Second layer solutions for prediction markets.

'''
Muslims and it's 'religion' are just ancient history in the next 2 or 3 decades. They have no place in the modern financial markets. Just don't bet on Islam if you want to make some real cash (thank me later)
'''
Context Link
Go1dfish undelete link
unreddit undelete link
Author: justfgz

edit: thanks for the awards. I'd be a dick to take credit. Go check out the one-man-band who actually wrote it---I've been reading for a couple months, good stuff https://bestinterest.blog/explain-the-big-short/
(Best Interest) This post will explain the Big Short and the 2008 subprime mortgage collapse in simple terms.
This post is a little longer than usual–maybe give yourself 20 minutes to sift through it. But I promise you’ll leave feeling like you can tranche (that’s a verb, right?!) the whole financial system!
Key Players
First, I want to introduce the players in the financial crisis, as they might not make sense at first blush. One of the worst parts about the financial industry is how they use deliberately obtuse language to explain relatively simple ideas. Their financial acronyms are hard to keep track of. In order to explain the Big Short, these players–and their roles–are key.
Individuals, a.k.a. regular people who take out mortgages to buy houses; for example, you and me!
Mortgage lenders, like a local bank or a mortgage lending specialty shop, who give out mortgages to individuals. Either way, they’re probably local people that the individual home-buyer would meet in person.
Big banks, such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, who buy lots of mortgages from lenders. After this transaction, the homeowner would owe money to the big bank instead of the lender.
Collateralized debt obligations (CDOs)—deep breath!—who take mortgages from big banks and bundle them all together into a bond (see below). And just like before, this step means that the home-buyer now owes money to the CDO. Why is this done?! I’ll explain, I promise.
Ratings agencies, whose job is to determine the risk of a CDO—is it filled with safe mortgages, or risky mortgages?
Investors, who buy part of a CDO and get repaid as the individual homeowners start paying back their mortgage.
Feel lost already? I’m going to be a good jungle guide and get you through this. Stick with me.
Quick definition: Bonds
A bond can be thought of as a loan. When you buy a bond, you are loaning your money. The issuer of the bond is borrowing your money. In exchange for borrowing your money, the issuer promises to pay you back, plus interest, in a certain amount of time. Sometimes, the borrower cannot pay the investor back, and the bond defaults, or fails. Defaults are not good for the investor.
The CDO—which is a bond—could hold thousands of mortgages in it. It’s a mortgage-backed bond, and therefore a type of mortgage-backed security. If you bought 1% of a CDO, you were loaning money equivalent to 1% of all the mortgage principal, with the hope of collecting 1% of the principal plus interest as the mortgages got repaid.
There’s one more key player, but I’ll wait to introduce it. First…
The Whys, Explained
Why does an individual take out a mortgage? Because they want a home. Can you blame them?! A healthy housing market involves people buying and selling houses.
How about the lender; why do they lend? It used to be so they would slowly make interest money as the mortgage got repaid. But nowadays, the lender takes a fee (from the homeowner) for creating (or originating) the mortgage, and then immediately sells to mortgage to…
A big bank. Why do they buy mortgages from lenders? Starting in the 1970s, Wall St. started buying up groups of loans, tying them all together into one bond—the CDO—and selling slices of that collection to investors. When people buy and sell those slices, the big banks get a cut of the action—a commission.
Why would an investor want a slice of a mortgage CDO? Because, like any other investment, the big banks promised that the investor would make their money back plus interest once the homeowners began repaying their mortgages.
You can almost trace the flow of money and risk from player to player.
At the end of the day, the investor needs to get repaid, and that money comes from homeowners.
CDOs are empty buckets
Homeowners and mortgage lenders are easy to understand. But a big question mark swirls around Wall Street’s CDOs.
I like to think of the CDO as a football field full of empty buckets—one bucket per mortgage. As an investor, you don’t purchase one single bucket, or one mortgage. Instead, you purchase a thin horizontal slice across all the buckets—say, a half-inch slice right around the 1-gallon mark.
As the mortgages are repaid, it starts raining. The repayments—or rain—from Mortgage A doesn’t go solely into Bucket A, but rather is distributed across all the buckets, and all the buckets slowly get re-filled.
As long as your horizontal slice of the bucket is eventually surpassed, you get your money back plus interest. You don’t need every mortgage to be repaid. You just need enough mortgages to get to your slice.
It makes sense, then, that the tippy top of the bucket—which gets filled up last—is the highest risk. If too many of the mortgages in the CDO fail and aren’t repaid, then the tippy top of the bucket will never get filled up, and those investors won’t get their money back.
These horizontal slices are called tranches, which might sound familiar if you’ve read the book or watched the movie.
So far, there’s nothing too wrong about this practice. It’s simply moving the risk from the mortgage lender to other investors. Sure, the middle-men (banks, lenders, CDOs) are all taking a cut out of all the buy and sell transactions. But that’s no different than buying lettuce at grocery store prices vs. buying straight from the farmer. Middle-men take a cut. It happens.
But now, our final player enters the stage…
Credit Default Swaps: The Lynchpin of the Big Short
Screw you, Wall Street nomenclature! A credit default swap sounds complicated, but it’s just insurance. Very simple, but they have a key role to explain the Big Short.
Investors thought, “Well, since I’m buying this risky tranche of a CDO, I might want to hedge my bets a bit and buy insurance in case it fails.” That’s what a credit default swap did. It’s insurance against something failing. But, there is a vital difference between a credit default swap and normal insurance.
I can’t buy an insurance policy on your house, on your car, or on your life. Only you can buy those policies. But, I could buy insurance on a CDO mortgage bond, even if I didn’t own that bond!
Not only that, but I could buy billions of dollars of insurance on a CDO that only contained millions of dollars of mortgages.
It’s like taking out a $1 million auto policy on a Honda Civic. No insurance company would allow you to do this, but it was happening all over Wall Street before 2008. This scenario essentially is “the big short” (see below)—making huge insurance bets that CDOs will fail—and many of the big banks were on the wrong side of this bet!
Credit default swaps involved the largest amounts of money in the subprime mortgage crisis. This is where the big Wall Street bets were taking place.
Quick definition: Short
A short is a bet that something will fail, get worse, or go down. When most people invest, they buy long (“I want this stock price to go up!”). A short is the opposite of that.
Certain individuals—like main characters Steve Eisman (aka Mark Baum in the movie, played by Steve Carrell) and Michael Burry (played by Christian Bale) in the 2015 Oscar-nominated film The Big Short—realized that tons of mortgages were being made to people who would never be able to pay them back.
If enough mortgages failed, then tranches of CDOs start to fail—no mortgage repayment means no rain, and no rain means the buckets stay empty. If CDOs fail, then the credit default swap insurance gets paid out. So what to do? Buy credit default swaps! That’s the quick and dirty way to explain the Big Short.
Why buy Dog Shit?
Wait a second. Why did people originally invest in these CDO bonds if they were full of “dog shit mortgages” (direct quote from the book) in the first place? Since The Big Short protagonists knew what was happening, shouldn’t the investors also have realized that the buckets would never get refilled?
For one, the prospectus—a fancy word for “owner’s manual”—of a CDO was very difficult to parse through. It was hard to understand exactly which mortgages were in the CDO. This is a skeevy big bank/CDO practice. And even if you knew which mortgages were in a CDO, it was nearly impossible to realize that many of those mortgages were made fraudulently.
The mortgage lenders were knowingly creating bad mortgages*.* They were giving loans to people with no hopes of repaying them. Why? Because the lenders knew they could immediately sell that mortgage—that risk—to a big bank, which would then securitize the mortgage into a CDO, and then sell that CDO to investors. Any risk that the lender took by creating a bad mortgage was quickly transferred to the investor.
So…because you can’t decipher the prospectus to tell which mortgages are in a CDO, it was easier to rely on the CDO’s rating than to evaluate each of the underlying mortgages. It’s the same reason why you don’t have to understand how engines work when you buy a car; you just look at Car & Driver or Consumer Reports for their opinions, their ratings.
The Ratings Agencies
Investors often relied on ratings to determine which bonds to buy. The two most well-known ratings agencies from 2008 were Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s (heard of the S&P 500?). The ratings agency’s job was to look at a CDO that a big bank created, understand the underlying assets (in this case, the mortgages), and give the CDO a rating to determine how safe it was. A good rating is “AAA”—so nice, it got ‘A’ thrice.
So, were the ratings agencies doing their jobs? No! There are a few explanations for this:

Even they—the experts in charge of grading the bonds—didn’t understand what was going on inside a CDO. The owner’s manual descriptions (prospectuses) were too complicated. In fact, ratings agencies often relied on big banks to teach seminars about how to rate CDOs, which is like a teacher learning how to grade tests from Timmy, who still pees his pants. Timmy just wants an A.
Ratings agencies are profit-driven companies. When they give a rating, they charge a fee. But if the agency hands out too many bad grades, then their customers—the big banks—will take their requests elsewhere in hopes of higher grades. The ratings agencies weren’t objective, but instead were biased by their need for profits.
Remember those fraudulent mortgages that the lenders were making? Unless you did some boots-on-the-ground research, it was tough to uncover this fact. It’s hard to blame the ratings agencies for not catching this.

