit. If your enemies are a few guys at the top holding a $25b short position and moving levers, keep it that way. Thirdly, if you don't want to be a human being for the sake of the person on the other side, be a human being for your wallet's sake. You make better financial decisions in the absence of emotions.
BB -- Blackberry AWS -- Amazon Web Services IVY -- Intelligent Vehicles Yo. I don't actually know if this stands for anything QNX -- Quick-Unix perhaps? It's a Unix-like embedded microkernel RTOS (real-time operating system) EOY -- end of year PT -- price target SP -- stock price EV -- electric vehicle SoC -- System on a Chip IoT -- Internet of Things TL;DR: Blackberry ($BB) is almost daily announcing new partnerships and new clients for their software, including new deals with companies that are just now or just this year launching autonomous vehicles that run on QNX software. The big kahuna of all these deals is BB's recent partnership with Amazon to go 50/50 into BB's software IVY, a scalable cloud-connected software platform designed for intelligent vehicle data gathering and data sharing. With Amazon's Jeff Bezos stepping down, and Andy Jassy filling his shoes, who was the CEO of AWS, BB will have some very firm support behind Amazon's new CEO. BB and Amazon are having a webinar Feb. 23rd about their partnership and IVY, which should be a strong catalyst moving forward. IVY beta earnings are projected to begin impacting BB's Q3 or Q4 earnings beginning in November this year, with IVY fully being integrated around the 2023 timeframe. Through a lot of reading and analysis, I believe BB has a four-tiered business model dating back as far as 2013 when BB's CEO John Chen was hired to begin the massive BB turnaround process. Tier 1 was development of QNX and IVY, lasting from 2013 to today and onward, however, Tier 2 overlaps Tier 1. Tier 2 was customer acquisition, primarily distributing their secure software in QNX, SecuSuite, Spark, and AtHoc. They secured 37 automakers during this time, including 9 of the top 10 automakers, over 106 governments from around the world, including all of G7 governments and 18 of G20 governments, as well as 77% of Fortune 100 companies, including partnerships with Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Sony, XPENG, XPEV, NVIDIA, Intel, Qualcomm, Baidu, IBM, LG, Samsung, and others. Well if they have such an incredible market share, why are they so undervalued? The answer is that QNX was not the end-all-be-all product. It was the base that the rest would be built on. Particularly IVY, which is the real money-maker. Tier 3 is IVY beta, and Tier 4 is IVY distribution and subscription revenue streams. So why is IVY the big deal and not QNX? They are both big deals, but QNX was never designed to be the money-maker. They are charging a one-time fee per vehicle use. There is a bigger goal here, to secure their clients as their customers for the bigger product in IVY. They also need QNX is to be a secure system in order for IVY to be trustworthy and reliable. And it certainly is secure. QNX has ISO26262 certification, as well as US government clearance, NSA clearance, and CIA clearance. The US government uses QNX and Blackberry products. Just let that sink in. That should tell you something about its security. Anyways, IVY will be used in autonomous vehicle level 4 and level 5 communication (note that QNX is level 5 certified... it has a business moat just in its security level and clearance), as well as EV and gas vehicle data collecting and AI-powered data synthesis. See below for more details on IVY. Wrapping up this TL;DR, BB is going to do well this year as IVY unfolds, but will do even better in the next 2-5 years. I have a PT of 25 by EOY and a PT of 80 by 2023 EOY, and a PT of 160+ by 2025 EOY TL;DR: TL;DR: BB go up, but go slow for now because IVY revenue not here yet, but big fast later. Make big monies, BB is the future tech that Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc will be building upon in the EV and IoT market
FAQs:
1) Why is Blackberry stock price going down? A: A few possible reasons. One, as of today the whole market is down. BB is connected to overall market swings as most companies are. Two, there may be some market manipulation by bearish financial institutions as there are a lot of calls expiring on 2/19. I would expect that BB SP to be volatile between $11 and $14 between now and then, and to move upwards after 2/19 and especially after 2/23 (Amazon + BB webinar). Three, there are bearish investors who still think BB is a phone company and don't understand the underworkings of BB's business strategy, their software, their patents, or their partners. Their revenue has been affected by coronavirus and has not been particularly phenomenal so far this year. 2) Should I invest now or later? A: First off, I'm not a financial advisor, these are just my opinions. Invest at your own risk. In my opinion, BB will see a large SP growth by EOY, anywhere from 50% to 150% growth by EOY. While revenue will likely not increase much this year, the partnership with Amazon and news regarding IVY will likely create new floors for their SP much higher than the current SP right now, at around the $12 SP 3) What's stopping competitors from building a similar product and hurting BB's business? A: There's a lot of reasons why BB has a huge moat right now. One, notice the partners that BB has with QNX. They've got all the big boys working them, aside from Apple and Tesla. Seeing as SpaceX runs on QNX, and seeing that Apple was trying to make a deal with Hyundai that did not go through, I think it is still possible that either Tesla or Apple or both companies could also make a deal with BB to use QNX as their OS system. BB worked to develop their QNX embedded microkernel OS for the last eight years or so. Anyone trying to step into the game now is far too late. Apple has the best chance of all companies, as it has its own OS and Apple knows security very well, but this still requires an entirely new system in order to work in the EV sector. Also, Apple announced recently that they would be developing their own EV, although they did not give much details beyond that statement. The likelihood that they are both working on the hardware and software side of this thing is slim given the large number of difficulties that come with certification as it relates to the cybersecurity software space. Regardless, I would suspect that either Apple or Tesla is the most likely to be competitors in this space, but neither company has successfully completed a certified OS system, particularly for the emerging sector of autonomous EVs. Tesla is currently building a Linux-based system that is having a lot of difficulty in passing certifications such as ISO26262, a struggle that has been ongoing for years now. They may achieve a product that passes these safety regulations and certifications, but the question remains whether this will be in time as the EV and autonomous market picks up speed, and whether competing companies would even be interested in using their product. In fact, any car company is unlikely to develop their own OS software because none of their competitors would be likely to use it. BB is the perfect business to license since it is not competing in the hardware sector for the EV market. This argument can also be used for Apple if they are also building an EV. 4) Why is BB's revenue so low if they have so many customers and partners? A: QNX has been licensed so far as a one-time purchase, per vehicle or IoT using their software. IVY will be a subscription-based software that also includes a one-time purchase. Thus, BB's revenue streams are somewhat unimpressive currently, but they are playing the long game. If my hypothesis is correct, it is John Chen's goal to lay low as software is developed and customer relationships are built. It's the same with the book market. It's the sequel that makes all the money, not the first book. QNX is just the first book of a series looking to hook in its customers with low costs before hitting 'em with the strong follow up in IVY. Additionally, in order to build a competitive business moat, it was to their advantage to not forewarn any competitors of their involvement and plans. Consider John Chen's work as a CEO in his last business Sybase. Chen worked as the CEO of Sybase for 10 years. For the first 7 years, the SP remained at around $10 a share. Three years later, the SP was at $100 a share. I suspect he is implementing a similar model with Blackberry. Chen joined Blackberry in 2013. BB stock actually dropped for most of the last 7 years, resting at a stock price of around $5. Now BB is at $12 a share. I would not be surprised if BB reaches $50 two years from now.
