Business and Stonks Thread

Most of the national ones like Fidelity and Empower give you a bunch of different options selected by your employer that you can choose from and follow along. They have the information linked on-line (prospectus, rate of return, financials, etc.) that allows you to see how they are doing and what they purport to do. This allows you to take an active role in how you are investing through any given part of a cycle.

Im about negative $400 on some stocks I bought that I don’t feel great about. I may just sell and reinvest in an index fund or something.

People are still buying AMC? Is Reddit planning another pump and dump?

I'm certainly not an expert and I haven't really been paying attention to how AMC has cut costs in the last year but I still don't see how this is a good stock for a reopening play. Just looking at the price graph it looks like the stock is actually up over where it was pre-pandemic. At this point everyone knows things are reopening so that is probably already baked into the price. I guess its possible that the movie theater industry will bounce back more than expected due to pent up demand and the industry will be saved but this seems like wishful thinking. The industry was already dying before the pandemic.

Long term reopening play with a possible short-mid term short squeeze.

Movie Theaters (ie AMC) is to Movies : Live Music (ie Live Nation) is to Music.

If you aren’t a big movie theaters person, it’s understandable to say why would I ever go to a movie theater when I can stream, use Netflix, [insert argument], etc. It’s the same argument people can make for live music. I can listen to music at home, cd, vinyl, [again insert argument], etc. Its a different experience and while some may choose the “home” option, people do and will continue to see movies in the theaters.

I will absolutely concede that AMC nearly went bankrupt last year. But early reopening numbers from recent movies like Godzilla vs. Kong, Mortal Kombat, and even the anime movie DemonSlayer have all smashed expectations on basically 25% capacity. And those 2 non-anime movies are objectively bad and still crushed it. China will also continue to be massive too and AMC has theaters globally. With live music, you go to most cities and most venues are owned / connected to Live Nation. The same is happening in movie theaters. We’ve seen the consolidation of some of the local / regional players but the ones that have survived will make it. We’ve already seen the theater chains making big changes and adding a lot more features, e.g., bigger and reserved seats, food delivery and full menu, alcohol. AMC is now letting you rent out a theater for events, parties, etc. Plus, the tent-pole movies have all gotten backlogged and will all be hitting the theaters had over the next 2-3 years. We have 6 fucking Marvel movies hitting theaters in the next 12 months and we seen a recommitment from the big production companies to return to the theater-first distribution model (even though Kong and MK have shown that movies can be released in theaters and steaming simultaneously).

In the near term, AMC along with GameStop are still both in positions to get massive short squeezes. Everyone thought after the January mini-squeeze that it might be over but the retail investors didn’t leave their positions and the Hedge Funds did indeed double down (literally) on their shorting of both stocks. With AMC, because it’s stock price is so cheap, retail has already bought up over 95% of the float and it’s shorted at like 30%. The simple math is in favor of the retail investor. You can go down the rabbit hole on Reddit but there’s actually some really good research out there on both stocks. The AMC to 100K are a bit ridiculous, but I think it’s pretty conceivable that we could see AMC spend a few weeks over $200 at some point this year.

haha thanks. I’ve been in AMC for the long haul anyway, but the opportunity cost to not add has been too great. It’s basically a $10 gambling ticket that has a 2% chance going to 0, a 50% chance going above $100, and a 90% chance it goes and stays over $20. GME just has a bigger runway for losses (current price about $175) and because it’s already elevated from its “cheap” share prices, I think it doesn’t have as high a potential in the squeeze and it’s LT price is probably lower than the 175.

Plus if the broader market crashes, i think GME and AMC could be the cause and the people that don’t have either, are gonna get crushed, IMO.

What is the theory behind GME and AMC crashing the market?

GME and AMC are likely to squeeze which could cause a cascade of margin calls that essentially wipes out a shit ton of hedge funds and other larger financial players.

Note: I really only follow the detailed AMC DD and statistics but the similar applies to GME as they are tied at the hip so when I refer to “squeeze” it’s technically multiple stocks, just using AMC as a reference.