Who’s to blame?
Everyone? Let’s play devil’s advocate…

Individuals: some people point the finger at homeowners, saying, “You should know better than to buy a $1 million house on a teacher’s salary.” I find this hard to swallow. These people, surrounded by the American home-ownership dream, were sold the idea that they would be fine. The mortgage lender had no incentive to sell a good mortgage, they only had an incentive to sell a mortgage. So, it’s hard for me to put too much blame on the homeowners.
Mortgage lenders: someone knew. I’m not saying that all the mortgage lenders were fully aware of the implications of their actions, but some people knew that fraudulent loans were being made, and chose to ignore that fact. For example, check out whistleblower Eileen Foster.
Big banks: Yes sir! There’s certainly blame here. Rather than get into all of the various money-grubbing, I want to call out one specific anecdote. Back in 2010, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein testified in front of Congress. Here it is:

To explain further, there are two things going on here.
First, Goldman Sachs bankers were selling CDOs to investors. They wanted to make a commission on the sale.
At the same time, other bankers ALSO AT GOLDMAN SACHS were buying credit default swaps, a.k.a. betting against the same CDOs that the first Goldman Sachs bankers were selling.
This is like selling someone a racehorse with cancer, and then immediately going to the track to bet against that horse. Blankfein’s defense in this video is, “But the horse seller and the bettor weren’t the same people!” And the Congressmen responds, “But they worked for the same stable, and collected the same paychecks!”
So do the big banks deserve blame? You tell me.
Inspecting Goldman Sachs
One reason Goldman Sachs survived 2008 is that they began buying credit default swaps (insurance) just in time before the housing market crashed. They were still on the bad side of some bets, but mostly on the good side. They were net profitable.
Unfortunately for them, the banks that owed Goldman money were going bankrupt from their own debt, and then Goldman never would have been able to collect on their insurance. Goldman would’ve had to payout on their “bad” bets, while not collecting on their “good” bets. In their own words, they were “toast.”
This is significant. Even banks in “good” positions would’ve gone bankrupt, because the people who owed the most money weren’t able to repay all their debts. Imagine a chain; Bank A owes money to Bank B, and B owes money to Bank C. If Bank A fails, then B can’t collect their debt, and B can’t pay C. Bank C made “good” bets, but aren’t able to collect on them, and then they go out of business.
These failures would’ve rippled throughout the world. This explains why the US government felt it necessary to bail-out the banks. That federal money allowed banks in “good” positions to collect their profits and “stop the ripple” from tearing apart the world economy. While CDOs and credit default swap explain the Big Short starting, this ripple of failure is the mechanism that affected the entire world.
Betting more than you have
But if someone made a bad bet—sold bad insurance—why didn’t they have money to cover that bet? It all depends on risk. If you sell a $100 million insurance policy, and you think there’s a 1% chance of paying out that policy, what’s your exposure? It’s the potential loss multiplied by the probability = 1% times $100 million, or $1 million.
These banks sold billions of dollars of insurance under the assumption that there was a 5%, or 3%, or 1% chance of the housing market failing. So they had 20x, or 30x, or 100x less money on hand then they needed to cover these bets.
Turns out, there was a 100% chance that the market would fail…oops!
Blame, expounded
Ratings agencies—they should be unbiased. But they sold themselves off for profit. They invited the wolves—big banks—into their homes to teach them how to grade CDOs. Maybe they should read a blog to explain the Big Short to them. Of course they deserve blame. Here’s another anecdote of terrible judgment from the ratings agencies:
Think back to my analogy of the buckets and the rain. Sometimes, a ratings agency would look at a CDO and say, “You’re never going to fill up these buckets all the way. Those final tranches—the ones that won’t get filled—they’re really risky. So we’re going to give them a bad grade.” There were “Dog Shit” tranches, and Dog Shit gets a bad grade.
But then the CDO managers would go back to their offices and cut off the top of the buckets. And they’d do this for all their CDOs—cutting off all the bucket-top rings from all the different CDO buckets. And then they’d super-glue the bucket-top rings together to create a field full of Frankenstein buckets, officially called a CDO squared. Because the Frankenstein buckets were originally part of other CDOs, the Frankenstein buckets could only start filling up once the original buckets (which now had the tops cut off) were filled. In other words, the CDO managers decided to concentrate all their Dog Shit in one place, and super glue it together.
A reasonable person would look at the Frankenstein Dog Shit field of buckets and say, “That’s turrible, Kenny.”
BUT THE RATINGS AGENCIES GAVE CDO-SQUAREDs HIGH GRADES!!! Oh I’m sorry, was I yelling?!
“It’s diversified,” they would claim, as if Poodle shit mixed with Labrador shit is better than pure Poodle shit.
Again, you tell me. Do the ratings agencies deserve blame?!
Does the government deserve blame?
Yes and no.
For example, part of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1992 mandated that the government mortgage finance firms (Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae) purchase a certain number of sub-prime mortgages.
On its surface, this seems like a good thing: it’s giving money to potential home-buyers who wouldn’t otherwise qualify for a mortgage. It’s providing the American Dream.
But as we’ve already covered today, it does nobody any good to provide a bad mortgage to someone who can’t repay it. That’s what caused this whole calamity. Freddie and Fannie and HUD were pumping money into the machine, helping to enable it. Good intentions, but they weren’t paying attention to the unintended outcomes.
And what about the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC), the watchdogs of Wall Street. Do they have a role to explain the Big Short? Shouldn’t they have been aware of the Big Banks, the CDOs, the ratings agencies?
Yes, they deserve blame too. They’re supposed to do things like ensure that Big Banks have enough money on hand to cover their risky bets. This is called proper “risk management,” and it was severely lacking. The SEC also had the power to dig into the CDOs and ferret out the fraudulent mortgages that were creating them. Why didn’t they do that?
Perhaps the issue is that the SEC was/is simply too close to Wall Street, similar to the ratings agencies getting advice from the big banks. Watchdogs shouldn’t get treats from those they’re watching. Or maybe it’s that the CDOs and credit default swaps were too hard for the SEC to understand.
Either way, the SEC doesn’t have a good excuse. If you’re in bed with the people you’re regulating, then you’re doing a bad job. If you’re rubber stamping things you don’t understand, then you’re doing a bad job.
Explain the Big Short, shortly
You’re about 2500 words into my “short summary.” But the important things to remember:

Financial acronyms suck.
Money flowed from the investors down to the mortgage lenders, and the risk flowed from the mortgage lenders up to the investors. In between, the big banks and CDOs acted as middle men and intermediaries.
When someone feels like their actions have no risk, or no consequences, they’ll behave poorly (big banks, mortgage lenders)When someone is given what seems like an amazing deal, they’ll take it (individual home owners).
CDOs are like empty buckets. Mortgage payments are like rain, filling the buckets. Investors buy tranches, or slices, across all the buckets. If mortgages fail, then the buckets might not fill up, and the investors won’t get their money back.
CDOs are intentionally complex. So complex, that not even the people grading them understood what was going on (ratings agencies).
Buying insurance on something your do not own is a behavior with potential for abuse (big banks)
Buying insurance on something for more than it’s worth is a behavior with potential for abuse (big banks). This is where most of the money in the financial crisis switched hands.

And with that, I’d like to announce the opening of the Best Interest CDO. Rather than invest in mortgages, I’ll be investing in race horses. Don’t ask my why, but the current top stallion is named ‘Dog Shit.’ He’ll take Wall Street by storm.
If you don’t mind my cussing but you do like this content, consider subscribing to the email list to get these articles (and nothing more) sent to your inbox every week.
I hope this post helped if you were looking for someone to explain the Big Short. Thanks for reading the Best Interest.