Blackberry Clients and Partners Automakers: Honda, Audi, Jeep, Mitsubishi, Ford, Hyundai, Volkswagen, Bentley, Lamboghini, Byton, Mini (cooper), Toyota, Subaru, Fiat Chrysler, Mazda, Nio, BMW, Porsche, Lexus, Kia, Land-Rover, Mercedes-Benz, Buick, Jaguar, Visteon, Skoda, Chevrolet, Nissan, Acura, Continental, General Motors, Baidu, Motional Other: Denso, Aptiv, Bosch, Panasonic, Harman, Bugatti, LG, Vodafone, Bell, Carahsoft, CACI, Telus, iSec, KPMG, Tableau, Qlik Major: Amazon, Google, Sony, XPENG, XPEV, Li Auto, NVIDIA, Canoo, Microsoft, Intel, Verizon, Qualcomm, IBM, LG, Samsung Major Investors: PRIMECAP, Hamblin Watsa, Ontario Teachers’ Pension, Vanguard, Harris Associates, ETF Managers Group, Wells Capital, Arrowstreet Capital, Kahn Brothers Advisors, Norges Bank Investment Governments: Albania, Andorra, Angola, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Belarus, Belgium, Benin, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Canada, Congo, Croatia, Czech Republic, DR Congo, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, France, Gabon, Germany, Ghana, Gibraltar, Greece, Guadeloupe, Hong Kong, Hungary, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Kuwait, Latvia, Lesotho, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macau, Macedonia, Malawi, Malaysia, Mali, Malta, Marthinique, Mauritania, Mauritus, Mayotte, Mexico, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Netherlands, Netherlands Antilles, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Réunion, Saint Barthélemy, Saint Martin, San Marino, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Turkey, USA, Uganda, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Uruguay, Vatican City, Western Sahara, Zambia, Zimbabwe
Blackberry Current Revenues:
BlackBerry Revenues: How Does BlackBerry Make Money? -- Trefis This display the biggest bearish argument to BB. Until IVY begins producing new revenue streams, BB is likely to not exponentially increase revenue streams, but only sustain moderate YoY growth
Blackberry Analysis Regarding Infotainment and Google and Ford Deal:
see "Blackberry (BB) Stock News Analysis | What I need to say..." by Financial Live by LEYA on the forbidden video website The media recently picked out a story that left out a lot of pertinent information, making it seems that BB lost Ford as a client. This is not true. QNX is designed to be a SoC. This means that other operating systems, such as Linux or Android, can be easily added to QNX. It is in fact encouraged. The Ford and Google deal was simply announcing the Ford would be using Android as their infotainment system. I believe that BB was never intended to try and be the predominant entity for all software systems in EVs or IoTs, but the backbone that connects all together, and to protect all components in a secure system. Autonomous EVs and even regular EVs in general would not be possible without a secure system protecting the product, as is true with IoTs. This is also why things like US Fighter Jets run on... you guess it, QNX. Ford is still using QNX. It is simply also now using Android that is running on top of QNX more commentary on this: Analyzing Blackberry Bear Argument - Case No. 1: Ford Deal
Image This is an interesting one to be sure. Facebook was being evil, like the do, and were caught using a number of BB patents. They settled in February, and the day that the settlement was finalized, John Chen (BB CEO) tweeted reminding everyone that BB is used on the ISS https://twitter.com/JohnChen/status/1358853064153784321?s=20 Well, the connection and speculation here is that Blackberry is going to the moon, and that the settlement is rather significant. Someone else also dug out some information in Facebook's most recent 10-K, specifically a portion for a 'non-cancelable contractual commitment' of an amount of $7500 million dollars. That's 7.5 billion btw. We don't know how big the settlement is, but it is worth noting that BB's entire market cap is 7.5B. I highly doubt that a settlement would reach such lofty numbers, but it could be possible that FB settled for some initial amount of $1B or so, as well as $1B in reoccurring payments over several years. We won't know until March 15th actually, so stay tuned.
Blackberry New Partnerships
Within the last few weeks, Blackberry has announced a stronger partnership with Baidu (China's Google), as well as their involvement with Baidu choosing to use QNX for their autonomous vehicles that will be hitting the road, as early as this year and next. BB has also announced their involvement with Motional, a joint venture between Hyundai and Aptiv, which will use QNX for their autonomous vehicles. Motional will be partnering with Lyft to use autonomous vehicles to begin serving customers and will be deploying their vehicles in 2023. It was also announced that QNX will be working with AOSP (Android Open Source Project), as well as announcing yesterday that QNX Hypervisor 2.2 is now released, which is what allows Android and Linux to run on top of QNX. A sum-up of all the recent news on $BB
Rumor: Blackberry Buyout? Here's why that's not happening:
Just read this post. It's quite revealing: Great Day for BB despite stick dipping. TL;DR: Amazon could have easily bought BB. Why didn't they? Well, all the big players are interested in this EV and IoT emerging sector. This is the new wave of technology that will dominate the market. First we had the dot.com boom, then the cell-phone and smart-phone market, and now we have the autonomous EV and IoT market. If Amazon were to buy BB, they would have to submit a tender offer. This would be a red flag to all the big players that Amazon were trying to buy up the best security out there. It would be a bidding war that could result in a double-digit multi-billion dollar buyout. It was much more to their advantage to create a secret alliance with BB and establish a 50/50 partnership, whose contract includes exclusivity for their use of IVY. Ouch! That's gotta hurt. This is where the importance of QNX lies. BB will be able to pull the rug out from any company that chooses to use something other than IVY. No IVY, no QNX, no EV. It will be a package deal where IVY is the big money maker. All other companies will have to build from the ground up or be forced to license QNX and make their money off of other sectors, such as the infotainment sector, as Google has already begun to do with the Ford deal. When this deal happened, the other big boys wet their pants realizing they needed to get into this space, and fast. Microsoft partnered with Cruise/GM. Apple tried to partner with Hyundai, who was so flattered, they may have initially said yes or indicated so, before realizing that they were already partnered with BB, so it was a no-go. Not sure if that is fact or fiction, but it is an interesting proposal.
Blackberry IVY + AWS Partnership:
Alright, so what's the deal with IVY? Why is it going to be so profitable? Why is IVY the real money-maker, while QNX has been used as the customer-acquisition software tool? Check out this picture: Image For one, IVY is designed for real-time communication between EVs or other IoTs. Autonomous driving level 5 requires vehicles to communicate with one another. This is where IVY comes in. IVY connects the different software components of an EV (which presumably are running on QNX), as well as harvesting data on those systems. The data used can be distributed for a wide-variety of uses, including, but not limited to, automakers and suppliers, app developers, consumer services, smart cities, EV charging providers, insurance companies, and vehicle maintenance providers. All of these different sectors will be willing to pay subscriptions for these data services, as well as the automakers and IoT makers who will also be willing to pay subscriptions for IVY. For instance, IVY can help share information between vehicles that will allow for a car detecting ice roads in one area so that other cars using IVY can take a different route. This results in less crashes, which helps the automakers. Insurance companies can use data from all these different data points as well, allowing them an inside-view of their clients. The list of what is possible here is inexhaustible. As for price points, the subscription models for multiple outside companies wanting to use the data will be create huge revenue streams for BB. With Amazon as a 50/50 partner, and with their resources and strategic management, BB will be poised to be the foundation in security and data sharing for the entire EV, and somewhat of the IoT market (the IoT market has more competitors for sure) see "Is BlackBerry Stock Undervalued?" by Wealthy Mindset on the forbidden video website see "Roadmap to $180 a share (BlackBerry Stock)" by Wealthy Mindset on the forbidden video website
Revenue, revenue, revenue...
Blackberry is poised to be an industry leader in EV, government, and IoT security and data sharing with products such as QNX, IVY, Spark, and their other software products. Stock price will likely stay somewhat stunted until IVY revenue begins picking up. It is possible that more announcements and marketing related to IVY will make this growth more rapid. In my opinion, either way BB over the next 5 years will 10x. The question is whether you want to get in now at $12 / share or two years from now at $40 a share or something similar, assuming that either way this stock is going to push for that 100B market cap (it's currently at 7B). There will be bearish analysts that will continue to say that Blackberry is a worthless company until those IVY revenue streams begin to come in. It is also possible that a realistic competitor may emerge within the next three years, such as Tesla or Apple. But if Apple is seeking to create its own EV product, then both companies will have a hard time finding any way to license their software to any other company. It remains possible that Apple and/or Tesla may strikes deals with BB as well in order to be able to produce autonomous vehicles and get a bite of that market share
Really, no competitors?
