Jumped on the $GME bandwagon on Friday, 4 @ ~316. My 36 hours of day trading has already taught me that no matter how this plays out, I will never YOLO on a bubble ever again.
The principle seemed straightforward: hedge funds got lazy/greedy, over-shorted their positions, bet against a company that wasn't actually going under, and some astute monkies on reddit caught them and triggered a short squeeze. Even as someone who knows almost nothing about the stock market, the basic premise makes sense. But the devil's in the details, and hype is blinding.
First red flag was when I realized DeepFuckingValue did not bet on the short squeeze, he bet on undervalued stock price over a year ago. He has also trimmed his position such that no matter what happens in the squeeze, he walks away with 8 figures. So the people screaming "if he's still in, I'm still in!" and "look at those brass balls, if he can lose $5MM in a day then I can hold" are really living up to the dumb ape meme. He didn't lose $5MM yesterday, he lost $5MM in *unrealized gains*, there is a *huge* difference.
Second red flag was a common sense idea that hedge funds won't go down without a fight, and they have literally billions of dollars and decades of experience. You don't get that without learning how to game the system in complex, subtle ways. So even if they are still heavily shorted (which they might not even be anymore), and even if somehow WSB is holding some kind of meaningful leverage over them, that doesn't rule out the very real possibility they have a dozen ways out of this that people like me have no idea about.
But even in the off chance that somehow this turns around, and $GME does go "to the moon," that doesn't change the fact that it's bad long-term strategy to bet on bubbles and jump on bandwagons. They almost certainly fail, and if they don't, they only serve to inflate egos that will fall even harder on the next gamble. I'm still holding my shares but I don't expect to see my ~$1200 ever again. In the off chance I break even or see a profit here, I will count it as dumb luck and use it as seed money to learn how to invest in real long term gains.
Edit: holy shit RIP my inbox. No way I can read all that.
Want to clarify a few things. Not financial advice.
My position: I knew I was late to the party. I wanted to gamble. I knew what I was doing, and (mostly) why I did it. Hindsight showed me it was more based on emotion than I wanted to admit, but still, I'm not surprised by the outcome so far, and I'm totally OK with taking the L and calling it a lesson learned. I don't blame DFV, WSB, or anyone for my choices. I own them, even proudly, because I wanted to step out and take a calculated risk vs. sit on the sidelines out of fear of loss. I'm holding because I already bought my tickets to this ride, want to see this thing play out, and I'm fine with gambling the final $300 on the outside chance things turn around.
Your positions: brothers, sisters, nonbinary siblings: you are not your portfolio. whether up or down, your value is not based on how big or small an imaginary number is. you are a human being on the bleeding edge of 3.5 BILLION years of evolution, you have more actual success in your past and potential success in your future than you'll ever know. 12 years ago I was a penniless alcoholic literally stealing change from my grandpa to get loaded on 211 Steel Reserve. I hit my bottom, joined AA, and now I'm a network engineer, wife, kids, the whole lot. Anything is possible if you don't give up on yourself. But I know it's not that easy, we all need borrowed self-esteem before we can see the real value inside. So if this $GME gamble hit you hard, please reach out to someone. don't give up. Hell, this bubble isn't even over, it might even turn around! But either way, don't give up.
Edit2:
wow, never expected this to go this far. wrote it on my way out the door as a way to cope with the situation. read a ton of replies, probably missed most of them. thanks for all the love and hate and everything inbetween! A few more points:

• Agreed that RH deserves to be held accountable. No question they manipulated this.
• Agreed it's not over yet. the squeeze could happen. but if it does, my main personal takeaway from this experience will stand: I won't speculate on bubbles anymore. This is my position if I lose everything or make $100k.
• if you posted gains, that's awesome! so glad for you, I wish you the best!

Edit3 2/3/21:
Full disclosure, I closed my position this morning at a ~$900 realized loss.
My gut says the squeeze happened, short interest isn't what I thought it was on Friday, and the stock will return to actual value soon.

For background, I'm 20. The markets have been very exciting lately. Huge gains have been made....but also huge losses. I am in the latter group. I saved money for most of my life, and started investing during 2020 after the pandemic hit. I didn't want to trade, I wanted to just get long term investments and hold them. And that did work out pretty well. I was down red at certain points, but it was never SERIOUS drops, and I was confident that my picks were good in the long run. I wouldn't go into details about the weighting, but my portfolio essentially contained AMZN, MSFT, AAPL, SQ, NKE, ARKK, PLTR, NVDA, WMT, COST, DIS, JNJ, PG, V, and a couple other small picks that were my "fun" stocks - I actually had a few dozen APHA shares at $6. I had heavy tech weighting, but I was confident in the long term prospects.
By this year, just about everything was in the green, and collectively up around 15%. Then came BB. BB looked appealing so I sold most of my stocks that had been moving sideways for a while (AMZN, MSFT, NVDA) and put the money into BB when it was low teens. Within a couple days, it hit the 20s and I sold for thousands in profit. The fact that I made thousands of dollars by doing nothing was crazy to me. The rest of my portfolio was also up several thousand dollars (overall, my profit was around $7000 at this point - a combination of the realized gains from BB and the unrealized gains from everything else).
Then came GME. Several months ago, I neglected GME because I did not think they were a good long term investment, and so I did not buy them when they were less than $20/share. So when I saw the stock jump to 40, and 60 in the span of hours, I thought that was crazy. So what did I do? Naturally, I got FOMO when the stock was almost $400 and bought into the hype because I actually believed in what people over at another subreddit were saying. Within a week, my portfolio dropped around 80% (roughly $20,000). I thought that would be the best learning experience for me, but I bought into the weed hype this week, and have lost another few thousand dollars. All in all, I've lost 90% of my money in the past month. I'm young so I can recover, and this wasn't money I needed urgently. But my money I worked for and saved is completely gone because of my decisions.
I'm writing this mostly for myself because I needed a reality check for myself and don't have anyone to talk to. I can't sleep at nights, and can't really focus on anything else. I've lost all interest in playing video games, and my grades are starting to take a hit. This is really embarrassing for me, and nobody knows I lost my money on stocks (nor do I want them to). I don't know if anyone needs to here this, but please be careful with your money, and don't invest more than you're willing to lose. Especially for young investors, we have such a long time horizon. There's no need to try and get rich quick. Conservative investing will compound over our lives.
Edit: the amount of support has really helped me get out of the dark place I've been in for the past couple weeks. I think I'll call a gambling hotline later just to talk it out with someone. Thanks guys :)
Edit 2: I know I haven't replied to every comment because it's really piling up, but I'm reading through them all. Even if I don't reply, the shared stories, and words of positivity have been extremely uplifting and reassuring :)

Disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor. This entire post represents my personal views and opinions, and should not be taken as financial advice (or advice of any kind whatsoever). I encourage you to do your own research, take anything I write with a grain of salt, and hold me accountable for any mistakes you may catch. Also, full disclosure, I hold a net long position in GME, but my cost basis is very low (average ~$67--I have to admit, the drop today was too tasty so my cost basis went up from yesterday)/share with my later buys averaged in), and I'm using money I can absolutely lose. My capital at risk and tolerance for risk generally is likely substantially different than yours. In this post I will go a little further and speculate more than I'd normally do in a post due to the questions I've been getting, so fair warning, some of it might be very wrong. I suspect we'll learn some of the truth years from now when some investigative journalist writes a book about it.
Thank you everyone for the comments and questions on the first and second post on this topic.
Today was a study in the power of fear, courage, and the levers you can pull when you wield billions of dollars...
Woops, excuse me. I'm sorry hedge fund guys... I meant trillions of dollars--I just briefly forget you control not just your own but a lot of other peoples' money too for a moment there.
Also, for people still trading this on market-based rationale (as I am), it was a good day to measure the conviction behind your thesis. I like to think I have conviction, but in case you are somehow not yet familiar with the legend of DFV, you need to see these posts (fair warning, nsfw, and some may be offended/triggered by the crude language). The last two posts might be impressive, but you should follow it in chronological order and pay attention to the evolution of sentiment in the comments to experience true enlightenment.
Anyway, I apologize, but this post will be very long--there's just a lot to unpack.

Pre-Market

Disclaimer: given yesterday's pre-market action I didn't even pay attention to the screen until near retail pre-market. I'm less confident in my ability to read what's going on in a historical chart vs the feel I get watching live, but I'll try.
Early in the pre-market it looks to me like some momentum traders are taking profit, discounting the probability that the short-side will give them a deep discount later, which you can reasonably assume given the strategy they ran yesterday. If they're right they can sell some small volume into the pre-market top, wait for the hedge funds try to run the price back down, and then lever up the gains even higher buying the dip. Buy-side here look to me like people FOMOing and YOLOing in at any price to grab their slice of gainz, or what looks to be market history in the making. No way are short-side hedge funds trying to cover anything at these prices.
Mark Cuban--well said! Free markets baby!
Mohamed El-Erian is money in the bank as always. "upgrade in quality" on the pandemic drop was the best, clearest actionable call while most were at peak panic, and boy did it print. Your identifying the bubble as the excessive short (vs blaming retail activity) is money yet again. Also, The PAIN TRADE (sorry, later interview segment I only have on DVR, couldn't find on youtube--maybe someone else can)!
The short attack starts, but I'm hoping no one was panicking this time--we've seen it before. Looks like the momentum guys are minting money buying the double dip into market open.
CNBC, please get a good market technician to explain the market action. Buy-side dominance, sell-side share availability evaporating into nothing (look at day-by-day volume last few days), this thing is now at runaway supercritical mass. There is no changing the trajectory unless you can change the very fabric of the market and the rules behind it (woops, I guess I should have knocked on wood there).
If you know the mechanics, what's happening in the market with GME is not mysterious AT ALL. I feel like you guys are trying to scare retail out early "for their own good" (with all sincerity, to your credit) rather than explain what's happening. Possibly you also fear that explaining it would equate to enabling/encouraging people to keep trying to do it inappropriately (possibly fair point, but at least come out and say that if that's the case). Outside the market, however...wow.

You Thought Yesterday Was Fear? THIS is Fear!