Source: https://bestinterest.blog/explain-the-big-short/

Hey Folks,
My first ever Reddit post and I guess I chose to make an essay of it. This post is about how 2020 has been a stellar year for me in the stock market. For context, I'm 32 and have a been trading for about 7 years. I started in 2013 with stocks and then in 2016, I switched to options trading which had disastrous consequences at first, but is also the reason I eventually managed to hit the million dollar mark. Disclosure: I have a pretty stable career completely unrelated to the finance world so a lot of this is mostly self taught, which I am sure is also the case with most readers :)
I will preface this post by saying that I am aware that there have been a bunch of success stories in the market in 2020 and by no means do I intend for my excitement and elation in sharing my story to come of as chutzpah. 2020 has been a crazy year considering the adjustments we have had to make to our lives because of Covid. The "benefit" of this has been the ability to wfh and this lifestyle change has spawned a whole new population of day traders. As an inhabitant of an area that follows Pacific Time, the 2.5 or so hours before work officially begins has been an absolute blessing for me. This additional time coupled with super favorable market conditions, gumption/balls of steel and a good technical understanding or experience of the stock market are the factors that probably led to my success. I will also say you need A LOT OF LUCK in this process. Sometimes things just work out for you in life and you ABSOLUTELY need that to even come close to achieving something like this.
Point to note: This post is going to ignore the injection and removal of some of my own funds along the way. You can assume the highest "baseline" amount I ever had in the account was around 140k. I mention starting at 11k but please note in no way is this post saying I went from 11k to >1 million.
Here's this year's action and the next few images summarize/document my crazy journey to get to this point.
BOOM portfolio as of 10/1/2020. 3000%. You can do it too!
I started trading 7 years ago. Mostly stocks. It was all good but humans have a propensity for risky behavior and I am human after all. This tendency meant that I couldn't just let my money sit in an account and grow gradually. I will admit I have a gamblerisk taker mentality and you must realize how critical this characteristic is to achieving success like this. Anyway, started dabbling in options in 2016 and I probably went about it the wrong way. My first foray into the options space was via long calls (which I realized later is actually only recommended for Options "Veterans" and not for those starting out as novice traders). Got burned A LOT along the way . I start with 11k in 2015ish and built that to about 39k by May 2017 and then literally lost more than 50% by 2019. Yuck! I know. Trust me there were days I would hate myself for being so incompetent or just displaying terrible money management. For this post, let's assume you only start seeing the action from Jan 8 2016 (image below)

The starting value here is reflected as ~100k
It's not so obvious anymore because the scale has been affected massively by the spike this year. But for clarity, my lowest point was Sep 2019 (See image below). I was heavily leveraged and this was where I was basically ready to give up. Thank god I didn't. So what changed? Read on!

https://preview.redd.it/l5ugxjuhuiq51.png?width=566&format=png&auto=webp&s=032d472e0e912f43b35547214eacdae371870311
So in retrospect, I think we were in a very bearish environment between 2018 and 2019. People don't reference it as a bear market because lots of stocks did climb in that period (and it technically wasn't a bear market) but the tariffs on the Far East really messed with a lot of trading strategies and just market movement in general. My favorite stock in the early part of wealth building was AMD! I used that to build my portfolio and get out of the rut, post 2019. I basically took all my 80-90k (46k + 100% margin) and bought long AMD calls with strikes very close to the market price it was trading at in June-Sep 2018 and expirations 4-6 months out and just waited. POTUS did us all a great favor by ending the damn tariffs and that's when this party started.
By March 2020, right before Covid, I hit 292k or so and was loving life and every minute of what I had pulled off. I will admit somewhere along the way between Oct 2019 and March 2020, I had traded NVDA and a few other large cap growth stocks given I now had all this additional purchasing power. BUT Guess what? My dumbass didn't take any profit! Or if I did, I reinvested it into the market. Remember what Mathew Mcconaughey's character says in WoWS? " They're all f**ing addicted. As brokers, we take their money out from 1 stock and dump it in another and just keep making money. Who cares about the investor!" .... So anyway, Covid strikes and BAM! my portfolio fell back to around 105k. I was pissed (I am sure many of you suffered the same fate). Thankfully, we have had a V shaped recovery (or K depending on what your political affiliation is) and I basically used the next 6 months from March till today to supercharge my portfolio to what you saw in the first image.
So here's what I learned along the way:
Disclaimer: None of what I mention in this post should be taken as financial advice. I accept no responsibility for how you do/do not use this information in your own trading strategies

The power of compounding is a beautiful thing. People understand this but don't full appreciate what this can do for you. If you start at 10k, you should aim to get to 20k first before trying to fly to 100k. When you get to a 100k, make sure you don't lose a single cent and have to start again from scratch. 100k with 100k margin = 200k. That can get you an ROI a helluva lot larger than if you were to start with 10k again. Grow your money in steps but know that in the casino, to win more, you have to bet more, which in this case would be your new principal amount after you have made profit.
Don't waste time trading rubbish. I see lots of new investors chasing the dollar stocks hoping they reach $10. Yes I did it with AMD but when I started trading AMD it had already gone from $3 to $16 in a year so the story was starting to build up! Penny stocks/pink sheet stocks are trash. Please don't waste your time on that. Large cap growth is the best way to make money. It's all about %. One option of TSLA or NFLX or AMZN purchased at the right time will make you a lot more than 1000 shares of a trash penny stock.
Technical Indicators are your friends. Learn how to use them, particularly in a bull market. I personally love Bollinger bands and RSI. These coupled with understanding the trend in a market will give you a significantly higher chance at making money than just speculating. Also, use these to either take profits off the table or to let your winners ride. 95% of all price action takes place within the +/-2 sigma bollinger bands(hence the definition). Don't believe me? Plot the chart yourself. Use the daily indicator for short term trading. Use the 3min or 5min chart for intra day trading.
If you are interesting in options trading, please go read or watch YouTube videos to understand how to get started. There is SO MUCH LITERATURE available for free. DONT PAY ANYONE to learn how to trade unless you want to contribute to the downpayment for their next Aston Martin :). Also, the Greeks didn't just give us great Mediterranean food, they are also the most important parameters in options trading. Delta and Theta should be with you at all times but dont' ignore gamma and vega. Alos understand how IV impacts your trading. The most successful/profitable strategy for me was (once I learned to do it correctly of course), buy call/put options with expiration>=2 months from the day you purchase them at a strike very close to the money. Don't worry about straddles and iron condors till you have mastered what the basics mean. Also, once you understand options and start buying them, know that writing Calls and Puts is a great way to collect premium as you grow your account. If you own shares, there's no reason you shouldn't be collecting extra income from writing calls against them. If a stock flies up too high, sell puts at 10% below the current price. In a bull market, you'll be hard pressed to find a growth stock that doesn't recover after tanking 10% in a 2 month time period.
Margin is your friend. Think of margin as the mistress/boy toy. He/She can give you unreal levels of pleasure but if he/she rats you out/bails on you, RIP. Use it wisely. Finally, trust nothing but your own instinct - No one but you is responsible for how you grow your account. Don't blindly follow people unless you understand what they are proposing. Most of us learn this the hard way (including me).
Take profit off the table but also let your winners run! Set yourself targets when you are in the very early stages of building your wealth. Remember the point I made about compounding? If you start at x, and make 20% on that, you are now at 1.2x. If you make 20% on that, you are now at 1.44x. I know you want to make 8x eventually but is it better to be realistic and try and grow 1.44x to 8x or go back down to 0.5x and then have to make your initial capital back and more? If your winners are up 20%, TAKE YOUR PROFIT. If you want to let it run, fine go ahead. But if you are now suddenly 50%, wtf are you waiting for? Are you going to stare at the screen hoping you suddenly see $1,000,000? That's not going to happen. Now, that said - in the current market climate which is a SEARINGLY HOT bull market, it is not unreasonable to see stocks climb 5-10% in a day. So? Take advantage of that of course but never ever let FOMO be the reason you lose out on profit.
Much like point 6, realize that you need to cut your losses when things don't work out. Go check out the CANSLIM method for some guidance on what targets to set yourself. E.g. in your early stages set tell yourself that no matter what, you will take profit at 20% upside and cut losses at -10% downside. On paper, with this math you can never lose. Of course, executing this requires curbing 10 different stages of human emotion which is why most never make consistent profit in the stock market.
Be greedy when others are fearful. I am at a stage now where I LOVE RED DAYS. Why? Because I know that in 24-48 hours the large cap growth stocks are going to recover and I will basically make close to 100% gains on my initial investment. Don't chase when others are chasing. Most of retail doesn't know wtf they are doing. Keep cash handy for days like this. Never be 100% invested with your entire portfolio and never be invested in a single stock unless you are very very sure based on technicals that you will see a rebound. And don't be scared to hit the buy button on a red day. Trust me, once you see it work you will instantly feel vindicated.
Finally, and most IMPORTANTLY. The risk taking mentality/gambler mentality is CRITICAL to making money. You won't hear this much and it might even be a controversial statement to make but your end goal should be to place a bet on a trade which you know, based on experience, will have a favorable/profitable outcome in the near future. To execute this you need to have the guts and the belief in what you are doing but also very low aversion to risk. I will add again that YOU NEED A LOT OF LUCK and a brazen assurance in your own abilities. These will come with time and you will likely make lots of mistakes along the way. But, if you are patient enough, you will reach that level where you stop second guessing your decisions and that's the day you are on your way to your dream portfolio.

