A friend of mine just sent this over to me. He's a noob and I'm a noob but in the true spirit of karma whoring for fake internet points I wanted to share and they said it's my funeral. Note we are both total retards, noobs and have no skin in the game cuz we too poor and can only afford plain popcorn, but we desperately want to see WSB succeed and Power to the Players! Do not take this as financial advice or god have mercy on your soul.
Uh guys… so we may see a crash that makes Enron look like a joke. There could be more than a short going on here, and more than firms pulling capital from other companies to cover.
I don’t mean to go all conspiracy theory on you, but hear me out.... I think everything is going so off-the-rails not because of the short, but because Vanguard, Fidelity and BlackRock have sold more stock than exists. This is illegal (duh) but it has happened lots of times in the past. In fact, we didn't have real laws against it until 2008. We may see some bizarre moves if WSB doesn't sell, because some people need to hide some crimes. No joke. Here's why I think this may be the case:
---------- The Background ----------
Read this first to understand how naked shorts work:
https://www.sec.gov/about/offices/ocie/options-trading-risk-alert.pdf
Basically, to short a stock, you must “borrow” the stock from another account, usually something like a margin account. This is something that typically the clearing house does on behest of the fund doing the shorting. Most people don’t even know when their shares are being borrowed by a hedge fund for the purposes of shorting.
A “naked short” is when you short a stock, but don’t confirm that the stock you are borrowing actually exists. This can happen when a clearing house either purposefully or inadvertently (ahem, sure) lends the same stock more than once. This basically clones the stock, just like an item cloning glitch in a video game. There are now two copies of the same stock in existence being actively traded… at least temporarily. Hold that thought.
Naked shorts can be devastating to the company being shorted, as not only do they lose liquidity because of the short, the cloned stocks serve to dilute the value of the real stocks being held by artificially increasing the number of stocks being traded. Especially for small companies doing initial investment rounds, this practically guarantees bankruptcy: the diluted value limits the amount of capital they can raise, as the company never sees the cash from the cloned stock.
Now, after the 2008 crash the SEC in theory made this illegal. Obviously, this practice kills companies if the short succeeds or destroys markets if the short doesn’t succeed. Either way, someone gets hurt.
HOWEVER, there’s a catch: Because hedge funds and clearing houses are permitted to operate behind closed doors, the SEC can only detect a naked short when a “failure to deliver” occurs. When someone calls the short, either because of a buy or because someone withdraws the right to loan their shares, the person shorting then has 3 days to deliver. If they can’t deliver the share (because it doesn’t exist) within 3 days, then this gets reported as a “failure to deliver”. Now, the SEC may look past a few of these because floats do happen, but too many and the SEC is obligated to open an investigation.
But of course, that never happens. The clearinghouse only has to report the net deliveries, not the actual transactions. This means that as long as there is someone buying on the day the failure-to-deliver would occur, the clearinghouse can roll the transaction forward… basically just like floating a check. The non-existent cloned stock is bought with the new buy, and the sell of real shares that should have covered that buy is left open but doesn’t need to be fulfilled for three more days. The clock resets. This is sort of like somebody-I-know used to do by floating checks back and forth between two different bank accounts: keeping the money in the air for several weeks until payday by continually writing checks to cover checks. Super unethical, but does work.
But, this can’t be continued indefinitely. There are SEC rules that make it tough to do this for longer than 21 days. IANAL, I don’t know every loophole, but that’s my understanding.
This is why after 2008 it became so important for the hedge fund to bankrupt the target company. If the company goes bankrupt, then the shares cease to be and the books never resolve. Even some kinds of restructuring can keep the books from resolving. It’s still possible to cover this without bankrupting the company if you can get enough people to sell, but it’s easier to crash the company and just make it all go away while pocketing cash from more shares than were ever real.
---------- The WSB Play ----------
Ok, now read this:
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4370860-gamestop-short-squeeze
This was basically the original WSB plan back from October. Don't worry about the plan... we know what's going on here already. Melvin Capital shorted by 140% which is more than the float. Gamestop had enough cash to cover debt so it seemed unlikely they would fail unless the hedge funds forced it to. Squeeze looks obvious when you lay it out that way.
BUT, there is one chart here that is super important when folks were trying to figure this out: look at the chart for institutional ownership!
https://i.imgur.com/Jh5AI8V.png
The top three names on that chart are Vanguard, Blackrock and Fidelity. As is suggested by the author, there is a strong likelihood that the top holders already loaned out all their shares to Melvin Capital. The shares had to come from somewhere, and this is the only place they could have come.
This is why some people thought this was a good move. Not just because there was a short, but because they could see that all the shares had already been “borrowed” which would force the hedge fund to buy at any price. There were simply no more shares available to option for any other kind of fuckery.
---------- The Expected Response ----------
Okay, so WSB made their move. And predictably Robinhood and a bunch of trading platforms cut the ability to buy GME. Seems obvious enough as a strategy to stem the bleeding, regardless of whether it is coming from Robinhood or, as they claim, the brokerage above them limiting trades for reasons. Whatever. Either way, this is an obvious response.
Likewise, there have been numerous pushes from the hedge funds to either convince WSB the positions are closed, or to convince them to change their position from GME to Silver.
Despite what the news is reporting, no one in WSB appears to be buying silver. Maybe someone is, but it ain’t them. I did a site-wide search for silver, then pulled the post history for all the accounts that made the posts--of which there are shockingly few compared to what the news media is implying. The only accounts promoting this appear to be mostly bots: they became reddit premium within the last week, or they are necro accounts that have no posts for two or three years until suddenly dozens of silver related posts in the last few days. Conversely, there are been numerous long standing accounts warning others that these silver posts are bots.
None of this is unexpected. Bots and media manipulation have been par for the course for political bullshit for the last few years.
Boots on the ground, I have literally no idea where the news media is getting this story other than a change in silver pricing. I am not seeing any such discussion in related communities, and certainly none that pre-dates the news stories! To be fair and avoid conspiracy: I don’t hang out on twitter. There are retail traders outside of Reddit, and perhaps the media is clumping multiple groups together and mistaking Twitter for Reddit. Wouldn’t be the first time. Even on 4chan /b/ is not /pol/ and so on. People make that mistake all the time, so the misrepresentation may be entirely unintentional. I know the internet is a weird weird place and not everyone gets how it works.
The last expected response is the fact that many of the hedge funds bought new short positions, especially assuming that most of Reddit would sell on Friday. (Which they did not) There are additional short positions held that expect WSB to fold within the next week. This coincides with the news reports expecting people to try to collect their profits. Of course, many people don't intend to do that. They aren't worried about the profits they want to see hedge funds go down.
But all this movement leads to an obvious question: If there are no shares available to borrow, then what are they borrowing against for the short??
---------- Clearing Houses are Sus ----------
Okay, soooo…. We expect Wall Street to prevent buying GME, which they have; and to unleash bots to change sentiment, which they have; and to promote news stories to try to change the situation, which they have.
BUT, with all of this, there are two retail trading platforms that are still allowing GME trades: Vanguard and Fidelity. There is also one firm that started buying GameStop themselves five days ago: BlackRock. Sound like a familiar list?????? These are the firms that held the shares that the hedge funds were borrowing against to short.
Now, if all the funds are trying to stop the bleeding, WHY would these firms still allow trading when no one else is… much less start buying themselves?
Unless…. The shares DON’T EXIST.
You can’t float a check between two accounts without writing another check. Someone needs to buy the shares in order to push the failure-to-deliver of the non-existent cloned stock into the future, otherwise the gig is up and the SEC finds out. If Vanguard and Fidelity become the only source for Redditors to buy from, then they can keep moving the doomsday clock forward. BlackRock can do the same thing by buying the stock themselves. Not as good a position, but not a lot of other choice if they need the books to read clean. Ok, someone with more experience than me can surely explain this better as there are some gotchas, but that's the basic gist.
More proof those shares don’t exist? This academic paper from last year gives a clue:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3673531
Even if you own shares, you can’t vote in a shareholder’s meeting if your shares have been loaned out. Less than half of GameStop shareholders were eligible to vote by April of last year, with even fewer by August! There were so many shares borrowed SIX MONTHS AGO that it was affecting GameStop’s ability to hold a quorum among shareholders.
Now the paper was only concerned about how short selling was affecting company’s ability to administer. The idea that these were naked shorts never came up AFAIK. But knowing what we do now, this seems increasingly likely.
Also, for good measure beyond academia, this was in the news from last year:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-investing-giants-gave-away-voting-power-ahead-of-a-shareholder-fight-11591793863
If you look at the volume that WSB has bought since then, and the amount held in options, and the amount of shares that have been borrowed against in the last week or two as hedge funds have placed a second set of shorts… well… it sure looks like there are way more shares on the market THAN EXIST. Of course, without having the records from the clearing houses, AFAIK there's no way to know for sure. Only the SEC can do that.
I don’t mean the bet WSB played… that Marvin had 140% of the FLOAT. I mean that Vanguard, Fidelity and BlackRock have sold more than the TOTAL SHARES that EXIST.
That's a completely different problem and it's punishable by jail time. Not a joke. It's basically counterfeiting stock shares, although that's not the terminology used. If this is true, who knows how many other times they’ve done this. Or maybe it's not true, and they just really like the stock??? If BlackRock started buying five days ago, and the longest they can likely do this is 21 days, then the doomsday clock doesn’t run out until at least February 17th. If Wall Street can get WSB to sell before then, then they won’t get caught and won’t go to jail. But if they don’t…. well, this will make Enron look like chump change.
If enough people hold until the end of February, and this is truly the situation, then there is a chance that major parts of Wall Street are going to IMPLODE.
---------- The Conclusion ----------
Apes need diamond hands until the end of February in order to get the SEC involved, most likely somewhere between Feb 17th - 19th. Whether or not this will happen is anybody's guess, but if it does all heck may break loose!
Wall Street will probably do everything in their power to prevent that. There are too many top players involved. Crazy moves are likely because stock brokers are smooshy and jail is uncomfortable.
This may effect the market. (Duh) Bloomberg may be correct, but not at all for the reasons stated. But, that said, I wouldn't panic if it does. I think it will be fine in the long run, but that's a whole other set of reasoning for another day.
Standard Disclaimer: This is not financial or legal advice. I am a retard and I have no idea what I am talking about. This is entirely speculation. :)
Edit: here is the link to my second attempt to post to WSB, maybe a mod can reverse the removal? The post still shows listed on my end: https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/la9ms9/follow_the_crumbs_gme_exposed_the_meta/
Edit 2: Ok so don't ask me for stock advice. I don't know stocks and neither does my friend. We both think holding is the right move but beyond that we don't know and could even be wrong about that. And furthermore I don't want this to come off like we're accusing these companies of nefarious deeds. We don't know what is going on. The data is sus. The activities are sus. Google is your friend and the post tries to list sources for the research. Do your own research though! For ducks sake this is a rando post on UserSub. I'm happy to see the love but this is a one shot research dump by someone who knows nothing about this topic.
Edit 3: u/traveljg has commented that Blackrock is on the record for selling not buying but I don't know enough about any of this to challenge the idea one way or another and my friend is off on some other crusade at this point so he's worthless for questions. This is why it is SUPER important that you do your own research and not take advice from a rando.
Edit 4: I'm not responding to chat requests. If you have comments make them on the post. What is wrong with you retards?