Ok short-side people, my hat is off to you. Just when I thought shouting fire in a locked theater was fear mongering poetry in motion, you went and took it to 11. What's even better? Yelling fire in a theater with only one exit. That way people can cause the financial equivalent of stampede casualties. Absolutely brilliant.
Robin Hood disables buying of GME, AMC, and a few of the other WSB favorites. Other brokerages do the same. Even for people on 0% margin. Man, and here I thought I had seen it all yesterday.
Side note: I will give a shout out to TD Ameritrade. You guys got erroneously lumped together with RH during an early CNBC segment, but you telegraphed the volatility risk management changes and gradually ramped up margin requirements over the past week. No one on your platform should have been surprised if they were paying attention. And you didn't stop anyone from trading their own money at any point in time. My account balance thanks you. I heard others may have had problems, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt given the DDOS attacks that were flyiing around
Robin Hood. Seriously WTF. I'm sure it was TOTALLY coincidence that your big announcements happen almost precisely when what has to be one of the best and most aggressive short ladder attacks of all time starts painting the tape, what looked like a DDOS attack on Reddit's CDN infrastructure (pretty certain it was the CDN because other stuff got taken out at the same time too), and a flood of bots hit social media (ok, short-side, this last one is getting old).
Taking out a large-scale cloud CDN is real big boy stuff though, so I wouldn't entirely rule out nation state type action--those guys are good at sniffing out opportunities to foment social unrest.
Anyway, at this point, as the market dives, I have to admit I was worried for a moment. Not that somehow the short-side would win (hah! the long-side whales in the pond know what's up), but that a lot of retail would get hurt in the action. That concern subsided quite a bit on the third halt on that slide. But first...
A side lesson on market orders
Someone printed bonus bank big time (and someone lost--I feel your pain, whoever you are).
During the face-ripping volatility my play money account briefly ascended to rarified heights of 7 figures. It took me a second to realize it, then another second to process it. Then, as soon as it clicked, that one, glorious moment in time was gone.
What happened?
During the insane chop of the short ladder attack, someone decided to sweep the 29 Jan 21 115 Call contracts, but they couldn't get a grip on the price, which was going coast to coast as IV blew up and the price was being slammed around. So whoever was trying to buy said "F it, MARKET ORDER" (i.e. buy up to $X,XXX,XXX worth of contracts at any price). This is referred to as a sweep if funded to buy all/most of the contracts on offer (HFT shops snipe every contract at each specific price with a shotgun of limit orders, which is far safer, but something only near-market compute resources can do really well). For retail, or old-tech pros, if you want all the contracts quickly, you drop a market order loaded with big bucks and see what you get... BUT, some clever shark had contracts available for the reasonable sum of... $4,400, or something around that. I was too stunned to grab a screencap. The buy market order swept the book clean and ran right into that glorious, nigh-obscene backstop limit. So someone got nearly $440,000 PER CONTRACT that was, at the time theoretically priced at around $15,000. $425,000 loss... PER CONTRACT. Maybe I'm not giving the buyer enough credit.. you can get sniped like that even if you try to do a safety check of the order book first, but, especially in low liquidity environments, if a HFT can peak into your order flow (or maybe just observes a high volume of sweeps occurring), they can end up front running your sweep, pick off the reasonable contracts, and slam a ridiculous limit sell order into place before your order makes it to the exchange. Either way, I hope that sweep wasn't loaded for bear into the millions. If so... OUCH. Someone got cleaned out.
So, the lesson here folks... in a super high volatility, low-liquidity market, a market order will just run up the ladder into the first sell order it can find, and some very brutal people will put limit sells like that out there just in case they hit the jackpot. And someone did. If you're on the winning side, great. It can basically bankrupt you if you're on the losing side. My recommendation: Just don't try it. I wouldn't be surprised if really shady shenanigans were involved in this, but no way to know (normally that's crazy-type talk, but after today....peeking at order flow and sniping sweeps is one of the fastest, most financially devastating ways to bleed big long-side players, just sayin').
edit *so while I was too busy trying not to spit out my coffee to grab a screenshot, piddlesthethug was faster on the draw and captured this: https://imgur.com/gallery/RI1WOuu
Ok, so I guess my in-the-moment mental math was off by about 10%. Man, that hurts just thinking about the guy who lost on that trade.*
Back to the market action..

A Ray of Light Through the Darkness

So I was worried watching the crazy downward movement for two different reasons.
On the one hand, I was worried the momentum pros would get the best discounts on the dip (I'll admit, I FOMO'd in too early, unnecessarily raising my cost basis).
On the other hand, I was worried for the retail people on Robin Hood who might be bailing out into incredibly steep losses because they had only two options: Watch the slide, or bail. All while dealing with what looked to me like a broad-based cloud CDN outage as they tried to get info from WSB HQ, and wondering if the insta-flood of bot messages were actually real people this time, and that everyone else was bailing on them to leave them holding the bag.
But I saw the retail flag flying high on the 3rd market halt (IIRC), and I knew most would be ok. What did I see, you ask? Why, the glorious $211.00 / $5,000 bid/ask spread. WSB Reddit is down? Those crazy mofos give you the finger right on the ticker tape. I've been asked many times in the last few hours about why I was so sure shorts weren't covering on the down move. THIS is how I knew. For sure. It's in the market data itself.
edit So, there's feedback in the comments that this is likely more of a technical glitch. Man, at least it was hilarious in the moment. But also now I know maybe not to trust price updates when the spread between orders being posted is so wide. Maybe a technical limitation of TOS
I'll admit, I tried to one-up those bros with a 4206.90 limit sell order, but it never made it through. I'm impressed that the HFT guys at the hedge fund must have realized really quickly what a morale booster that kind of thing would have been, and kept a lower backstop ask in place almost continuously from then on I'm sure others tried the same thing. Occasionally $1,000 and other high-dollar asks would peak through from time to time from then on, which told me the long-side HFTs were probably successfully sniping the backstops regularly.
So, translating for those of you who found that confusing. First, such a high ask is basically a FU to the short-side (who, as you remember, need to eventually buy shares to cover their short positions). More importantly, as an indicator of retail sentiment, it meant that NO ONE ELSE WAS TRYING TO SELL AT ANY PRICE LOWER THAN $5,000. Absolutely no one was bailing out.
I laughed for a minute, then started getting a little worried. Holy cow.. NO retail selling into the fear? How are they resisting that kind of price move??
The answer, as we all know now... they weren't afraid... they weren't even worried. They were F*CKING PISSED.
Meanwhile the momentum guys and long-side HFTs keep gobbling up the generously donated shares that the short-side are plowing into their ladder attack. Lots of HFT duels going on as long-side HFTs try to intercept shares meant to travel between short-side HFT accounts for their ladder. You can tell when you see prices like $227.0001 constantly flying across the tape. Retail can't even attempt to enter an order like that--those are for the big boys with privileged low-latency access.
The fact that you can even see that on the tape with human eyes is really bad for the short-side people.
Why, you ask? Because it means liquidity is drying up, and fast.

The Liquidity Tide is Flowing Out Quickly. Who's Naked (short)?

Market technicals time. I still wish this sub would allow pictures so I could throw up a chart, but I guess a table will do fine.
​

Date	Volume	Price at US Market Close
Friday, 1/22/21	197,157,196	$65.01
Monday, 1/25/21	177,874,00	$76.79
Tuesday, 1/26/21	178,587,974	$147.98
Wednesday, 1/27/21	93,396,666	$347.51
Thursday, 1/28/21	58,815,805	$193.60

What do I see? I see the shares available to trade dropping so fast that all the near-exchange compute power in the world won't let the short-side HFTs maintain order flow volume for their attacks. Many retail people asking me questions thought today was the heaviest trading. Nope--it was just the craziest.
What about the price dropping on Thursday? Is that a sign that the short-side pulled a miracle out and pushed price down against a parabolic move on even less volume than Wednesday? Is the long side running out of capital?
Nope. It means the short-side hedge funds are just about finished.
But wait, I thought the price needed to be higher for them to be taken out? How is it that price being lower is bad for them? Won't that allow them to cover at a lower price?
No, the volume is so low that they can't cover any meaningful fraction of their position without spiking the price parabolic almost instantly. Just not enough shares on offer at reasonable prices (especially when WSB keeps flashing you 6942.00s).
It's true, a higher price hurts, but the interest charge for one more day is just noise at this point. The only tick that will REALLY count is the last tick of trading on Friday.
In the meantime, the price drop (and watching the sparring in real time) tells me that the long-side whales and their HFT quants are so certain of the squeeze that they're no longer worried AT ALL about whether it will happen, and they aren't even worried at all about retail morale to help carry the water anymore.
Instead, they're now really, really worried about how CHEAPLY they can make it happen.
They are wondering if they can't edge out just a sliver more alpha out of what will already be a blow-out trade for the history books (probably). You see, to make it happen they just have to keep hoovering up shares. It doesn't matter what those shares cost. If you're certain that the squeeze is now locked in, why push the price up and pay more than you have to? Just keep pressing hard enough to force short-side to keep sending those tasty shares your way, but not so much you move the price. Short-side realizes this and doesn't try to drive price down too aggressively. They can't afford to let price run away, so they have to keep some pressure on at the lowest volume they can manage, but they don't want to push down too hard and give the long-side HFTs too deep of a discount and bleed their ammo out even faster. That dynamic keeps price within a narrow (for GME today, anyway) trading range for the rest of the day into the close.
Good plan guys, but those after market people are pushing the price up again. Damnit WSB bros and Euros, you're costing those poor long-side whales their extra 0.0000001% of alpha on this trade just so you can run up your green rockets... See, that's the kind of nonsense that just validates Lee Cooperman's concerns.
On a totally unrelated note, I have to say that I appreciate the shift in CNBC's reporting. Much more thoughtful and informed. Just please get a good market technician in there who will be willing to talk about what is going on under the hood if possible. A lot of people watching on the sidelines are far more terrified than they need to be because it all looks random to them. And they're worried that you guys look confused and worried--and if the experts on the news are worried....??!
You should be able to find one who has access to the really good data that we retailers can only guess at, who can explain it to us unwashed masses.

Ok, So.. Questions

There is no market justification for this. How can you tell me is this fundamentally sound and not just straight throwing money away irresponsibly?? (side note: not that that should matter--if you want to throw your money away why shouldn't you be allowed to?)
We're not trading in your securities pricing model. This isn't irrational just because your model says long and short positions are the same thing. The model is not a real market. There is asymmetrical counterparty risk here given the shorts are on the hook for all the money they have, and possibly all the money their brokers have, and possibly anyone with exposure to the broker too! You may want people to trade by the rules you want them to follow. But the rest of us trade in the real market as it is actually implemented. Remember? That's what you tell the retailers who take their accounts to zero. Remember what you told the KBIO short-squeezed people? They had fair warning that short positions carry infinite risk, including more than your initial investment. You guys know this. It's literally part of your job to know this.
But-but-the systemic risk!! This is Madness!
...Madness?
THIS. IS. THE MARKET!!! *Retail kicks the short-side hedge funds down an infinity loss black hole\*.
Ok, seriously though, that is actually a fundamentally sound, and properly profit-driven answer at least as justifiable as the hedge funds' justification for going >100% of float short. If they can be allowed to gamble INFINITE LOSSES because they expect to make profit on the possibility the company goes bankrupt, can't others do the inverse on the possibility the company I don't know.. doesn't go bankrupt and gets a better strategy from the team that created what is now a $43bn market cap company (CHWY) that does exactly some of the things GME needs to do (digital revenue growth) maybe? I mean, I first bought in on that fundamental value thesis in the 30s and then upped my cost basis given the asymmetry of risk in the technical analysis as an obvious no-brainer momentum trade. The squeeze is just, as WSB people might say, tendies raining down from on high as an added bonus.
I get that you disagree on the fundamental viability of GME. Great. Isn't that what makes a market?
Regarding the consequences of a squeeze, in practice my expectation was maybe at worst some kind of ex-market settlement after liquidation of the funds with exposure to keep things nice and orderly for the rest of the market. I mean, they handled the VW thing somehow right? I see now that I just underestimated elite hedge fund managers though--those guys are so hardcore (I'll explain why I think so a bit lower down).
If hedge fund people are so hardcore, how did the retail long side ever have a chance of winning this squeeze trade they're talking about?
Because it's an asymmetrical battle once you have short interest cornered. And the risk is also crazily asymmetrical in favor of the long side if short interest is what it is in GME. In fact, the hedge funds essentially cornered themselves without anyone even doing anything. They just dug themselves right in there. Kind of impressive really, in a weird way.
What does the short side need to cover? They need the price to be low, and they need to buy shares.
How does price move lower? You have to push share volume such that supply overwhelms demand and price therefore goes down (man, I knew econ 101 would come in handy someday).
But wait... if you have to sell shares to push the price down.. won't you just undo all your work when you have to buy it back to actually cover?
The trick is you have to push price down so hard, so fast, so unpredictably, that you SCARE OTHER PEOPLE into selling their shares too, because they're scared of taking losses. Their sales help push the price down for free! and then you scoop them up at discount price! Also, there are ways to make people scared other than price movement and fear of losses, when you get right down to it. So, you know, you just need to get really, really, really good at making people scared. Remember to add a line item to your budget to make sure you can really do it right.
On the other hand..
What does the long side need to do? They need to own as much of the shares as they can get their hands on. And then they need to hold on to them. They can't be weak hands either. They need to be hands that will hold even under the most intense heat of battle, and the immense pressure of mind-numbing fear... they need to be as if they were made of... diamond... (oh wow, maybe those WSB people kind of have a point here).
Why does this matter? Because at some point the sell side will eventually run out of shares to borrow. They simply won't be there, because they'll be safely tucked away in the long-side's accounts. Once you run out of shares to borrow and sell, you have no way to move the price anymore. You can't just drop a fat stack--excuse me, I mean suitcase (we're talking hedge fund money here after all)--of Benjamins on the ticker tape directly. Only shares. No more shares, no way to have any direct effect on the price whatsoever.
Ok, doesn't that just mean trading stops? Can't you just out-wait the long side then?
Well, you could.. until someone on the long side puts 1 share up on a 69420 ask, and an even crazier person actually buys at that price on the last tick on a Friday. Let's just say it gets really bad at that point.
Ok.. but how do the retail people actually get paid?
Well, to be quite honest, it's entirely up to each of them individually. You've seen the volumes being thrown around the past week+. I guarantee you every single retailer out there could have printed money multiple times trading that flow. If they choose to, and time it well. Or they could lose it all--this is the market. Some of them apparently seem to have some plan, or an implicit trust in certain individuals to help them know when to punch out. Maybe it works out, but maybe not. There will be financial casualties on the field for sure--this is the bare-knuckled capitalist jungle after all, remember? But everyone ponied up to the table with their own money somehow, so they all get to play in the big leagues just like everyone else. In theory, anyway.
And now, Probably the #1 question I've been asked on all of these posts has been: So what happens next? Do we get the infinity squeeze? Do the hedge funds go down?
Great questions. I don't know. No one does. That's what I've said every time, but I get that's a frustrating answer, so I'll write a bit more and speculate further. Please again understand these are my opinions with a degree of speculation I wouldn't normally put in a post.