Okay, I could probably write much more and I might edit this again in future but I will stop here for now. I hope you were able to take something from this. I respect your opinions so feel free to disagree with anything, everything I have said. I am just sharing my story and always happy to hear yours too!
Good luck folks. I hope you all make boatloads of money and have very happy, enjoyable lives regardless of whether you are motivated by money or not!
-Phantas

EDIT:
Thanks for the comments everyone. I appreciate both the love and the hate. Many of you make excellent points and valid arguments both for and against what I have done.
I saw a few posts about how this might be fake. I understand that this is my first post and so it does create some doubt. Video proof below for those who had concerns on the legitimacy of the screenshots. I apologize in advance for the disparity in the numbers. Due to this morning's gains, the portfolio value in the video is significantly higher than when I made this post.

https://reddit.com/link/j3fx2video/dteq0s1njpq51/player

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-can-be-thanked-creating-a-growing-ev-market-2020-10
A decade ago, no major automaker was going to bet on a non-existent electric-vehicle market. Big Auto was happy to sit back and watch Tesla try to create a new segment. But now, almost every carmaker has announced significant electric-vehicle ambitions for the coming decade.
Make no mistake: Without Tesla, this wouldn't be happening. We'd still be asking the circa 2006 question, "Who killed the electric car?" if Tesla hadn't reset the EV race in the years before the financial crisis, narrowly avoided bankruptcy, and positioned itself to deliver half a million vehicles in 2021 (and gift investors with a 9,200% return).
Now, the global EV market is poised to grow, especially in China, where auto sales are already millions more annually than in the US, with the potential to top out at twice what the US sees every year, around 16-17 million new cars, trucks, and SUVs. A large percentage of those new sales could be electric, and automakers don't want Tesla to capture them all.
Thanks for the awards.

The NBA is the parent company to the WNBA, since there is no WNBAdiscussion I figured this would be the place to speak openly and honestly about the WNBA from a 15 year NBA fan's perspective.
For those unfamiliar with the origins of the WNBA the league was founded 24 years ago by the NBA under commissioner David Stern. The goal of this league was to get more women interested in basketball and to give Top-level American talent a place to play on the home front.
Good intentions and for the first 5 years of the WNBA's existence things were looking up, the league expanded from 8 teams in 1996 to 16 teams to start the 2002 season. Average attendance started at roughly 9000 per game in 1996, spiked to 11k per game in 1998 and declined back to 9k per game in 2002.
Therein lies the first issue with the WNBA, after 2002 the per game attendance numbers started a slow decline, so much so that by time 2010 rolled around many teams were relocated to smaller arenas or simply folded. There are now 12 teams in the WNBA and only 3 of the founding teams are in the same city. (4 founding teams folded and 1 was relocated 3 times)
The viewership and per-game attendance numbers were always low, people blame lack of marketing but if we're being honest almost every single person knows the WNBA exists. I believe that the main is reason is the general sports watching market is simply uninterested in professional women's basketball. Think about it, how many people do you know who watch the WNBA? Who buy the jerseys? or even go to WNBA games? (Pre-corona) I'm willing to bet that the number is quite low.
The majority of sports consumers are male and the WNBA was created to lure females into sport consumption. On paper the idea makes sense right? 50% of people don't really watch sports and most are female, why not try to and acquire that market? The problem is in reality women consume so many other types of media that the WNBA simply does not compare to. Social Media sites, YouTube and even the Kardashians have higher rates of engagement and support than the WNBA ever will. Adam Silver even revealed during this interview that they are frustrated that women are not showing up to the games. He also revealed that the WNBA is supported predominantly by older men.
The next problem is the biggest issue with the WNBA, there is a huge lack of entertainment value when you actually watch a game. Don't get me wrong, these women are phenomenal players and are fundamentally very very good. The problem is that biology is a bit of a motherfucker. Women cannot compare to men in terms of strength, acceleration or verticality. Think about a player like Gary Harris. His vertical leaping ability and hangtime in this play is absurd. Gary Harris is a solid player but he is no superstar player like Lisa Leslie or Candace Parker or even Brittany Griner. Yet those are the only 3 players in the WNBA to have dunked ever and none of them could jump like Harris can.
When you watch an NBA game there is always a chance to see a moment that captures our imaginations or even exceed them. Think about this play JR Smith of all people did something that looked incredible. The entire stadium got on its feet, you probably have chills from watching that play. That is the power of the NBA.
The WNBA suffers from a lack of athleticism compared to the NBA and unless we make serious strides in genetic engineering that gap will simply never be closed.
Now we have to talk about money, a touchy subject because the WNBA does not share it's financial data with the public. Adam Silver also admitted that the WNBA receives 12 million a year from the NBA as a stipend yet the league itself still loses 20 million a year on average since its founding. Now all this would be scary enough to look at if I was a member of the WNBPA but the strange thing is all the coverage on the financials of the league are about the wage-gap between the two leagues. Granted initially the WNBPA said they just wanted the same percentage of BRI (basketball related income) as the men's league (men's league gets 50%). However if your league takes in roughly 60 million a year in income and loses 20 million a year, why would you be entitled to the same percentage? Your labor is not generating profits even close to what a healthy professional league should be.
Even if you triple the WNBA salary cap does it make the league more watchable? As per my earlier arguments I believe the answer is no.
Most WNBA players actually play overseas during the offseason in Eastern Europe and earn up to triple their WNBA income. Which begs the question why even come back? Just play in Europe make your money and rest during the regular WNBA season.
If you were a software engineer in Ohio and you got offered triple your salary to work in Poland or Turkey how seriously would you consider that job offer?
This isn't a manifesto trying to take down women's sports. I enjoy women's tennis, I loved watching the US women's soccer team run rampant over the world cup and even female golfers are starting to gain popularity which is fantastic!
This is specifically about how the WNBA is a league on the decline and it has failed to establish a foothold in the US. The market isn't there, the product is subpar, the business is bad and the players make significantly more money elsewhere.
I am curious to hear what you guys have to say about the WNBA, do you think it has a future? If so what can the league do to generate interest ?