All the tactics Hedge funds are using to crash GME prices were revealed as far back as 2014 in this article:
Anatomy of a short attack
TL;DR: Ladder attacks to drive the price down, Media assults, Brokers pulling margin, Paid bashers, Diversion attempts - all tactics seen in recent weeks were predicted by this article from 2014
Transcript if website crashes due to traffic:
Anatomy Of A Short Attack
Abusive shorting are not random acts of a renegade hedge funds, but rather a coordinated business plan that is carried out by a collusive consortium of hedge funds and prime brokers, with help from their friends at the DTC and major clearinghouses. Potential target companies are identified, analyzed and prioritized. The attack is planned to its most minute detail.
The plan consists of taking a large short position, then crushing the stock price, and, if possible, putting the company into bankruptcy. Bankrupting the company is a short homerun because they never have to buy real shares to cover and they don't pay taxes on the ill-gotten gain.
When it is time to drive the stock price down, a blitzkrieg is unleashed against the company by a cabal of short hedge funds and prime brokers. The playbook is very similar from attack to attack, and the participating prime brokers and lead shorts are fairly consistent as well.
Typical tactics include the following:
Flooding the offer side of the board
Ultimately the price of a stock is found at the balance point where supply (offer) and demand (bid) for the shares find equilibrium. This equation happens every day for every stock traded. On days when more people want to buy than want to sell, the price goes up, and, conversely, when shares offered for sale exceed the demand, the price goes down.
The shorts manipulate the laws of supply and demand by flooding the offer side with counterfeit shares. They will do what has been called a short down ladder. It works as follows: Short A will sell a counterfeit share at $10. Short B will purchase that counterfeit share covering a previously open position. Short B will then offer a short (counterfeit) share at $9. Short A will hit that offer, or short B will come down and hit Short A's $9 bid. Short A buys the share for $9, covering his open $10 short and booking a $1 profit.
By repeating this process the shorts can put the stock price in a downward spiral. If there happens to be significant long buying, then the shorts draw from their reserve of "strategic fails-to-deliver" and flood the market with an avalanche of counterfeit shares that overwhelm the buy side demand. Attack days routinely see eighty percent or more of the shares offered for sale as counterfeit. Company news days are frequently attack days since the news will "mask" the extraordinary high volume. It doesn't matter whether it is good news or bad news.
Flooding the market with shares requires foot soldiers to swamp the market with counterfeit shares. An off-shore hedge fund devised a remarkably effective incentive program to motivate the traders at certain broker dealers. Each trader was given a debit card to a bank account that only he could access. The trader's performance was tallied, and, based upon the number of shares moved and the other "success" parameters; the hedge fund would wire money into the bank account daily. At the end of each day, the traders went to an ATM and drew out their bribe. Instant gratification.
Global Links Corporation is an example of how wholesale counterfeiting of shares will decimate a company's stock price. Global Links is a company that provides computer services to the real estate industry. By early 2005, their stock price had dropped to a fraction of a cent. At that point, an investor, Robert Simpson, purchased 100%+ of Global Links' 1,158,064 issued and outstanding shares. He immediately took delivery of his shares and filed the appropriate forms with the SEC, disclosing he owned all of the company's stock. His total investment was $5205. The share price was $.00434. The day after he acquired all of the company's shares, the volume on the over-the-counter market was 37 million shares. The following day saw 22 million shares change hands - all without Simpson trading a single share. It is possible that the SEC has been conducting a secret investigation, but that would be difficult without the company's involvement. It is more likely the SEC has not done anything about this fraud.
Massive counterfeiting can drive the stock price down in a matter of hours on extremely high volume. This is called "crashing" the stock and a successful "crash" is a one-day drop of twenty-percent or a thirty-five percent drop in a week. In order to make the crash "stick" or make it more effective, it is done concurrently with all or most of the following:
Media Assault
The shorts, in order to realize their profit, must ultimately put the victim into bankruptcy or obtain shares at a price much cheaper than what they shorted at. These shares come from the investing public who panics and sells into the manipulation. Panic is induced with assistance from the financial media.
The shorts have "friendly" reporters with the Dow Jones News Agency, the Wall Street Journal, Barrons, the New York Times, Gannett Publications (USA Today and the Arizona Republic), CNBC and others. The common thread: A number of the "friendly" reporters worked for The Street.com, an Internet advisory service that short hedge-fund managers David Rocker and Jim Cramer owned. This alumni association supported the short attack by producing slanted, libelous, innuendo laden stories that disparaged the company, as it was being crashed.
One of the more outrageous stories was a front-page story in USA Today during a short crash of TASER's stock price in June 2005. The story was almost a full page and the reporter concluded that TASER's electrical jolt was the same as an electric chair - proof positive that TASERs did indeed kill innocent people. To reach that conclusion the reporter over estimated the TASER's amperage by a factor of one million times. This "mistake" was made despite a detailed technical briefing by TASER to seven USA Today editors two weeks prior to the story. The explanation "Due to a mathematical error" appeared three days later - after the damage was done to the stock price.
Jim Cramer, in a video-taped interview with The Street.com, best described the media function:
When (shorting) ... The hedge fund mode is to not do anything remotely truthful, because the truth is so against your view, (so the hedge funds) create a new 'truth' that is development of the fiction... you hit the brokerage houses with a series of orders (a short down ladder that pushes the price down), then we go to the press. You have a vicious cycle down - it's a pretty good game.
This interview, which is more like a confession, was never supposed to get on the air; however, it somehow ended up on YouTube. Cramer and The Street.com have made repeated efforts, with some success, to get it taken off of YouTube.
Pulling margin from long customers
The clearinghouses and broker dealers who finance margin accounts will suddenly pull all long margin availability, citing very transparent reasons for the abrupt change in lending policy. This causes a flood of margin selling, which further drives the stock price down and gets the shorts the cheap long shares that they need to cover.
Paid bashers
The shorts will hire paid bashers who "invade" the message boards of the company. The bashers disguise themselves as legitimate investors and try to persuade or panic small investors into selling into the manipulation. (Click here for Confessions Of A Paid Stock Basher).
This is not every trick the shorts use when they are crashing the stock. Almost every victim company experiences most or all of these tactics.
Analyst Reports
Some alleged independent analysts were actually paid by the shorts to write slanted negative ratings reports. The reports, which were represented as being independent, were ghost written by the shorts and disseminated to coincide with a short attack. There is congressional testimony in the matter of Gradiant Analytic and Rocker Partners that expands upon this. These libelous reports would then become a story in the aforementioned "friendly" media. All were designed to panic small investors into selling their stock into the manipulation.
Planting moles in target companies
The shorts plant "moles" inside target companies. The moles can be as high as directors or as low as janitors. They steal confidential information, which is fed to the shorts who may feed it to the friendly media. The information may not be true, may be out of context, or the stolen documents may be altered. Things that are supposed to be confidential, like SEC preliminary inquiries, end up as front-page news with the short-friendly media.
Frivolous SEC investigations
The shorts "leak" tips to the SEC about "corporate malfeasance" by the target company. The SEC, which can take months processing Freedom of Information Act requests, swoops in as the supposed "confidential inquiry" is leaked to the short media.
The plethora of corporate rules means the SEC may ultimately find minor transgressions or there may be no findings. Occasionally they do uncover an Enron, but the initial leak can be counted on to drive the stock price down by twenty-five percent. The announcement of no or little findings comes months later, but by then the damage that has been done to the stock price is irreversible. The San Francisco office of the SEC appears to be particularly close to the short community.
Class Action lawsuits
Based upon leaked stories of SEC investigations or other media exposes, a handful of law firms immediately file class-action shareholder suits. Milberg Weiss, before they were disbanded as a result of a Justice Department investigation, could be counted on to file a class-action suit against a company that was under short attack. Allegations of accounting improprieties that were made in the complaint would be reported as being the truth by the short friendly media, again causing panic among small investors.
Interfering with target company's customers, financings, etc.
If the shorts became aware of clients, customers or financings that the target company was working on, they would call and tell lies or otherwise attempt to persuade the customer to abandon the transaction. Allegedly the shorts have gone so far as to bribe public officials to dissuade them from using a company's product.
Disclaimer: This is not financial advice, this is not my work I'm just copy/pasting the article(bolding the most relevant parts, and re-ordering sub-chapters)
I'm long GME

I’ve been playing Destiny for quite some time and I’ve enjoyed the community around it a lot, but the one thing that frustrates me the most about Destiny is how little the community actually knows about game development. It’s driving me crazy, so I wrote this whole thing down. I’m a game designeproducer myself, I’ve never worked on a project as massive as Destiny (not many people ever do), but I have worked on several gaming projects, some of them big in large companies, some of them small gaming apps. I know enough to explain the basics here, but I’m definitely not the ultimate authority on videogames and I’m not representing Bungie whatsoever, everything here is only from my experience. My goal here is to give you some useful info and calm my mind about this.
The Destiny community is incredibly vocal, especially this sub, which is generally a good thing, but the lack of understanding really damages not only the enjoyment of the community members but also the game itself IMO. I’ll explain some of the basics I think any hardcore fan should know here with an example and then I’ll outline some specific problems.
How Games Are Made
A videogame pipeline can be simplified into this flow: Demand from the top/the market -> top management decision -> design and prototyping -> development and feedbacks -> in house testing -> public testing -> marketing and publishing -> data collecting and analysis -> feedback implementation. It’s a circle that applies to everything from the big picture like the main campaign, to the smallest details like colors of shaders or proofreading of even the smallest posts. Every decision made in this system, even the tiniest ones, has to be debated, supported by data and expertise, approved in multiple places based on the priority, and checked multiple times after it’s implemented.
Game developers, especially in a powerhouse like Bungie, are very skilled, talented, experienced, and passionate people who always do their best to navigate that flow to satisfy the demands with a quality product delivered on time. I can’t stress this enough, developers (including QA testers, designers, artists, marketing, publishing, the whole team) are pretty much always incredibly hard-working people with a love for video games, because otherwise, they would never stay in this scummy business. They’re underpaid, overworked, and most likely overqualified for what they have to do. Some of them know almost everything there is to know about their field and they’re always improving as well.
Because video games, especially gargantuan living games with real-time action combat like Destiny, are insanely complicated, you need sometimes hundreds of experts to put them together. The pipeline needs to be perfectly planned, flexible so you can adapt to problems, and also easy enough to implement so you can deliver the product on time. All of these factors result in a tight-rope walk that never ends.
Now it’s time for an example. Let’s say during Season of the Worthy you get an assignment to create a catalyst for Thorn that would make it more popular in PVE, but doesn’t make it overpowered in PVP. Seems simple enough, right? There are dozens of posts about this topic on this subreddit, how hard can it be. The answer is, very, very hard.
You start working on your designs. You analyze all other exotic catalysts and hand cannon perks in the game - how they were made, their philosophy, psychological effects, and how they influence gameplay, you discuss everything in your team. When you create your first version, your design lead tells your whole team that hand cannons are getting a range buff and Thorn is now a 140 RPM and you have to adjust your design. After that, your priorities get shifted to helping with Beyond Light and the DSC weapons so it’s finished on time, so you put Thorn on hold. You don’t want to waste time though, so you give the art team an assignment to create the catalyst icon.
After two months of work on Beyond Light, you come back to Thorn, but now you basically have to start over because the future meta has changed so much. You create new designs and this time they’re approved by management, so you move onto prototyping. Developers are way too busy debugging and QA testing Beyond Light, so they have no time for Thorn and that task gets put into their To-Do list. You have no choice but to move onto your other tasks and start working on weapons for seasons 13 and 14.
When development starts finally working on Thorn, they find an exploit in your design that would allow it to two tap in PVP, you have to rework it again and hope they’ll have time to implement it this time. They don’t and the Thorn catalyst now officially misses its deadline and is pushed from Beyond Light. The marketing team doesn’t hear about it though, so they publish the icon you had made four months ago, leaking the catalyst coming out. This is of course your fault, but these things happen during all the chaos and there was almost nothing you could have done.
When you finally push this task through and it’s checked and approved dozens of times in different places (weapon design team, design lead, writing, sandbox team, development, QA, studio director, etc.) you have to make sure it’s published correctly in the right build, it has all necessary descriptions and marketing texts done and translated into all languages and the community managers know about it so they can get ready to collect data.
This single task took you a year to complete even when you did your best to do it fast and well and I left out about 90% of problems you would normally encounter. THIS is game development.
Community Attitude and Feedback
Now we get to why the uninformed community hurts the game so much. This sub would only see Thorn getting a catalyst and it would immediately be flooded with posts like “The catalyst sucks in PVE, buff pls”, “Bungo doesn’t care, the catalyst sucks for Warlocks” and a few “Why catalyst for Thorn, but not for Skyburner’s Oath”, completely missing the point of the catalyst and adding nothing to the discussion.
Bungie devs are way more informed, skilled, and experienced than us, the community. The only feedback they are interested in from us is quantitative - basically what we like and what we don’t like about the game. Any posts giving them ideas, elaborate reworks, or straight up negative outrage will accomplish nothing, because they already know everything about the game and discuss it daily in way more detail than we could ever imagine. The only qualitative feedback they should collect and measure is from content creators and the top 1% of the player base because those people actually know some aspects of the game Bungie doesn’t. I know it may sound like the hated “Bungo only listens to sweats and Youtubers”, but that’s kinda the point, they should be listening.
It doesn’t mean that our voices are ignored or not listened to. I would bet all of my money that all forums are constantly monitored and analyzed. The truth is, however, that the only valid opinion we can give that Bungie should consider is what aspects of the game we like, and what aspects we don’t. Anything beyond that we already tell them through data they collect from our play sessions.
As I wrote above, any change within this massive game is complicated and could take months or years to be implemented, so being upset we don’t have everything now is just useless. Bungie is hard at work to make good stuff, we should respect them more and not bring out the pitchforks every time a season slows down a bit and we can’t play for four hours a day every day for the whole year. There will always be problems in a live game and they are doing a fantastic job, I can’t even imagine how much work must go into it. So before you post about something in the future, take a moment to think about the process and figure out what exactly you can provide to the devs with your feedback, because otherwise, you’re fanning the flames on something that probably isn’t actually burning. It’s just taking its time as it should.
With all of the above said, it isn't the community's fault that we're not informed. The fault lies entirely with Bungie not educating people enough and this problem could be avoided.
Reasons Why Things Suck
I’ll close by giving my two cents on why the game isn’t perfect and never will be, just so you know where the community's frustrations should go.

1. The biggest reason that influences everything - Bungie is a company owned by a group of shareholders that will always force the studio to grow and provide more profit. With every extra dollar, the value of the company grows and the board of directors gets richer and because of the super predatory capitalism we live in now, Bungie has to justify every single decision with a monetary value. It's not the fault of the devs, they don't make much money themselves.
2. The game is massive and always online. I’m pretty confident that no other studio would be able to support Destiny for so long without the game completely crashing down. Technology always evolves and it’s almost impossible to keep a living game up to date, so some parts of the front end of the game will always suck because Bungie has to upkeep the back end we will never get to see.
3. The project has been going on for a decade, which leads to people wanting to naturally move on. Replacing team members on a living game is very difficult, which leads to problems and delays.
4. The community is not educated about the game enough, which is why I ended up writing this. The continuous cycle of negative outrage that comes from a lack of understanding damages the game because the devs are forced to deal with it without disclosing information. If people knew more, they could help Bungie, but no company that wants to make big profits will ever open up its communication because it would show just how many decisions are influenced by the search for profit.