Well it's called a business moat for a reason. As we have recently seen, QNX is working with AOSP, and so clearly, they are not to be worried about. Tesla is not a true competitor as their OS product is not certified yet, and has demonstrated difficulty in doing so, and additionally, other automakers will not want to benefit their competitors by using their product. A third-party non-auto-maker will be much more desirable. Other companies such as VxWorks, have a lot of to prove both in security and certifications, as well as producing an OS product that is compatible with an emerging autonomous level 5 EV market. QNX's embedded microkernel RTOS is very much unique in this regard. This type of system allows for real-time processing and power distribution, while protecting the system from attacks. In an embedded microkernel system, if one part of the system is attacked, the whole system will not shut down, in layman's terms. This is essential for the security of any high-risk product that is built upon an underlying software that controls that different components of the system.
Conclusion:
All eyes are turned towards Blackberry right now. People want to know what this deal with Amazon will look like, how it will work, what they will focus on, (will Amazon also use this system for a fleet of delivery drones? hmmm), what the revenue streams will look like, what are their projections, what markets and sectors are they targeting, what are their future goals, what will Amazon be doing on their end, etc, etc. The Amazon + BB webinar may answer some of those questions, or maybe they won't. Time will tell (Feb. 23rd, specifically -- here's a link to sign up and watch: Next-Gen Vehicle Architectures Unlock Unprecedented Opportunities for Automakers). Also look out for that FB settlement numbers on March 15th, and Q4 earnings March 31st. I don't expect Q4 earnings to be particularly interesting unless they include the FB settlement numbers. Could those numbers instead be put into Q1 earnings for 2021? Possibly. Initially IVY beta is expected to begin being released late this year. I will also be looking forward to see how Apple and Tesla respond in the coming months. Ultimately, BB is a long-term play, but is poised to dominate this emerging industry with the partnerships and security focused software they have secretly been building. Now if only the could do something about their logo, some rebranding would be nice... This is not financial advice, just my own opinions. I am not a financial advisor nor a professional. I own 14k shares in Blackberry, as well as options (10x 8/17/21 20c BB). Do your own DD and fact check me as well
Apparently we’re all saying this now, but I am not a financial advisor and you should do your own DD. With that being said, I present you with the following: I’m a fan of DFV the man, but I’m more interested in really really deep fucking value. This will likely be a long post, but I think you’ll find value in it if you can follow along (see what I did there?). For those of you kids who can’t read good, I’ll put the TLDR right here at the top: KT Corp ($KT) is so undervalued it’s almost fucking embarrassing. When I say undervalued, I don’t mean by a little bit… I mean if this thing doubled it would still be a good value. At the time of my writing this, KT is trading at $10.62. A realistic price target, if the market were to properly value this company, is ~$30.00 I’ll go in depth as to why as we continue through this story, but the long and short of it is the Tangible Book Value of KT Corporation is $19.66/share. What does that mean? It means if KT declared bankruptcy tomorrow, was forced to sell off all of its tangible assets and pay back its debt, the remaining money to be returned to shareholders would be $19.66/share. This does not take into consideration intangible assets – which have real value (in the $BILLIONS), but are harder to assess. Again, it’s trading at $10.62 as of this writing (a price/tangible book value of only 0.54). Value investors typically look for stocks trading at <3.0 price/TBV. Deep value would be <1.0. KT is trading at 0.54, and a price/book ratio of 0.42! Shares are cheap, options are cheap. Do what you will – hell, sell it short if you want – but I like shares and calls. KT CORPORATE PROFILE KT Corporation (formerly Korea Telecom) is a South Korean integrated telecom conglomerate which was founded in 1885 – but realistically in 1981 in a more noticeable form – with business operations sprinkled throughout Asia, Africa, USA & Poland. KT is South Korea’s first telecom company and dominates Korean market share in many of the spaces in which they compete:
Line of Business
% of Korean Market Share
Mobile Services
31.4%
Fixed-line local telephone & VoIP
64.9%
Broadband Internet Access
40.9%
Pay TV Services
31.6%
As a conglomerate, KT has their hands in a number of diversified pots.
Products & Services
% of Total Revenue
Mobile Services (incl. 5G)
27.3%
Fixed-line (incl. VoIP, broadband, data comm.)
19.5%
Media & Content
10.1%
Financial Services (incl. credit card solutions)
14.6%
Other (incl. IT, network services, real estate development)
11.6%
Sale of goods (primarily mobile handsets)
16.8%
Corporate Location Map: https://i.imgur.com/syXIRxy.jpeg KT has ~30% institutional ownership, with BlackRock being a large buyer in Q4 2020. KT has also filed paperwork for a massive share repurchase program. For what it’s worth in this day and age, the short % of shares outstanding is a measly 0.09%. No one is going short on this thing at its current price. You’d literally have to be insane to short it – it’d be like picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. FINANCIAL METRICS & PEER COMPARISONS KT’s balance sheet is rock solid. While it may not have the booming high growth of clean tech or cannabis, it is still growing and maybe more importantly, doing so profitably. I touched on the tangible book value in the TLDR above, but this cannot be understated. If you were to liquidate the company entirely, shareholders would receive $20-30 per share after the debt had been repaid. I have highlighted some comparison ratios in the images below to show the truly disgusting undervaluation of KT. Compared to US-based telecom services index peers: https://i.imgur.com/iOmE5mI.jpeg Using a comp multiple for valuation based on these index comps gives the following implied value per share for KT ranging from $26.33 - $109.88 (unrealistic top end): https://i.imgur.com/0hYg7Zy.jpeg Compared to industry peers/comps: https://i.imgur.com/lT8uPvh.jpeg The following comparison is really the tale of the tape. When we look at tangible book value, we see that all of the peers are trading above the tangible book value. This is obvious, given the share price should exceed the liquidation value. But we see the opposite being true for KT. Again, it is trading at HALF of its tangible book value. You could theoretically buy up all of the existing shares, liquidate the company, and double your money. This is what I mean by real deep fucking value. https://i.imgur.com/vGaVp9b.jpeg Not that we put much weight in them around here, but all of the analysts are bullish on KT as well, with median upside of 33%. https://i.imgur.com/Buhxpqq.jpeg They just published their updated earnings presentation and have positive forecasts for growth as well: https://corp.kt.com/eng/attach/record/2020/KT%20ER%20PT%204Q20%20ENG_FIN.pdf I am long shares and 07/16/21 $15 calls. Everyone looks for the TLDR at the bottom (I put it at the top of the post), but here it is: Massively undervalued, $30/share realistic price target, it's trading at half of its tangible book value - meaning you could theoretically buy up all of the shares, liquidate the company's tangible assets, pay back the debt and be left with 2x your money and still have all of the intangible assets. This is REAL value.
BB is probably not the next GME, it's probably the next TSLA
NOTE: By "next TSLA" I mean a stock that grows far beyond what talking heads think is "reasonable". Not that they are company like TSLA or that they will see similar returns. EDIT: BECAUSE SOME PEOPLE CAN'T READ, BB IS NOT GOING TO BECOME A NEARLY TRILLION DOLLAR COMPANY LIKE TESLA. The comparison is with a company that is undervalued because it's going to get in on a brand new market that it helps create. BB has some elevated short interest for sure. That short interest may even be increasing. However the float on the stock is massive compared to GME. There are over 550 million available shares of BB, and the short interest is below 100%. While there may be some movement up based on shorts covering, GME is a once in a lifetime thing. Nothing is the next GME. Not AMC, not NOK, not BB. The large players aren't ever going to be caught this way again in a place where retail investors can screw them, and GME isn't over. If what you want it to participate in that, then you should buy GME. But I think BB is fundamentally more valuable than its current price.
Current Situation of the Company
BlackBerry, which started as Research In Motion, was the "original" smartphone company, before Apple ate them alive. They didn't have the product pipelines or the money to compete against Apple, and the company was nearly killed by the iPhone and later the Samsung Galaxy brand. Over the last several years, BlackBerry has pivoted into a software security company. They mainly sell security products with a focus on machine learning and artificial intelligence. From Fidelity:
BlackBerry Limited provides intelligent security software and services to enterprises and governments worldwide. The company leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to deliver solutions in the areas of cybersecurity; safety and data privacy; and endpoint security management, encryption, and embedded systems.