Back in March, long before a short seller would raise questions about electric-truck company Nikola Corp. and hasten its founder’s exit, early investors in the company were expressing concerns of their own. Those investors, led by mutual-fund giant Fidelity Investments, were worried that Trevor Milton, for all his brash visionary talk and Twitter braggadocio, lacked the ability that Elon Musk possesses to deliver these sorts of newfangled products to market. They lobbied successfully to remove him as CEO before the company’s June IPO and for Milton’s father to leave the board, according to people familiar with the matter. When the deal was done, Milton only held the title of chairman, the post he resigned this month.
The back-room negotiations show that Milton’s past was a concern to investors months before General Motors Co. executives placed a bet on the company in a US$2 billion deal carved out after the IPO. They liked Milton’s vision and his ability to raise cash and felt the venture was safeguarded from his shortcomings in operations by his push upstairs, say people familiar with the matter. Nonetheless, the events that have unfolded since the short-seller report, with Nikola’s stock plunging amid a steady stream of negative headlines, have exposed just how high the risks still were.
Now, it’s up to former GM Vice Chairman Steve Girsky, whose blank-check company VectoIQ took Nikola public via reverse merger in June, and Nikola CEO Mark Russell to stabilize the business and regain investor confidence. The plan with GM was to use Nikola’s hot stock and Milton’s ability to raise money to build a hydrogen-fueled trucking business with GM’s technology.
“There is obviously someone on the diligence side who isn’t going to get a nice bonus this year,” said Reilly Brennan, founder of the venture capital fund Trucks Inc. “The best possible thing if you’re a shareholder is that Milton is no longer running the company and you have Girsky as chairman and GM providing technology.”
The GM deal was originally scheduled to close Sept. 30, and the automaker has said it plans to carry through, but that timing may slip, say people familiar with the matter. BP Plc is still engaged with Nikola in talks to partner on a network of hydrogen fueling stations for fuel-cell trucks the company hopes to sell, but also is slowing the pace for a deal, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. BP and GM declined to comment.
Milton’s tale reads like a Greek tragedy. The report by short seller Hindenburg Research accused Milton of overhyping Nikola’s technology and has prompted investigations by the Justice Department and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. A cousin has accused him of a decades-ago sexual assault, which he denies. The company’s value peaked at US$30 billion and is now worth about US$7 billion.
Girsky and GM Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra have both said publicly that they did plenty of due diligence. People familiar with the matter say that GM found out when scouting the deal that it had better batteries and fuel-cell technology but joined forces because Nikola had a working semi truck and access to capital markets. In addition, GM will get paid to build Nikola’s Badger pickup on existing assembly lines. Milton was so excited to get the Badger pickup program moving that he signed a deal that heavily favored GM, one of the people said.
Nikola’s stock and GM’s US$2 billion stake are worth less than half what they were on Sept. 8, when the deal was announced. Milton’s own stake is worth US$1.7 billion, down from almost US$5 billion at one point.
Milton said in a June interview with Bloomberg News that he grew up in modest surroundings in Layton, Utah. His family moved to Las Vegas when he was very young and he lost his mother to cancer shortly after moving back to Utah in the sixth grade. He wrote on Twitter he didn’t finish high school, earning an equivalency certification instead, and later dropped out of college. His Twitter account has since been deleted.
He grew up in a tight-knit Mormon family, according to Aubrey Smith, his first cousin. She went on social media recently and accused him of sexually assaulting her in 1999 when she was 15 and he was 17.
In a public account on Facebook and Twitter, and repeated in a phone interview, Smith said that Milton came onto her at the funeral of their grandfather. He took her shirt off without permission, Smith wrote, and then he touched her inappropriately before someone knocked at the door and she ran out.
Milton denied the allegations through a spokesman.
Smith said Milton raised money from family members to get his start. He founded and ran several businesses, including a home-security company that Milton claims he sold for US$1.5 million. Next, in 2009, he founded an e-commerce platform called Upillar.com, which Milton claims “pioneered the shopping cart online.”
Then he got into clean propulsion but ended up embroiled in litigation with dHybrid Inc., which he founded in 2009. The company retrofitted diesel vehicles with natural-gas-burning turbines, claiming the dual system had greater efficiency.
But a deal with Swift Transportation Co. in 2010 ended in court when Swift alleged dHybrid defaulted on a US$322,000 loan and that it retrofitted only half of the agreed vehicles. The case was dismissed in 2015.
Milton later tried to sell dHybrid to a company called sPower in May 2012 but that, too, got mired in lawsuits after sPower backed out and accused Milton of exaggerating its technological capabilities.
Amid the litigation, Milton started another company with a very similar name, dHybrid Systems, selling it in 2014 to Worthington Industries.
During an interview with Bloomberg in June, Milton said that dHybrid Inc. was a success but conceded that, “we ended up closing that one down because of some litigation.”
His next startup was Nikola, founding it in 2014 in Salt Lake City before moving to Phoenix. Emulating Musk, he took the name from the electricity pioneer Nikola Tesla, and the company was soon billed as the Tesla of Trucks. His plan was seen as potentially disrupting the entire transportation industry by making trucks that ran on batteries or hydrogen-fuel cells. He also planned to build a network of hydrogen filling stations.
Friends and Family
Milton had friends and family members working for Nikola despite resumes that didn’t match the job. His brother, Travis Milton, is director of hydrogen and infrastructure. His LinkedIn profile shows that most of his experience was being “self-employed” in Maui. The short seller, Hindenburg Research, said that Travis Milton poured concrete as a contractor. Milton’s father Bill was originally on the board but stepped down when VectoIQ took the company public.
The company’s stock prospectus said that Nikola had awarded more than 3 million stock options “to recognize the superior performance and contribution of specific employees.” The list included Travis Milton and an uncle, Lance Milton, the document said, acknowledging that they are relatives.
As Milton went public with Nikola’s technology, questions soon arose involving his claims about the company’s fuel-cell system. He bragged in an investor video in 2019 that the company had created “what other manufacturers said was impossible to design.” But while Nikola holds patents in fuel-cell and battery technology, most of its planned hardware was coming from German supplier Robert Bosch Gmbh.
Nikola Demonstrations
It became clear that Milton had gotten ahead of himself. A 2016 demonstration showed a truck that didn’t have a working hydrogen-fuel-cell system and was missing key parts, people familiar with the matter said in June. Milton said at the time that the parts were removed as a safety precaution.
In July of this year, he recorded a video of the semi truck in which he ran alongside the vehicle as it coasted at low speeds in a parking lot. Aping Musk’s combative social-media persona, Milton took a shot at his detractors saying, “these damned trolls, I wonder if they are going to apologize to everyone for the lies they spread the tens of thousands of comments about how fake we are.”
Girsky said in the webcast “Autoline This Week,” in which Bloomberg participated, that he has been in Nikola’s fuel-cell trucks and that they work.
Still, when the GM deal was done, GM will be supplying all of the technology for every global market except Europe. Nikola’s pickup truck, called Badger, will use GM’s Ultium battery, and the semis will run on a fuel cell developed by GM and Honda Motor Co.
Since Milton’s departure, Nikola has billed itself more as an integrator of other technologies into its Badger pickup and semi trucks.
For GM’s part, the automaker is protected from any financial downside. GM got 11 per cent of the stock for no cash investment and gets paid for its technology. If Nikola fails, GM won’t lose a dime.
Milton has remained silent and is out of the company. He unknowingly presaged his own downfall in the June interview with Bloomberg: “Part of becoming a better person in life is losing everything you have got and having nothing left.”
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/nikola-founder-milton-s-fall-reveals-what-his-backers-feared-1.1500376

The beginning I would likely handle it roughly as Subaru, given I dont tend to think very sharply with my guts being cut. A little better or a little worse.
Once in the mansion and after getting killed a few times by Rem-Ram and finding about the curse:
1) The first priority would be to learn a spell to die painlessly and immediately. No ifs and buts, this is going to be THE first and only priority.
2) Screw the "working in the mansion" part, I suck too much at house chores and I am too lazy for that. Mad respects for Subaru for handling it. I am staying as a guest, for a time.
3) Get a loan from Roswaal or sell him my phone. This is then when I begin exploiting RBD. There has to be betting and stock markets and I am going to break them.
4) Once I repay Roswaal then I would call a meeting and try to reveal as much as I can and be as upfront as I can. Instead of mentioning RBD I would likely paint it as some future seeing ability and use the profits as proof, to ease the maids doubts.
5) Build a fortune with RBD and then become a heavy financial backer for Emilia. Make a reputation that if you invest with me, you are becoming rich, the only condition on the agreement would be to pledge to support Emilia. This should sway a good chunk of the financial sector to her.
6) Go to the poor places, build homes, donate and upgrade the living standard, in the name of Emilia. Emilia is going to be the candidate of the people. I think that would be pretty much my strategy on Subaru's place. What about you? What would you do in Subaru's place?

As the title suggests - I’m all in on Bitcoin.
Background: 28 year old with no financial obligations (no house, wife, kids etc). I have a stable job working for a Hedge Fund in London.
The way I see Bitcoin is essentially an asymmetric risk/reward bet. There’s a possibility it doesn’t take off from the $10k mark and the price falls indefinitely.
On the flip side there is a multitude of bullish sentiment which could realistically 10x the price over the next 5 years.
My argument is - with house and equity prices at all time highs, what is my best bet to maximise my income for the future? A provably scarce hard asset that has an enormous network effect and the possibility to grow into a multi trillion market seems like a sensible option.
My strategy is definitely not for everyone. I am diversified in the sense that my salary is correlated with the stock market. If BTC and the equity market collapse simultaneously then I will cry myself to sleep for a few days but I’ll still be debt free.
In Satoshi we trust.