That’s it, sorry for the length of this essay. I hope you learned something and let me know if you’d be interested in more stuff like this (takes on sunsetting, sandbox, etc.). I would like to give people more info so they don’t waste their precious time on stuff completely outside of their control and maybe educate people about the industry. I love the game and I hope you’ll appreciate it a bit more now.
Edit 1:
This post is not meant as a defense for the faults of the game or an excuse for bad decisions, it's meant as a resource to give you perspective and information. If you believe the game is not as good as it was promised to be or disagree with some design choices made, you are of course entitled to your own opinion, and there are quite a few things I myself absolutely hate in Destiny. I can't answer questions related to design on Destiny with confidence, because I don't work for Bungie and I won't speculate much on why certain decisions were made. I can give you my opinion on stuff like sunsetting based on my experience in another post, but ultimately it's only speculation with little benefit. All I will say is that there is always more stuff we don't know about the game than we do know and design should be judged in context.
When it comes to questions related to Bungie's scummy tactics when it comes to monetization and bad communication, I agree with you, as I said above. Money is the biggest factor of why Destiny suffers and the best way for us to do anything about that is to stop buying it. I know it's a cliche statement, but it's true.
And lastly, for the comments saying stuff like "shut up, Bungie sucks and you know it", please read what I said again and think about it. The devs most likely love the game just as much as you once did, if not much more.
Edit 2:
I'll add one thing that keeps popping up. It's clear that Destiny is a product developed for profit, so if your outlook is "I don't want to know about development, I'm just an unhappy consumer that didn't like this product", I agree as would most likely everybody that it's absolutely a valid stance, but that's not what my post was about. If that's how you see any product, you should tell the producer why you didn't like it if you care enough to do so and move on. The post is meant to inform people who don't want to move on from Destiny, especially those who continuously engage with the product from a place of understanding even if they don't have it, which wastes their time and does nothing for the product. If you don't like this game or any other game, it's absolutely OK and you should move on from playing it, complaining about things you don't want to understand won't help you achieve what you want and only makes the game worse. As I said above, the best way to show your disagreements is not to support the company and if you don't like Destiny, please stop playing it and take care of yourself. Your time is valuable, don't give it away to someone you don't agree with.
Edit 3
This will be the last edit on this post. I appreciate all the awards and great discussions happening below, but holy cow did this get a lot of vitriol. I expected a lot of negativity, but it still surprised me. It's partially my fault for trying to talk about so much with not enough room so I'm sure I made a few mistakes. I'll reply to a few things that I want to make clear and then leave this alone, it's way too long anyway.
If you see any malicious intent, attacks, arrogance, or "Bungie shilling" between the lines, I put none there, at least not on purpose. My goal was to inform, as I said right at the start, so if you see any other agenda, it's not there and my writing either wasn't clear enough, or you're looking for something that I didn't write. Take the post for what it is, a stranger on the internet telling you something you may not know from their experience. If you disagree with me, downvote the post and explain why, no need to insult anyone, you're once again wasting your precious time.
I didn't mention management as a problem on Destiny, because I don't know enough about it. Leadership is very often a problem on any collaborative projects but calling someone out without the necessary data is exactly what I warned about in my post, so I won't comment on it, but feel free to disagree with me. Maybe you know more about the subject than I do and I'll be happy to read your reply.
I never put myself up as an ultimate authority on the subject, all of this is just basics I thought hardcore fans should know and I communicated that. This post was already very long and I didn't have time, nor did I want to describe theory in detail, so insulting me over not explaining how scrum works in a post meant for people with no experience is not necessary. If you want to argue about production methodologies, my reasoning on examples given, and how healthy management looks like with me please feel free to message me and I'm sure we'll have a cool conversation, I'd love to hear about your experience from working in gaming.
And that's it, I hope you got something out of this. Have a great day and see you around.

[I know I said final edit, but I made a final final edit below, and preserved the original post at the bottom. I'm disorganized, sue me.] 2nd-to-FINAL EDIT: Toning down the Rhetoric. We need real data, can this be mathed out? I like that guys idea of a shareholder meeting. GET THESE FUCKS IN JAIL. TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE.
ALLEGATION: SECURITIES FRAUD, NAKED SHORTING COLLUSION BETWEEN MELVIN AND CITADEL
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Let's roleplay, retards. I'll play the billionaire fuckhead who wants to bankrupt Gamestop, because I think it'll be a fun story to jerk off to.
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I hatch a brilliant little plan to short them to death. Here's my plan.
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I collude with the company who invested in me, who processes my transactions, to make the world think I have 5 Million GME. This happens. I don't know how, but keep going with me.
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So now, all I have to do, is NEVER let one of these specific 5 million GME shares out of my account, or the jig is up. They'd be caught as a FAIL TO DELIVER if someone ever got their hands on one. So how do I never sell one of these? Shorting!
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But no no guys... not just regular shorting. We... we would short. EVERY. TRANSACTION. EVEN THE ONES THAT LOSE US MONEY. It's more important and valuable to me to pay for a clean share off the market to boomerang back, than it is to release one of my POISON SHARES into the market and get found out. Luckily, I know a clearinghouse that sits in front of all my transactions, and can help with this little bit of intercepting magic.
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So, we do this for a while. Hey, wait, a big order came in, there wasn't enough float in the pool to boomerang clean shares, oh shit, we let a couple go. Well, let's wait and see what happens.
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< INSERT LINK HERE TO THE FAIL-TO-DELIVERS ON GME SECURITY OVER TIME > https://i.redd.it/1wpfodbyb6f61.png
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Oh, shit. Things are warming up. People think Gamestop might really come back. If there's a lot of trading, they might've found out about my 5 million FAKE POISON shares, when the clearinghouse comes to deduct it from my account.
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Oh, shit. It happened. A lot. Look at those fail to delivers. They're everywhere on $GME, and only on GME.
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The jig is up.
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I don't want to get caught, so I hit my "omfg algorithm" button, that will liquidate and put any asset in my entire portfolio in front of those buy orders for GME. I know, the redditors are idiots, so I'll HEDGE THIS POSITION with another profitable meme position.... like AMC.
They decided "FUCK IT" eventually, and traded in their FAKE SHARES for REAL MONEY at some point during this, and those are FOUND OUT WITH FAIL TO DELIVERS. THEY ARE SLIDING ALL THEIR ILL GOTTEN GME GAINS INTO OTHER STOCKS, PROBABLY THRU OTHER BROKERS, SO THEY CAN BERNIE MADOFF THIS BITCH AND RUN AWAY WITH ALL THE MONEY.
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THOSE ARE FAKE SHARES, "CREATED" BY CITADEL AS IF MELVIN OWNED THEM, AND ALWAYS FRONTED (SEE: LAUNDERED) CLEAN SHARES WHENEVER TRANSACTIONS WOULD HAVE COME IN FOR THEM. AND THERES WAY MORE THAN 5 MILLION AND ITS NOT JUST MIGHT NOT JUST BE GAMESTOP. [Edited, im retarded]
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Final final Edit/addendum [lol i know, i'm unorganized, shutup] 2/5/21 3:51pm EST: I am still here, I am still convinced, and I am still advocating. I however will not be posting here anymore. I am preserving it via an internet archive screenshot, and logging off for good.
The amount of ACTIVE disinformation is a data point. Look at the seemingly unrelated geopolitical panic boilling over among the rich and well connected specifically. Look at the people who have been victimized by this behavior in the past, finding their courage to speak up. Most of all, look at the data. Keep your head in the math and data. Create mathematical models of your own to represent the forces that YOU KNOW are in play, and come to your own conclusions.
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I spent the past 2 days kind of sweating a lot, and freaking out. Am I gonna die? They gonna put a hit out me? Am I in danger?
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NO. These are lazy fucking idiots. These guys' wives boyfreinds don't even wash their own fucking car.
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You don't have anything to fear. Their crimes are in the open, in daylight, with data. They committed them so nakedly, so lazily, so sloppily.... The data PROVING this has been in the open for what, like weeks? months? Think of the MILLION other securities they could have done this to instead of pushing that gamestop threshhold over 100%. These are just LAZY ENTITLED FUCKING CUNTS. They are willing to risk SYSTEMIC FINANCIAL SYSTEM COLLAPSE because they got too lazy to fucking copy paste their strategy on a new thing.
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And you know what I am? I am lazy too. And we're all sitting at home, being lazy, and we're gonna take your ILLEGALLY GOTTEN LAZY GAINS and put them to true good use.
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Cool, right?
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REDDITORS YOU MUST REALIZE, THAT THIS ALL CHANGED THURSDAY. A DYING RAT DOES NOT LAY DOWN TO DIE, AND THE DEATHBLOW WAS NOT DEALT THURSDAY.
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They are now actively ponzi scheming. You can again, see it in the trends. Its hydraulic flow of capital, across securities, to protect their one, poisoned, fake stance. This is MASSIVELY ILLEGAL to cover with borrowed. I didnt know what the fuck a ponzi scheme even WAS until I started trying to find a way to explain my stupid fucking waterfall analogy.
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Do you know why % held by institutions was above 100% for way too fucking explainably long? Those were the fake shares that citadel and melvin colluded to make. Melvin as a short seller, wouldnt look suspicious if the "institutional % held" by them was high.
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Do you know why % of float went down, that wierd S3 data anomaly? They started selling. Their. Fake. Shares.
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Do you know why we see lots of fail to delivers occurring? Those are those fake shares showing up in the drains.
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It's been a ponzi scheme all along. Just, it was being held WITHIN the single GME security. But, on thursday, they got caught. The financial world was either sleeping on it, or in on it, and wasnt prepared for them to get caught. Either way really doesn't matter right now, as the result was: RAISE THE MARGINS. LET THEM DIE. ...... oh also we mightve just fucked a bunch of smaller brokers.... like, a lot of them, by essentially making them have to have 10x more operating capital than they do..... well.... whatever, everyone sees the writing on the wall. If they believe, they'll raise some more capital. Please correlate this with the actual facts surrounding robinhood, 212, etc halt of trading. They DID fuck up too with their reaction, I am not excusing them. But look at the actual events.
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So they were caught. Nothing to do now, but to sell their fake shares. They've been doubling down on shorts this whole time since probably $20, all the while leaking faked shares into the pool. We all hold fake shares. There's no way of knowing anymore. The well is poisoned.
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We need to force a shareholder vote now, to get a tally. We need to force the SEC to do their goddamn jobs and fast, go freeze these criminals assets COMPLETELY, NOT THE GME SECURITY ALONE, because they are GETTING AWAY WITH IT via a naked ponzi scheme.
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The bomb is no longer contained within GME. They detonated their bomb on thursday, when they got CAUGHT, and decided that its jail no matter what, so they clicked the algorithm named "PONZI SCHEME" and fucking started making calls to drum up disinfo. Do you understand the criminal motive, of a 100% defeated foe (fake shares revealed), to do another criminal self preserving move (ponzi)?
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Up until Thursday they were using legal mechanisms to push back from being found out. When they got caught, they switched to illegal ponzi mechanisms. I'm a fucking ape and I can understand this criminal motive.
When the ponzi algorithm runs out, you are left with a stock GME that has a market cap representing $0 of melvins dollars, and a market cap of whatever other securities they are funneling their money into, representing $all of melvins dollars. Do you notice how, if melvin also held some sort of position in those other companies, melvin still has his dollars? And do you notice how there are exactly $0 of melvins money to squeeze out of GME when the correction actually occurs? P O N Z I
THEY WILL WIN, unless the REGULATORS COME AND DO THEIR GODDAMN JOB. And remember, the villians here have already released the poison into the well. It's gonna be very very very VERY hard to unpoison this shit. Do the regulators just say that, hey, that amount of lead in your drinking water is fine now?
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Let's see whose side they are really on.
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I've forwarded it to a diverse range of tiplines and media outlets. I am not enough. One retards voice will never be heard. Apes strong together. APES STRONG TOGETHER.
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Only the light of day will reveal all these SQUIRMING, MISINFORMING, MONSTERS hiding in our system. The data is there. Only those who DO NOT WANT TO SEE IT, are not seeing it. They are the paper handed bitches, who are barking as loud as they can BECAUSE THEIR JAW IS MADE OF STYROFOAM AND FAKE SHARES.
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You and I are all 2am_spaghetti, because 2am_spaghetti is just some fucking nerd who knows how to game systems (IN VIDEO GAMES) and can see some fucking patterns in this system. These monsters are game theorying real life, and they just lost. But rather than pay the cost, they are literally trying to hit reset by doing a manuever that has historically nuked the entire system, counting that the lay person doesn't know enough. Because it worked in '08. And who knows how many other times.
Make your own judgement, apes.
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Original post below.
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please help me, I'm resorting to just sending people reddit DMs, I am 110% certain of this, you can call me the time traveler
Their stoploss algorithm is modeled after HYDRAULICS across their whole portfolio. The squeeze has a pressure relief valve, and this is it.
https://imgur.com/MHmpwVe Edit: maybe a better explanation? :: https://imgur.com/gallery/5t9QgEc
Imagine using your car jack while the handle is twisted open. No pressure, fluid is just movin around. Even in this state, sometimes if you pump it fast enough you can see little jumps of life. The real solution though, is to Tighten it up, now we have a pressurized system.
Visualize their algorithm as a cascading waterfall, pouring portfolio-wide capital to the very bottom until there is literally nothing left and in which case it EXPLODES. We hit that thursday with those reports of 5k bids being filled right before everything shut down. But in this waterfall, the only stock they HAVE to defend is GME. They already are out of water, but theyve erected an insanely big waterfall that hides where they are out of water up top, and fills it in by the time its time to fulfill at the bottom buy. The hole has ALWAYS been there the moment they overshorted, and it remains. Its why they didnt bail at 20, or 80, or 115. THEY CAN'T AS LONG AS THOSE NAKED SHORT VOLUME > FLOAT. This was the math all along.
This also explains the Fail to delivers on GME, the clearinghouses are finding the fake shares in the drains while Melvin tries to chlorine this pool.
TLDR: The mathematical strategy of the situation is to reduce the blue area's leverage (multiplicative), and grow the maximum red force (additive).
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We have to reduce blue to win, or come up with an incredible amount of red, quickly. If we don't, all of yellows dollars will flow to the other meme stocks / negatively correlated stocks and THERE WILL BE LESS TENDIES == LESS TOP END OF SQUEEZE. IN FACT, GME TENDIES ARE BASICALLY BEING GIVEN TO THE OTHER STOCKS, IN AN EFFORT TO MAKE COSTS LOW, SO THE COST OF COVERING THOSE FAIL TO DELIVERS IS MANAGEABLE.
Melvin (or to be fair, whoever originally authored and held the naked short shares) is using TIME as their ally - THE FAIL TO DELIVERS == THE AMOUNT OF NAKED SHORT STOCK, and IF THEY RUN OUT THE CLOCK, ALL OF THEIR FAKE STOCK GETS CAUGHT IN THE DRAINS AND IS PAID FOR BY WHOEVER PAYS FOR THAT SHIT AND THEY DO NOT GO TO JAIL
This theory connects the dots.
Please if you have an in with wsb mods etc, forward them this to read. Ive been trying via modmail, posts, everything. Anyone with a platform needs to know this. Since all the memes are booming like an ETF, the profits on the others are being just siphoned into GME which holds their ultimate loss - the naked shorts that we KNOW they have on GME.
EDIT2: omg melvin is so sinister. They knew redditors would bandwagon. They are using our own UNFOCUSED HYPE against us to prop up GME. PLEASE HELP ME BE A MEGAPHONE, WE HAVE TO GET THE WORD OUT.
EDIT: 💎💎🙌🏼🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀

Hi, guys. I know we're trying to limit the old WSB talk, but I've been thinking a lot about the GME threads, and this won't fit as a comment, so I hope it's alright that I post this here. I'm shocked by what the community has become, and I'm sure you're seeing it, too: the onslaught of misinformation, delusion, emotional volatility not unlike GME's volatility, and (since Friday) sells at massive losses and debt... Oof. It hurts to see it. (But I still can't look away.) WSB has experienced massive communal losses like this before, but never like this. How did it go from a simple stocks subreddit to an echochamber of GME hype and conspiracy theorists? The threads from even just a month ago were radically different than what they were a week later, and even more different than they are now. It's fascinating. It certainly raises a lot of questions.
Here's my opinion: The GME community has plunged into groupthink faster than their stock price plunged to the ground (if you're not familiar with groupthink, check this out). But how did this happen so quickly?
Let's take a deep dive.