BlackBerry IVY is a scalable, cloud-connected software platform that allows automakers to provide a consistent and secure way to read vehicle sensor data, normalize it, and create actionable insights from that data both locally in the vehicle and in the cloud. Automakers can use this information to create responsive in-vehicle services that enhance driver and passenger experiences as well as provide valuable product insights back to the manufacturer.
BlackBerry Limited (NYSE: BB; TSX: BB) today announced an expansion of its strategic partnership with Baidu, whose high-definition maps will run on the QNX® Neutrino® Real-time Operating System (RTOS) and will be mass-produced in the forthcoming GAC New Energy Aion models from the EV arm of GAC Group (Guangzhou Automobile Group Co., Ltd.). ... The QNX Neutrino RTOS foundation for Baidu’s high-definition maps is a robust real-time microkernel operating system that provides deterministic performance as well as flexibility to address the limited resources of the embedded system.
Their QNX system is already used in over 100 million cars that are currently on the road, including a direct partnership with Ford that they've had since 2016. They are in the final stages of completing an amazing turnaround as a company, and it looks like they have a good chance of doing it successfully. So what are the challenges?
Balance Sheet Issues
BB has almost 2/3 of their current "assets" tied up in patents. This can be seen on their 2019 balance sheet as "Intangible Assets – Total: $2.352 billion". Their assets which are easier to liquidate are nearly exactly their current liabilities ($1.196 billion vs. $1.121 billion), as they added $638 million in debt in FY2019. Just a few weeks ago, BlackBerry sold 90 of its smartphone patents to Huawei. It also signed a licensing deal with OnwardMobility and Foxconn to allow it's name and software to be used in making a new 5G Android-powered smartphone that has a physical keyboard, filling a small but important niche in the smartphone industry that is mostly untapped at this point. These moves signal the intent of BlackBerry to leverage parts of its balance sheet that have been mostly sitting idle since 2016 when they exited the smartphone market for good as a manufacturer. The challenge is that their cash flow and income have been negative or paltry for quite a while. That was never going to turn around until they were able to monetize some of their existing IP and position the company for a solid market segment. At this point, they have successfully done both.
Earnings
This section definitely depends on your focus and perspective. For instance, BlackBerry's GAAP EPS has been negative more than positive since 2016. But on the other hand, their adjusted actual EPS has beaten consensus estimates for every single quarter going back to Q3 2015. If you believe in Chen's ability to execute the turnaround, then this seems positive. If you think the company is destined for failure and a slow death, then this seems negative.
Conclusions
Overall, I think BB is undervalued at its current price. They are very well positioned to take off as autonomous vehicles become more common, and most importantly, they have extremely valuable partnerships in many different markets, including some fantastic access to the Chinese market through their partnership with Baidu. Autonomous vehicles are a market that doesn't exist yet. Not truly. But many people believe that autonomous vehicles are going to turn into a HUGE segment of the market over the next decade. While car companies (particularly TSLA) provide direct exposure to that, they come with manufacturing risks and other things such as supply-chain risks. TSLA, Toyota, Ford... they could all face issues that simply come down to "we ran out of good suppliers of Cadmium" or something similar, while what you want is exposure to autonomous vehicles. BB has none of that. Their revenue and exposure to the market is entirely within the software, and because of their wide range of partnerships they shouldn't be dependent on any particular manufacturer. I expect to see them reporting positive earnings during FY2021 (though only slightly), and a much more obviously robust performance in FY2022. Their patent portfolio alone in 2020 was worth about what their market cap was, that's how undervalued this company was due to concern about earnings. Once those earnings turn around, I think the valuation based on only fundamentals should put the stock at about $20 right now, and about $30-$35 by the end of this year. There is also a non-trivial chance of a purchase by another company such as Alphabet that wants access to their partnerships, patent portfolio, and machine learning software. DISCLAIMER: I am not a financial advisor and this is not financial advice. It is an organization of my own thinking behind the positions I have opened with my money. Overall, BB benefits from its meme-stock status, and a bit of a short squeeze could happen for sure. But based just on my reading of their business itself, I think the stock has room to as much as triple within a year. Current position disclosure: 100 BB @ 14.2687 +4 19 FEB 21 15c @ 4.125 +2 19 FEB 21 40c @ 1.93 +1 19 MAR 21 25c @ 4.64
Hello fellow retards I know these are difficult times for this sub and it’s almost impossible to post something solid which is not about the current meme stocks. Instead of jerking to some porn i did some research on PLTR and want to share my DD with you. This might be a longer text for your love dopamine level so maybe you should grab some your Adderall before. The following text might you give your eyes aids since English isn’t my native language. I will try my best. Palantir as a Company – the beginnings PLTR was founded by some people and one of them is Peter Thiel who worked alongside with our holy papa Elon at PayPal. As a payment-service they had concerns about money laundering and founded PLTR to tackle this issue early. The CIA also funded PLTR (they are always funding stuff like this – Siri as example). This actually might be the reason why people think that PLTR is a company which aggregates data and do data analysis for the government….but this is not accurate and not correct at all if you see the big picture. I will explain this point later. You retard still reading? Nice here some rocket emoji’s to pump your dopamine and keep you happy. 🚀🚀🚀 Let’s start with the DD First of all my POV is looking for a midterm to long term investment in PLTR. My valuation considers PLTRs current state and predicting from now on for the next few years.
1. The Management
Before I start with the product I rather start with the management. You can sell the nicest thing in the world. I can guarantee you that the product definitely won’t be considered as the nicest thing after a while if you have a shitty management (Intel). With Peter Thiel on the leaderboard we got a competent asshole and CEO is Alex carp (co-founder) Peter Thiel is well known and Alex Karp is one of us. He yolod his heritage into some business and become a chad. Seriously tho, I trust Peter and if Peter holds on Alex since Decades so do I. Peter proved so many times how cunning he is and showed how to pick adapt problems early and create solutions.