NVIDIA Corp. (NVDA) shares have soared in 2020, more than doubling versus an S&P 500 rising by less than 3%. The stock got an extra boost this past week after it announced it would acquire Arm Holdings from SoftBank Group for $40 billion. Despite the significant acquisition, some traders are betting the stock has seen its peak and is heading lower. Meanwhile, an analysis of the technical chart suggests the equity drops 12% from its price of $487 on September 18.
NVIDIA paid what amounts to nearly 21 times sales for Arm Holdings, based on the fiscal year 2020 results. However, that is about the same premium that SoftBank paid for Arm back in 2016, when SoftBank bought the company for $31 billion. One could argue that NVIDIA may have even overpaid for Arm, given that revenue growth has decelerated since 2015.
Betting The Shares Will Fall
The deal to acquire Arm from Softbank will be dilutive to existing shareholders. NVIDIA will pay $21.5 billion in its stock to SoftBank, allowing SoftBank to take a stake in NVIDIA of between 6.7% and 8.1%. That dilution could be why an options trader is betting that NVIDIA stock falls from its current levels.
On September 18, the open interest levels for the NVIDIA November 20 $500 puts and calls rose. The data shows that 4,000 of the $500 calls were sold for about $49.40, and 4,000 of the $500 puts were bought for approximately $52.90. It creates a bearish spread transaction where the trader paid about $3.50 for the contracts and is a bet the stock is below $496.50 by the expiration date.
Technicals Nearing A Breaking Point
Additionally, the technical chart suggests that NVIDIA shares may fall as well. The stock has already fallen about 18% from its peak, and those declines may grow worse. The shares are now sitting on an uptrend that formed in early March. Should the stock fall below that trendline and break support at $460, it could result in the shares falling to around $427, a drop of an additional 12%.
Expensive Deal
The deal for Arm Holdings is likely to prove to be an expensive one for NVIDIA, with the company paying about $21 billion in stock to close the acquisition, while likely financing the balance through cash and debt. The company had about $11 billion in cash and short-term investments at the end of the July quarter.
NVIDIA paid about 20.6 times those 2020 sales for Arm, about the same as the 20 times sales Softbank paid in 2016. But consider that Arm had revenue growth of just 1.5% in 2019 and 7.5% in 2020. Arm had revenue growth of 15% in 2015 in US dollar terms, and 22% in British pounds. When adjusting for growth, one could argue that NVIDIA could have gotten Arm for a lower price to sales multiple when considering the slower growth rate.
Growth Through Acquisition
The latest move, which follows last year’s purchase of Mellanox, could even be seen as a sign by some investors that NVIDIA now needs to move to a model of growth by addition, helping to maintain those big sales and earnings growth rates. The company needs to keep these tremendous growth rates to support the massive earnings multiple the market affords it, currently at 44.1 times next year’s earnings estimates.
It will be interesting to see how investors digest NVIDIA’s significant acquisition. Given the stock’s enormous move higher, it would not be surprising at all to see the shares fall to lower prices over the short- to medium-term.
Michael Kramer is a financial market strategist and the portfolio manager of the Mott Capital Thematic Growth Portfolio.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kramermichael/2020/09/20/nvidias-stocks-may-plunge-12-followings-it-deal-for-arm/amp/

Hey everyone, I am a former Wall Street trader and quant researcher. When I was preparing for my own interviews, I have noticed the lack of accurate information and so I will be providing my own perspectives. One common pattern I see is people building their own algorithm by blindly fitting statistical methods such as moving averages onto data.
I have published this elsewhere, but have copy pasted it entirely below for you to read to keep it in the spirit of the sub rules. Edit: Removed link.

What it was like trading on Wall Street

Right out of college, I began my trading career at an electronic hedge fund on Wall Street. Several friends pitched trading to me as being a more disciplined version of wallstreetbets that actually made money. After flopping several initial interviews, I was fortunate to land a job at a top-tier firm of the likes of Jane Street, SIG, Optiver and IMC.
On my first day, I was instantly hooked.
My primary role there was to be a market maker. To explain this, imagine that you are a merchant. Suppose you wanted to purchase a commodity such as an apple. You would need to locate an apple seller and agree on a fair price. Market makers are the middle-men that cuts out this interaction by being always willing to buy or sell at a given price.
In finance lingo, this is called providing liquidity to financial exchanges. At any given moment, you should be confident to liquidate your position for cash. To give a sense of scale, tens of trillions in dollars are processed through these firms every year.
My time trading has been one of the most transformative periods of my life. It not only taught me a lot of technical knowledge, but it also moulded me to be a self-starter, independent thinker, and hard worker. I strongly recommend anyone that loves problem solving to give trading a shot. You do not need a mathematics or finance background to get in.
The trading culture is analogous to professional sports. It is a zero sum game where there is a clear defined winner and loser — you either make or lose money. This means that both your compensation and job security is highly dependent on your performance. For those that are curious, the rough distribution of a trader’s compensation based on performance is a tenth of the annual NBA salary.
There is a mystique about trading in popular media due to the abstraction of complicated quantitative models. I will shed light on some of the fundamental principles rooted in all trading strategies, and how they might apply to you.

Arbitrage

One way traders make money is through an arbitrage or a risk free trade. Suppose you could buy an apple from Sam for $1, and then sell an apple to Megan at $3. A rational person would orchestrate both legs of these trades to gain $2 risk free.
Arbitrages are not only found in financial markets. The popular e-commerce strategy of drop-shipping is a form of arbitrage. Suppose you find a tripod selling on AliExpress at $10. You could list the same tripod on Amazon for $20. If someone buys from you, then you could simply purchase the tripod off AliExpress and take home a neat $10 profit.
The same could be applied to garage sales. If you find a baseball card for $2 that has a last sold price on EBay for $100, you have the potential to make $98. Of course this is not a perfect arbitrage as you face the risk of finding a buyer, but the upside makes this worthwhile.

Positive expected value bets

Another way traders make money is similar to the way a casino stacks the odds in their favour. Imagine you flip a fair coin. If it lands on heads you win $3, and if it lands on tails you lose $1. If you flip the coin only once, you may be unlucky and lose the dollar. However in the long run, you are expected to make a positive profit of $1 per coin flip. This is referred to as a positive expected value bet. Over the span of millions of transactions, you are almost guaranteed to make a profit.
This exact principle is why you should never gamble in casino games such as roulette. These games are all negative expected value bets, which guarantees you to lose money over the long run. Of course there are exceptions to this, such as poker or card counting in black jack.
The next time you walk into a casino, make a mental note to observe the ways it is designed to keep you there for as long as possible. Note the lack of windows and the maze like configurations. Even the free drinks and the cheap accommodation are all a farce to keep you there.

Relative Pricing

Relative pricing is a great strategy to use when there are two products that have clear causal relationships. Let us consider an apple and a carton of apple juice. Suppose there have a causal relationship where the carton is always $9 more expensive than the apple. The apple and the carton is currently trading at $1 and $10 respectively.
If the price of the apple goes up to $2, the price is not immediately reflected on the carton. There will always be a time lag. It is also important to note that there is no way we can determine if the apple is trading at fair value or if its overpriced. So how do we take advantage of this situation?
If we buy the carton for $10 and sell the apple for $2, we have essentially bought the ‘spread’ for $8. The spread is fairly valued at $9 due to the causal relationship, meaning we have made $1. The reason high frequency trading firms focus so much on latency in the nanoseconds is to be the first to scoop up these relative mispricing.
This is the backbone for delta one strategies. Common pairs that are traded against each other includes ETFs and their inverse counterpart, a particular stock against an ETF that contains the stock, or synthetic option structures.

Correlations

Correlations are mutual connections between two things. When they trend in the same direction they are said to have a positive correlation, and the vice versa is true for negative correlations. A popular example of positive correlation is the number of shark attacks with the number of ice-cream sales. It is important to note that shark attacks do not cause ice-cream sales.
Often times there are no intuitive reason for certain correlations, but they still work. The legendary Renaissance Technologies sifted through petabytes of historical data to find profitable signals. For instance, good morning weather in a city tended to predict an upward movement in its stock exchange. One could theoretically buy stock on the opening and sell at noon to make a profit.
One important piece of advice is to disregard any retail trader selling a course to you, claiming that they have a system. These are all scams. At best, these are bottom of the mill signals that are hardly profitable after transaction costs. It is also unlikely that you have the system latency, trading experience or research capabilities to do this on your own. It is possible, but very difficult.