Forming a collective identity

We'll start at the basics. Formation of a collective identity is a necessary first step; you can't develop groupthink without the group part. From where I see it, WSB as its own collective identity certainly helped speed up the process of forming GME's identity. When the sub boomed, most members were, at first, generally welcoming (if not by old sub members, then by the thousands of new ones pouring in), and the lingo was easy to learn. It was easy to feel apart of the community. Not only that, it was exciting for new subs: GME brought a sense of solidarity. Just check out this thread to see what I mean. Whether their goal was to 'stick it to hedge-funds' or get rich quick, all new subs who didn't know much about investing felt an expectation, and maybe even certainty, in their GME investment: an upward spike was coming, it was only a matter of when.

Rhetoric

Rhetoric is very important to a collective identity. It's like an inside joke; other people might not get it, but you and your friends do. I was playing a multiplayer video game the other day, and someone came in the lobby with the username GME. Another player in the lobby got excited when he saw it. He said, "WSB?" and the first person answered, "to the MOOOON!" Instant friendship. Rhetoric strengthens camaraderie. It makes you feel like you're part of the "in" crowd.
This is another reason that the existence of the WSB community probably aided in the rapid formation of GME identity: new subs quickly took on WSB rhetoric. Diamond hands vs. paper hands, to the moon... you get the drift. New investors wanted to feel part of WSB, and rhetoric is one of the easiest ways to do it.
I want to talk specifically about the terms "diamond hands" and "paper hands" for a moment. These are very important terms for the GME identity. Prior to the GME explosion, I think WSB members would agree that diamond hands and paper hands didn't really mean that much. I would even say that diamond hands were viewed somewhat negatively.
Regardless, those terms are loaded with some heavy positive and negative correlations, and without the self-deprecation and self-awareness generally present in WSB, the use of those terms could easily slip into the beginnings of discrimination-- which is exactly what happened when GME took over. To newcomers, diamond hands sounded great! If you're investing in GME, you're not only part of the in crowd: you've got diamond hands. The sellers? They've got paper hands. They suck. You don't want to be one of them; they're gonna wish they were one of you. Now, we're subtly digging deeper into that "us vs. them" narrative.

A sense of urgency

Throughout the GME boom I saw a lot of people ask, "is it too late to get in now?" The general response: No. But you need to get in NOW.
There was a real feeling of time sensitivity, and there was a lot of uncertainty surrounding it: who knows if you missed your only chance in? Easily-swayed, brand-new investors wanted to get in. The idea of making easy money was certainly appealing, and there was an undeniable FOMO factor. When the young investor became interested enough to ask if it's too late and became spammed with comments to get in now, it probably felt like an easy decision to make. It probably made GME profits feel like an inevitability. Who were they to know any better?
Even if our brand-new investor had a chance to profit on GME, there were a lot of red flags in their decision to invest at all. They were emotionally investing, and there's lots of signs that point to it. And just like any emotional investor, once they were in, the easy-swayed, brand-new investor felt the actual implication of investing actual money like they'd never expected. They might have been certain of GME's upward movement before, but now, they felt the dips a lot more. I don't need to tell you how volatile GME's dips were-- they were bad. Our brand-new investor probably tried not to panic; the diamond hands vs. paper hands rhetoric probably played a large role in their ability to stick around. Our new investor didn't want to be a paper-handed fool. And they probably tried to convince other people to get in with the very same rhetoric, too. They had to! Their money was on the line now, and the end goal was to get enough people to invest so that the squeeze will happen, right? Right??
Oh, the squeeze. The very reason for our GME adventure. Because of its role, there was a lot of information being touted about short squeezes, a lot of copy-and-paste action, and a lot of outdated sources. People relied on a website called isthesqueezesquoze.com without much consideration into who was running it, or if it was updating in real time, or even how it would determine if the squeeze had been squozed. Eventually, the message seemed to become: if other people sell when they want to, then the stock price and volume will go down, and hedge-funds will cover their shorts, and our brand-new investor will be left with nothing. That's not fair, right? We can't even squeeze if people aren't buying on the dips, right? We're all in this together, right, guys??
Uh oh. You see where this is going?

Group polarization

Group polarization, which is a common red flag for groupthink, is the tendency of a group to make decisions that are more extreme than the initial inclination of its members. You've seen it: that leftist friend you have starts hanging out with other leftist people, and they become even more leftist.
For the GME-community, mid-to-late January was likely the biggest push for polarization. At this time, we had the emergency of more GME-community "enemies:" the mainstream media and big brokers. MSNBC called the GME movement a terrible idea, hedge-funds cried about their losses on air, interviewees suggested that WSB could be considered insider trading, others called WSB's move cheap and illegal. Shortly after the media attacks, Robinhood and other brokers began to shut down trading. The media coverage sucked, but this was a lot worse. Now, it was personal. GME couldn't trust the news, but now, GME couldn't even trust their brokers.
GME was angry. The threads were spammed. The general sentimentality was hurt, betrayal, mistrust, and war cries: how come hedge-funds are allowed to play dirty tricks but we're not? The news is owned by a bunch of rich guys, so of course they would be against the GME movement. The "us vs. them" narrative dug deeper, and now, it had more meaning: we're the underdogs! We'll fight our way up to the top by ourselves! Us vs. them!
The more that the GME-community grew, and the longer that they gathered in their threads, the more they mistrusted the stock market, and the easier it became to blame a lot of things on them. Not only that, but they felt more right. GME will skyrocket. This is getting national attention because we are succeeding. You can literally see the real-time descent into group polarization in the memes they used: "GME $100 is not a joke" became "GME $1,000 is not a joke," and then $5,000, and then $10,000, and then $20,000..... I believe there are some people out there that genuinely thought GME could break 5 digits. A lot of people genuinely thought it would break $1,000.
Stock peaked Thursday morning around $470, but that wasn't enough for GME. Even after it dipped back down to $200 at close, the community was certain it would boom again. GME $1,000 was not a meme. I can't figure out why, but somewhere before or on Friday, a lot of the community began to believe that $320 was the number to hit. The squeeze would happen after they got back up to $320. People went with it.
Friday morning, the stock struggled to go back up. When the market began to close, GME had one goal in mind: close at $320. Minutes before closing, the GME thread exploded, comments rolling in the thousands per minute, filled with the now-familiar GME rhetoric: "hooooold" and "buy guys! we need you to buy!!" and "GME TO THE MOON!" among many, many others. The ticker looked like a tug-of-war.
Market closed at $328. GME won the battle.
This is exactly where it went downhill fast. GME had an entire weekend to fill until the U.S. market would open again, and their win left them glowing all weekend. Here was the proof that they needed; if they could win a battle, they would win the war. Just take a look at the weekend thread to see what I mean. "Be prepared for the fight next week." "The media is going to try to scare me into selling? Nah." Rocket emojis. "Hold the line." Remember, this was an entire two days of celebrating their win: the more they celebrated, the further polarized they became, and the more they mistrusted everyone else. The romanticism might've been strong before, but it was getting stronger. I saw one comment comparing GME-investors to movie superheroes. MOVIE superheroes. Jesus.
In the midst of their celebrating, what did they do when someone said they should sell?

GME-specific rhetoric and the WSB fracture

Now that GME had effectively polarized itself, it needed some new rhetoric. The WSB stuff just wasn't extreme enough for them anymore. Hedge-funds became hedgies. People who doubted GME were spreading FUD. Hedgie-bots were a huge issue. GME needed to "hold the line." Do you notice a lot of the rhetoric became blatantly war-related? Wonder what the benefit of that could be.
But what about the old WSB community?
Towards the end of January and up through now, the ones who sold their stocks and talked about it were downvoted to hell. The polarized hivemind had decided that anyone who sold for any reason at all were weak, paper-handed, they would regret everything. The ones who cautioned others to do the same were even more so. And don't even think about talking about other stocks. What do you think this is? A subreddit for the whole market?
Some studies suggest that online rhetoric is tied to an increase in aggression. When a user feels like they're part of community identity, they'll behave the way they think they're supposed to, and the way that they see others behave. Our new investor sees someone call someone else a paper-handed tard for selling? Well, they'll do the same. Even if they don't feel that strongly about it, they might do it anyway, just to feel like they belong. It's all pretty much subconscious. There's not a lot of critical thought in the beginnings of groupthink.
If you said GME wasn't going back up, you weren't just wrong, you being wrong made them very angry. I commented something about how people should sell GME and one user replied, "you clearly haven't been paying attention at all. That is the most stupid bullshit I've ever seen. You truly are the tippy top tard of all tards." It's the perfect example for this: using the retard rhetoric, full-on aggression, etc.
Old WSB members were a new enemy of sorts. Anyone who said anything against GME were hedgie-planted bots aimed at creating FUD. (See how complicated this rhetoric is getting as polarization gets stronger?) Any other stocks? Distractions. Stupid bot, the hedgies won't fool me into buying anything else. The entire subreddit served only one purpose: GME, and GME alone. Everyone else can get out.
I think it's clear that we've arrived at the end of the line...

The fall of GME

So, the stock market opened up Monday, and GME charged into battle again. But it didn't go as expected: GME went down fast.
People were getting scared. A lot of them had probably invested a lot more than they were willing to lose-- there were stories of loans taken out, inheritances given early, rent and grocery money being spent. Even if they weren't on the brink of financial devastation, the losses were massive for some. That shit hurts. For emotional investors, it might feel like the end of the world. So, here's our brand-new investor staring at some deep red numbers on the screen, maybe more terrified than they'd like to admit being, wondering where to go next.
Well, good thing our brand-new investor had a daily thread to turn to! What would make them feel better than to settle comfortably into their echo-chamber? Here were users calling them brave and intelligent. Diamond hands! Keep up the good work! Tasty dip, get these discounts! There were copy-and-pasted messages. Our brand-new investor was swayed into buying this easily, so wouldn't they feel reassured this easily, too?
Then came the negative brigade. A lot of people came back for their 'i told you so's: get out while you can, stupid bagholders, can't believe you guys are still holding, etc... To the brand-new investor, these negative comments were like a cold slap of doubt-- at this point in the game, with our investor possibly thousands of dollars under on the first stock trade of their life, they can't handle the doubt. They probably can't even process their losses yet; it cannot possibly be real. The echo-chamber was certainly convinced it wasn't... So, these negative comments must be bots. Nobody really has any doubt. If anyone does, they just have paper-hands.
As the stock fell harder, the GME-community got really desperate. They tried to appeal to your pathos. There was a lot of "if you never sell, you'll never actually lose." A lot of "if DFV isn't selling, I'm not selling," ignoring the fact that DFV had sold more than enough to cover his initial investment. It became downright misinformation: Mark Cuban's comment urging GME-holders to keep holding was frequently turned into "if Mark Cuban isn't selling, I'm not selling." The VW squeeze was referenced several times as a comparison. Here's a great list of the misinformation spewed from someone's post earlier.
This was where the delusion really began to set in. Nothing, absolutely nothing, could be attributed to the fact that GME was steadily falling. At the end of every day, the narrative changed: the squeeze would happen tomorrow. No, the next day. No, sorry, the day after that. No one can be trusted anymore: the news is fake, the negative subs are bots, and hedgies are cheating! That dip was just a short ladder attack. That dip was just the shitty paper hands selling. That one was the hedgies cheating. Thousands of comments rolled in by the minute. Millions were accrued in losses, many by those who couldn't afford it, and yet, the GME-community lashed out at everyone else for doubting them. Wednesday rolled around and the stock could hardly break $100. But WHO were the idiots? The paper hands. The liars. The cheats. GME will return, they said anyway. The media is wrong. There was misdirected anger. Memes rooted in the thought that GME would rocket.
You guys knew the utter delusion that the threads became. I don't think I could describe it well, even if I wanted to. But here's the most delusional comment I've seen, the one I think perfectly sums up the GME-crowd:
"Stop questioning. You are told to buy and hold. Just follow directions."
Stop questioning. Just follow directions.
That is fucking groupthink.

What now?

I could really get into other contributing factors here. There have been a lot of IRL events that have probably been a catalyst for this; we've been seeing a lot of mistrust of the mainstream media, growing support for the rich vs. poor narrative, and mistrust of the government lately. There's been a lot of conspiracy theories and echo-chambers online.
I don't know the future of GME. I also know that there's some truth to the things that the GME-community has said: I'm sure there were bots in the subreddit. I'm sure there was market manipulation. But, like all truths man-handled by groupthink, it was warped beyond belief. Not everyone disagreeing with GME was a bot. Not all downward dips were market manipulation. But that's exactly what they believed.
So, where do we go from here?
There are many implications this phenomenon will have on an individual investing level and, with WSB, on a group-wide level. I hope that investors burned by the GME movement will learn the implications of emotional investing and FOMO-- we've certainly all been there before. I hope GME doesn't continue to become a massive conspiracy similar to Qanon (the rhetoric has evolved to be something scarily similar).
I'm curious to hear what everyone else's thoughts are. Let me know what you think.

The ad was bizarre but straightforward enough.
Late fifties male seeks woman in twenties to manage large-scale dollhouse

• Candidate needs to maintain a household of eleven Real Dolls by tending to the daily wardrobe, grooming, and other needs of the dolls.
• Nothing inappropriate.
• $250 paid in cash at the end of every shift.

