GameStop axes its short-lived NFT marketplace as it retreats from crypto
GameStop axes its short-lived NFT marketplace as it retreats from crypto
GameStop has notified customers that it's shutting down its NFT market, effective February 2. The marketplace launched in July 2022. GameStop also shut down its year-old crypto wallet in November, citing "regulatory uncertainty."
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But..but...moass?
What the GameStop bros fail to realize is that while they are essentially correct about the crookedness of the market, they have still backed a losing horse.
GameStop just doesn't offer most gamers good value so they don't spend their dollars there. This is on top of bad treatment of low-level employees, which is quickly becoming a death sentence for companies whose main demographics work retail jobs and know exactly how bad retail work like GameStop can be. Finally investing in shit like NFTs that no real gamer wanted or asked for. (On top of NFTs being a joke of a scam)
MOASS would be a beautiful thing but GameStop will not be the gust of wind that blows down this house of cards.
There is actually a fantastic video essay about Gamestop bros by Folding Ideas (the guy who made Line Goes Up) called "This is financial advise". I highly recommend listening to it, the whole thing turned out to be way more complicated than it seemed.
Here's the vid in question, I second, it's very good.
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Thanks for the suggestion! It was a good video. Also reinforces my belief that the rational, boring narrative is almost always the right one.
I second this recommendation.
The market is crooked, but not at the level of crazy conspiracies the Superstonk bros think / thought. A company took a big gamble on Gamestop tanking, and they were caught. They paid a huge price, and it's over. There's still market manipulation going on, there's still trading in dark pools, and the regulators are not able to keep up. But, it's not a crazy conspiracy with everyone trying to screw the little guy. It's big guys all trying to screw each-other, and screwing the little guy if they have a chance, and the regulators are trying and failing to keep up.
Exactly. I think the market is, on average, a good representation of value, but only over longer time periods and across sectors. All bets are off with individual stocks.
So I buy index funds, and that has worked out well for me. Buying individual stocks has more to do with psychology and gambling than analysis (e.g. buy Tesla because it's popular and will get more popular, not because there selling a lot of cars and will sell more cars), and that's just not my bag.
I would hesitate before buying any individual company's stock these days. There's just too much manipulation, hedging, FOMO, and just irrationality associated with any given company. Gamestop is a poster child for irrationality, but so is WeWork, where a lot of very serious investors somehow convinced themselves that a real-estate company should be valued like a tech company.
Throw Tesla in that bucket as well, especially since they'll see a ton more competition.
Large companies like Apple and Amazon are probably pretty safe, but mostly because they have so much momentum that big movements are unlikely in the short to medium term.
I don't bother though, because I just don't see much expected payoff to taking on more risk vs larger baskets of stocks
Yeah, I wouldn't touch Tesla with a 10-metre pole. That's a prime hype stock that IMO is massively overvalued. But, even if I'm convinced it's overvalued I wouldn't short it because the market can stay irrational much longer than I can stay solvent.
Large companies like Apple and Amazon are probably pretty safe, but mostly because they have so much momentum
The problem with that is that they're so big that the upside is not great. But, the downsides are murky. What if Biden is re-elected and the justice department, FTC, etc. get serious about breaking them up? Besides, in the medium term a lot of their share price is based on hype, FOMO, etc.
With index funds, you get a good hedge against any one company's swings. And, if Alphabet is hurt probably Meta will benefit so you in the end you're just tracking tech stocks in general.
The problem with that is that they're so big that the upside is not great
The upside should mirror the market because the top 10 companies in the S&P make up ~30% of the index. So if Apple, Amazon, etc make big moves, the market will likely make similar moves.
So buying a handful of massive companies is just an inefficient way to buy the S&P, which is just an inefficient way of buying the whole market.
It's not the worst idea, I just don't see much of a point. I don't know why I should expect Apple to outpace the market.
But yeah, I totally agree with you, buying funds makes a lot more sense. I do pretty much zero work and get most of the benefits for a fraction of the risk.
So buying a handful of massive companies is just an inefficient way to buy the S&P, which is just an inefficient way of buying the whole market.
Mostly, sure. But, the difference is that the index contains some of the smaller companies too. If there's something that hits all the big companies at the same time (like robust anti-trust enforcement actions), the mid-sized companies are the ones who are most likely to benefit because they can take advantage of the pressure on the big companies.
If you just invested in the big companies you could be hurt, but theoretically if you invest in the whole market (or an index representing it) you could have the losses in the big tech stocks offset by growth in the mid-sized ones.
Anyhow, I think we mostly agree. The market is manipulated, many traders, even pros, are irrational. So, even if you know what you're doing, it's smart to hedge and spread your risk around.
(On top of NFTs being a joke of a scam)
They really are the platonic ideal of a scam. There's just so much nothing there. No facade, no structure, no foundation. It's the wire mother of wire fraud.