Mean reversions

Another common strategy traders rely on is mean reversion trends. In the options world the primary focus is purchasing volatility when it is cheap compared to historical values, and vice versa. Buying options is essentially synonymous with buying volatility. Of course, it is not as simple as this so don’t go punting your savings on Robinhood using this strategy.
For most people, the most applicable mean reversion trend is interest rates. These tend to fluctuate up and down depending on if the central banks want to stimulate saving or spending. As global interest rates are next to zero or negative, it may be a good idea to lock in this low rate for your mortgages. Again, consult with a financial advisor before you do anything.

BIG UPDATE: New 13D/A Form; Ryan Cohen disclosed it has held recent talks with the retailer's management and board members. RC Ventures says it believes that under the right circumstances it could produce the best results for GameStop shareholders if it were more involved.
I. INTRODUCTION

When I look at the sentiment surrounding GameStop, it doesn’t take very long to see comments like these, yet here we are. What’s going on? Are people that stupid? Just jumping on the new console cycle? Idiots not pulling their gains and going to zero? When even wsb thinks the stock is a dud, it must be right? Nearly 120% short interest, yet the stock is up nearly 40% this week.
Its no secret GameStop has been hurting. The secular shift to digital has been pressuring them for some time with their highest margin category - used video software – under significant distress. Each year their gross margins contract with net income in the red these past few quarters. Everybody has written them off as the easiest short in the world, however I'm going to try to explain whats going on and tell you that buying GameStop may not be as bad as you think.

II. CONSOLES

Just to start things off, you have to remember we’re in the beginnings of the new console cycle. But what does that even mean? Well the advent of new consoles means new trade-ins, new product, new customers, and a fresh spike in GameStop’s popularity. Sales have stagnated the years prior, and they are all but certain to go up and remain elevated for the next 1-2 years. Note that against all counts, the company was actually profitable during the 2019 holiday season, with new consoles you can bet that they will annihilate all expectations and proceed into 4-8 more positive quarters off the cyclic shift. This is pretty unanimous, and everyone accepts that they will start reporting positive going forward. In fact, new console cycles are where GME has historically spiked.

III. POST CONSOLE CYCLE

At this point, the focus turns to what happens once the hype dies down. Digital will continue to erode upon physical, but the key factor here is that physical is not actually dying off. Its not going to zero. The biggest reason physical is sequentially a lower percentage of the market is because the total market size is increasing. Digital is shooting off while physical is largely stagnant. Note that physical games admittedly have their strengths. Not only are they structurally cheaper because you can resell them, they also have clear definitions of ownership and the collectability factor where you need to have a physical copy you can hold. In fact, two thirds of console video game players prefer physical vs digital.
While physical is here to stay, albeit at a weaker level, that isn’t enough to turn the tides for GameStop. You see, GameStop knows digital is the trend and here to stay, they are not fighting it, they are moving along the secular shift. GameStop sells digital games. GameStop is set to release a mobile app combining Game Informer and a online storefront by month end. They are doubling down on their online store with +500% ecommerce growth in Q1 and +800% growth in Q2. Expanding into numerous other categories. Nearly 70% of their online orders were fulfilled on the same day leveraging their wide network of stores, of which they are pruning the excess. Also, Game prices are set to increase $10.
GameStop’s Loyalty Program accounts for over 55M users. They intend on leveraging this network though a company branded credit card with spending rewards to grab market share and retain customers. Furthermore, a digital revenue sharing model continues to grow as publishers understand the value of GameStop as a customer acquisition service and that keeping the company afloat is better for sales and the general video game industry. (See the fall of Toys R us and its impact on Mattel/Hasbro; turns out the manufacturers really needed ToysRUs)

VI. BALANCE SHEET

But wait, their financials must be shit right? They have to be losing money. How much longer can they last?
Well it turns out their books are rock solid. They offered their creditors a new set of terms to push back debt for 2 years, 50% of them took it. They have eliminated all excess goodwill impairments. They are in a $300M net cash position with significantly reduced inventory (which explains the sharp reduction in Q1/2 sales) and massively cut SG&A by 28% in preparation for the console cycle. FCF KING
Many believe the days of their strong margins are long gone, but in fact its only beginning. You have to remember, digital is only outpacing NEW physical games. Retro games are a huge untapped market where GameStop can replicate their past success, and it is a category digital can never penetrate. Jesus wtf. GameStop is looking into these already

V. MAJOR BACKING

In fact, their ecommerce prospects are so promising, Ryan Cohen bought a 10% stake. This guy took on Amazon and won. Jefferies and Telsey, wall street firms, came out with strong buy ratings citing company prospects. Michael Burry still holds a 5% stake. This guy took on Wall Street and won. Half their creditors ($200M worth) believe in GameStop’s prospects. Why would they defer their debt unless they believed the company will be in a paying position by 2023?

VI. THE SHORTS

But here is the real kicker. GameStop’s short float. 120% has never been seen before. The short theory was that GameStop would not make it to the new console cycle and the shorters would collect their tendies. But GameStop made it. Current short fees are like 60% and from some figures we can draw on, we estimate that around 70% of the shorts got in under $7, GameStop is currently nearing $10. 70% of the shorts are underwater. Even if you don’t believe that any of their initiatives will work you have to admit that the company will be able to continue operating for another two years off the new console hype alone. When the stock hits roughly $15, we can expect to see several margin calls trigger a fucking massive short squeeze. For reference, Blue Apron, Volkswagen.

VII. CONCLUSION

Just the fact GME got to the new console cycle must be making the shorts cry. Add on that they’ve been making serious progress towards online and mobile presence, aligning themselves with industry trends, operating in a growing market, potential monopoly in the untapped retro market, solid financials, beginning their new upward cyclic cycle; you have the makings of a powerful ecommerce storefront just leaning into their growth period. Even post console hype, they should be able to leverage their branded credit card to retain a huge number of customers and bite off huge market share off other retailers. Lastly, remember that despite the trend towards digital, its in the gaming industry's best interest to keep GameStop going strong. The likelihood of additional revenue sharing agreements are fairly high.
For comparison GameStop has a P/S ratio 0.11. Chewy has a P/S ratio of 3.6. If GME begins to grow their revenue from this point its valuation will begin to normalize. Even a P/S of 0.2 would mean a stock price of ~$16, 0.4 would mean $32. The company is going to ride the console hype and likely trigger more than a few margin calls along the way. Everything management has been doing is to ride the new cycle into a fluid ecommerce business model, and everything I'm seeing suggests its going to work.

Tl;dr
10c 9/25 to play XBOX prerelease
10c 10/2 to play Mobile App/Stimulus
10c 11/20 to play Console Release Date
10c 4/16 to play Holiday Earnings/short squeeze
***most text references are from GameStop's Q2 transcript which you can find here.
***Digital vs Physical preorder statistic from u/nonagondwanaland
***Additional Digital vs Physical statistics

Grips. Let's talk about 'em.
If you've spent any amount of time on this subreddit, you've likely seen at least one post about a Grip case that has fallen apart. Most of you have seen several. We know this because we've seen every single one. We’d like to see less of them. Ideally, none.
Over the past 18 months, we’ve been on an odyssey to fix the underlying problem. What follows is a chronicle of that journey.
Our objectives in writing this post are three-fold. There will be a tl;dr version at the end of this post, summarizing each of the three:

Offer an in-depth technical explanation as to why Grip cases fall apart.
Outline the improvements we've made to the Grip case to mitigate and eventually solve the issue.
Provide some much-needed context as to how widespread the issue truly is, and what our next steps are for affected Grip SKUs.

Since you're still here, you must be in it for the long haul. Assuming an average reading speed of 250 words per minute, this is going to take you nearly 24 minutes to get through. We'll try to make it the most informative 24 minutes of your life. Let's get started.