A lot of women would be put off by that ad, but not me. Let’s just say, I’ve seen some shit in my life. I was finally starting to dig myself out of a trash pile of childhood trauma by getting into a good college, when the reality of tuition fees set in. I needed a part-time job to stay afloat, and creepy sex doll man would have to be it.
I tried calling the number on the ad, but nobody picked up. A few minutes later I got a text asking my name, age, and times of availability. Another text later, I was asked to start at nine the following day. I was surprised at the ease of the interview, if you could even call it that, but I didn’t feel like questioning it. Whatever the guy’s deal was, that was his business, not mine. As long as he didn’t breach any boundaries and paid me on time, we’d get along just fine.
I wasn’t stupid, though. I called my cousin Ronnie and told him what was going on and where I’d be the next day. Ronnie sighed but didn’t question my decision. We grew up with the same shitty guardians, and he knew I could handle myself.
“Just be careful, Lu,” he said at the end of the call, “pack the bag, okay?”
“Of course, Ronnie,” I smiled into the phone, “I’ll be in touch if anything happens.”
‘The bag’ was a backpack of essentials for any kid that was unfortunate enough to grow up in a neighborhood like mine. My bag contained pepper spray, a swiss army knife, drinking water, a couple of protein bars, and a cheap disposable phone with Ronnie’s number saved in contacts. I hoped for the best but prepared for the worst. Always.
I was at the given address at exactly 9 o’clock the next morning.
The house was breathtaking. A tall, asymmetrical two-story with whitewash walls and a multifaceted roof. The windows were different sizes and shapes, the panes a charming baby blue with glass that sparkled like morning dew on grass. I walked up the cobblestone path, admiring the clean-cut lawn and tulip flower beds that lined the perimeter.
Maybe this won’t be so bad, I thought, climbing the porch steps.
I couldn’t find a doorbell, only a large bronze knocker designed to look like some sort of horned creature, possibly a bull. It was as though the sculptor had chosen to make the beast in man’s image, the result being a grotesque blend of the two. I banged the knocker three times and waited. Nothing happened. I tried again. No one came to the door. I pulled my phone from my back pocket just as it received a message from the Craigslist number.
Go inside. The girls are on the second floor.
Whatever you’re into, buddy, I thought as I pulled the door open and stepped inside.
The entrance hall was everything the exterior suggested. Polished hardwood floors shimmered like glaciers on a sunny day. A needlessly large chandelier descended from somewhere far above my head. Quaint antique hall cupboards and paintings of flower pots tied the look together. It was all meant to be quite lovely but something felt off. The interior seemed almost too precise, as though crafted after the idea of an old Victorian home. The passing of time generally implied a dash of ruggedness, and this place had none.
A large-scale dollhouse, I thought, remembering the ad with a slight shudder.
I clutched at the straps of my backpack, straining to hear any hint of life within the house. There was only the slight echo of my sneakers scraping across the floor as I crossed the hall on my way to the grand staircase.
I lingered before taking the first step. It wasn’t too late to turn around and find something less creepy to do. Sure, the pay was excellent, but my gut was telling me there was something very wrong with the house. Determination and a hint of curiosity argued with my better instincts and won.
I walked up the carpeted steps.
“Hello?” I called upon reaching the second floor. No answer.
To my left, a door stood open, revealing an old-school parlor room. I stalled before entering, realizing that the distant concept of eleven life-sized dolls had been far more agreeable than the actual sight of them.
What can I say? The dolls were exquisite in a vacant, detached sort of way. Someone had dressed them in a variety of colorful nightgowns and bathrobes. Some faced windows, others were seated around a coffee table. All were positioned in poses that were meant to look natural. Their size was that of your basic, petite woman, with some evident variation in the hip and breast departments. There were blondes with blue eyes, sultry brunettes, a redhead, African Americans, Asians, you name it. One even had rainbow-colored hair and blue lips.
“Louisa,” a soft voice interrupted my doll-induced trance.
My right hand instantly went for the pepper spray as I whirled around in one swift, jumpy motion.
“Jesus,” I muttered, slipping the spray back in place, “You scared me, lady.”
The owner of the voice was a tall, thin woman well into her fifties. She wore a long, red cardigan that she buttoned over a lilac turtleneck and a full-length, plaid skirt. The entire outfit was so hideous that I barely even registered the fact that the woman herself was attractive for her age. She had a very dignified sort of face, with a dainty nose and knowledgeable eyes. A good amount of thick, greying hair was tied back in a low ponytail.
“My apologies, Lousia,” the woman smiled politely, “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“It’s Lu actually,” I mumbled, trying to compose myself.
“Nice to meet you, Lu,” the woman’s smile held, though her gaze sharpened, “My name is Mrs. Claymore and I am the mistress of Vanderley House.”
“First time I’ve been in a house with a name,” I replied, watching her face. Much like my surroundings, the woman carried herself in a manner of welcome, but it all felt a bit scripted.
“I believe my husband has given you the general gist of your duties here at Vanderley?”
“Well,” I surveyed the kinky mannequins lounging around the room, “The text messages mentioned I would have to watch the dolls.”
“Yes,” she spoke slowly as though addressing a small child, “You will be acting as the part-time manager of the household. In essence, you will be filling my shoes while I’m away.”
“I see,” I nodded, feeling uneasy.
For the next hour or so Mrs. Claymore took me around the house, showing me the different rooms and explaining my increasingly bizarre work tasks. Every morning, I was to change ‘the girls’ into their daytime outfits and carry them around the house, setting them up at their respective activities. I would learn the dolls’ names and activities from a chart. My shift would end around the time the so-called hygienist showed up to perform cleaning procedures on the dolls.
“If all that is clear,” Mrs. Claymore concluded, “I will leave you to your job.”
“Alright,” I nodded, struggling with my apprehensive feelings.
I let out a long breath as soon as Mrs. Claymore retreated downstairs. If ever there was a master at not asking questions, it was me. And yet, I had so many. Everything about Mrs. Claymore indicated that she was an intelligent, proper sort of woman, and I just couldn’t reconcile that image with the things she was saying. Was she unhinged? I half wished the husband had met me instead. A creepy old man with a sex doll fetish, while super gross, was something that I could understand and even turn a blind eye to. For the right amount of money, of course. But this? What the hell was this?
Walking back to the parlor room, I felt my resolve strengthen. Late morning sunshine spilled in through the sheer curtains, illuminating the dolls in a cool, gray light. Not a single speck of dust could be seen in the rays. The dead eyes of the dolls reflected my mood.
I studied the clipboard Mrs. Claymore had given me. It contained the aforementioned doll chart printed on a crisp, expensive-looking sheet of paper. Cynthia was the first doll on the list. With a flicker of dread, I stared at the tiny picture printed on the page. The photograph, while small and a little blurry, was clearly of a real person, not a doll. It showed a pretty redhead somewhere outside, with locks of hair lifted by a gust of wind.
I scanned the room, quickly locating Cynthia in a nearby armchair. The resemblance to the person in the picture was uncanny. I walked up to the doll and stared at her face, reaching out a hand to graze a cheek with my fingers. She was definitely a doll, not a person. Even so, the fact that her image was molded after a human being felt all sorts of wrong. I turned my attention back to the chart:

• Cynthia - 21 y.o. - 5′7″/122lbs. - Biochemistry student - Plays violin - 11:00 AM violin lesson in drawing room - 12:30 quiet reading time in study;

What an oddly specific type of girl. Hardly your average boner inducer. Scanning the other five entries on the page disturbed me more than I could say.

• Valeria - 20 y.o. - 5′7″ / 107 lbs - Athlete - Ballroom dancer - 11:00 AM dance lesson in drawing room - 12:30 yoga in downstairs hallway;
• Gina - 22 y.o. - 5′6″ / 121 lbs - Barista - Cat lover - 11:00 disciplinary session in entrance hall - 12:30 quiet reading time in study;
• Katryn - 25 y.o. - 5′5″ / 115 lbs - Nurse - Enjoys video games - 11:00 AM - dance lesson in drawing room - 12:30 yoga in downstairs hallway;
• Angelique - 21 y.o. - 5′7″ / 135 lbs - Unemployed - Recreational drug user - 11:00 AM - double disciplinary session;
• Madison - 28 y.o. - 5′6″ / 118lbs - Daycare teacher - Enjoys reading - 11:00 AM - dance lesson in drawing room - 12:30 quiet reading time in study;

​
My hands trembled as I finished reading the last entry on the page. There have been so many times in my life where I have felt helpless and afraid. While horrible, each instance had an identifiable source of danger. A drunken uncle, an abusive social worker, a school bully. It was easy to work through fear when you knew what to expect.
The place had me stumped. There was something very wrong about it, about Mrs. Claymore and her yet-to-be-seen husband. About the dolls that were meant to look like real people. I knew then that I should leave, but there was a part of me that didn’t want to. Call me the collector of evils, but I just had to know what sort of fucked up darkness lurked the serene halls of Vanderley House.
I left the parlor and located the closet, a room on the second floor which was dedicated to all eleven doll wardrobes. I’d caught a glimpse of it during the walkthrough, but didn’t get a chance to take it all in.
It was the size of a bedroom, with shelves of shoes, folded clothes, and hanging garments lining the walls to my left and right. The other end of the room consisted of a mirror wall. I stared at my small frame reflected in four distinct angles. A couple of jet-black curls fell loose from my ponytail and I tucked them behind an ear. I looked very pale, not unlike a doll myself. That thought sent a visible shiver through my reflection.
The shelves of the closet were an obsessive-compulsive dream come to life. Everything was sorted by clothing type and color. The chart hadn’t specified what the dolls should wear, so I trusted my better judgment in picking the outfits. There were few modern garments available, but there was a large variety of basics that would look decent on most people. I pulled some items from the shelves and went to pick out the shoes. Not many options there either, mostly pumps. I was about to head back to the parlor when another glance at the mirrors revealed a detail I had very nearly missed.
Though three of the full-length mirrors were visibly nailed to the wall, the one on the far right had no bolts in the corners of the frame. I tried wedging my fingers in the small crack between mirrors and pulling it, but that yielded nothing. After a second’s thought, I tried pushing instead and the hidden door popped open.
Inside was the first hint of the real Vanderley.
The mirror concealed a small, dusty room. A bare lightbulb dangled from a wire, revealing unfinished concrete walls and stacks of moving boxes. I approached the nearest box and looked inside. It was filled with clothes, but they were nothing like the garments in the outer closet. These were trendy crop tops, boy shorts, cocktail dresses.
A lump formed in my throat.
I opened more, finding high heels, hoodies, sunglasses, watches, trinkets. I had to stop myself then. There were a lot of boxes and I didn’t have time to ransack the place. Mrs. Claymore could find me at any moment, and I needed more proof of my growing suspicions.
I walked out to the front closet, closing the mirror door behind me. I did my best to wipe away the fingerprints that revealed my intrusion. I reached for the phone in my back pocket so I could call Ronnie, and found that it was missing.
Of course, I thought, reaching for the hidden zipper on the inner side of my backpack. I powered on the flip phone and auto dialed Ronnie. He picked up on the first ring.
“Code red,” I whispered into the passé gadget.
“I fucking knew it, Lu,” Ronnie reprimanded, “I’ll be there in forty, an hour tops. Keep safe.”
“Will do,” I promised, replacing the cell before picking up the pile of clothes I’d selected for the dolls.
Mrs. Claymore must have fished my phone out of my back jean pocket at some point during the walkthrough, but why? Was it to snoop on me, mess with me, potentially cause me harm? None of the answers quite fit the bill, but I had a feeling I would learn the truth soon enough.
I made sure to keep calm as I walked back to the parlor room. There was no use for panic, I needed to keep my thoughts clear. I set down the pile of clothes on the coffee table and approached Cynthia. I lifted her arms and pulled her nightgown off. Putting her arms back at her side, I took a step back and surveyed the dolls’ body.
There was no doubt in my mind that Cynthia was molded after a living, breathing young woman. While her body held true to the beauty standards of today, it was not perfect. Her large breasts hung low without the support of a push-up bra and there was a birthmark to the right of her bellybutton. Again, I felt the need to reach out and feel her, to make sure that she wasn’t alive. I placed my hand on her lean stomach. She felt plastic as ever. Room temperature, high-grade silicone, and yet.
There was an energy.
I’d had that feeling before in museums, on school trips where I snuck away from the crowd and stared at some old army general’s chair, or an early telephone set. I thought it was common, getting vibes from items, but Ronnie told me it wasn’t. I didn’t dwell on it much. To me, objects carried stories, just like people did.
So what was Cynthia’s?
I placed my other hand in her palm and an overwhelming sense of sorrow erupted inside me. The force of it made me fall to the floor, laying my head on Cynthia’s knees. I didn’t let go of her, I couldn’t. The doll was telling me her truth. One so awful that my limited imagination could only produce it in dull aches that ran through my body. The grief was insurmountable, and I let it flow through the both of us.
“What did they do to you?” I asked, choking back tears.
There was no reply as the immense darkness receded into heavy but manageable despair. It was then that I noticed the small tattoo on Cynthia’s inner left wrist. It was a black stencil of the bull-man I had seen on the entrance door of the Vanderley House.
I couldn’t waste time. I had to gather as much information as possible before Ronnie showed up.
I got up and started checking all the other dolls. Every one of them had the same tattoo. I picked up the doll chart, now fully convinced it was a list of victims. I needed to learn as much about them in the short amount of time I had left.
Cynthia. Valeria. Gina. Katryn. Angelique. Madison. They were all here. Each headshot contained a girl outside, not a doll. They were REAL, but were they alive?
I felt my breath falter as nausea threatened the scant contents of my breakfast. There were only six girls on this page. The truth hit me like a punch to the face as eleven sets of dead eyes stared at me. The link I always suspected, but couldn’t prove.
Until now.
With shaky hands, I unclipped the piece of paper and flipped it over. There were six more entries on the back, but my eyes instantly went to the last one on the page. Right there, beside a tiny, pixelated photograph of me standing outside Vanderley House that very morning, I read the following:
​