2. PLTR Business model/ products
Before we understand how important PLTRs products are we have to understand that we are simpeltons who don’t have any business with PLTRs. We create data. We don’t fuck with it. We creating with using our phones or working in the office. Only a few of us may working with accumulated big data. PLTRs customers’ base isn’t neighbor Joe or Aunt Nancy. The products they offer are not even for midcap companies they are more designed for whole industries and governments. That’s the reason why their products aren’t so tangible for many people. PLTR basically offers systems to big companies/governments which import their data into these systems. PLTR doesn’t sends workers to the client to collect data and analyse it. They sell platforms. They got 2 Products called “Gotham” and “Foundry” You may think wtf is this guy talking about? Let me explain it in 2 examples: First example is Syria with Gotham. It was impossible in the country to know who the good guys are and who the bad ones are. I know u muricans only know yourself and the rest of the world is the “rest of the world” for you. But this wasn’t so simple in Syria you had many factions with different intentions and some of them were allies and some of them were enemies. The lack of information or the ability of recognizing and sorting these information’s are crucial in a war. PLTR solved the struggle with creating a map which provided resilient information for the marines so they can operate safely. Civil problems over there could also be fixed. https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/10/04/palantir-using-big-data-to-solve-big-humanitarian-crises/ Actually what the John Hopkins University does with the covid numbers and the map, is some sort of what PLTR offering with their solutions. There are rumors that the tracking of Covid and the vaccination will be done by PLTR. In their S1 Form PLTR describes it this way “Gotham, our first software platform, was constructed for analysts at defense and intelligence agencies. They were hunting for needles not in one, but in thousands of haystacks. And they did not have the software they needed to do their jobs. In Afghanistan and Iraq, soldiers were mapping networks of insurgents and makers of roadside bombs by hand. Gotham enables users to identify patterns hidden deep within datasets, ranging from signals intelligence sources to reports from confidential informants, and helps U.S. and allied military personnel find what they are looking for.” https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1321655/000119312520230013/d904406ds1.htm#rom904406_11 The second example is about “Foundry” and it’s directly from the S1 File of PLTR (page 121) “An Airbus A350, for example, has five million parts and is built by hundreds of teams that are spread across four countries and more than eight factories. Companies routinely struggle to manage let alone make sense of the data involved in large projects. Foundry was built for them. The platform transforms the ways in which organizations interact with information by creating a central operating system for their data.” Both of these systems solving big issues with less effort. The arms industry as example would took billions for drones and stuff in Syria for the same job. The important fact is that PLTR does not spend so much resources for new clients they only have to provide access and support for their services and the client feeding the “machine” with data. The key point is to understand that PLTR benefits very huge from economy of scales. This is very important since their costs for additional revenue is basically flat while the profits growing exorbitant with new customers. They offer a software and platforms and not kind of services where they need man power. All they do is working on their platforms and improving it. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-palantir-ipo-breakingviews-idUSKCN26E3I2
I could spam some multiplication on revenue or even a DCF but I think it’s not necessary. Expect the costs of research and development (maybe marketing) the costs of PLTR stood mostly flat in the last quarters. It’s a growth stock and the pricing is mostly in the perspective of PLTR. This is actually all we need to know that the revenue increases while the costs staying mostly flat. Check out the balance sheets at page 12 on the S Form 1. Let’s talk about the market. The whole market seems overpriced but it isn’t tbh. Due to the low cost of capital there is no alternative than to throwing your money on stocks or on real estate. There is nothing with a solid interest rate around (not even in emerging markets). At the stock exchange like in 70s, the companies had to offer a return, a perspective which should be more attractive as putting your money on a saving account with 8% interests without risks. These times are gone since the 2000s. So before people discuss insane valuation they should check out the fiscal and economical policies. Now back to PLTR and why the price is difficult to set (cheap imo). First of all PLTR did a direct listing without an investment bank for their share offerings. Its lacking of the valuation which they usually would get through such a process. PLTR wanted to do IPO with Morgan Stanley but it was mess. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-04/morgan-stanley-s-long-romance-of-palantir-pays-off-as-ipo-nears Morgan Stanley proved themselves many times as stubborn communists when it comes to valuations. I mean you guys remember their disgusting price targets for tesla like 100$ post split or stuff like that. These guys are very focused on numbers and I know it’s difficult to price in the potential and perspectives. But you can’t ignore these things for a fundamental valuation. If you want to consider these things in the price you have to understand the business of the company. This ended that one team at Morgan Stanley valuated PLTR with 5 billion while another team thought they worth 40 billion. https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2018/11/14/palantir-ipo-valuation-morgan-stanley.html How is this difference possible and why is this happening? Because people don’t understand what they are valuating. This happened a lot in the last decade because the decision makers in these banks and many analyst don’t have any idea which metrics they should use on companies like that. They are using the metrics from classical industries on new business. They freaked out when Facebook was valued with 100 billion as IPO. Same with Twitter and in the last years it was Tesla. They said apple going to tank every damn year in the last decade. I honor Warren Buffet so much since he has the dignity to realize that he don’t understands something but at the same time he sees the potential and the trend. That’s why he hired 2 Chads who bought Snowflake for him. The transformation and the generation change didn’t happened yet. That’s why they try to use the metrics from Caterpillar on Tesla. Guys the whole market is mooning with the cheap liquidity. Pennystocks and zombie companies transforming into billion dollar market cap companies. Facebook as IPO had a market cap of 104 billion back in 2012. At that time it wasn’t possible for Facebook to monetize their users with selling ads. They just paid 100 billion for the potential in more difficult market conditions. Look at the IPOs like doordash, Bumble. I’m not going to call this a bubble. Just check out their business cases and use the metrics. Maybe its easier for people to understand Bumble and Doordash… On page 12 of the S1 (balance sheet) Form you can already see the huge positive trends in PLTRs revenue and their costs. All this without all the positive events and contracts PLTR recently got. PLTRs valuation is difficult and I think it’s miscalculated by pessimistic communist who don’t understand that their products are game changers for industries, governments and defense forces. Because of these points I think there is huge price potential for PLTR
5. Risks for PLTR
Despite the general market risks PLTR mentions at page 29 of the S1 Form the competitors as the main risk: “We face intense competition in our markets, and we may lack sufficient financial or other resources to maintain or improve our competitive position.” The S1 Form didn’t aged well. Actually I don’t think that PLTR would have any trouble with offering new shares. Also with Peter Thiel as one of the founders the financial side should be stable. As PLTR competitor people use to mention IBM. The boomers from IBM already surrendered with their Windows95 computers and decided to cooperate. The biggest threat would be big tech with big money like AMZN or APPL. You all now the stories about APPL and Spotify or AMZN and all the merchants. Even if the big players would step into PLTR markets it would be difficult for them since PLTRs products doesn’t rely on an Amazon store or on apple devices. PLTR is years ahead with their products. I think the greatest risk (still) are the boomerish arms industry and all the boomers in pentagon and other authorities. There are very corrupt infrastructures when it comes to decision making and assigning contracts. People fear changes but they can’t avoid the changes. With the recent judgements we can see a turn on the tables but the transformation will still take time. It’s a circuit breaker with an avalanche effect. The risk factors on page 16 on the S1 form mostly aren’t relevant anymore. People complained that PLTR wasn’t profitable for 18 years. Well PLTR was never designed to be profitable and Alex Karp once said “love us or leave us alone”. https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2020/09/09/palantir-ceo-makes-livestreamed-pitch-to-investors.html But even this changed recently. PLTR became profitable in 2020 with 130,000,000§. Now the same people complaining about how high the stock price compared to the profits. Well just you wait.
6. Conclusion and Outlook
If you still reading I have to admit that this was a lot text and i am sorry again about the lingo. Let’s connect the dots and bring this information to a point
The boomer coalition in the pentagon and in the arms industry is taken down by PLTR. They will able to get the governments contracts and the classic arms/defense industry is no match for PLTR products. The judgements of lawsuits were catalyst and the effects should be already shown in the next earnings. These were such underrated events but I think there still will be some odds but PLTRs situation is much better as it was a time ago. The chains are off!
PLTR superior products profits hugely from economy of scales. They don’t have any significant costs when they acquire new customers. Making the big data usable for decisions making is already very important and step by step people realize that this issue growing fast. We creating everyday more data than we did yesterday and leaving the majority of it as trace and unstructured data. We don’t work with it but big Institutions does.
Here is the passage from the S1 and I fully agree with it: “The systemic failures of government institutions to provide for the public — fractured healthcare systems, erosions of data privacy, strained criminal justice systems, and outmoded ways of fighting wars — will continue to require both the public and private sectors to transform themselves. We believe that the underperformance and loss of legitimacy of many of these institutions will only increase the speed with which they are required to change.”
PLTRs value. The current situation of the market with tons of liquidity seems like a bubble. People don’t know what to do with the cheap capital and people throwing it even on meme pennystocks.
Facebook had his ipo back in 2012 during much harder market conditions as now. The valuation of Facebook was over 100 billion and people called it insanely overvalued. They did it because Facebook didn’t had a way to monetize their users (especially on mobile platforms). Facebook has a market cap of over 750 billion now and nobody calling it over valued. A remember the recent examples? Bumble?! Bruuuh. Don’t get me wrong if you invested in Bumble but they have nothing special to offer and their business case can easily copied or improved by others. Its shows the current state of our market with the crazy liquidity that even zombie companies got astronomic valuations. Use these metrics on PLTR with great products, great management, low cost base and less odds as ever before…. PLTR price is wrong imo especially in this market and with PLTRs current state and perspective.
Do you use PLTR? Me Neither! It’s not designed for us and we have to inform us about the success. PLTRs new contracts and their future are shining bright. With the settled lawsuits the sky is clear for PLTR. But their customer base is not only America. I’m not a murican and 3 weeks before I just find out that the police departments in our state using PLTR products. I don’t need to link endless evidences here since you can google it by yourself and see how many contracts PLTR recently got. Especially after the circuit breakers we talked about.