The Market and the Economy. Main Street, Wall Street, and Washington

The pandemic has hurt so many people that it's hard to comprehend. Honestly, I don't even pretend to be able to. I have been crazy fortunate enough to almost not be affected at all. Honestly, it is a little unnerving to me how great the disconnect is between people who are doing fine (or better than fine, looking at my IRA) versus the people who are on the opposite side of the ever-widening divide that, let's be honest, has been growing wider since long before the pandemic.
People on the other side--who have been told they cannot work even if they want to, who wonder if congress will get it together to at least keep them from getting thrown out of their house if they have to keep taking one for the team for the good of all, are wondering if they're even living in the same reality.
Because all they see on the news each day is that the stock market is at record highs, or some amazing tech stocks have 10x'd in the last 6 months. How can that be happening during a pandemic? Because The Market is not The Economy. The Market looks forward to that brighter future that Economy types just need to wait for. Don't worry--it'll be here sometime before the end of the year. We think. We're making money on that assumption right now, anyway. Oh, by the way, if you're in The Market, you get to get richer as a minor, unearned side-effect of the solutions our governments have come up with to fight the pandemic.
Wow. That sounds amazing. How do I get to part of that world?
Retail fintech, baby. Physical assets like real estate might be a bit out of reach at the moment, but stocks will do. I can even buy fractional shares of BRK/A LOL.
Finally, I can trade for my own slice of heaven, watching that balance go up (and up--go stonks!!). Now I too get to dream the dream. I get to feel connected to that mythical world, The Market, rather than being stuck in the plain old Economy. Sure, I might blow up my account, but that's because it's the jungle. Bare-knuckled, big league capitalism going on right here, and at least I get to show up an put my shares on the table with everyone else. At least I'm playing the same game. Everyone has to start somewhere--at least now I get to start, even if I have to learn my lesson by zeroing my account a few times. I've basically had to deal with what felt like my life zeroing out a few times before. This is number on a screen going to 0 is nothing.
Laugh or cry, right? I'll post my losses on WSB and at least get some laughs.
Geez, some of the people here are making bank. I better learn from them and see if they'll let me in on their trades. Wow... this actually might work. I don't understand yet, but I trust these guys telling me to hold onto this crazy trade. I don't understand it, but all the memes say it's going to be big.
...WOW... I can pay off my credit card with this number. Do I punch out now? No? Hold?... Ok, getting nervous watching the number go down but I trust you freaks. We're still in the jungle, but at least I'm in with with my posse now. Market open tomorrow--we ride the rocket baby! And if it goes down, at least I'm going down with my crew. At least if that happens the memes will be so hilarious I'll forget to cry.
Wow.. I can't believe it... we might actually pull this off. Laugh at us now, "pros"!
We're in The Market now, and Market rules tell us what is going to happen. We're getting all that hedge fund money Right? Right?
Maybe.
First, I say maybe because nothing is ever guaranteed until it clears. Secondly, because the rules of The Market are not as perfectly enforced as we would like to assume. We are also finding out they may not be perfectly fair. The Market most experts are willing to talk about is really more like the ideal The Market is supposed to be. This is the version of the market I make my trading decisions in. However, the Real Market gets strange and unpredictable at the edges, when things are taken to extremes, or rules are pushed beyond the breaking point, or some of the mechanics deep in the guts of the Real Market get stretched. GME ticks basically all of those boxes, which is why so many people are getting nervous (aside from the crazy money they might lose). It's also important to remember that the sheer amount of money flowing through the market has distorting power unto itself. Because it's money, and people really, really, really like their money--especially when they're used to having a lot of it, and rules involving that kind of money tend to look more... flexible, shall we say.
Ok, back to GME. If this situation with GME is allowed to play out to its conclusion in The Market, we'll see what happens. I think all the long-side people get the chance to be paid (what, I'm not sure--and remember, you have to actually sell your position at some point or it's all still just numbers on your screen), but no one knows for certain.
But this might legitimately get so big that it spills out of The Market and back into The Economy.
Geez, and here I thought the point of all of this was so that we all get to make so much money we wouldn't ever have to think and worry about that thing again.
Unfortunately, while he's kind of a buzzkill, Thomas Petterfy has a point. This could be a serious problem.
It might blow out The Market, which will definitely crap on The Economy, which as we all know from hard experience, will seriously crush Main Street.
If it's that big a deal, we may even need Washington to be involved. Once that happens, who knows what to expect.. this kind of scenario being possible is why I've been saying I have no idea how this ends, and no one else does either.
How did we end up in this ridiculous situation? From GAMESTOP?? And it's not Retail's fault the situation is what it is.. why is everyone telling US that we need to back down to save The Market?? What about the short-side hedge funds that slammed that risk into the system to begin with?? We're just playing by the rules of The Market!!
Well, here are my thoughts, opinions, and some even further speculation... This may be total fantasy land stuff here, but since I keep getting asked I'll share anyway. Just keep that disclaimer in mind.

A Study in Big Finance Power Moves: If you owe the bank $10,000, it's your problem...

What happens when you owe money you have no way to pay back? It's a scary question to have to face personally. Still, on balance and on average, if you're fortunate enough to have access to credit the borrowing is a risk that is worth taking (especially if you're reasonably careful). Lenders can take a risk loaning you money, you take a risk by borrowing in order to do something now that you would otherwise have had to wait a long time or maybe would never have realistically been able to do otherwise. Sometimes it doesn't work out. Sometimes it's due to reasons totally beyond your control. In any case, if you find yourself there you have no choice but to dust yourself off, pick yourself up as best as you can, and try to move on and rebuild. A lot of people had to learn that in 2008. Man that year really sucked.
Wall street learned their lessons too. Most learned what I think most of us would consider the right lessons--lessons about risk management, and the need to guard vigilantly against systemic risk, concentration of risk through excess concentration of leverage on common assets, etc. Many suspect that at least a few others may have learned an entirely different set of, shall we say, unhealthy lessons. Also, to try to be completely fair, maybe managing other peoples' money on 10x+ leverage comes with a kind of pressure that just clouds your judgement. I could actually, genuinely buy that. I know I make mistakes under pressure even when I'm trading risk capital I could totally lose with no real consequence. Whatever the motive, here's my read on what's happening:
First, remember that as much fun as WSB are making of the short-side hedge fund guys right now, those guys are smart. Scary smart. Keep that in mind.
Next, let's put ourselves in their shoes.
If you're a high-alpha hedge fund manager slinging trades on a $20bn 10x leveraged to 200bn portfolio, get caught in a bad situation, and are down mark-to-market several hundred million.. what do you do? Do you take your losses and try again next time? Hell no.
You're elite. You don't realize losses--you double down--you can still save this trade no sweat.
But what if that doesn't work out so well and you're in the hole >$2bn? Obvious double down. Need you ask? I'm net up on the rest of my positions (of course), and the momentum when this thing makes its mean reversion move will be so hot you can almost taste the alpha from here. Speaking of momentum, imagine the move if your friends on TV start hyping the story harder! Genius!
Ok, so that still didn't work... this is now a frigging 7 sigma departure from your modeled risk, and you're now locked into a situation that is about as close to mathematically impossible to escape as you can get in the real world, and quickly converging on infinite downside. Holy crap. The fund might be liquidated by your prime broker by tomorrow morning--and man, even the broker is freaking out. F'in Elon Musk and his twitter! You're cancelling your advance booking on his rocket ship to Mars first thing tomorrow... Ok, focus--this might legit impact your total annual return. You need a plan, and you know the smartest people on the planet, right? The masters of the universe! Awesome--they've even seen this kind of thing before and still have the playbook!! Of course! It's obvious now--you borrow a few more billion and double down again first thing in the morning. So simple. Sticky note that Mars trip cancellation so you don't forget.
Ok... so that didn't work? You even cashed in some pretty heavy chits too. Ah well, that was a long shot anyway. So where were you? Oh yeah.. if shenanigans don't work, skip to page 10...
...Which says, of course, to double down again. Anyone even keeping track anymore? Oh, S3 says it's $40bn and we're going parabolic? Man, that chart gives me goosebumps. All according to plan...
So what happens tomorrow? One possible outcome of PURE FANTASTIC SPECULATION...
End of the week--phew. Never though it'd come. Where are you at now?... Over $9000^\)!!! Wow. You did it boys, and as a bonus the memes will be so sweet.
^\)side note: add 8 zeros to the end...
Awesome--your problems have been solved. Because...
​
..
​
BOOM
​
Now it's EVERYONE's problem. Come at me, Chamath, THIS is REAL baller shit.
Now all you gotta do is make all the hysterical retirees watching their IRAs hanging in the balance blame those WSB kids. Hahaha. Boomers, amirite? hate when those kids step on their law--I mean IRAs. GG guys, keep you memes. THAT is how it's done.
Ok, but seriously, I hope that's not how it ends. I guess we just take it day by day at this point.
Apologies for the length. Good luck in the market!
Also, apologies in advance for formatting, spelling, and grammatical errors. I was typing this thing in between doing all kinds of other things for most of the day.
Edit getting a bunch of questions on if it's possible the hedge funds are finding ways to cover in spite of my assumptions. Of course. I'm a retail guy trying to read the charts and price action. I don't have any special tools like the pros may have.