• Louisa - 20 y.o. - 5′4″/115 lbs - ex tenebris lux - ex malo bonum - 11:00 AM - The Hygienist

​
A door slammed downstairs, and though I wished with all my being that it was Ronnie arriving early to get me out of this mess, the large Roman numeral clock on the wall of the parlor told me that it was far too soon to get my hopes up.
Heavy footfall ascended the stairs in a slow, confident stride. Echoes of the intruder carried through the house and into the parlor. I picked up the pepper spray and rummaged around my backpack for the swiss army knife. I slipped the spray in my back pocket and held the knife on the inside of my palm so it was out of view.
It was time for my appointment with the hygienist.
READ PART 2 HERE
^{This is part 1 | part 2 | part 3}

The Russia Mafia is part and parcel of Russian intelligence. Russia is a mafia state. That is not a metaphor. Putin is head of the Mafia. So the fact that they have deep ties to Donald Trump is deeply disturbing. Trump conducted FIVE completely private meetings and conferences with Putin, and has gone to great lengths to prevent literally anyone, even people in his administration, from learning what was discussed.
According to an ex-KGB spy...Russia has been cultivating Trump as an asset for 40 years.
Trump was first compromised by the Russians in the 80s. In 1984, the Russian Mafia began to use Trump real estate to launder money.
In 1984, David Bogatin — a convicted Russian mobster and close ally of Semion Mogilevich, a major Russian mob boss — met with Trump in Trump Tower right after it opened. Bogatin bought five condos from Trump at that meeting. Those condos were later seized by the government, which claimed they were used to launder money for the Russian mob.
“During the ’80s and ’90s, we in the U.S. government repeatedly saw a pattern by which criminals would use condos and high-rises to launder money,” says Jonathan Winer, a deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement in the Clinton administration. “It didn’t matter that you paid too much, because the real estate values would rise, and it was a way of turning dirty money into clean money. It was done very systematically, and it explained why there are so many high-rises where the units were sold but no one is living in them.”
When Trump Tower was built, as David Cay Johnston reports in The Making of Donald Trump, it was only the second high-rise in New York that accepted anonymous buyers.
In 1987, the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, Yuri Dubinin, arranged for Trump and his then-wife, Ivana, to enjoy an all-expense-paid trip to Moscow to consider business prospects.
A short while later he made his first call for the dismantling of the NATO alliance. Which would benefit Russia.
At the beginning of 1990 Donald Trump owed a combined $4 billion to more than 70 banks, with $800 million personally guaranteed by his own assets, according to Alan Pomerantz, a lawyer whose team led negotiations between Trump and 72 banks to restructure Trump’s loans. Pomerantz was hired by Citibank.
Interview with Pomerantz
Trump agreed to pay the bond lenders 14% interest, roughly 50% more than he had projected, to raise $675 million. It was the biggest gamble of his career. Trump could not keep pace with his debts. Six months later, the Taj defaulted on interest payments to bondholders as his finances went into a tailspin.
In July 1991, Trump’s Taj Mahal filed for bankruptcy.
So he bankrupted a casino? What about Ru...
The Trump Taj Mahal casino broke anti-money laundering rules 106 times in its first year and a half of operation in the early 1990s, according to the IRS in a 1998 settlement agreement.
The casino repeatedly failed to properly report gamblers who cashed out $10,000 or more in a single day, the government said."The violations date back to a time when the Taj Mahal was the preferred gambling spot for Russian mobsters living in Brooklyn, according to federal investigators who tracked organized crime in New York City. They also occurred at a time when the Taj Mahal casino was short on cash and on the verge of bankruptcy."
....ssia
So by the mid 1990s Trump was then at a low point of his career. He defaulted on his debts to a number of large Wall Street banks and was overleveraged. Two of his businesses had declared bankruptcy, the Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City and the Plaza Hotel in New York, and the money pit that was the Trump Shuttle went out of business in 1992. Trump companies would ultimately declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy two more times.
Trump was $4 billion in debt after his Atlantic City casinos went bankrupt. No U.S. bank would touch him. Then foreign money began flowing in through Deutsche Bank.
The extremely controversial Deutsche Bank. The Nazi financing, Auschwitz building, law violating, customer misleading, international currency markets manipulating, interest rate rigging, Iran & others sanctions violating, Russian money laundering, salvation of Donald J. Trump.
The agreeing to a $7.2 billion settlement with with the U.S. Department of Justice over its sale and pooling of toxic mortgage securities and causing the 2008 financial crisis bank.
The appears to have facilitated more than half of the $2 trillion of suspicious transactions that were flagged to the U.S. government over nearly two decades bank.
The embroiled in a $20b money-laundering operation, dubbed the Global Laundromat. The launders money for Russian criminals with links to the Kremlin, the old KGB and its main successor, the FSB bank.
That bank.
Three minute video detailing Trump's debts and relationship with Deutsche Bank
In 1998, Russia defaulted on $40 billion in debt, causing the ruble to plummet and Russian banks to close. The ensuing financial panic sent the country’s oligarchs and mobsters scrambling to find a safe place to put their money. That October, just two months after the Russian economy went into a tailspin, Trump broke ground on his biggest project yet.
Directly across the street from the United Nations building.
Russian Linked-Deutsche Bank arranged to lend hundreds of millions of dollars to finance Trump’s construction of a skyscraper next to the United Nations.
Construction got underway in 1999.
Units on the tower’s priciest floors were quickly snatched up by individual buyers from the former Soviet Union, or by limited liability companies connected to Russia. “We had big buyers from Russia and Ukraine and Kazakhstan,” sales agent Debra Stotts told Bloomberg. After Trump World Tower opened, Sotheby’s International Realty teamed up with a Russian real estate company to make a big sales push for the property in Russia. The “tower full of oligarchs,” as Bloomberg called it, became a model for Trump’s projects going forward. All he needed to do, it seemed, was slap the Trump name on a big building, and high-dollar customers from Russia and the former Soviet republics were guaranteed to come rushing in.
New York City real estate broker Dolly Lenz told USA TODAY she sold about 65 condos in Trump World at 845 U.N. Plaza in Manhattan to Russian investors, many of whom sought personal meetings with Trump for his business expertise.
“I had contacts in Moscow looking to invest in the United States,” Lenz said. “They all wanted to meet Donald. They became very friendly.”Lots of Russian and Eastern European Friends. Investing lots of money. And not only in New York.
Miami is known as a hotspot of the ultra-wealthy looking to launder their money from overseas. Thousands of Russians have moved to Sunny Isles. Hundreds of ultra-wealthy former Soviet citizens bought Trump properties in South Florida. People with really disturbing histories investing millions and millions of dollars. Igor Zorin offers a story with all the weirdness modern Miami has to offer: Russian cash, a motorcycle club named after Russia’s powerful special forces and a condo tower branded by Donald Trump.
Thanks to its heavy Russian presence, Sunny Isles has acquired the nickname “Little Moscow.”
From an interview with a Miami based Siberian-born realtor... “Miami is a brand,” she told me as we sat on a sofa in the building’s huge foyer. “People from all over the world want property here.” Developers were only putting up luxury properties because they “know that the crisis has not affected people with money,”
Most of her clients are Russian—there are now three direct flights per week between Moscow and Miami—and increasing numbers are moving to Florida after spending a few years in London first. “It’s a money center, and it’s a lot easier to get your money there than directly to the US, because of laws and tax issues,” she said. “But after your money has been in London for a while, you can move it to other places more easily.”
In the 2000s, Trump turned to licensing deals and trademarks, collecting a fee from other companies using the Trump name. This has allowed Trump to distance himself from properties or projects that have failed or encountered legal trouble and provided a convenient workaround to help launch projects, especially in Russia and former Soviet states, which bear Trump’s name but otherwise little relation to his general business.
Enter Bayrock Group, a development company and key Trump real estate partner during the 2000s. Bayrock partnered with Trump in 2005 and invested an incredible amount of money into the Trump organization under the legal guise of licensing his name and property management. Bayrock was run by two investors:
Felix Sater, a Russian-born mobster who served a year in prison for stabbing a man in the face with a margarita glass during a bar fight, pleaded guilty to racketeering as part of a mafia-driven "pump-and-dump" stock fraud and then escaped jail time by becoming a highly valued government informant. He was an important figure at Bayrock, notably with the Trump SoHo hotel-condominium in New York City, and has said under oath that he represented Trump in Russia and subsequently billed himself as a senior Trump advisor, with an office in Trump Tower. He is a convict who became a govt cooperator for the FBI and other agencies. He grew up with Micahel Cohen --Trump's disbarred former "fixer" attorney. Cohen's family owned El Caribe, which was a mob hangout for the Russian Mafia in Brooklyn. Cohen had ties to Ukrainian oligarchs through his in-laws and his brother's in-laws. Felix Sater's father had ties to the Russian mob.
Tevfik Arif, a Kazakhstan-born former "Soviet official" who drew on bottomless sources of money from the former Soviet republic. Arif graduated from the Moscow Institute of Trade and Economics and worked as a Soviet trade and commerce official for 17 years before moving to New York and founding Bayrock. In 2002, after meeting Trump, he moved Bayrock’s offices to Trump Tower, where he and his staff of Russian émigrés set up shop on the twenty-fourth floor.
Arif was offering him a 20 to 25 percent cut on his overseas projects, he said, not to mention management fees. Trump said in the deposition that Bayrock’s Tevfik Arif “brought the people up from Moscow to meet with me,”and that he was teaming with Bayrock on other planned ventures in Moscow. The only Russians who are likely have the resources and political connections to sponsor such ambitious international deals are the corrupt oligarchs.
In 2005, Trump told The Miami Herald “The name has brought a cachet to certain areas that wouldn’t have had it,” Dezer said Trump’s name put Sunny Isles Beach on the map as a classy destination — and the Trump-branded condo units sold “10 to 20 percent higher than any of our competitors, and at a faster pace.”“We didn’t have any foreclosures or anything, despite the crisis.”
In a 2007 deposition that was part of his unsuccessful defamation lawsuit against reporter Timothy O’Brien Trump testified "that Bayrock was working their international contacts to complete Trump/Bayrock deals in Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. He testified that “Bayrock knew the investors” and that “this was going to be the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Moscow, Kiev, Istanbul, et cetera, and Warsaw, Poland.”
In 2008, Donald Trump Jr. gave the following statement to the “Bridging U.S. and Emerging Markets Real Estate” conference in Manhattan: “[I]n terms of high-end product influx into the United States, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets; say in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo and anywhere in New York. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
In July 2008, Trump sold a mansion in Palm Beach for $95 million to Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian oligarch. Trump had purchased it four years earlier for $41.35 million. The sale price was nearly $54 million more than Trump had paid for the property. This was the height of the recession when all other property had plummeted in value. Must be nice to have so many Russian oligarchs interested in giving you money.
In 2013, Trump went to Russia for the Miss Universe pageant “financed in part by the development company of a Russian billionaire Aras Agalarov.… a Putin ally who is sometimes called the ‘Trump of Russia’ because of his tendency to put his own name on his buildings.” He met with many oligarchs. Timeline of events. Flight records show how long he was there.
Video interview in Moscow where Trump says "...China wanted it this year. And Russia wanted it very badly." I bet they did.
Also in 2013, Federal agents busted an “ultraexclusive, high-stakes, illegal poker ring” run by Russian gangsters out of Trump Tower. They operated card games, illegal gambling websites, and a global sports book and laundered more than $100 million. A condo directly below one owned by Trump reportedly served as HQ for a “sophisticated money-laundering scheme” connected to Semion Mogilevich.
In 2014, Eric Trump told golf reporter James Dodson that the Trump Organization was able to expand during the financial crisis because “We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia. I said, 'Really?' And he said, 'Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programmes. We just go there all the time.’”
A 2015 racketeering case against Bayrock, Sater, and Arif, and others, alleged that: “for most of its existence it [Bayrock] was substantially and covertly mob-owned and operated,” engaging “in a pattern of continuous, related crimes, including mail, wire, and bank fraud; tax evasion; money laundering; conspiracy; bribery; extortion; and embezzlement.” Although the lawsuit does not allege complicity by Trump, it claims that Bayrock exploited its joint ventures with Trump as a conduit for laundering money and evading taxes. The lawsuit cites as a “Concrete example of their crime, Trump SoHo, [which] stands 454 feet tall at Spring and Varick, where it also stands monument to spectacularly corrupt money-laundering and tax evasion.”
In 2016, the Trump Presidential Campaign was helped by Russia.
(I don't have the presidential term sourced yet. I'll post an update when I do. I'm sure you probably remember most of them...sigh. TY to the main posters here. Obviously I'm standing on your shoulders having taken a lot of the information or articles from here).