I have genuinely trust into Peter Thiel and Alex Karp that their will make the best of PLTRs potential. The odds getting removed and the demand for PLTR is increasing. If all these information would priced in correctly we would have a share price of at least 60-70$. With upcoming and ongoing positive events PLTR share price should soar more.. What’s next? Now we have earnings ahead and the lock up period ending. For the earnings I think the number will be fine and keep up the positive trend on revenue with a disproportionately trend of the costs. The most important part will be guidance for 2021. We should listen closely and see if the magic is already happening. The second event is the ending of the lock up period. You all remember the end of the lock up period of Nikola? Just 1-2 days after they announced they don’t got the GM deal? The stock tanked – for a good reason. You know the guy Trevor Milton. But in PLTRs case everything is different. Despite the successful deals they got, does a guy who says “love us or leave us alone” sounds like someone who going to drop his shares at the first possibility? I don’t expect such a behavior from Alex Karp and neither from Peter Thiel. If some employees drop their shares it should be fine. I would appreciate if the stock prices would go below 3ß. It would create a healthy bullish chart pattern and would be actually a nice discount to get in or stock up. I don’t think that the shares going to dump a lot because of this event. The earnings and the guidance are more important and the key events if you want to invest mid – long term. What does all this means for you? Nothing! Please don’t do any market activity based on my DD. I’m just sharing my knowledge and looking for critics so I can reevaluate my theses. This is not a financial advice. My hearts bleeding for all the GME holders. My last Reddit account got banned because I criticized “the pumpers”. In one of the comments I called the mods gay and got banned permanently (bye bye 20 k karma). If you are new to this please don’t do any decision based on this so I can sleep gladly. I’m not well positioned and not trying to pump this stock. I have 70 shares and a CSP. Fair play and fuck all the bots and pump and dumper we recently got in the sub! Leave an upvote if this post helped you. I need some more karma to be able to shitpost everywhere again!
You guys are paper handing $GME because you haven't seen the squoze yet and are worried the company is worth nothing
Most of you retards in GME got in when the stock already jumped several times from where it was 8 weeks ago. You're all shouting Wall St is preventing the MOASS through manipulative actions (they definitely are). However you're all losing sight of why the short squeeze was even possible in the first place and pissing your pants wetting your paper hands in the process. We didn't invest in GME because the shorts were over 140% of the float and wanted to punish Wall St If any of you autists actually did some DD or even watched some of DFV's videos, you'll realize that GME was a value play, the short squeeze was just the cherry on top. I have seen over the past two weeks, a huge gaslighting effort from billionaires on TV (and unintentionally reddit users pushing only the MOASS), getting you to believe that Gamestop's value is from the short squeeze. What everyone forgot is how valuable of a company Gamestop is now. So what changed about Gamestop? In Nov 2020 Ryan fking Cohen joined Gamestop's Board. Who is Ryan Cohen? This is the guy who built Chewy from the ground up, he was in all respects, able to build a Pet e-commerce empire and directly compete with Amazon. Not only did Ryan join the board, but he was able to bring along with him Chewy's COO/CMO and CFO. You know who else is on the board? Reggie Fils-Aimé, the previous President of Nintendo Americas. If you don't know Reggie, you definitely know his face. So now you know Gamestop is poised for a shakeup, Ryan didn't join the Board and bring with him two other people because he thought Gamestop was going to get squozed, he did it because he understands there is a lot of money to be made here. Valuation I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert in valuing companies. Properly evaluating a company purely based on financials does not work in today's market anymore, but to appease the F people. Here are some facts: Critics argue brick and mortar retail, and as a result Gamestop, is dying. While they aren't wrong, they fail to also address that Gamestop had 300% YoY growth in e-commerce sales. Gamestop is also actively shutting down stores and rebranding existing ones as experience centers. Physical Gamestop stores are going to be where all you autists hang out when you're outside of your rooms. Gaming is huge, anyone who argues otherwise is living under a rock. As cringe as it was, Ninja hosting the NYC ball drop is testament to this. Singular game titles like Fortnite and Minecraft are worth billions alone. The gaming industry itself is worth nearly $200 Billion and slated to grow double digits YoY. There is a great DD written by a VC on why Gamestop is going to the moon
This market cap (matching industry standards) should for an appropriate valuation for a growth stock be $50B.....This is why the short squeeze is distracting many. In 5 years if you diamond hands this company, the fair value of shares can range from $800-$2400 and not be in any sort of bubble or unjustified by fundamentals speculation.
To repeat that, based on fundamentals alone (nothing to do with a short squeeze), GME per share could be worth $800 conservatively, or $50 Billion. Chewy at this time is worth roughly $40 Billion in a smaller market, Pet products vs Gaming. So polish your paper hands and turn them into fking diamonds. There is nothing Wall St can do can make you sell. And when this company starts turning itself around, you'll have been at the ground floor. TL:DR Gamestop not worth nothing if shorts not squoze. Everyone wants you to believe it so you can sell now. Gaming is huge, Gamestop is positioning itself to be big. P.S. For all you retards, everyday you hold your shares is another day Melvin and co need to pay interest. Hold your stocks for at least a year, and you even get to pay long term capital gains tax as opposed to short term counts as ordinary income. (Read hold onto your shares for longer, less booboo from govt). Also this is why you don't fking buy on margin or play with options.
I watched 749 movies in 2020 including 636 feature length films, here's my takeaways
I'm an amateur film lover, as I'm sure many of the folks in /movies are. I will be the first to also admit that I was also one of the lucky ones last year to have 'boredom' as one of my biggest problems, and so to everyone reading this I hope you have a far better 2021. Watching lots of movies isn't necessarily something new to me, especially in such a vast quantity, I watched a lot in 2019 as well and it's something that works for me. I know some people say they don't like watching so many in quick succession for various reasons, and that's cool, just know that this works for me and I like to think I have a fairly good memory of almost everything I've watched (certainly all of the ones that I've enjoyed). And I can safely say I don't feel burnout coming on either...at least not yet, fingers crossed. I also feel we're incredibly lucky to live in the era that we live in, watching films has never been easier than it has now, there's so many ways, both legal and illegal. Just this year alone, we've had four major classics receive Blu-rays for the first time ever, Satantango, Los Olvidados, Roman Holiday and Beau Travail. I can't even begin to imagine how frustrating it must have been to be an amateur movie lover in previous decades without the conveniences we have today and without access to the benefits of being in film industry circles. As a result, it becomes a case of, the more you watch, the more great movies you realise are out there and the 'never-ending watchlist syndrome' becomes a real thing. But I take that as a positive knowing that this isn't some tick-box exercise and that watching movies is a life-long journey. After all, we all watch movies for different reasons, sometimes to laugh, to kill time, to make us better people, for catharsis and various other purposes. To keep this relatively short for the main post (I can detail further in the comments if anyone's interested) I'll post my top 5 (in no particular order) for each calendar month of 2020, varying from popular favourites to ones I feel like deserve way more attention in the general conversation. FULL LIST HERE Jan 2020
Le Cercle Rouge (1970) - The first film of the year I saw and only fitting because I adore Melville's work. Anyone who loves a good heist movie should absolutely do themselves a favour and watch this. What I love about Melville is how he uses action and silence to drive the story and build suspense rather than overload you with dialogue that would overexplain things you could figure out by just observing. Treating your audience with respect is the sign of a great filmmaker.
Seven Chances (1925) - Every Buster Keaton movie I watch, i'm more and more impressed with how much mileage he managed to get out of everything, from cameras, to sets, to space in the frame. For anyone looking to get into silent cinema, Buster Keaton is the most accessible place to start next to Charlie Chaplin. The blackface we could do without though.
Little Women (2019) - Greta Gerwig made the best adaptation of a book that has had like 8 adaptations before it, and some of them really good, she's a genius. That's all I have to say.