There is a prevailing mis-understanding among people fresh to the market that you can buy and sell as much as you want at the "market price." This is false. You are buying and selling from real people or algorithms that believe they can scalp your order. The idealized scenario is that GME rallies, Melvin covers, and everyone at reddit gets out at the top. This represents a misunderstanding of market mechanics. Melvin will cover before we truly know it, and the crash will happen as quick as the rally.
So with recent events, you must ask yourself:

Who is Your Counterparty?

Nothing is a sure bet. How confident are you that your counterparty is who you think it is? Thousands of redditors & new traders beyond have been buying stocks fully confident that Melvin Capital hasn't exited their trade. This is also supported by some analysis provided by two different firms, although their estimates differ some amount. Confounded in this is the interpretation of the data: Does this include market makers and dealers that are short stock but covered with calls or options deltas? Is their information fully accurate in an event the likes of which has never happened? It's tough to know for sure.

Know Everyone's Hand

Your guess on how much they've covered and when they covered has a massive effect on how you perceive the value of this trade. Buying if you think Melvin has $10b notional to cover is a much better bet than if they only have $2b to cover. You also have to consider how much notional the rest of the market has bought in anticipation of a squeeze. The difference between the two represents your effective edge.
Remember, we don't actually know Melvin's current position. We don't know what's going on behind closed doors. We only know the hand they're showing us via media. Has their clearing firm taken over? Has a much bigger collection of firms absorbed the position? Have they been buying since Monday? Have they covered and have new funds entered the space at a much better level?
You are fighting Goliath at a poker table in the city of Gath. The pot is worth $25 billion dollars. Ken Griffin has never lost. Melvin's prime brokers Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche are not used to losing (well, Deutsche is). They will do whatever it takes to take the pot from you and leave you holding the bag. They will not blink twice because there is a lot of fucking money on the line.

Know What Can Go Wrong

Nobody could have guessed everything that happened this week. Prepare yourself for the unexpected. Your brokerage will undoubtedly close out your position at the worst possible time. The stock could be halted for days. You could be assigned on ITM options. Your stock could get delisted. Your stock may get diluted.

Only Spend What You're Willing to Lose

This one is self explanatory. Your investment could go to zero. Even if you think you make money on every trade, if your bet size is 100%, the long term value of your portfolio is zero.

Don't Take Out Loans on Emotional Capital

If you are new, you really don't know the gut-wrenching, stomach-turning feeling of seeing the possibility of your net liquidity hitting zero or negative. It fucking sucks. You just know the highs. You're buying along the speculative frenzy and frantic rallies, wrapped in anti-billionaire & pro-underdog themes. It may even feel good to think that a guy who cut his teeth at a firm notorious for an insider trading scandal is getting his comeuppance. We love the feeling. If you are fully invested financially & emotionally, you are completely overleveraged and will pay the price. Make feeling good your goal, and set limits that you can stomach.
There are several feel-good stories of people making life-changing money to pay off their student loans or their family members' surgeries. Please think twice about this, and only spend what you can afford to lose. If placing a bet makes the difference between your pet living or dying, you may have a gambling problem. These were success stories because they got in at a much better level and could have had a much sadder ending.
Secondly, don't take it personal. There are people on the other side of your trades, your brokerage support line, the subreddit, the media. They are all playing their own hand to the best of their knowledge. It's easy to blame a broker, yell at their support desk, hate-tweet at a company, or even rage-text that guy you know who develops APIs at ETrade. A lot of people across the industry are rooting for you. Fuck, even Ted Cruz and AOC are rooting for you, because this transcends politics. If you're mad at Melvin Capital or Ken Griffin or the guys who crashed the economy in 2008, keep it that way. They will try and misdirect your anger in every single direction: brokerages, the media, and reddit. If your enemies are a few guys at the top holding a $25b short position and moving levers, keep it that way.
Thirdly, if you don't want to be a human being for the sake of the person on the other side, be a human being for your wallet's sake. You make better financial decisions in the absence of emotions.

Edit: Actual TL;DR - There is none. It's a complicated issue and I'm hoping you will take the time to read the post if you want to engage in the discussion. That's why the post is tagged 'discussion'.
I made a lengthy comment after reading this post yesterday. What a crazy helmet! But it was the top comment chain in that thread that caught my attention, particularly this comment:

Annoyance leads to a group that is willing to put up with it getting all the rewards but hating the game because it's annoying and a second group that doesn't put up with it but hates that they're missing out on the stuff the first group is getting. Everyone loses.

My thoughts on this subject probably merit its own discussion thread, so here it is.
This reminds me of Grod's Law:

Grod's Law: You cannot and should not balance bad mechanics by making them annoying to use

Years ago on the Giant in the Playground forums (a community for the D&D 3.5 edition tabletop roleplaying game), an argument broke out when a user recommended balancing the absurd power of magic using classes by making them meticulously track their material components for each spell.
For those unaware, material costs for spells that didn't have an explicit monetary cost listed were generally just flavorful; holdovers from Gary Gygax's day at the helm, basically little Easter eggs in the game. Like Detect Thoughts required you to use 2 copper pieces to cast, e.g. 'penny for your thoughts?', and Fireball required you to use bat guano (known to be high in sulfur content) and saltpeter (chemically combined they create an exothermic reaction IRL).
Anyway, your wizard or whatever was expected to buy a spell component pouch for a few gold and that pouch was assumed to have all the basic material components they'd need for most spells in limitless quantity. Spells in D&D can be incredibly powerful and versatile in their use, and the most powerful builds in the game all involve casting magic. Well, this user suggested balancing those spells by making wizards have to spend time gathering their individual material components. Want to cast Fireball? Spend a few days scraping bat shit off the cave floor, etc.
The problem with this rationale is that it doesn't really solve any problems. Wizards are still just as powerful, but now the player has to go out of their way, detracting from the campaign and story, so they can scrape their spell juice off the dungeon floor. Grod argued the following:

• The disruptive munchkin ignores it, argues it, or forces the rest of the group to suffer through it. His power remains the same, and he gets more annoying to play with.
  
• The inappropriate powergamer figures out how to circumvent the restriction. His power remains the same.
  
• The reasonable player either figures out how to circumvent the restriction (rendering it moot), avoids the class (turning it into a ban) or suffers through it. His power remains the same and/or his enjoyment goes down.
  
• The new player avoids the class or suffers through it. His enjoyment goes down.
  

Tie this back into PoE already!

Yes, sorry. Thanks for putting up with my rambling.
I kinda feel like harvest is like this - A terrible implementation of a mechanic that GGG (i.e. Chris Wilson) hates (i.e. thinks is 'bad' for the game). It highlights a massive problem with itemization and crafting in this game.
Way too much character power is tied up in gear as compared to skills and passives. And Harvest crafts are so powerful because other crafting tools in PoE are are way too random, but the power creep in items over the years has made it way too appealing (various influence mods for example). Crafting most items is a gamble, plain and simple. Gambling is just not appealing to many people, and it can get expensive very fast. It's layers upon layers of RNG for even the chance of getting a decent item, some of which can be build-enabling, and there are very few deterministic methods of getting what you want. It's far easier to just buy a powerful item like that from someone else. Of course, that can't be done for SSF players, but even in trade league it can be problematic when GGG balances the game around meta-builds (supply and demand means you might not get to enjoy playing your build because upgrades are too expensive).
GGG wants the game to be like this. They want you to engage in the skinner box of gambling RNG they've designed. Harvest just doesn't jive with how they want you to build your character, but it's immensely popular for anyone who hates gambling and wants to build their character in a predictable and targeted way. Their solution was to leave it in the game but make it as cumbersome and obnoxious to engage with as possible, so it becomes a massive opportunity cost to do so.
You find a grove in a map. Cue 20 to 30 minutes of reviewing your stash and gear for possible upgrades and reviewing craft options for valuable ones that might be sold on TFT, etc. It completely disrupts the flow of the game and you can barely save enough valuable crafts for one or two side builds. When you finally do get one of the few good craft options, you might not even have something to use it on! Ultimately it's far more time-efficient to sell your good crafts (using 3rd party mechanisms, of course) and just keep playing the game.

How does this affect me, SaneExile?

The system affects the game exactly how Grod proposes:

The inappropriate powergamer figures out how to circumvent the restriction. His power remains the same.

PoE isn't a collaborative tabletop game like D&D, so "inappropriate powergamer" is, well, an inappropriate name for this group. Optimizing gameplay in PoE is perfectly reasonable and encouraged. But people who trade crafts in large volume on TFT or are in massive guilds throwing around thousands of exalts are not your average optimizer, and are not affected by this cumbersome barrier to entry. They find the optimal solution and just incorporate it into their gameplay and profit off it massively.

The reasonable player either figures out how to circumvent the restriction (rendering it moot), avoids the class (turning it into a ban) or suffers through it. His power remains the same and/or his enjoyment goes down.

Reasonable player -> average PoE player. The distinction between these two groups can get fuzzy, but it's hard to argue that someone playing 40 hours per week and someone playing 10 hours per week can achieve the same levels of effectiveness. Practice makes perfect, and practice takes time. Those in large communities are, likewise, not really playing the same game as the solo players (e.g. aura-bots, trade groups, etc.). For some, efficiency is measured in chaos per hour. For a few, it can be exalts per hour. This group is very much the former.

The new player avoids the class or suffers through it. His enjoyment goes down.

Class -> game mechanic. In this case, I'm sure a lot of people just pretend the Sacred Grove doesn't exist. Harvest is a thing that other people do. And if they do choose to engage with it, its cumbersomeness and complexity means their overall enjoyment of PoE is diminished. I couldn't even begin to explain the system to someone new to the game, at least in a reasonable manner that doesn't sound like a college economics lecture.

Conclusions

So, average people either suffer through harvest's implementation because it's so damn useful, or they avoid it and suffer FOMO or other gambling-induced psychological issues because the power-players in the community are cranking out incredibly OP gear on the trading market. Lose-Lose. This isn't unique to harvest, it's just the most obvious with this crafting system in the game. Crafting in general is fucked up, when you really consider how it's designed to prey on gambling addiction.
This might not be a problem in the short term (obviously you don't need the helmet posted above to make specters work), but in the long term it throws off the balance of the game through power creep. The Raise Specters gem was meganerfed this league, but it's definitely still playable, and with items like this, it's not even that much weaker than before. Essentially, the power of the skill was offloaded from the gem to PoE's itemization system, and the barrier to OPness is that much higher. The rich get richer and the average market has one less meta build.
GGG really fucked up Harvest, but it's only because Harvest highlighted just how fucked up crafting in this game is. Super powerful crafts have always been something only the PoE rich engage with regularly and with any significant profit. Harvest, for its league at least, let more casual players engage with that system. And the power creep ended up being so massive that they hamstrung it every chance they got.
Ultimately, GGG's implementation ends up hurting the whole game because of Grod's Law - the benefits of it are minimized while the annoyance is maximized. It's possible we can benefit from some stopgap solutions, like more horticrafting station space, tradeable crafts (like beasts), etc., but many of these come with their own host of issues. They're just bandaids on the crafting mechanic as a whole, which is a product of the itemization design.
TL;DR, thanks for coming to my TEDTalk. General disclaimer that this is my personal opinion of the state of the game, one that I've put way too much time into. It's still fun in a lot of ways, but the more I play the more I see problematic design features creeping their way into the game.
Edit: Well this took off. I've been trying to address arguments from you all as best I can, but there's one I noticed in particular keeps coming up and I think my main post didn't clarify my stance as well as it could've:
I'm not against the idea of RNG. Randomness in itself is not a problem for this genre or most games in general. I am however very much against the argument that, 'well the entire game is randomness so more randomness is fine.' I've tried to address that in this comment, which I'll link instead of reiterating.

