Kolek planning to go pro
Before I start - I am biased, I do own a decent chunk of Gamestop stock. Obviously, none of this is financial advice.Jefferies has raised their GME target to $175 with an upside of $220. That means an analyst actually believes the stock has higher to go than it's current closing price. They are certainly an outlier, but they're still a massive investment bank. Numerous others (including Bank of America) have taken their ball and gone home, meaning their analyst has thrown a fit that they can't properly value the stock based on "fundamentals". Regardless, to answer your question:1. The CEO, CFO, and new board members are compensated mainly via stock. Actually the board is 100% stock. It was based on the share price over a 1 month period - I believe there were a number of hires and additions over a period, but most of their cost basis is somewhere between $140-180. CEO Matt Furlong's cost basis is over $200. The chairman (Ryan Cohen) did not convince a bunch of ex-Amazon execs to quit on Bezos for a failing video game retailer. Not to mention, he executed a subtle takeover of the board, ousted current CEO and CFO, and wholesale replaced his board seats with ex-Chewy and other impressive members.2. Gamestop's current price has allowed them to raise ~1.7 billion in capital via stock issuance and pay off all debt, which frankly, was part of the bear thesis. They aren't going bankrupt and they aren't failing anytime soon.3. Many believe they are going to blow their targets out of the water in September for ahead of earnings. Frankly, they have a rabid investor base who go out of their way to shop at Gamestop. We're also on the upswing of a new console cycle, where Gamestop always gets a lift from.4. They've expanded into adjacent markets, grown e-commerce revenue significantly, and opened two massive distribution facilities on the east and west coast.5. There are confirmed crypto/NFT developers working for Gamestop. Many hypothesize it's either to develop an NFT to resell "used" digital games (digital games being a consumer taste preference has also long been part of the bear thesis). Others believe it is an NFT dividend, which would effectively prove the stock has 'synthetic' shares that a market maker, Citadel, used their MM privileges' to create. Distribution of this would immediately require the short HFs to cover and cause a squeeze.I could go on, but I think the company is doing well and the price is being suppressed by multiple entities. I'm an investor, but am not a "Reddit Edgelord" as stated above.
Jefferies has raised their GME target to $175 with an upside of $220. That means an analyst actually believes the stock has higher to go than it's current closing price. They are certainly an outlier, but they're still a massive investment bank. Numerous others (including Bank of America) have taken their ball and gone home, meaning their analyst has thrown a fit that they can't properly value the stock based on "fundamentals".
Regardless, to answer your question:1. The CEO, CFO, and new board members are compensated mainly via stock. Actually the board is 100% stock. It was based on the share price over a 1 month period - I believe there were a number of hires and additions over a period, but most of their cost basis is somewhere between $140-180. CEO Matt Furlong's cost basis is over $200. The chairman (Ryan Cohen) did not convince a bunch of ex-Amazon execs to quit on Bezos for a failing video game retailer. Not to mention, he executed a subtle takeover of the board, ousted current CEO and CFO, and wholesale replaced his board seats with ex-Chewy and other impressive members.2. Gamestop's current price has allowed them to raise ~1.7 billion in capital via stock issuance and pay off all debt, which frankly, was part of the bear thesis. They aren't going bankrupt and they aren't failing anytime soon.
These are the most important keys for me. There are intelligent and forward thinking people running the show at GameStop now, and thats whats most encouraging and potentially exciting for the company moving forward. As well as the secondary they raised which allowed them to clear their books. Frankly every company that experienced some wild spike this year, including KOSS and others, should have quickly issued secondaries at the inflated price and replenished their coffers.
Simple Rules for Investment Success:1) If you don't understand it, don't buy it.
As I said at the time in the investment thread, this is why I got out after my extremely brief foray.During the initial spike into triple digits I made a small investment in put options, believing the stock was wildly overvalued and would come back down. Went to a meeting and came back an hour later to see that the stock has continued to spike from 114 when I bought the puts to 170+.In any rational market I should have been solidly in the red at that point and I opened up the trading screen with the intention of doubling down on my paper loss only to see that the value of my puts had inexplicably gone up. So instead I bought the puts back with a small profit, got out and stayed out.
GameStop closed at $211 today. Pretty clear it’s not retail driving this volume. And if you look at the run-ups, it looks quarterly.