Mon Oncle (1958) - Tati's sense of humour is exactly my kind of humour. The production design in his films could have a book written on them. There's so much effort put into his films and watching them is a joy. There's no real structure to the movie as such, it's like a 2 hour string of gags put together all tied together by the central character of Monsieur Hulot who was the inspiration for Rowan Atkinson's Mr Bean. If something light-hearted and fun like this sounds like your thing then give it a shot.
Certain Women (2016) - Kelly Reichardt is one of the greatest American filmmakers working today and even though I haven't seen First Cow yet, I can safely say that it's hard to find many working right now more consistently good than her. There's a vignette with Kristen Stewart and Lily Gladstone that is one of the most heartbreaking portrayals of loneliness and unrequited love that I've ever seen.
Feb 2020
L'Argent (1983) - the best exploration of money, its corrupting effects, Bresson's one of my all-time favs. The acting is deliberately different to what you might expect from a conventional (Hollywood for example) movie but stick with it and you'll get something viciously scathing and cynical about the current state of society. Best part, it all takes place in less than 90 minutes.
Landscape in the Mist (1988) - I had a funny experience with Angelopoulos, i saw The Travelling Players first and it really bored me, then I saw this and Eternity and a Day and now he's one my all time favourite directors. One of the greatest child performances I've ever seen. Such a great exploration of the innocence of childhood, what happens when that innocence is taken away, the uncertainty from uncaring parents, and how to move beyond that and find peace and beauty in life
The Big City (1963) - Ray's direction in this is overwhelmingly good tbh. There's a scene where Ray uses mirrors which is so, so good. It's feminist without feeling preachy.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) - The last movie I saw in cinemas. Also Celine Sciamma, idk where I've been all this time, but I'm glad I've finally been introduced. I could go on and on about this movie. Watch this with headphones if you don't have a good sound system, it's worth listening to how much care was put into the audio-visual experience of this film. Most people seem to take their time syncing with the rhythm of this film until there's a scene (and you'll know when you see it) halfway through the movie where the film sort of transcends above everything it's being doing and then the rest of the movie flies by.
Bullitt (1968) - Think I could count on one hand the number of great car chases that exist in cinema, Bullitt has one of them. McQueen's just effortlessly good in this.
March 2020
Intolerable Cruelty (2003) - I really want this to get a critical re-appraisal. Maybe its because I'm a Coen Bros diehard but I find this hysterical and George Clooney bringing back Cary Grant's ghost from the past is a thing of beauty.
The Assassin (2015) - Don't mistake this for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 2.0 and you'll enjoy this. It's not as fast-paced and it doesn't want to be. But it's a memorable experience either way.
Toy Story 4 (2019) - I've been disappointed with Pixar in the last decade but this is proof that they won't drop the ball on the thing that made them iconic.
Eternity and a Day (1998) - see comments for Landscape in the Mist above. Also Eleni Karaindrou is in my top three composers of all time, her music alone is worth listening to even if Angelopoulos' films dont interest you.
Paddington (2014) - I'm using this as a spot to not just highlight this but also the sequel, for once I agree with Reddit, they backed the right movie and the circlejerk for Paddington is justified. So if youve not seen them, go do that, if you've seen them already well just do it again.
Apr 2020
Raw (2016) - I'm not a horror enthusiast, but this is definitely one I would recommend to everyone. Made me a bit queasy at times even though I'm not easily scared. The themes are explored in such a unique way.
The Koker Trilogy - Cheating a bit here, but I'm a sucker for meta cinema and Kiarostami's an all time great for me. They're all short in runtime but what they explore is enough for two trilogies let alone one. The first movie starts off quite simply and is very accessible, and it's also a movie that never feels like its exploiting the group of people its filming for the purposes of entertainment. In a more conventional movie, you could've expected a weepy melodrama about how hard the poor have it. The next two films then build on that and what cinema means as an artform and the meta connections that it creates become something else entirely. It'll leave you thinking over it all for a while.
Faces Places (2017) - Agnes Varda's a national treasure. Her work is ridiculously unpretentious and her life experience alone makes it worth listening to her, she always had fun and so did the audience too through her infectious personality and her endless curiosity for life. And best of all, its a short and sweet runtime.
Down by Law (1986) - Jim Jarmusch is the king of the hangout movie. Idk how he does it, one day I'll understand how he makes such low stakes movies seem so compelling but I'm not there yet.
Beetlejuice (1988) - I miss peak Tim Burton. I know Kevin Kline's Oscar that year is one of the few rare occurrences where a comedic performance won but Michael Keaton deserved it way more in my opinion. Without him, there is no movie. And the music choices are fantastic.
May 2020
Secrets and Lies (1996) - This could've been really silly in the wrong hands, its the kind of premise I might expect from an Adam Sandler comedy and yet it's genius.
Minding the Gap (2018) - The depiction of the lasting, ripple effect of domestic violence in this is so honest and raw and the way it's cut together is so fantastic. I'm so glad Bing Liu got the recognition he deserved for this.
Dogville (2003) - in a career full of provocations, von Trier's Dogville is maybe his greatest provocation. An experiment that pulled off and then some and so dense you could write a paper on this movie alone. I will say I had a funny experience with Dogville as I put it on one day and then I tried watching it and found the way it was shot quite distracting, but then something came up about 15-20 mins into the movie and I had to turn it off and restarted it the next day. The next day it just worked I guess because I was already aware that von Trier was using a completely different camera and it didn't bother me so much.
Faust (1926) - one of the absolute best silent films out there. Murnau's a goddamn master. Feels so modern, and for a tale that's been done to death, I do urge people to check out the first cinema adaptation because it's still fresh.
Man with a Movie Camera (1929) - I will admit, my stamina with experimental films is pretty limited but this was a blast, and it has more innovations in like 70 minutes than most decades of cinema do. The Michael Nyman score with this is highly recommended.
June 2020
Beau Travail - The ending to this is one of the best endings ever. I won't spoil for anyone who's not seen it. Definitely more austere and slower-paced for some but for those who sync with the rhythm, it's well worth it.
Scenes from a Marriage - In a well-worn subgenre, maybe the best movie about marriage and divorce ever?
What's Up Doc? - Really makes me wish the screwball comedy genre wasn't dead. Someone bring it back.
Da 5 Bloods - Honestly I really thought this was a blast, and another case of an auteur smuggling a great film into a genre flick.
A Hidden Life (2019) - I've not seen To the Wonder, Song to Song or Knight of Cups yet, but I'm just glad Terrence Malick is still making great movies. James Newton Howard and Jorg Widmer need way more recognition for their work on this for music and cinematography respectively.
July 2020
The Square (2017) - So apparently this is one of the more hated Palme d'Or winners but I loved it, Ruben Ostlund's keeps making movies and I'll keep watching them. I thought this was hilarious and really well acted.
Shoah (1985) - If there's a film on here I could get everyone to see, it would be this, but I have no misguided expectations considering the runtime and the material. But you could break it up into parts, there are clear stopping points in this. I would say it's the best thing I've seen this year. I think the way the Holocaust is taught in schools is not up to scratch at all and its the reason why antisemitism is still so present in society today. I think if everyone watched Shoah, it would do a good deal towards understanding how humans work and how something like this happened and how we can prevent it from ever happening again.
OJ Made in America (2016) - For a subject matter that has been written about ad nauseam with dozens of on-screen adaptations, docs and God knows what else, Ezra Edelman performed a goddamn miracle making something as good as this. One of the best examinations of how America reached the point that it's at right now.
Carlos (2010) - Cheating a bit here with this one, but seriously, Olivier Assayas what the fuck? How did you make something like this? Genuinely baffles me how Edgar Ramirez has been wasted ever since this movie came out. One of the best biopics I've ever seen and I think I had my heart in my mouth for the entire OPEC raid.
The Right Stuff (1983) - The editing in this is flawless, so many remarkable choices in the cutting department which is why this felt so well-paced for its length. It also has an ensemble cast that has become quite famous in the years which makes it worth the watch too. Definitely one to check out for any sci-fi or space movie enthusiasts. The satire in this is razor-sharp as well.
