Skip to main content

There is no GameStop MOASS coming

 




Sorry.  There is none.  There is a cult on Reddit that consists of folks who tell either other that they're all about to get rich with their collection of modestly priced GameStop stock, or options. 

The coming apocalyptic event that will lift the true believers into the heaven of obscene wealth is known as: the GameStop MOASS.

MOASS stands in turn for "mother of all short squeezes." For those who aren't familiar with matters financial and don't know what a "short squeeze" is ... let me just say that it is the mirror image of a traditional stack market panic.  An old-school panic is a situation in which the price drop of a stock sets off a sudden belief that the stock will go further down, and a rush to sell it in time to get SOME value out of the sale.  That rush to sell is a self-fulfilling prophecy: it does drive the stock price down.

A short squeeze is the opposite.  It is where people (generally those who have bet that a stock will fall in value -- we need not worry about the mechanics) comes to believe their bet has been wrong. The stock will go up at a speed that will ruin them.  They seek to settle their position, which requires purchasing the stock.  If enough speculators are in this position and react that way, then the sudden panicky desire for the stock does drive its price up.    

The MOASS, the mother of such squeezes, would of course be great news for those who own the stock going in. Even if the stock in question is GameStop.

https://slate.com/technology/2024/10/reddit-gamestop-stock-wall-street.html

But the cult is fooling itself.  As cults do.  There is no impending GameStop MOASS.   

How can I know this? Well, first, because the apocalyptic predictions have been coming in for years now.  A bit like the ones about Jesus arriving.  “GOOD MORNING - HOPE YOU ENJOYED YOUR LAST POOR WEEKEND. MOASS IS NOW🚀🚀🚀” typed one Reddit user in January of this year.  “Good night, apes. Sleep well. We’ll most likely have MOASS in the morning,” another pronounced in July. It happened neither time. There had been a bit of an upward move in April and May, but far short of MOASS levels! The January prediction just quoted came in the midst of a downward drift and the July prediction of another one.  

More importantly: the management of GameStop has figured this out! They know they have a cult and they are making money off of it in a way that makes MOASS ever more distant.

Farhad Manjoo offered a more detailed explanation in SLATE recently.  I commend it to you. 


Labels:

Comments

  1. Paul D. Van PeltNovember 2, 2024 at 6:26 AM

    Odds are this is probably right. Murphy said anything that can go wrong will...at the worst possible time. This has proven right, occasionally. But, it not anything to bet the farm on. Relax. Have a cappucino. Or a martini.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more