I am not new to the risk of penny stocks, been playing with pennies for about 8 years now. Luckily, I have had a lot more success than fails but do not take this as "financial advice" and more something to think about.
Lets talk $HCMC.. the most hyped stock in my opinion over this past weekend and is being pushed for it to still have momentum. If you truly believe this stock will hit a $1 you need to take a step back and learn how much is needed to move a stock with 105.1B Outstanding shares... to put it in perspective, Apple for example has 16.8B.. Apple the Trillion dollar company. I am not saying you can't take a quick gain but read on what share dilution is and how it effects the stock price. When the court decision does occur with HCMC, expect some movement but to move toward $1 the company needs to do a reverse split. I am sure there is a lot more into how a company can reduce its outstanding shares but that is a common one I have seen in pennies. I won't go in-depth in what a reverse split is but look up on that. This stock will move if truly everyone actually throws some cash in it but don't expect a full dollar with 105 B Outstanding shares.
I understand it can be challenging to filter on what will be the next 30% plus gain in one day. Maybe you have seen 100% - 1000% gains on stock websites. Some of you I see asking for recommendations on a $100 to play with on your first investment. You got to know what would be considered a "pump and dump" and a legitimate company. Let's take $INKW for example, this stock had increased close to 80% today. A good amount of people have posted about this stock the past few weeks, and today it moved roughly 80%,. Deals with Walmart, selling out on Amazon, and moving toward Hemp water. There is actual PR (Press Release) with recent information on the stock. It takes 10 mins to learn all this about the company, or what you will see people call DD (Due Diligence). 10 mins of my day before thinking hmm should I jump in? Am I missing the ride? or is this a long term play for me?
The market for me is just a bunch of hype and speculation. ESPECIALLY PENNIES. I personally don't see pennies as long-term investments. I get in and get out like my wife's boyfriend when I go to work. but you got to know what works best for you and if you truly believe in the company. Lets take some other popular stocks I have seen posted here: $OZSC, $ILUS, $HITIF (admitting I own this one for my weed play), $TSNP. I have seen these stocks have solid PR but would not jump in unless DD was made.
As you grow to be an experience trader, learn how to read candlestick graphs. It can be a snoozer learning but if you understand it, it will help a good amount if you want to buy in dips or see when you want to sell. ITS OKAY IF YOUR STOCK GOES RED. Yes, pennies are more risk. I had days losing everything when I first was trying to invest in them but I also had days with huge gains. Its okay to hold but hold knowing your risk tolerance. Remember, you thought long-term because you believed in this company and it has solid potential. Long-term is long-term so don't let a bad week make you take a big lost only to see it rise again the following.
I am in no way an expert in investing nor trying to give you investing advice. This is more for people who really want to understand how to invest, but the high from one of your stocks performing at a 100% and letting your emotions get to you can be a rough lesson to learn when you expect it every time. I didn't understand how to play pennies at all firs starting and for me losing even $100 was a big deal at the time.
There is a lot of pump/dump post on here I been seeing from day old accounts. I even look at the companies they are trying to pump. If there is no website, social media is terrible, or real product ... it is a P/D.
I ask all experience traders to share their advice on this post so we can combat the bots we have been seeing for the crowd.
Good Luck to all the new investors. I consider pennies as a daily gamble more than a long-term. I am sure others view it different.
EDIT:
Just scrolling through frequent questions -
I use TD Ameritrade as my broker. Look into how to use their thinkorswim platform.
I recently opened a Fidelity account to avoid OTC Market trading fee’s though.
Found an article that gives a good summary of some major brokers for pennies:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.timothysykes.com/blog/best-broker-for-penny-stocks/amp/
I never been a fan of Robinhood. I opened an account when it was up and coming but didn’t like the layout and lack of stocks that were available to invest in. So not sure how it is today but I do know you can’t invest in the OTC Market through this broker.
Asking for my thoughts on a specific stock -
I really don’t know about some of the stocks that were posted on the comments so I have no thoughts. I see some popular come up, like $OGCN. But I don’t know anything about that company besides it being popular on this subreddit.
Messaging me to ask on what company you should Invest in -
Sorry, I don’t want to answer that. Awesome how you took this post but again I am not an expert. Just sharing my years of experience. I invest with confidence but the risk will always be there. I don’t want you to jump in a boat I wasn’t aware had a hole in it.
What I do when I find interest in a stock but unsure on it is put it on my watchlist. With Ameritrade I am able to keep tabs on its performance, press release, and most of all the dip! But my watchlist consistently change.
Advice on learning to read candle sticks -
Man, this for sure was challenging for me. Probably because it is boring to learn lol. YouTube taught me. I don’t have any sound advice besides looking there. I can’t find the video that I saw repetitively anymore but just searching for it, I see a good amount of people teaching.
When I got comfortable, I experimented with $20 often to see if I had it down. I am sure some people just catch on to it, I wasn’t one of them. But now it is crazy easy to read.

Note: BlackBerry is NOT a cyber security company. They are a security company. Revenue does not care about your AI driven autonomous machine learning EV car with DDs. People are using these terms loosely. A quick lookup for interviews with John Chen would prove that he explicitly avoids these terms as they do not define nor matter to the products/revenue of BlackBerry. QNX revenue does not depend on any of these terms, it's on installation on any device. This includes the space station, of which there is 1 of with obviously non-recurring revenue. Buying based on these basis would be gambling.
Bull:

• Business transformation: BlackBerry is now a software company, starting the transformation in 2015. The focus is security, the general term.
• 5 Products:
  • QNX: Embedded system OS.
    • Multi-OS housing: It has the capability to allow for multiple OSs on a single chip.
    • Real-time availability/software prioritization: Not all pieces of software operate on the same priority. Steering/braking would be higher priority than media, and QNX allows for that. Even if the thread/core is shared with other applications, when high priority software is requesting a resource it will be prioritized to ensure reliability.
    • Resource sharing: CPU, RAM, and GPU resource sharing between different applications capability. Two applications can share the same CPU core and bump each other based on prioritization.
    • Why not Linux? QNX has the highest certification for security available. Linux does not. CEOs would want to avoid liability and this certification allows for that.
    • Device agnostic: It can be installed on any device, not just cars. Any IoT and offline device can use QNX.
  • QNX Hypervisor: Consolidate multiple OSs on a single SoC using virtualization
    • SoC: System on a chip. Instead of using multiple ECUs, which is what car manufacturers currently do, they can use one single chip to run multiple high priority applications and multiple OSs. This is what Tesla does now.
    • Virtualization: Running an OS in a virtual environment. Think Linux environment inside of Windows. This helps with debugging for developers without having to have the actual hardware.
  • IVY: Scalable cloud-connected software platform for vehicles.
    • What is it a solution for? When a vehicle manufacturer wants a way to transmit the QNX/OS data safely, normalize it, and visualize it/interact with it. It also allows car manufacturers to own the data, unlike other OSs.
    • Scalable: AWS servers are capable of handling the load from many endpoints.
    • Software platform: There is currently no centralized software ecosystem for vehicles. IVY is providing that.
    • Non-BB developers would be able to use an SDK to develop applications on IVY for infotainment/general apps/others. IVY will also use ML to gain insight on unrecognized patterns by developers. An example of this is detecting if a car slipped, without having the developer connect multiple sensors to figure out if that event happened.
    • 50/50 joint effort on revenue and effort to develop the ecosystem. Using AWS's knowledge in AI/ML for calculated sensors (slip, driver on seat, etc)
    • Usage by other vendors: A city can connect to the data from vehicles and detect when ice/slipping is happening. If brakes are getting overheated coming from a high elevation area. If a car had an accident, etc. An insurance company can provide an app to give discounts similar to the currently implemented OBD-2 readers. A maintenance provider can also connect to this data and check if an error is specific to maintenance, malpractice, or general misuse.
  • Spark: Endpoint management. Basically API security. Did not delve far into this, basic info.
    • Unified Endpoint Security: This is the endpoint where a laptop/phone/IoT device hits. It provides encryption and security around that. Continuous authentication is a part of it, where a device is learning the user behavior using ML and continuously checking if the behavior matches the original owner; if not, lock the device.
    • Unified Endpoint Management: Basically managing your API for devices.
    • Zero trust: I think this is specifically talking about continuous authentication. Basically, it's not an authenticate once and forget it. It's constantly tracking behavior to verify the user is the authenticated user.
  • AtHoc: Non-enterprise communication system.
    • Target customers: Government, healthcare, education, etc.
    • Solution: A communication system targeting non-enterprise businesses; specifically for Event management, cross organizational communication/collaboration, mass notifications.
    • Who does this benefit? You've seen the hacks in healthcare/educational/governmental sector. This is specifically for them.
  • SecuSUITE: Phone application to allow employees to use work related data in personal devices without cross communication (between personal and work data).
    • End to end encryption.
    • Separation of concerns between personal and work data. Employers CANNOT access your personal data.
    • Used by NATO; doesn't carry much value in my book but maybe in yours.
• Customer oriented solutions: As you've seen in the products above, some products overlap and are just names to target specific customers. It allows customers to easily understand what product could solve their issue. Continuous authentication is a great example of this: Their customer complained that they kept re-authenticating, so they designed a solution allowing them to authenticate once and using ML they learned their behavior and can continuously check if the user is the owneauthenticated user. This kind of passion in leadership is good for business.
• Liability: QNX has the highest security rating available. Most CEOs want to avoid liability when it comes to security, using QNX would help them avoid that in a similar way cloud services help them avoid being blamed for hacking.
• Leadership: BBs leadership isn't one to play on famous words to drive the stock up. John Chen explicitly states this in his interviews and says they are a security company. Not cyber, doesn't mention AI or whatever. He explicitly avoids meme words and understands what the point of BBs business is.

Where I think growth can be made:

1. QNX in more cars. They can capitalize on the idea of less ECUs = less cost for OEMs + security.
2. IVY usage by OEMs along with QNX.
3. IVY ecosystem. Maybe application billing?
4. Professional services (support) for the products listed.
5. AtHoc increased market share in more governmental/healthcare/educational entities.
6. SecuSUITE for more enterprise customers with the idea being saving employers money from purchasing work phones for employees, and worrying about securing them.

Bear:

• Revenue: It is not yet based on a subscription/usage basis. You can only produce so many cars, and they don't give an insight on how much do they charge per car for QNX. Anywhere from $2 - $20 is what was mentioned in transcripts. This is a growth area, but not at a trajectory that's excellent. IVY does work on a subscription/usage basis, but IVY can be used WITHOUT QNX. I'm worried about this, but still see it as an area that will generate revenue in the range of $400 MM - $600 MM at the price of $20 per 30M cars. The 30M per year is based on the listing of their customers and their yearly production rates. Keep in mind I stated any device, this does not include trucks or other IoT devices.
• Market share: These are relatively new products. J.P. Morgan pointed this out as a priority for growth. This could end up not working out and growth never happens. This is a relatively low risk due to QNX and IVY providing SO MUCH value for car manufacturers Vs. other products in the market.
• Patent revenue: They sold a chunk of their no longer relevant patents to Huawei. This makes up a small (<= 32%) of their revenue and is a one time sale. The coming quarter could be equal or less to the last quarter revenue due to either other sales making up the lost revenue from patents, or coming up short. It could come higher if they sold more services, but due to COVID and knowing that many car manufacturers have lowered their production due to chip shortage, the next quarter will most likely be lower.
• VW.os: VW is making their own OS. VW.os is what they're calling it. They're currently using QNX, but that revenue could potentially stop. Personally I don't believe VW is capable of doing that. It's a marketing hype. Their companies are not capable of good collaboration or good implementation based on what I've read and researched (can't find article right now), but it's something to be concerned about.
• QNX success: While IVY could be using QNX, it does NOT depend on it. There is potential for OEMs to use IVY without QNX. I think this is a low risk, but still risk. 19 OEMs are already using QNX.
• Lack of Answers: I can't get much out of their earnings call. They don't delve into pricing for QNX, how they plan to grow it besides getting more car manufacturers and more cars post Corona. How they plan to do recurring revenue. A breakdown of each revenue segment would be helpful, but I don't see that either and there is hesitancy to delve into it.