AMC was $2 a share, ramped to $3 in January then popped to $20 in the mini squeeze, then bottomed around $5.50 in February. It’s now pushed back to $10 over the last three months and has been trading sideways for 3 months with record setting short data.

GME was $20 entering the year, ramped to $40 in January then popped to $400 in the mini squeeze then bottomed around $40 in February. It too has ramped up again and has been now been trading sideways in the $150-180 range. Same pattern.

The prolonged sideways trading in each have allowed retail investors to continue to buy up the float to where in AMC’s position retail literally owns nearly 90% of the float.

When AMC squeezed in January, there were around 50M shares shorted. They pushed the price up to $20 and in that time we’re only able to cover 7M shares. That squeeze alone nearly crashed the market. 3 months later, you’d think they’d have closed out of their short positions? NOPE, AMC now has 150M shares shorted. They’ve tripled down on shorting AMC yet the prices for both have already pushed back up and are essentially trading sideways at 1/2 their peak mini squeeze.because of the sideways trading, retail has almost literally bought up every. Since January, we’ve seen several HFs that have either gotten wiped out because or at least got crippled. And a completely unrelated HF (Archegos) went bankrupt after being overleveraged and having 1 bet go bad. All the major banks have recently raised record setting amounts of cash to increase liquidity and a ton of emergency financial rules and regulations are getting rushed into action. (A lot of these rules are related to HFs going bankrupt, how their assets get sold off to hint: banks with lots of liquidity”). That’s a lot of the “legal” stuff going down.

Then when you can go into the more “illegal” or conspiracy path. There’s definitely some illegal stuff going on, it’s just to what extent. This is where you can really go down the rabbit hole in research. Reddit is honestly the best place to find this detailed. You just need to skip r/WSB and all the meme posts. r/superstonk, r/amcstock, r/gme and dig thru their DD posts. One of the easiest examples that falls into this bucket is the number of shares shorted. We know all the reported numbers and they are all basically records, short interest, percentage of float etc. So that 150M shorted shares for AMC is technically higher but accurate. With the illegal activity that is believed to be happening, that number could be some multiple of that: 2X or 5X or 10x, depends on how greedy and desperate the HFs have gotten. So if it jumped to $20 / share and they only covered 7M how will they cover 750M (5X multiple) when there are only 450M shares to begin with?

i may end up being wrong but this feels a lot like that weird part of time where counting cards was a legitimate illegitimate business and a handful of people made out like bandits, some people got some lower windfall, and then everyone else is just chasing that feeling but the powers that be will change the decks. eventually some dumb ass movie will be made about these people and itll be sleazey and terrible and itll be nominated for awards. 

19% is great especially if it’s year to date. I have 11.46% ytd but took a bit of a bath yesterday. 1 year is sitting at 58.51%, and 3 is 17.48%. I think empower includes your contributions so some of that is payroll contributions. But if I could hit 3 or 4 more years of 10-20%, I’ll end up with a decent monthly check to go along with SSI and pension. I fucked around too much early, so I probably won’t ever see that million. But my boy who we hired 10 years ago is now 34 and has like $480,000 socked away already. He and I made some good moves and bought some dips. But we figured that if he can average 12% til 65, he’ll have like 16,000,000 to retire with. The compounding that kicks in later really matters. We also assumed that once you hit 300k, you should be able to pad 100,000 at a minimum every 3 years with substantial contributions, dividends and returns. Really it’s more like $130k, but 100 is fine for shits and giggles. So once you cross a million, any 10% year is going to be another 100k. I guess I could get rich if I had more working years ahead. But I don’t want to work forever and will eventually just say fuck it. Main goal is to be able to live independently until the end without having to rely on anyone else to pay for my shit.

I had about 60$ in doge from back in December. It’s a fuck ton more today. Haha.

What’s your sell price?

TBH, it really depends. I’m feeling more confident that 100 will be in reach for a sustained enough time to sell above that and bring me a nice payday. For me, shit starts to get enticing above maybe $350.