Aug 2020
Birth (2004) - Honestly feel like the flack for this was undeserved, Jonathan Glazer needs to be better funded. So well-shot, there's a long take in this that feels like it inspired Portrait of a Lady on Fire's ending. Nicole Kidman sells this as well, could've been bad in the wrong hands.
Winter Sleep (2014) - I'm a sucker for Nuri Bilge Ceylan's dialogue, he writes like no one I've ever seen. For anyone unfamiliar with him but familiar with Chekhov or Dostoevsky, do check his work out. It's one of those movies which really manages to capture the complexities of life and how no person is perfect and the importance of coming to grips with the positive things that 'shitty people' do and the bad things that 'good people' do. I love the climax to this film, one scene in particular and what it has to say about class and social differences.
An Elephant Sitting Still (2018) - Honestly this was 4 hours long but it felt like 2. There's no denying this is a heavy movie but for its subject matter, it seems to float through its runtime because of deeply you care about the characters by the end. It should feel very grim to get through and I guess it is in parts but you're so drawn into the world that it doesn't matter. RIP Hu Bo.
Happy Hour (2015) See above except 5 hours, however this is probably lighter in tone than An Elephant Sitting Still. It's the dynamic between the four leads, the intimate details we come to know about them and how their relationship changes over the course of the story which is what makes it so weirdly riveting. This is a must-watch for Ozu/Koreeda/Rivette fans. The workshop sequence is weirdly hypnotic and such a genius way of setting up the lead characters.
Life is Sweet (1990) - One of the great films about food and the love of it. Mike Leigh makes it look easier than it is.
Sept 2020
I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020) - Not gonna write too much on this as it's quite recent and quite popular on here. But Charlie Kaufman shows no signs of slowing down. As long as people give him the money, seriously someone keep giving him money.
Tomboy (2011) - I'm kinda convinced that in the two decades Celine Sciamma has been working, she might be one of the best needle droppers in cinema ever. This film just exudes empathy for its protagonist. The lead performance is what makes this so tender and charming as well.
A Face of Another (1966) - A film that never wastes its high concept premise, a stunning lead performance (considering the impediments), and a director who deserves praise equal to some of the other Japanese greats.
Muriel's Wedding (1994) - Ridley Scott said he saw this 6 times and that was enough to convince me. I hope it's enough for anyone reading this too. Best use of ABBA in a movie (sorry Mamma Mia fans). Looks so basic on the surface and yet it has some of the best cinematography in any comedy I saw last year.
Mommy (2014) - Best use of montage in the 21st century I've seen. I had a weird experience with this movie in that I found it quite irritating (I know Steve is supposed to be irritating) and then when the montage happened, everything clicked and it was an all-time favourite.
Oct 2020
Drug War (2012) - Johnnie To's direction in this is so meticulous, it's like watching competence porn. The action scenes are back-loaded but they're worth the wait. The movie builds to its climax so effortlessly and it's a tight script, not a minute wasted. At 104 minutes, you could do a hell of a lot worse for an action movie.
Ryan's Daughter (1970) - Feel like this deserves a bit more respect than it already gets in the David Lean canon. It's a case of it being compared to Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago which I feel like is why it's hard done by. The music by Maurice Jarre is fantastic and the central romance is fantastic.
The Heiress (1949) - In a career full of masterpieces, William Wyler's The Heiress stands at the top for me. I gave this a watch after Olivia de Havilland's passing this year and her performance is so so good. The ending is an all-timer for me.
The Vanishing (1988) - If you love thrillers, you owe it to yourself to watch this. Most people have seen it recognise it for the classic it is. The structure of the story takes a more innovative and different turn to how a more conventional movie would set this up.
The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) If you ever wanted an interesting take on a religious story, then a take by a homosexual, an atheist and a Marxist might just be the one to watch. Very respectful of the source and proof that religious movies can be great.
Nov 2020
Magic Mike XXL (2015) - Yeah honestly this slaps. This is another one of those sequels sort of akin to Mad Max Road Warrior and Fury Road, and Evil Dead 2 where it's better than the first installment because it doesn't have to spend time laboriously setting the world and the characters up. It gets straight into the story and any melodrama is avoided, it's a bro hangout movie without the baggage of 'bro culture' and there's no toxic masculinity. It's a movie that also knows its progressive without having to make it known to the audience like a lot of other (mainly Disney) blockbusters do nowadays. It also breaks rules in the cinematography and editing department by breaking the 180 degree rule. It's really low-stakes, doesn't take itself seriously at all and technically it's really well put together.
A Bride for Rip Van Winkle (2016) - One of those movies where you will never be able to guess where it ends up based on how it begins.
Blue Collar (1978) - For anyone who was a fan of the portrayal of class differences in Parasite, this is definitely worth a watch. Genuinely one of the best directorial debuts I've seen and the ending is a classic. Every character's motivation is so fleshed out and maybe features one of the more morbid death scenes in cinema as well.
The Counsellor (2013) - Yes I also enjoyed this as well lol. This is so hypnotic if you're in the right mood. This is probably one of the most cynical mainstream movies I have ever seen and you'll know within a few minutes if the dialogue is your type of thing. I did see the extended cut for this as I heard it was better than the theatrical version which seems to be a consistent thing with Ridley Scott. Bardem gives a wild performance too.
The Tale of Princess Kaguya (2013) - Lord is the animation in this stunning. Also this is the best adaptation of the Superman story of 2013, don't @ me.
Dec 2020
Terms of Endearment (1983) - I know the Best Picture winners of the 80s seem to get the most flack from the more recent decades, which is why I, for silly reasons, put this off for so long as I have also fallen victim to caring more about the perceived hype around a film and the awards it gets rather than just assessing a film for what it is. This is a deeply touching, heartfelt movie with I guess you could call an ensemble cast that I think honestly almost anyone could enjoy. What's great is how it avoids easy chances for melodrama and it doesn't villainise anyone in the movie, it only asks us to understand where they're coming from. For anyone Jack Nicholson fans, this is a must-watch.
Sound of Metal (2019) - This is such a compassionate and sensitive film right down to how it was cast, some of the best use of sound design I've seen in a movie in a long time. Again another movie that could've opted for easy choices in writing to create drama between Riz Ahmed and Olivia Cooke's characters or at Paul Raci's community. Parts of it are telegraphed and expected and yet they still hit you with the force of a train.
Centre Stage (1991) - Maybe Maggie Cheung's career-best performance? The movie itself shows how paint-by-numbers most biopics are by juxtaposing scenes of the actual cast and crew of the film discussing the story of the subject with scenes of the actors recreating the history. I'm not sure if this was influenced somewhat by Kiarostami's Close-Up from the year before, I can't imagine it as there's only a one year gap, but regardless, very impressive. Great use of music as well.
Another Round (2020 I feel like enough has been said about this already, it's certainly blowing up. Vinterberg and Mikkelsen need to work way more than they already do, The Hunt is one of the best of the last decade, and Another Round will be one of the best of this decade. The use of music is phenomenal and the movie makes me wish ensemble awards for acting existed at the Oscars because this everyone is perfect. Maybe one of the best modern movie endings I've seen.
The Up series (1964-present) - This is sort of a collective nomination as I have yet to finish it but if anyone found the central conceit of Boyhood fascinating then this is one to watch. Maybe one of the greatest social examinations conducted ever and for a society thats becoming gradually more and more class conscious, this is worth a watch. Probably not recommended to binge it as video clips from previous installments do get re-used for context because of how they were aired 7 years apart for audiences.
For anyone wondering if I'm going to list my most hated movies, unfortunately for those lot that's not something I'm going to do, as I feel like this sub already dumps on a lot of movies as it is and I don't feel the need to add onto that any further. If you have any questions or thoughts you'd like to share, please do; a big thing that kept me going was the conversation it let me have with others. Thanks for reading.
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