Prediction: I think QNX can become a $1B revenue per year alone. $2B revenue per year as a company is not far fetched. Without a subscription/usage based model, it is difficult to see how growth can go beyond that. BB is good in 2-5 years, not this year. I can see their revenue growing to potentially $2B - $4B revenue per year. They did mention trying to figure out a subscription/usage based billing, if done then the revenue would be much higher. I think $18 is a fair price on the high end. It could grow further than that, but expectations would be HIGH.
Resources:

1. John Chen interview: https://youtu.be/_hQQlCWMrQA?t=313
2. John Chen interview: https://youtu.be/FNdbGhun2E8
3. J.P. Morgan IVY presentation: https://cache.webcasts.com/content/jpmo001/1416508/content/58ffe5daaa24e738fdef0d065b9b15077892ea63/pdf/secured/BlackBerry_-_Winter_2020-21_Investors_Deck.pdf
4. IVY: https://blackberry.qnx.com/en/aws
5. QNX: https://blackberry.qnx.com/content/dam/bbcomv4/qnx/software-solutions/embedded-software/qnx-neutrino-rtos/pdf/QNX-Neutrino-Product-Brief-v7.pdf
6. QNX Hypervisor: https://blackberry.qnx.com/content/dam/qnx/products/hypervisohypervisorGEM-ProductBrief.pdf
7. QNX Tools: https://blackberry.qnx.com/en/embedded-software/qnx-software-development-platform
8. Spark UEM: https://www.blackberry.com/content/dam/bbcomv4/blackberry-com/en/products/resource-centeresource-library/guides/guide-blackberry-spark-uem-suites.pdf
9. Spark UES: https://www.blackberry.com/content/dam/bbcomv4/blackberry-com/en/products/resource-centeresource-library/briefs/Solution_Brief_BlackBerry_Spark_UES_Suite_Final.pdf
10. AtHoc: https://www.blackberry.com/us/en/products/blackberry-athoc
11. AtHoc in healthcare: https://www.blackberry.com/us/en/products/blackberry-athoc/healthcare
12. SecuSUITE: https://www.blackberry.com/us/en/products/secusuite
13. Customer oriented solutions - continuous authentication: Start the video at 5:04: https://www.blackberry.com/us/en/events/security-summit/2020/video-details/work-anywhere
14. Easier link: https://vimeo.com/497426347
15. VW OS: https://electrek.co/2020/06/19/vw-to-develop-its-own-operating-system-but-dodges-question-about-id-3-software/

Position: 1,500.
Disclaimer: I don't know everything, I may be incorrect about some things. This is based on what I've researched and to the best of my ability. Do your own DD. Obligatory this is not an investment advice.
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Edit: This is the only sub with a lot of discussion. I appreciate y'all.
​
🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀
Edit 2: One day later, marked closed $18.03. Crazy.

There seems to be a lot of interest in stocks from young investors. I imagine that many will make their way from WSB to this sub because WSB is a bunch of monkeys flinging poo. You may have lost some money and now you want to explore stocks from less of a Meme and emotional perspective.
There is nothing wrong with Meme stocks. Meme stocks can be fun. I have had fun with it. I am also a 42-year-old man with rental properties, commercial properties, and a few small businesses. BB, NOK, AMC, and even GME are all fine. The DD is fine behind all of them. The issue is that if I lose $1,000 then I can write myself a check from one of my businesses for $10,000 to make myself feel better. That is not a brag...it is simply sharing that people come from different places in life.
You are just starting off life and probably have far fewer resources and every dollar matters more.
I challenge anyone to CMV but I am not a big proponent of stocks as a core investment strategy. Here are my reasons why.

1. Information has a time-decay of value. Meaning that information becomes less valuable over time. Data is what is mined to often produce new Information. You are at a disadvantage when it comes to both data and information. The information that you get on a retail level has already lost much of its value. This is where the saying "if you read it in the news you are already too late"
2. You have no power. You simply cannot compete with whales and whales don't become whales by letting people glean the crumbs that are leftover. They have the power to move markets, you don't.
3. You have no control over outcomes. You have no control over the success of a company. You have no control over other investors. You have no control over anything.
4. The odds on options are not that great. Even compared to blackjack our betting the outside of a roulette table they are just not that good.
5. Many people that are far more intelligent than you are, lose money at stock investing.
6. Your emotions and FOMO will be a hindrance and problematic.
7. Most stock investors are too young to understand the market cycles

I like stocks as a small part of an overall investment strategy for young people for the following reasons.

1. Time is valuable and you have the most time
2. Compound interest is the "force" behind all investing and compound interest compliments the stock market very well
3. Certain strategies can complement long-term wealth building

Building wealth through stocks is like trying to build a house one brick at a time...just you, and you are gathering the straw, digging the mud, and pressing each brick by hand. When it rains many of your bricks will wash away. If the sun shines for enough days then you will make good progress.
The problem is that all markets cycle. The housing market cycles. Petroleum and natural gas cycles. The stock market cycles. I believe that a full market cycle is around 18 years with around 7-12 years in an up cycle and 6-11 in a down cycle. In the stock market, they call these bull and bear markets. We are currently in one of the longest bull markets on record due to interest rates and the feds printing money. No one has a crystal ball but sooner or later the market will peak. When this happens Boomers will be the first to pull money out and put it into bonds or CDs. Boomers are as big of a whale as retail can get. Anyone and I mean anyone could have made money in the current market. If ten years ago you had asked a five-year-old to pick five of their favorite things and invested in their choices you would have made money. That could be Barbies, YouTube, Pizza, Sprite, and their Dog. They would have made money on any stocks you picked around those five things.
There will come a day sooner or later when Boomers and GenX will see trends in the market that they don't like. Boomers own multiple houses and are deep into retirement. GenX is a small but powerful generation that is now on the back Nine Holes of life. Gen X will largely inherit the wealth of the Boomers. There will come a shift towards mitigating losses and that shift is not far away. When they move their money from markets so goes the market.
Is it fair to say that one of the longest bull cycles on record could transition to one of the longest bear cycles?
Let's look at Millenials...a generation that is struggling to just buy a home. Boomers own a few. GenX may own a couple and Millenials that are now entering into their forties struggle with one. Millenials are a massively sized generation that I believe is now bigger than both GenX and Boomers combined because Boomers are dying at a rapid pace. Millenials are the generation that were adults starting life and careers in 2008 and full-blown families with Covid-19. Maybe one of the unluckiest generations.
GenZ is this very talented and intelligent generation. Y'all are creating disruptions in culture, in politics, and in Wall Street. You are savvy and demanding. Giving billionaires the finger while pissing on the front door of their mansions.
But you need to be careful.
Stocks are not the key to your success. They are just a single tool in your toolbox. A better tool may be early homeownership or owning a small business. Life is about options...and I am not talking about the gambling options of Wall Street. I am talking about the options of having equity in a home to adapt to economic swings. I am, talking about the options of owning a small business where your day to day decisions make you smarter and more valuable. Where you own assets that make you money. Most importantly you have control over your own destiny.
I am not telling you not to invest in stocks. I am just telling you that it should be a limited part of your overall strategy in life. Unless someone has been through two complete cycles of the stock markets then I would take their advice with a grain of salt.
General advice:

1. Don't sell stocks that you have taken a loss on
2. Buy when everyone is selling and sell when everyone is buying
3. Invest in stocks with a strategy based on your knowledge and experience
4. Invest only what you can afford to lose
5. Stocks work best with time. Leave them alone
6. Be a value investor
7. Invest with a purpose

Number seven is important. For example, I like Robotics, AI, and Automation. I like these is two specific areas....transportation and mining. I operate in the Transportation industry. I know that very soon human drivers will be eliminated and self-driving trucks will take over. Trucks will be loaded, driven, and unloaded without a single human being doing any of that work. With that will come an entire supporting industry. Tow trucks will need to be automatically dispatched when trucks break down or in accidents. AI will need to be involved in decision making. I will see these changes before I am dead and I am 42.
I like underwater mining. Our oceans are the next frontier and the next gold rush. We have areas of sea bottom that has very little life but is rich in gasses, minerals, and thermal energy. Automation, AI, and robotics will play a huge role in underwater mining. I will see this transition start in my lifetime and I am 42.
Beyond that, once we have machines that are capable of underwater mining then we have the basics for machines that can mine inner-system planetary objects. From nearby asteroids to the moon, to thermal energy collection closer to the sun, to Mars and beyond. The wealthiest person in existence will be the person that is able to start the first off-planet mining operation. Where there is no EPA, no taxes on land, where we are not building sub-divisions next to mines. Where we don't have to worry about the ecosystem. Where gasses and pollutants are not pollutants because there is nothing of consequence to pollute. The largest land-owners in existence will be the owner of off-world mining operations. That may not happen in my lifetime...but it may in yours.
I like investing in Meme stocks because they are fun. But I also invest in Robotics, AI, and automation with one-single question....is this company taking humanity one-step close to automated transportation or underwater mining? I invest with a purpose.
Sure I will grab up some value stocks every now and then. People are going to be flying more than ever in a few years. People are going to be more social than ever in a few years. Shoot Condom manufacturers are a buy right now because people will be..........you get the idea.
The whole reason that I wrote this excessively long post is to maybe get you into thinking about your strategy....what is it? And to caution you on being "all-in" on stocks.
Stonks don't always go up.