Only sorta. I’m not sure how much they are right about the crookedness of the market - it’s just that retail investors are at a severe disadvantage to institutional ones.
What they did do was create a short squeeze for a bunch of folks (rightly) betting that GameStop is overvalued because it’s a shit company with no real path to an increasingly digital market.
The problem, basically, is that the people saying "buy Gamestop" originally were people who figured "Hey, this stock is probably slightly undervalued." As in, this is $2 but it could probably climb to more like $2.50 or $3 over the next five years.
Then WSB started to meme the thing like crazy, because WSB are a bunch of degenerate gamblers who don't give a fuck about actual sensible investment strategies, which created the conditions for a short squeeze, which pulled in a bunch of newbie retail investors who drove the squeeze even higher, but were given absolutely no realistic expectations about what that would look like.
I was one of those newbie retail investors, and I actually tripled my money on GME, because I saw the price spike, went "Yep, that's the squeeze, I'm out" and got my tendies, or whatever the fuck these idiots call it.
But for a lot of these people, the expectations of what this short squeeze would look like had basically snowballed into "Remake the global economy with us at the top" so they bought in hard, and kept buying in, way past the point where the squeeze was done, past the point of having any reasonable expectation of cashing out at anything other than a huge loss.
So now they're stuck basically praying for a miracle, because they've got nothing else left.
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Yeah, there are way too many folks who let the hype about an interesting technical trading opportunity go their head, got emotionally invested, and now are confusing it with fundamental analysis.
I disagree with many of your ideas..you are ignoring many positive facts about gamestop.
Employees were treated badly in the past, but go to a store now, it was full like literally full. The guy at the counter was having an a Animated discussion about pokemon with a kid and her mom having a blast.
Nft images are the dumbest use case of a new technology I've ever seen, that being said dismissing nfts as a new technology shows how ignorant you really are to the whole situation this technology will take over many things but it will probably be transparent to you.
Many of the people jumping on the nfts are bad bandwagon sound exactly like dumb internet haters from the 80s and 90s, keep your negativity.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/nfts-werent-supposed-end-like/618488/
But the NFT prototype we created in a one-night hackathon had some shortcomings. You couldn’t store the actual digital artwork in a blockchain; because of technical limits, records in most blockchains are too small to hold an entire image. Many people suggested that rather than trying to shoehorn the whole artwork into the blockchain, one could just include the web address of an image, or perhaps a mathematical compression of the work, and use it to reference the artwork elsewhere.
We took that shortcut because we were running out of time. Seven years later, all of today’s popular NFT platforms still use the same shortcut. This means that when someone buys an NFT, they’re not buying the actual digital artwork; they’re buying a link to it. And worse, they’re buying a link that, in many cases, lives on the website of a new start-up that’s likely to fail within a few years. Decades from now, how will anyone verify whether the linked artwork is the original?
Anil Dash helped create the first NFT spec in a coding jam, and it had serious limitations. The bit-limitation is huge. NFT's still only contain a URL. What happens if the website hosting that URL goes down? Well now your NFT points to nothing because it's actually just a fucking link, not an actual image.
But sure, this somehow has actual utility in a world where data can be copied infinitely at no cost and that's a good thing. We should be fighting to remove paywalls to access information, not adding fucking digital ones.
Because I just can't wait for every college textbook to be an NFT to try to stop textbook piracy. What a joke. That shit just makes me want to pirate things and break digital locks more. Yarr Harr Fiddle Dee Dee!
There is so little use for NFTs in the real world.
Do we live on different planets? I have been to my local GameStop (decent location next to a busy Target and just off the highway) tons of times, and there's rarely more than one customer there. Their used games are way overpriced, their selection sucks, and accessories are relatively limited.
I used to love going to GameStop as a kid, but everything I liked about it seems to be gone.
While I agree there is room for actually useful use cases in the NFT technical design the fact is unequivocally that GameStop built a market place for the dumb pictures. And that was a collosal waste of money and good will. They went Hero to Zero in my eyes with that move.
Not your keys? Not your crypto.
Don’t worry. The meme stock bros will come up with a new stupid narrative about how this was always part of the plan and how no one actually believed the NFT marketplace was the catalyst for moass. Just trust the plan and keep holding.
Are they still at it? I thought this would have collapsed by now.
Its below 15 dollars atm and is continuing to fall.
Lmao no kidding, after reading your comment I went to google and typed in "reddit crypto gamestop nfts" and the second result was literally a 100% serious post from Superstonks 2 days ago titled "Why Gamestop's NFT Marketplace Closure Is A Great Sign". Forget bitcoin, if you want to get rich just invest in copium instead
GameStop could go completely out of business and they would still manage to find a way to continue the copium.
There's even an example of that with a related cult, the Bed Bath and Beyond guys. Said company went under, but the memestock holders still continued the copium.
Stonks are at 1 cent, buy and hodl! Diamondhands!
A lot of people who were into Gamestop didn't want them to get into NFTs like that anyway in the first place.