Tl;dr: fans of a video game are excited about the release of what could be the spiritual successor of their video game. Said developer makes very bold promises and obviously fails to deliver, finally releasing a very disappointing game and alienating most of the community.
I recently stumbled upon this subreddit; I've enjoyed reading most of the posts here and figured I had a few stories to share as well. From 2012 to about 2018, I was active (though with intermittent breaks) in a community of Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 players. This was a small community, with no more than a few hundred active members at its heyday and only a few people active now. Despite its small size, there were definitely a few memorable instances of drama. This is one of those stories; it actually involved another game called Theme Park Studio, which – as you may expect from the title – was not what it promised to be.
Background
Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 was released in October 2004, developed by Frontier and published by Atari. It was primarily a theme park management game, where players have to earn money and keep guests happy in a theme park by constructing and maintaining rides, shops, paths, scenery and more. There was also a sandbox mode that allowed players to build without any monetary restrictions. A small but active community set out to build roller coasters and theme parks (and occasionally completely different projects) in this sandbox mode and share their results online.
While the game was good for its time and viewed positively by many, it did have some downsides. Firstly, the game used a grid: when placing rides and scenery, you were confined to this grid and had little freedom to place things where you want. Secondly, the roller coaster construction system was limited compared to similar games, and as a result most roller coasters were hardly very smooth. Thirdly, the game was poorly optimized. As an example: the game had a day-night cycle, but the game was basically unplayable at night, so people set the game to only daytime.
Over time, people became more and more ambitious in their projects, and these problems became more apparent. As a solution, lots of custom content (akin to mods in other games) was made by members of the community: custom scenery objects, custom rides and even custom roller coaster tracks. These objects were much more versatile and looked much better than most in-game content. As a result, people almost exclusively used custom content to build their projects. Combined with some smart picture and video editing, almost nothing was still recognizable from the original game.
While custom content brought a whole new level of versatility and arguably kept the community running for a long time, the aforementioned problems still persisted. Because the game was being pushed to its limits, people were wondering when a sequel was coming. By 2012, there was no word yet by Atari on a potential sequel, and many similar games from other video game publishers had failed to offer any meaningful improvement to Rollercoaster Tycoon 3. However, this was soon to change.
The spiritual successor
Enter Pantera Entertainment, a small, unknown video game publisher and developer. In November 2012, they posted a trailer to Theme Park Studio, which presented itself as a theme park building tool. Unlike Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, which had a focus on park management, the focus was on building attractive theme parks and rides. Many of the aforementioned issues were solved in this game: there was no grid-based system that dictated where you had to build, roller coasters could be constructed with much more freedom, and the graphics looked more modern. One major feature was the ability to import custom content. Obviously this was also possible in Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, but only using third-party software. That the developers were now anticipating for this was a good sign.
The community was generally excited about Theme Park Studio: it looked to be the spiritual successor to Rollercoaster Tycoon 3. The staff from Pantera would even visit the forums (at the time, most of the community was active through online messaging boards) and would happily provide updates, answer questions and take suggestions. This left a good impression with most of the community.
Over the coming months, more and more promises were being made on new features and huge amounts of content. The game was looking to become a very ambitious project. Now, it would later be discovered that little development had actually been done on the game: the trailer had really only showed footage from Pantera’s earlier title, Hyper Rails. Nevertheless, the release date was set for summer 2013, and the community was still optimistic for a long time.
In April 2013, a Kickstarter campaign was set up. For the uninitiated, Kickstarter allows for developers to source crowdfunding for a project. Developers set a goal and have a set time to achieve that goal. People can ‘back’ a project by donate towards that goal, and in return receive rewards based on the amount they donated. Money only goes towards the project if that goal is actually reached; otherwise the ‘backers’ receive their money back. Well, Pantera set a goal of $80.000 for Theme Park Studio, to be fulfilled within a month. Backer rewards were ambitious: lower amounts would get you the game for free, both a physical and digital copy, and perhaps some merchandise, while those who backed larger amounts were allowed to suggest or design certain rides for the game, and the highest-tier backers (think $500 or more, which only a few people donated) would get you an invitation to a big release party. Now, keep these rewards in mind, as they’ll become important later on.
It took a while and people feared the goal wouldn’t be met, but thanks to enough promotion and a few generous donations, about $100.000 was raised, and the goal was met. Despite Pantera’s ambitious promises, the community was optimistic. Some high-standing members of the community were even assisting in the development of the game and were offering their custom content – made for Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 – to be used in Theme Park Studio. Unfortunately, as we would later discover, this hard work would never really pay off.
Early access
The Kickstarter campaign offered a release date of September 2013. As time went on, it became very apparent that this was unachievable. The game was delayed several times; first to later in 2013, then to April 2014. Finally, they announced that instead of waiting for the complete game, Theme Park Studio would enter Early Access on Steam in February 2014.
Early Access allows people to play a game before its full release. People can play the game and offer feedback to the developers, who can use this feedback to improve the game and add new content in free updates to the players. In this case, that would mean that Theme Park Studio would first release as a basic theme park builder, and that other features, such as new rides and the custom content importer would be added later.
Early Access is an example of something that works well on paper, but is often butchered in practice. When done well, Early Access is a win-win situation: players don’t have to wait to play the game but can get involved in its development, and developers will receive money which they can use to fund the rest of the development. Unfortunately, it is rarely done well, and there are many games released through Early Access that are flat-out unplayable or clearly unfinished. Similarly, many games never leave Early Access or only leave many years later, because developers have little incentive to improve and complete a game they’ve already received money for.
Well, Theme Park Studio would turn out to fit the latter category. Upon release, the game was... disappointing. Most notable was the lack of ability to build roller coasters: players could only build flat rides (simple rides such as a merry-go-round or a Ferris wheel). The game was also poorly optimized and didn’t look particularly great. Still, many people called for the community to be patient and wait for new updates to come: Pantera had provided a route map for the implementation of further updates to provide some perspective.
This implementation was generally very slow. For example, the ability to build roller coasters – a rather essential part of a theme park construction tool - didn’t come until August that year; even then, people weren’t happy about it, as it was unintuitive and difficult to use, and many considered it hardly an improvement from Rollercoaster Tycoon 3. The community slowly grew divided. A sizeable group defended Theme Park Studio and called for people to be patient, but a growing group had become very critical of the game and its developers. However, besides lacking updates and producing a game of low quality, there were other glaring issues as well.
Pantera loses approval
Now, remember the aforementioned Kickstarter rewards? As time went on, it became increasingly clear that many of these rewards would never be released. Many people complained about not receiving digital access to the game once it was released through Early Access, despite promises from Pantera – and that was the easiest reward for them to fulfil. Even to this day, some people are yet to receive digital access. People were also losing hope about higher-tier rewards, such as physical copies of the game, merchandise and the release party.
Probably the most controversial reward tiers were those that allowed backers to design rides, however. More than 100 people had pledged enough money to have a ride suggestion implemented into the game. It turned out, however, that many of these suggestions would never see the light of day. On the forums, people complained about their suggestions being rejected, while some received no response from Pantera. When eventually an update was released that was supposed to contain rides suggested by backers, people noted that way fewer rides were added than that there were backers. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but I think no more than 10% saw their rides actually published in-game.
Now, resentment grew towards Pantera for failing to uphold their end of the bargain and releasing an unfinished, low-quality game. By this time, there was also not much left of the actively involved, feedback-taking staff that represented the game when it was first announced: the developer became notorious for failing to take and accept constructive criticism. Many people had their posts removed and accounts banned from the official Theme Park Studio forum for speaking out against the developer.
Another absurd rule on their forums was their stance on ‘dark rides’, mainly indoor rides based around creating an atmosphere above being thrilling, such as a haunted house. As the name suggests, many dark rides are dark: the atmosphere is creepy or scary, and many horror themes are used. Well, the forum banned the posting of rides containing demonic themes or otherwise being ‘sacrilegious’, effectively meaning most dark rides. This pissed off the community, as quite a few people made dark rides and this was seen as infringement on their creativity. It also spawned a series of memes on rides that were “too dark and sinister for Theme Park Studio”. Another questionable decision by the development team was to add VR support; while becoming the only theme park building or management game to have it, it was generally criticised because it would add very little to the game and so many other aspects of the game needed much more working on. I’m sure there were other decisions made by Pantera that received significant backlash from the community, but these I remember best.
The aftermath
Over time, interest in Theme Park Studio faded away and people generally gave up hope that they would ever receive their Kickstarter rewards. There were still a few avid supporters of the game, but the broken promises, slow progress, disappointing results and bad PR meant most people in the community had changed their stance over the years. The game was forgotten and slowly faded into irrelevance. There was no real way for backers to get their money back or otherwise hold Pantera accountable for the unfulfilled promises, an issue that other failed Kickstarter campaigns unfortunately also have. Amazingly, some of the backers reported actually receiving a physical copy of the game, albeit five or six years after the initial Kickstarter campaign, but similarly there are still people waiting for their rewards to this date.
Theme Park Studio was finally released in December 2016, after many years in development. It released without much fanfare and definitely without a release party that backers had paid hundreds, sometimes even thousands of dollars for; many people didn’t even notice it had left Early Access. The game never took off and its reviews on Steam are mostly negative. The entire fiasco made people much more sceptical of other new games: from 2014 onwards, many other theme park simulation games were announced and released, but people were much more cautiously optimistic about these games (and rightfully so; many of them failed, but those are stories for another time).
Eventually, the true spiritual successor to Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 was released: Planet Coaster, developed by Frontier (the original developers of Rollercoaster Tycoon 3). It was released in November 2016, prompting some to think that the definitive release of Theme Park Studio only weeks later was a hasty attempt to piggyback off of that success. It did almost everything Theme Park Studio promised and offered the possibility to build much more detailed and complex rides. Over time, many people who played Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 switched over to Planet Coaster because of the vast improvements.
People generally forgot about Theme Park Studio, and many people wanted to leave it in the past. It’s hard to find many of the original forum posts on the topic. RCTLounge, one of the major forums on the topic, was closed in 2016 due to inactivity. In 2018, Shyguy’s World, another forum on the topic, actually removed the Theme Park Studios board and deleted all posts to forget about the ‘dark and sinister’ affair. As the forum’s owner said: “The first rule of Theme Park Studio... you do not talk about Theme Park Studio”. The official Theme Park Studios forums are also down and the website is vastly outdated. Most of this post was sourced by memories, the Wayback machine and the few threads I could still find.
Many people agreed that Pantera was probably a well-intentioned company that had simply bitten off more than they could chew. Clearly they had vastly underestimated the difficulty of this project and lost any drive to complete the project as it went on and support disappeared. Nevertheless, all the drama resulted in a bitter aftertaste for many people and changed people’s outlooks on the future releases of similar games.

As a level 42 player, I’ve never had an issue with raiding with low level trainers. I’m happy to invite them to my raids and I’m happy to help them with theirs.
However, I just had the displeasure of doing a Suicune raid with 8 other people between the levels of 26 and 34 and oh my god. First of all it should have been 9 others but someone backed out at four seconds, then we got into the raid and I saw what other people were using. Across from me I see a gyarados using waterfall, a togekiss, and what appeared to be two entei on my left. I then watch the gyarados switch to a heatran, the togekiss to a suicune and both entei’s into more entei’s?!?! This lack of counters in favour of not very effective Pokémon by 5+ people proceeded for the entire raid.
I just don’t even understand what people are doing. You don’t have to play a lot or be a god at this game to just use the counters the game suggests. These people either cared so little about winning that they deliberately chose their cool Pokémon or just don’t care to put any effort into figuring out what the counters to water types are. Either way, I think it’s incredibly disrespectful to come into a community like this where we are counting on each other and not put in the minimum effort.
This was the first time I’ve lost a raid by such a large margin with so many people. I still can’t wrap my head around what these people are thinking, but I’m not interested in wasting my time or money on them anymore.
Losing a raid because we aren’t strong enough even though everyone tried their best is 100% ok with me! We tried we failed, that’s life. But losing because people just don’t care to try or put the effort in to learn is such a slap in the face. That’s my rant for the day.
I’ll probably continue to raid with lower level players, but today I’m pissed and jaded.
Edit: I absolutely hear what everyone is saying here, and while I completely understand your opinions, my thoughts are still the same. Ignorance, first time and new raid boss are not an excuse. If you are going to raid in a community like this, you have a responsibility to do your research first and ensure that you are going to be a contributing member of the team.
I for example watch a YouTube video or find a website which tells me what the best raid counters are. I then make use tm’s as necessary to make sure my team is as good as I can be. Then I make a battle party so I can switch back to it quickly after they all faint. I also ensure I have six max revives before I join or host a raid so that I will get back in with my strongest again. All of this with the exception of using a bunch of tm’s can be done by very low level players as well.
I just think you have to pull your own weight and be a contributing member of the community if you want to benefit from it.
Edit 2: This has been a really interesting discussion that I’ve enjoyed quite a bit. While I’ve heard a lot of different points of view my core belief and feelings regarding this hasn’t changed. In my opinion, if you want the benefits of being a part of a team, you should do your best to be a contributing member of that team. You don’t have to have a full team of XL shadow counters, but you do have to do a little research to determine which of your Pokémon are best for the job. Real people are counting on you, putting real money on the line and you should be respectful of that.
Im gonna turn off notifications now but I may swing by tomorrow. Have a good night/day everyone!

From the guys who brought you The Greatest Short Burn of the Century..

Oh man, oh man, oh man.
Not again.
-Drizzy

Preface:
Please believe me when I say I really wanted to take this month off and enjoy the snow in Tahoe. But as I was driving, something caught my eye...
Make no mistake. This stock is not going to be nearly as volatile or profitable as GME. In fact, this might be so boring that most of you will ignore me yet again. And that’s exactly why I like it. I’ll do my best to make this engaging, but the fact is, this is going to be a slow grind. Both this DD and the stock.
Also, as a bonus, Reddit is currently public enemy #1 in the eyes of the media. Why don’t we do a quick heel-turn and join their side? Are they gonna hate us for buying boring value stocks? They won’t know what hit them. That will be a fun show to watch.
Anyway… let’s take a look under the hood. As always, not financial advice. Just education. NOTHING IS A RECOMMENDATION. We are just sharing knowledge here. Ok SEC?
Intro:
Ford (NYSE: $F -- NOT NASDAQ:$FORD), is another depressed deep value multiple expansion arbitrage play. No short squeeze this time. The GME asymmetry may not be seen again for 10 years.
It might seem boring and unsexy on the surface, but Ford is a fantastic company in the midst of one of the best turnarounds in American history. And with a little help from our friend Mr. Options (or as Buffett called, Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction) we can turn a boring old Ford into a lightning fast Ferrari using the quadruple income option wheel strategy. Don’t try this at home. If you don’t know what CSPs, CCs, or vega are, stick to shares. Those should work just fine.
Let’s break this down into 5 parts: electrification story and leadership, multiples expansion, technical analysis, options, and the trade.
By the way, in 2019, the Ford F-Series was second only to the Apple iPhone, which raked in $55 billion, in terms of total revenue generated. The F-Series generated more revenue than the NFL, MLB, NBA, and the NHL combined, which added up to $40 billion. Just something to think about.

The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round...