There are a lot of newbies entering the space. There are many reasons this is great news, but I've also noticed that the quality of posts and discussion about bitcoin has plummeted. We really aren't having the important discussions with nearly the frequency that we should.
Now I know some of you won't like me saying this, but it really does need to be said. Someone needs to be realistic with our new friends and give them the bad news and tell them the things they don't want to hear. So here goes.
I feel that we're due for a correction, and I really don't think we've even gotten started. I've been around this rodeo a few times and it always -feels- different in the moment, but in reality it's mostly cyclical. In 2017/2018 we saw a months long sell off after the run up to 20k that saw Bitcoin fall to 4k. That's more than 75% in the red from the preceeding ATH. Refer to this figure later.
I think we're going to see a few -15%'s, maybe even a -20% or -30% before we're really back in bear territory. When it comes I expect the new crowd to go through the same things I and many others went through when we were the new kids.
Weak hands will get shaken out. People getting way over leveraged/exposed and taking out credit to buy BTC are going to be burned hard and maybe leave the space forever. Some will risk it all and put their house on the line, and nearly all of those will lose their home. People will buy into BTC expecting their investments to double overnight, everynight.
This shit happens every time. The vets come in to tell the new guys not to panic, or not get into serious debt chasing the bull run, and we get ignored. People will tell us we're trying to short, or how we might be causing this guy to miss out on SICK GAINZ by telling him not to take a second mortgage out to buy BTC. In reality, most of us really do care about the space, and want to see it grow. It hurt me every time I read about someone blowing years of their life away trying to chase the dragon at the end of the bull run. It hurts me more now to see it happening again, and the same arguments getting thrown about as justification for being reckless with their finances.
Refer back to that -75% figure I dropped before. Would you rather that be the value of your house? Or would you rather it be the money you saved over time to buy ₿ responsibly? I made my own mistakes too, thankfully not with my house or something else vital to me, but mistakes nonetheless that put me in severe debt when I tried to chase BTC back in 2013. I only just now climbed out of that hole. (I literally made the last payment before posting this)
Bottom line is that BTC unfortunately attracts the get rich quick types, and when shit hits the fan they are NOT happy. They will panic sell to stop the bleeding. If you gamble your life savings on Bitcoin while it's at ATH because of FOMO, it's going to really hurt.
The harsh truth of it is, if bitcoin is going gangbusters and you don't already own your position, you're too late for the bull run. Your best bet is to accumulate over time, so that in four years when we're looking at this situation again you can be the guy making five figures in his sleep, and making posts like these telling the new guys to have a longer term view.
I dunno, I just don't want to see people FOMO themselves into crippling debt like I did, and have heard so many horror stories about. It's the beginning of a very wild ride over the next couple of months.
EDIT: With this getting a lot more attention than I thought it would, I'd like to just say thank you to everyone for even giving this the time of day. I was initially replying to another comment on a different thread and the whole thing got a little long winded, leading me to just post this here instead.
I just wanted to clarify a few things that I feel got left out or that I missed the mark on:

1. I am very bullish. I do not believe we're crashing imminently, but rather wanted to caution those getting sweaty palms of what could happen should they get too emotional and overextend while we're in uncharted territory.
   
2. I don't think we're going to follow a picture prefect pattern of the previous bull runs. The price is entirely unpredictable, and if one could tell you with any certainty what the price or market sentiment would be at any given time they would have to be a time traveler.
   
3. It is never too late to get into BTC. But you should temper your expectations when you're a late entry to the cycle. The 10x gains come later when you've held through a full cycle.
   

I run a private campground. It’s been in my family for generations. For those of you with a rich family history, I’m sure you know how stories tend to accumulate. They get passed along haphazardly from one generation to the next, distorting as they do, and the truth grows muddy along the way. Land is like that too, except instead of gathering stories about Aunt Jodi’s scandalous first husband, it gathers monsters.
If you’re new here, you should really start at the beginning and if you’re totally lost, this might help.
There’s a lot to do to maintain a campground and I’ve been having to do a lot of the work myself around here. I don’t want my winter staff going into the deep woods without a good reason right now. Normally I’d send Bryan, as he has the dogs to protect him, but those are on loan. Also, I haven’t seen a lot of Bryan. He shows up, he gets the work done that he needs to, and then he just… vanishes for a while. I don’t know if he’s visiting his dogs or the fairy or both. And now that I think about it, Bryan tends to make himself scarce throughout the year. I guess I haven’t paid that close of attention before. He still gets the job done just fine so does it really matter if he’s off visiting his fairy bff in his downtime?
Unfortunately, even with the spiders’ help, I’m still battling the thorns in my chest. It’s taking a lot of my strength away and I’m getting winded easier. It’s made getting rid of these accursed things a priority. I know the fairy said they’d go away when they killed the fomorian, but as many of you have pointed out, they’re taking their sweet time going about that.
I do have a theory about the current stalemate, though. The fomorian probably wants the thorns to cover more of the campground. The fairy probably wants the sun to return, being of the company of Lugh and all. And both of them probably want less treacherous footing for their steeds.
I see the dapple gray stallion’s hoofprints in the snow sometimes. It makes it easy to avoid. I just turn around and immediately go in the opposite direction.
With this surefire way of avoiding my nemesis, I figured it was time to try a gamble. The fairy initially told me that I could try finding a way to banish the thorns by seeking out another entity of disease. I’ve taken that to mean the gummy bears. Their presence has brought sickness and rot before. The only problem was I really wasn’t sure how to find anything out from them. Did I use their bodies in an elixir? Did they have the answers themselves? There was a human shaped gummy bear, at least until one of Byran’s dogs splattered it. Perhaps there’s more intelligence among them than I thought.
I decided to try out one of Mattias’s strategies. He learned a lot about these creatures simply by being close to them. Following their paths through the woods.
I figured the worst that would happen is I’d wander around the forest for a bit and maybe feel a little stupid.
...okay, that’s really not the worst that could happen, considering the upheaval my land is experiencing, but barring any other catastrophe it wasn’t that dangerous of a plan.
Or at least, the first part wasn’t.
I got some dead mice from the pet store to bait the traps with. They weren’t very big, so I didn’t expect to attract any of the larger gummy bears. This was perfectly fine with me. I was in no hurry for another encounter like the last one, especially with the dogs on loan to the fairy. I baited the traps and left them scattered throughout the deep woods.
Within a couple days the traps yielded results. I found the jellied remains of a rabbit inside one of the traps, staring at me with glistening eyes, its translucent ears quivering. I crouched beside the cage.
“I’m going to let you out,” I said. “Don’t try to bite me or I’ll drop-kick you into the afterlife.”
Just to be safe, I released the gummy bear with the cage door pointing away from me. The rabbit bolted and I sprinted after it, only to lose it within seconds. So the worst case scenario came true, I felt real dumb there, standing in the woods and belatedly realizing that I couldn’t actually keep up with a rabbit.
The second gummy bear I caught was a raccoon. That’s still not something I was convinced I could keep up with, so I took the liberty of breaking both of its hind legs before I released it. The bones snapped like dry branches. The gummy bear hissed wetly and bared its yellowed teeth at me, but otherwise didn’t seem to be in pain. I’m not sure if this qualifies as animal cruelty and frankly, I’m trying not to think about it too hard.
This time, I had no problem keeping up with the gummy bear once it was released. It dragged itself along by its forelegs, seemingly oblivious to the dangling appendages that trailed behind it. Our progress was slow and I impatiently began to wonder if perhaps I should have only broken one. There was nothing I could do about it now. The gummy bear would turn and hiss at me if I got too close, so I kept a healthy distance between us.
And I followed it. I honestly had no idea where it would lead me, but Mattias’s journal implies that he learned everything he did by being close to these inhuman things. The world is less stable when they’re nearby, he claimed. Things slip through.
It took a long time. I was tempted to quit and go home repeatedly and each time I had to remind myself to have patience. Mattias surely had, as he didn’t have the siren call of the internet luring him away. The raccoon made a circle of the deep woods, its pace consistent, dragging its broken legs behind it. It moved with purpose. It stayed off the road, but I caught glimpses of gravel now and again through the barren trees. After a little while I realized that it was slowly but surely turning, heading back towards the hill that led up and out of the forest.
I was beginning to think this had all been a waste of time and I should just finish the thing off. Watching it drag itself all through the woods for the past couple of hours had stirred an acute sense of guilt about this entire affair. Killing something was one thing. That’s a matter of life and death, generally. But crippling something like this… perhaps there’s more of my father in me than I thought. He’s in the quiet spaces of my soul and most of the time I can’t hear him over the roar of my anger.
I heard him now.
I steeled my resolve and hefted the crowbar I’d brought along for just this purpose. Blunt weapons are the best tool for destroying gummy bears. Sharp edges can cut pieces off them, but that won’t necessarily slow them down. Even if you cut it in half you could get unlucky and the pieces might reconnect and join back together and then you got a gummy bear with its ass literally stuck to its shoulder flailing around and trying to bite you.
Blunt trauma, however, separated the parts beyond repair. Like dropping a cherry pie on the floor. You aren’t getting that back together in a cohesive form. And like an exploding cherry pie, the gummy bear burst into a gooey red smear that coated the nearby ground and splattered on the trees when I brought the crowbar down into the center of its body.
Something like smoke hovered over the ground. It was only there for a second. I might have missed it, had I not been watching. Ever since my encounter with the human sized gummy bear I’ve been thinking about what I saw and experienced and wondering if I’d imagined it. But there it was. A miasma. An ill wind carrying sickness to anyone that inhaled it. It rolled away from me, traveling uphill, and then it passed between two trees and was gone.
I almost walked away. But something stirred in the back of my mind, sluggishly connecting the pieces. Dropping each thing that had happened into place until the pattern was evident.
I’d followed it around the old woods. We’d made a circle and were now at where we’d begun. Except sometimes… when walking in a circle with intent… you don’t actually wind up back where you started.
There are other worlds inside my campground. Many more than what I have encountered already, according to my ancestor.
I walked after the smoke and passed between the two trees and they creaked as I went by them, bending their heads to twine their branches so that I passed under an arch and then…
I was elsewhere.
The hall. I’d found the hall of the gummy bears.
I need to stop using such stupid names for the things on my campground.
The structure was of primitive construction. The ceiling was thatched and birds flew between the rafters. There were no windows and the only light came from candles burning in sconces on the wall. The air was thick with the stink of rancid fat and smoke. I tried to take shallow breaths and walked slowly forwards across the rushes strewn over the dirt floor. Small things rolled and broke under my feet. I did not look closer to see what they were. They felt like bone fragments.
The hall continued on for a long time. The darkness swallowed me up and I could only see a handful of yards in any direction. The columns supporting the roof blurred together, each one the same as the last. Round posts with the bark roughly hewn off, painted in ochre tones of yellow and red. Primitive colors made from the earth. This place was very old, a remnant from the earliest edges of human civilization.
I reached the end of the hall. At first I took the back wall for a mosaic, dark wood interspersed with ivory points of varying sizes. Then, as I drew closer, the shapes resolved themselves. Skulls. The back wall was covered with skulls. Animal skulls of all sizes. I recognized groundhogs, squirrels, deer, and a couple coyotes.
A platform of rough hewn stone was built against the back wall. On it sat a chair, backless, with a rounded seat of hide stretched between two ornate arms. The carvings that covered the legs and arms were the only intricate decoration I’d seen in this entire place.
I crept closer to the chair, trying to get a better look. It was then that I noticed there was something strange about the mortar holding the stones together.
It glistened in the faint candlelight, like a fatty cut of meat.
I drew up short with a sudden sense of unease. Nervously, I hefted the crowbar, taking confidence in its weight. I held still and listened to my surroundings, intently searching for any noise, any sign that something was urgently amiss.
A rattling in the corner. Like the scuttling of tiny claws. I pivoted to face it, just in time to see one of the skulls fall off the wall.
It did not strike the ground. It stopped just short, as if falling into thick snow, and then it tilted gently to one side and went motionless. Smoke condensed beneath it, barely discernible in the dim light of the candles.
It felt like it was staring at me.
Then it was gone, swiftly flowing out of sight the instant I blinked. Heart pounding, I watched the shadows, trying to discern where it had gone. But behind me I heard another noise, like the scrape of claws, and I turned to face it just as another skull fell from the wall. This, too, was caught by the smoke.
I felt like my heart was ready to burst from my chest. The rushing of my own blood echoed in my ears. I licked my dry lips and waited, my eyes darting back and forth in a vain attempt to watch all angles. The room was silent. I couldn’t depend on my hearing. How would smoke make noise?
The first came from my right. It swept in low, the smoke billowing like the incoming tide. I turned on my heel and brought the crowbar down in an overhead swing. It connected just as the creature surged upwards, the empty eye sockets leering. The mid part of the crowbar crushed through the skull and into the brain cavity and the smoke dispersed as if flattened, floating back down to the ground.
Blunt teeth raked against my shoulder. I hissed and spun, swiping sideways with the crowbar as I did. It passed through the column of smoke and the creature faltered, as if losing its balance, and a follow-up swing sent the skull tumbling away in three separate pieces.
More skulls were rattling on the wall. Three fell. Then two more. They were quickly swallowed up in the darkness, only to emerge seconds later, lunging at me from the shadows. I would dispatch one with a well-aimed blow and then turn to counter another. Or feel the bite of their teeth. I could only be thankful there was no jawbone with which to crush whatever limb they latched onto when they had an opening. Still, the teeth broke skin. I barely felt the pain underneath the adrenaline.
They were aiming for my throat. For my abdomen. And for every one I dispatched, another couple skulls would fall.
Then there was another sound, overwhelming the rattling of the skulls or my own frantic breathing. Laughter. A gurgling, wet laugh, emanating from the direction of the throne. I risked taking my eyes off the shadows and saw that the mortar holding the stones together was not… actually… mortar.
It was flesh. Jellied, translucent flesh. And it was seeping upwards, congealing on top of the dais, working its way up the legs of the throne.
And it was laughing.
“Send them all!” I screamed at the dais. “I’ll smash every skull on that damn wall if I have to!”
There were so many now. They crowded between the columns, lines of ivory skulls bobbing on a thick carpet of smoke. I exhaled slowly, trying to steady my nerves. I could do this, I told myself. I was stronger than them. Their teeth could not pierce very far and so I only had to outlast them and protect my vitals. And hadn’t Beau taught me how to outlast?
“Go on,” I growled. “My name is Kate. I’ve killed inhuman things before and I’ll destroy all of you as well if I have to.”
The chuckling finally stopped with a final, satisfied note echoing down the long hall. Panting, I pivoted, watching as the creatures receded into the shadows between the columns. Finally, only once the silence returned and nothing else came out of the darkness at me, did I turn and give my full attention to the mass at the fore of the room.
It covered the throne as a shapeless mound of flesh the color of an onion. A quivering lump fully the height of a human and just as wide, the chair hazy behind the translucent jelly. As I watched, small shapes detached from the dais. Stones, two the size of my fist and the rest the size of walnuts. These slowly made their way up through the entity’s body until they floated in the middle of the space between the arms of the chair. The larger stones positioned themselves as eyes and the rest became teeth. The teeth split apart and it began to speak.
“Have you brought me tribute?” it gurgled.
“No,” I replied.
“Then you are an intruder.”
All around me, the skulls shifted, moving forwards a pace. I resisted the urge to raise my weapon once more.
“That is not my intent either.”
“Ahhhhh.” The teeth spread into a smile. “Then you are a supplicant.”
“Are you a king of the Partholanians?” I asked.
Those ancient people of Ireland who died of disease.
“It has been a long time since I’ve heard their name,” it replied thoughtfully. “We are of them. They had a name for our hall. It has since been forgotten.”
I briefly considered telling it what we call them, but quickly squashed the idea. I didn’t want to cause myself more problems by naming it and I certainly didn’t want to name it “the hall of the gummy bears” I mean that’s a terrible name.
DO NOT CALL IT THAT IN THE COMMENTS.
“There’s thorns on my land,” I said. “They’re rotting the trees.”
“So you seek us?”
“They say the Partholanians died of disease.”
“You are a supplicant, here to beg a boon,” it hissed.
My heart sank. Another bargain. It named what it wanted with no small measure of malicious joy and I knew before it finished that I would not be able to grant what it wanted.
It asked for bodies. Human bodies. Not these weak animals that they steal here and there, filling their wretched, dead corpses with the spirits of its people until the flesh dissolved to pieces around them and they came fluttering back here, to this last refuge of its kind. It wanted living flesh. Strong flesh, that they could inhabit and walk among the living once more.
I said that wasn’t possible. I offered it dead human bodies. It was something, at least, and I could obtain those. The funeral home might be willing to help. I only needed to fulfill the bargain long enough to get a remedy for the thorns, I thought desperately.
The creature refused. They were tired of inhabiting dead things, bodies that had already given up on life and could not be restored. It wanted a heart that remembered how to beat and lungs that knew how to breathe.
“And what of the person that inhabits that flesh?” I asked.
“Perhaps the soul will stay. Perhaps it will depart. I do not care.”
If I did this, it said, it would give me what I needed to stop the rot. I took a deep breath. And I agreed to its bargain. It shook with pleased laughter.
“One last question,” I said. “Why can’t you get a body of your own making, like how the other creatures on my campground have?”
Beau says he remembers being on my land, walking down the road looking for someone to share his drink with. He came from somewhere, as did the hammock monster and the lady with extra eyes and all the others.
“The watcher will not let us pass,” it hissed. “We are too weak. We cannot take form. We can only steal, scavenging the scraps. It is a shameful survival. Do you pity us?”
“No,” I said quickly.
“Nor do we pity you. We see your death sometimes, lurking in the woods.”
“My death?” I asked desperately. “The beast? Or something else?”
It chuckled, a sickening gurgling sound, like boiling mud.
“Bring me bodies,” it said, “and perhaps I will tell you more.”
I recognized the dismissal. I turned and walked away, the skin on the back of my neck crawling under the weight of all those empty eyes watching me go. The doors to the hall hung open for me and when I passed through, the trees unwound themselves and the arch and the hall were gone. There were only the snow-laden branches of the campground.
I’m a campground manager. I have no intention of honoring this bargain. I admit that it is tempting to give some of my more problematic campers to them. Heck, for some of them, being a flesh vessel for the decaying soul of an unborn monster of ancient times would probably be a personality improvement. However, as I’ve discussed before, the town does not look kindly on bargains with evil things. They turn a blind eye to the campground for the most part since we contain the evil things, but I feel this might cross a line. There’s no direct benefit for the townsfolk, after all. I’m not keeping something away from them. The gummy bears are stuck here already. If anything, I’m throwing innocent people into their maw just to make them stronger.
I don’t think they’d accept it being worth the sacrifice to get rid of the thorns, either. They tend to be rather short-sighted. It would take the thorns consuming the campground and overflowing into their land for them to accept the necessity of such a bargain. I don’t have enough time to wait for that.
And I don’t know… it’s kind of nice to be the heroine sometimes. Maybe this is my father’s legacy coming out. He always wanted to save people.
So I’m going to cheat. That’s one of the strengths of humanity. We can freely use deceit. I just need a willing accomplice.
And I know exactly who to ask. [x]
Read the full list of rules.
Visit the campground's website.