Electrification story and leadership:
Let’s jump into history for a second. Ford had a meteoric rise from 1997 - 1999 from $15 to around $32 at the peak. This was due to $F reporting massive earnings increases each quarter:

• Dec 1996 - 1997 Ford F-150 - Truck of the Year
  
• Jan 1997 - Ford profits up 82 percent
  
• Oct 1997 - Ford profits up 64 percent
  
• Jan 1998 - Ford profits up 56 percent
  

They were just feasting and feasting. Jim Farley looks like the best person alive to revitalize Ford, capable of tripling the stock in 2-3 years. Look at the last two quarters:

• Q3-2020 - Adjusted EPS: 65 cents vs 19 cents expected, Automotive revenue: $34.71 billion vs $33.51 billion expected (due to pent up demand)
  
• Q2-2020 - Adjusted EPS: A loss of 35 cents per share versus a loss of $1.17 per share expected, Automotive revenue: $16.6 billion versus $15.95 billion expected.
  

Here are excerpts from the Q3 earnings and some other notable highlights:

Farley: Now that plan, which was introduced to the Ford team and many stakeholders on October 1, is very straightforward. Among other things, No. 1, we will compete like a challenger, earning each customer with great products but as well services with rewarding ownership experiences. Number two, we're moving with urgency to turn around our automotive operations, improve our quality, reduce our cost and accelerate the restructuring of underperforming businesses.
And third, we're going to grow again but in the right areas, allocating more capital, more resources, more talent to our very strongest businesses and vehicle franchises; incubating, scaling and integrating new businesses, some of them enabled by new technology like Argo's world-class self-driving system; and expanding our leading commercial vehicle business with great margins but now with the suite of software services that drive loyalty and generate reoccurring annuity-like revenue streams; and being a leader in electric vehicle revolution around the world where we have strength and scale. So now speaking about EVs. To start with, we're developing all-new electric versions of the F-150 and the Transit, the two most important, highest-volume commercial vehicles in our industry. These leading vehicles really drive the commercial vehicle business at Ford, and we're electrifying them.

Quick sidebar here from my buddy M: "Whereas traditional manufact / consumer / industrials are valued on an EBITDA multiple, SAAS has historically been valued on a revenue multiple, which translates to flat out higher valuations. EVs themselves are not necessarily a higher margin product that justifies a higher multiple (at least not that I've seen), but tech services / subscriptions are the real money makers in this game. Hint Hint companies like Apple throwing everything they have at trying to integrate services and subscriptions over the last 5 years"
This further justifies the expansion multiples we expect will catch up to leading EV automakers (see below).

We own work at Ford. And these electric vehicles will be true work vehicles, extremely capable and with unique digital services and over-the-air capabilities to improve the productivity and uptime of our important commercial customers. The electric Transit, by the way, will be revealed next month, and you heard about it here first, for all of our global markets. We believe the addressable market for a fully electric commercial van and pickup, the two largest addressable profit pools in commercial, are going to be massive.
Now you're going to see our strategy of electrifying our leading commercial vehicles and our iconic high-volume products expand very quickly at Ford.
When you look at our results, they reflect the benefit of our decision two years ago to allocate capital to our strongest franchise, namely: pickups, a whole range of utilities across the world, commercial vehicles and iconic passenger vehicles. Additionally, we saw higher-than-expected demand for our new vehicles in the quarter.
Together, these factors, plus the strongest performance from Ford Credit in 15 years, led to a total company adjusted EBIT margin of 9.7%. That's 490 basis points higher than last year.
As an outcome of all this, we generated $6.3 billion in adjusted free cash flow.
The strong cash flow in the quarter gave us the confidence and the ability to make a second payment on our corporate revolver, which we did on September 24. So now we have fully repaid the entire $15 billion facility, and we ended the third quarter with a strong balance sheet, including nearly $30 billion in cash and more than $45 billion of liquidity, which provides us with the vital financial flexibility we need.

Check out this credit downgrade weeks before Ford paid off their revolving credit facility. Smells like GME?
Alright. What about Q4-2020 and beyond? Ford is expected to post a loss. TA is signaling a beat (see the TA section). Ford is spending this money in order further restructure and deliver on the following items in their pipeline:
Bronco:

• Within the first month of open reservations, the Bronco had received an estimated 230,000 reservations. 230,000 reservations is an incredibly impressive figure, especially when put into the context of Ford’s total vehicle sales. 230,000 sales would represent 4% of Ford’s total sales.
  
• Current estimates place over 20% of reservation holders as first-time Ford buyers.
  
• The most expensive trim, the limited ‘First Edition’, has already sold out.
  

Mach-E vs Tesla Model Y. Just the fact that there is debate between the better car is bullish for Ford.

• Source 1
  
• Source 2
  
• Source 3
  

The upcoming 2021 F-150 has positive consumer reviews as well:

• The 2021 Ford F-150 Is So Stuffed With New Tech & Gadgets That Even Tesla Owners Are Impressed!
  
• DeMuro - The 2021 Ford F-150 Is Totally New and Really Impressive
  
• Some other nice features: Fold down the shifter, lay seats down completely flat, speakers in headrest, tailgate worksurface (pen/pencil holders, rulers) C clamp, 120V outlet, bottle opener, light), sensing running board, tailgate step and railing, and more. Watch the video.
  

Ford Raptor launch (just happened today, customers are excited. Look at the comments on YouTube and IG)
Further potential tailwinds:

• Ford partnering with Rivian in a $500M deal. Product yet to be released.
  
• Google partnership that caused the intraday spike on 2/2.
  
• Ford is rumored to secure the USPS contract since deal talks are falling through with WKHS.
  

The Postal Service told Trucks.com that it expects to reach a contract with one or more of the teams bidding for the business in the federal government’s second fiscal quarter of 2021. That works out to the first quarter of next year.

• There is a historical inverse relationship between gas prices and car sizing. Tell me if I'm reaching here. But as America continues to head towards electrification and energy independence under Biden, larger gas cars will be more in demand. Furthermore, the aftershock of COVID will continue to propagate the dedensification of cities. Less commuter vehicles, and more travel vehicles. And look who is conveniently positioned to take advantage of all of this?
  
• Dr. Anning Chen is also a killer CEO of Ford China. This is largely intangibles (which Wall Street cannot model), but watch his interviews here and here.
  
• Dr. Chen used the COVID shutdown to improve the operational efficiency of the company. It has not shown on the bottom line thus far, but it will later.
  
• CTO Dr. Ken Washington bio. Ex Lockheed.
  
• Kennard on the board.. PE guy, on the AT&T board and former FCC chairman.
  
• Vojvodich. Ex CRM and ADHZ.
  
• Regarding the above leadership and BOD members, experienced executives are a better fit for running the day-to-day than any other. Add a sprinkle of savvy techfin folk and you have a recipe for a elite transition.
  

English please? Ford is a strong company. Farley is delivering on his promises and can lead the company towards an operationally efficient turnaround towards electrification. Combine this with a loyal customer base rivaled only by AAPL, and you get another special opportunity. This is the turning point.
Multiples Expansion:
Now here lies the crux of the thesis. Amidst all the EV hype, Ford is being unfairly ignored at an extremely depressed multiple compared to the other companies in the EV space. Here are some comparisons (numbers may be slightly outdated, pulled earlier this week, more relative comparison than absolute):
$Ticker - Market Cap - TTM Revenue MM - TTM EBITDA MM - Revenue Multiple - Ebitda Multiple
TSLA - $810B - $28B - $4B - 29X - 202X
NIO - $92B - $12B - ($7B) - 7.6X - (NaN)
GM - $78B - $116B - $18B - 0.7X - 4.3X
F - $44B - $131B - $10B - 0.3X - 4.4X
That’s an eyesore. Let’s focus on just TSLA and Ford, because why not. Assuming Ford can quickly turn towards electrification (from the evidence above), these two companies are fair comparisons. No Tesla is not a software/energy company, look at their automotive % of revenue. Stop it. It has only recently dropped to 80% due to the expansion of their leasing division. Energy is still a tiny part of TSLA.
Revenue Multiple:
TSLA = 29X
F = 0.3X
EBITDA Multiple:
TSLA = 202X
F = 4.4X
Yes those numbers are correct. Look at them for 60 seconds and tell me what you see. Quick quote from my buddy M:

Just zoom out and think. TSLA is for sure ahead of the rest on their tech and charging infra right now. But in terms of just overall bottom line infrastructure and manufacturing capability; once the GMs, Fs, and VWs of the world can get the ball rolling, they are way ahead in that aspect. Much more experience in production and retail / distribution channels, as well as logistics sourcing. Plenty of battery makers, and self driving tech makers out there too right now. Small to mid scale M&A will probably be the name of the game if I had to guess.

This is why Burry is short $TSLA, but two scenarios can unfold: either the high-flying stocks drop, or Ford rises. I believe we will land somewhere in the middle, with Ford rising as we begin to enter the optimism phase in the final third of our bull market.
Shorting is a dangerous game anyway... So I’ve been hearing on the news...
TA, Options:
Exhibit A from our resident chart whisperer J (who will remain unnamed because you monkeys keep bothering him).
Larger view.
As you can see, the trendline has broken out.
Exhibit B from our resident quant T (also to rename unnamed):

Starting on 1/4 you'll find right tail distributions into any liquidation which represent large buying. Which has led up to a recent run-up and eventually left tail distributions which represent short coverings which lead into the gaps and thinner distributions where there aren't any major bids. Even with the pullback on 1/22 we see more right tail distribution after the profit taking from the recent run-up, which means someone is buying up the inventory.
This is unusual for F, where F trades within tight ranges. On 2/1 you can see a bimodal distribution which means a new player has stepped in, which we assume has additional knowledge apart from the larger players that were already in the market. The recent range between 10.70 and 11.20 indicates that the market has accepted this price range as fair value. Without additional research at first glance we can see that a large player (or players) is buying up a significant amount of inventory.
On 1/4 we find that the volume increased to 77,559,128 from the previous trading of 34,462,454 (125% increase) and 33,127,776 the day before that. Volume has been higher since.
On our first major left tail distribution (which represents short covering) since the buying on 1/4 the volume was at 113,707,973.

Exhibit C
250k shares of F 10.92; 100k F 11.04; 3.53m F 9.78; 708k F 9.78; 500k F 9.64; 377k F 9.50; 338k F 9.50; 201k F 9.75; 192k F 9.80; 150k F 9.77
These are blocks of shares bought in the past 7 days
Top OI changes:
+19610 F 02/05/21 11 C 43821 38% 13% 48%
+12904 F 02/05/21 12 C 31929 38% 11% 52%
Top OI positions:
170902 F 02/19/21 10 C +807 26% 49% 25%
112480 F 02/19/21 12 C +3207 29% 29% 41%
The percentages are bid mid ask.
Someone is bullish on Ford.
For an earnings play, daily RSI is oversold looking towards an uptick.
Options gamma is interesting to note as well.
Open interest on 2/5 $13 and $15Cs are also notable. Could be covered calls? Could be someone knows something?
Could be Jeff reading too much into the tea leaves. Not financial advice. Just showing you what I see.
The Trade: The simplest way is just to purchase shares and collect dividends as Ford may reinstate them sometime in 2021. Possibly leaps if you feel adventurous.
For the option junkies like myself, and as a tribute to the greatest company in American history, I will use the wheel(s). The GME trade was a very special and momentous occasion. Now that we have a bankroll, we’ll just quietly play theta gang as we enjoy our lives and spend time with our families and loved ones. Here’s a good summary.
This is not for amateurs. I mean, none of this is financial advice anyway, just educational.
But in a nutshell, I will: 1) Buy shares, 2) Sell CSPs 30-45 days out with 0.3 delta, 3) sell CCs with 0.3 delta (will reconsider this if Ford goes vertical) 4) Collect dividends.
The Wheel doesn’t work on everything. Here are the qualifications from the above post, let me know if this sounds familiar:

• Profitable company that has solid cash flow
  
• Bullish, or Very Bullish, analyst ratings
  
• Priced around $10 to $50 so that I can afford to take the assignment if needed and I stay away from sub-$10 stocks as a rule
  
• A stable chart without wild gyrations (especially those caused by CEO tweets!)
  
• A nice dividend is always a good thing, both that you may collect it if assigned the stock but also that dividend stocks tend to more stable and predictable.
  

Hmm...
Conclusion:
Ford is a massive, complex, multinational corporation so I’ve likely missed very many things, but I wanted to get this out before ER so I can flex again. (No market manipulation here lol. My buddy's multi-million dollar block buys didn't move the needle one iota.) There are many things I haven’t covered, and simply don’t know yet. As more facts begin to unfold, and as I spend more time with the stock, I’ll share the information here. Also, every time I post about an equity, it seems to go down. Lol... (GME). With all this in mind, this is still a very risky bet.
Nevertheless, I like what I’ve seen thus far. Ford looks like a fantastically healthy company in the midst of a turnaround towards electrification with a phenomenally depressed multiple according to the market’s appetite. It deserves a multiple trending towards TSLA’s, not a dying auto manufacturer. Jim Farley has shown early to be a great CEO and I think he can continue the transformation. We’ve begun to enter a phase of exuberance, so I’ll choose to long Ford instead of short TSLA.
As a bonus, we have the opportunity to join forces with the boomers and talking heads and bet on one of their favorite companies. Time for America to be on the same side again. We’ve been divided for too long.
I know my GME posts were lucky. I’ll stake my reputation on another bet. One call sure is lucky. What about two? In any case, investing is a marathon, not a sprint. Glad to be a part of this journey with you all. Note: I will not discuss GME in the comments, which all depends on Ryan Cohen. There is nothing further to add until Q4 earnings.
And finally, we’ve officially entered the last phase of our very long bull market. This is not necessarily a sell signal yet, as some of the greatest returns can come in this period and can last for a long time. I will do my best to look for the signal and sound the alarm. The world will be celebrating, and I will be bearish. Burry’s passive indexing bubble call in combination with Thiel’s government debt bubble call will lead us into a dark time of unprecedented proportions. Tail risk hedging won’t work as the declines will be slow at first, and then fast and violent and unrecoverable. Be careful. Listen to Ken Fisher. Thank you very much for your time.
Positions: Bullish shares, LEAPS, on-going quadruple income wheel strategy as Ford reinstates the dividend. Timeframe 12-18 months. Watch out VIGILANTLY for macro risks. Bear market is on the horizon. Drop some Fs in the chat to pay respects.
PT: $32 with a chance of $98 if we start to see exuberance in the broader market.
-JA