Alright so I don't really know what to do, I deleted all my social media and my trading platform and tried to keep away but it pulls me back in because it's eating me up inside.
I've held stocks worth about 10k since 2017 at the peak basically (not the best..). I wanted to average down all 2020 but I couldn't due to my financial situation (didn't have a job and needed the money for security in applying for something), I knew it was going to bounce back like this or at least that's what I thought but couldn't do much about it. Now that I can eventually come to grips with, because I just played it safe, at least I can reason my way out of that one.
What I can't accept though is being an idiot during the memestock days in end of January. I ended up selling my largest stocks APHA and Canopy (Apha was about 15.5 CAD on TSX) to buy memestocks purely out of boredom. I was fine with losing the money, which I did, and it didn't really bother me, because it was a fun gamble. I thought I would have time to buy back in at a similar price point. Then suddenly a few days later they begin skyrocketing.. And now I'm sitting here, hating my guts, hating my life, hating everything. Not only did I play it safe and ignore my instincts to average down in 2020 but I actually sold my top stocks right before this explosion - and that's what I have a hard time living with.
I can't rationalize my way out of it, I can't justify it, I can only see people being extremely excited about APHA, posting screenshots of huge gains, and excited about future gain that is "inevitable".
I can't study, I can't eat, I can't go to the gym, I'm just balled up with ulcers in my stomach. I don't know how to cope... I held that shit for 3-4 years and didn't do anything, just let the stocks sit for very long term, didn't even have my trading platform downloaded. Then the memestocks happened and I downloaded my trading platform and got involved for no reason.
I could have just literally ignored it like I was going to...
**Edit:*\* Wow that is an overwhelming amount of support. Thank you so much guys for your support it has helped a lot.. especially hearing about others being in the same boat.
I'm going to take a break from reddit now and social media where friends are asking me if I'm a millionnaire because I've been talking these stocks up to them all 2020.. So they assume I have them now, so I'm going ghost protocol for a while and try to focus on my school.
I still have my health, my friends and family, and in the long run, I'll have a happy life. Lesson learned..

So I'm seeing a lot of information out here about Melvin and 6 days to cover and all that and I think a lot of it is outdated. Actually, I know it's outdated because people were saying the same thing a week ago and $GME has risen like 300% since then. There's been a huge amount of price action, and yet the shorts everyone has been talking about have exited their positions and there's still tons of short interest. What gives? Why haven't the shorts learned their lesson? Are they just stupid? Maybe. But maybe not... Let's consider the short's view on this situation:
The $GME Short Thesis as of 1/27: Here's the scene. A stock which is widely regarded as colossally overvalued has doubled in value several times within a matter of weeks. You know that the retail investor plan is to force shorts into a squeeze scenario. However, volume is up to unprecedented levels as new traders flood into the market to get in on the action, so the days to cover is falling, making it easier for shorts to get out quickly when they get a window. Meanwhile, older long retail investors (aka bought like a day ago) are staring at what are, to them, very nice gains. It's been several days of insane price action already, and people are predicting the end is near because, well, it must be, right? The uncertainty and perceived risk of losing unrealized profits are very high.
You look at this and predict the following: retail investors who have made tidy profits will sell upon a volatility move, causing a chain reaction of sell-offs. In other words, you expect that the bubble is gonna pop upon sharp price action (could be either way) and then there's going to be a sharp decline as retail investors scramble to take whatever profits they can before the next guy sells at a higher price.
So what do you do as a short with that thesis? Short the stock, of course! Even if there's tremendous upwards price action the next day, you can just sell short again, pay off the old loan with the new short money, and now you're in an even better position. Your best bet as a short is to short the stock the moment before the bubble pops. High interest rates from your lender don't bother you because, based on the thesis, you're only holding your loan for a few days and the share price on the other side is going to be way below where you shorted. This is why short interest is still strong - it's generally a good play to short a bubble that you expect to pop soon.
How the Short Thesis could fall apart: So, the whole short thesis is based upon the idea that retail investors are going to close out their $GME positions very abruptly as soon as they see some nice gains and sense that "the end is near." But here's the thing: what if they don't? As an investor in $GME myself, I did the following with my gains - I sold a portion of them to cover my initial cost basis and now I'm just sitting on the rest as "house money." I'm not buying in anymore because I'm managing risk, but I'm not pulling out because I think there's more juice to squeeze and I've got a lot of cushioning below if the price does start dropping. If this strategy is broadly applied by other retail investors (and it's a pretty classic and intuitive investing/gambling strategy), volume will slow down and the price will generally plateau.
So as a short, aren't you happy that the price stopped rising? HELL NO. You need that price to either fall so you can close at a profit or rise sharply so you can roll your position up. $GME remaining tremendously overvalued at a steady price for a long time would be horrible for you as a short. You've taken out a huge loan, you're paying huge interest, and there seems to be no end in sight. This is how shorts playing volatility are forced to close at big losses - when the interest over time eats up all of their potential profits before volatility strikes. I think this is the scenario in which we'd see a true MOASS.
Disclaimer: I am just a guy on the internet. I don't have specialized education in the market, but I think this is a pretty plausible thesis for the continued short interest and how the MOASS might develop. I could be totally wrong! Let me know what you think about it in the comments
Positions: 100 shares $GME, avg cost basis 103.95