PART ONE

Why Do Grips Fall Apart?
Most phone cases are made out of a single material. The material itself varies from case to case, though the most common is Thermoplastic Polyurethane (TPU). The Grip case, as a point of comparison, is made of two different materials: an elastomer and a polycarbonate.
The word elastomer is a combination of the words elastic and polymer. That's because it describes polymers that have elastic properties - like the one that forms the outer rim of your Grip case. The elastomer that we use is responsible for two critical properties of the Grip case: impact protection and grip.
If you fell off of a rooftop, would you rather land on a hard plastic surface, or a rubber surface? If you value your life at all, you'd choose the rubber - its elastic properties would absorb much more force from the impact. Guess what rubber is? First one to answer "an elastomer" wins a prize!
Next, imagine you’re a pervert, gently running your finger across every surface of a No. 2 Pencil. Which part of the pencil do you think would provide the most resistance to the tracing of your finger? If you guessed "the eraser," congratulations: you possess a basic understanding of coefficients of friction. Erasers are made of rubber. Rubber has a high coefficient of friction because of its elastic properties.
The Grip case's elastomer isn't rubber - it's our own specially-formulated compound. It's still a useful comparison, as all elastomers share similar properties - provided they have the same degree of Shore Hardness.
One person reading this is asking: “Shore Hardness?” The next section is their fault.

A Beginner's Guide to Material Science
The Shore Hardness scale gauges the hardness of various elastomers. It can be measured with a device called a durometer. You probably don't have one.

Low Shore Hardness = softer, more malleable, less dense, more rubber-like.
High Shore Hardness = harder, less malleable, more dense, more plastic-like.

If you fell out of a building and landed on a rubber surface with a high Shore Hardness, injury or death would be much more likely.
If you used an eraser with a high Shore Hardness, you'd find it wouldn't actually do much erasing.
Now, what if you made a phone case out of an elastomer with a high Shore Hardness? It wouldn't offer much grip or impact protection.
The Grip's outer rim is made from an elastomer with a low Shore Hardness. As a result, the material is grippy and impact-resistant, but much more malleable and thus more likely to deform. That's why we bond the elastomer to a polycarbonate skeleton.
Polycarbonates don't require as much explanation as elastomers: they're a category of plastic. On your Grip case, the back plate is made of polycarbonate. The elastomer rim is bonded to the polycarbonate plate on all sides of the Grip, providing structural rigidity to the elastomer, fighting to keep it from deforming. At least, that's the idea. As we've all seen, it hasn't worked out that way.
Bonding two distinct materials together is much more complicated than gluing them together. Instead, we rely on a thermal bonding process. Basically, that means we heat both of our polymers to a degree which would turn you from “rare” to “well done” in moments. This heat melts the polymers, which we then inject at a pressure which would turn you from “solid” to “paste” even faster.
Once injected, these two materials get fused together along the seams. To further reinforce the bonds, we use a series of interlocking "teeth" to provide a greater surface area on which the bonding process can occur. Consider these teeth the mechanical bond, which exists to strengthen the thermal bond.

Pictured: Bonding mechanic between the elastomer and polycarbonate.
With that out of the way: why do Grips fall apart?
The elastomer rim around the edge of the Grip case is naturally inclined to deform and stretch. The bonding mechanisms we described above are designed to keep that from happening, but it often isn’t strong enough. As soon as the bond fails at any point, it's only a matter of time until a total structural failure occurs.

PART TWO

How Are We Stopping Grips From Falling Apart?
Philosophically, there are two approaches to take:

We can investigate why, exactly, the bond between the elastomer and the polycarbonate is failing.
We can tweak and iterate the thermal and mechanical bond - strengthening it to the point where it's statistically improbable that your case will fall apart.

We tried the first approach - it's the road to madness. The number of variables is irrationally large. What's the temperature like where you live? The altitude? The humidity? Do you bring your phone into environments that deviate from the ambient temperature of your location? Does your school or workplace have extremely dry air? Do you bring your phone into a sauna? What sort of soap do you wash your hands with? Do you have oily hands? What sort of food do you cook? Do you smoke? How hard do you press on the buttons? What's your angle of approach when you actuate a button? How big are your hands? How often do you take your phone out of the case? Do you remove it from the top, the bottom, the sides?
We could follow all of these roads, find out exactly which factors are causing the bond to fail, then implement preventative measures to keep it from happening - but that would take a decade. We don't have that long. Much like you, we want this fixed yesterday.
So, from the moment we received our first complaint about a Grip deforming around the buttons, we've been making structural, thermal, and mechanical improvements to the design and production process of the Grip case - some visible, some not. Every new phone release has brought a new iteration on the core Grip design, with each one reducing the failure rate, incrementally. We'll bring the receipts in the next chapter. For now, let's highlight the most noteworthy improvements.

The Most Noteworthy Improvements
The first signs of trouble were the buttons. Months before we'd received our first report of a Grip case de-bonding, we saw the first examples of buttons that had bent out of shape.

Pictured: Button deformation.
Why the buttons? Because you press down on them. The force from button actuation puts strain on the elastomer, causing displacement of the material in the surrounding area. Through a combination of time, repeated button actuations and the above-mentioned force, the case would permanently deform around the buttons. This concept is called the "compression set" of the elastomer - Google it.
The solution to this problem was two-fold:

First, we increased the compression set of the elastomer. Essentially, we made it as dense as we could, without compromising on the elastic properties of the material.
Second, we added relief slits surrounding the buttons - they're plainly visible on any newer Grip case model. These relief slits are an escape route for the force generated by button actuation. They also had the positive effect of making button actuation significantly more satisfying (read: clicky).

Pictured: Relief slits to improve button tactility and durability.
Another early issue, pre-dating the first reports of total de-bonding, was a deformation of the elastomer along the bottom of the case - where the charging port and speakers are.
Since we've covered the basics on how the interlock between the elastomer and the polycarbonate creates a bond, this is how the interlocking teeth along the top edge of the polycarbonate skeleton of the Grip used to look.

Pictured: First-gen interlocking teeth on the top of the Grip.
...and here's the bottom of that very same Grip case.

Pictured: First-gen interlocking teeth on the bottom of the Grip.
Notice anything? Around the charging port, there is absolutely nothing keeping the elastomer in place. No teeth, no structural reinforcements... it's no coincidence that an overwhelming majority of early Grip deformations happened along the bottom.
Since then, we’ve added a reinforced polycarbonate structure around the bottom of the Grip case. You'll see what that looks like in a bit.
So, why didn't the launch portfolio of Grip cases have mechanical interlocks or a polycarbonate support structure along the bottom?
The answer may or may not be complicated, depending on how much you know about plastic injection molding. We'll assume the worst and explain the concept of "undercut" to you with a ridiculous metaphor.

The Ridiculous Metaphor
Imagine you had a tube full of melted cheese. Next, imagine you emptied that entire tube into your mouth. Rather than swallowing the cheese, you decide to let it sit in your mouth and harden. Why are you doing this? We don't know. Let's just say you want a brick of cheese that's perfectly molded to the contours of your mouth - a very normal thing to want.
So, your mouth is completely filled with cheese. It hardens. You reach into your mouth to remove the brick of cheese. As you're removing it, you encounter a problem: your teeth are in the way. This wasn't a problem when you were putting the cheese into your mouth, but that was because the cheese was melted and could flow around your teeth. Now that the cheese has hardened, this is no longer the case.
In the world of plastic injection molding, this is an undercut. Our concern was that, by molding a structurally rigid piece of polycarbonate around the charging port and speaker holes, we'd find ourselves unable to remove the Grip Case from the mold once hardened. Imagine spending $30,000 on industrial tooling only to get a $30 phone case stuck inside of it.
Once we saw Grip cases deforming along the bottom cutouts, we knew we'd need to find a way to remove the cheese from your mouth without breaking your teeth. To make a long story short: we did it. The cheese is out of your mouth, and you get to keep your teeth. Congratulations! Now, keep reading.
On newer models of the Grip case, the result is a polycarbonate bridge extending around the bottom cutouts, adding both structural reinforcement and interlock mechanisms to promote mechanical bond, much like the ones which line the perimeter of the rest of the Grip case.

Pictured: Newest-gen structural reinforcement on the bottom of the Grip.
On the subject of structural reinforcements, this design revision was around the time we flanked the buttons with some fins, working in tandem with the heightened compression set and button relief slits, detailed above, to further guarantee that button actuation would have no impact on the overall durability of the Grip case.

Pictured: Lack of button fins on the first-gen Grip.

Pictured: Button fins on the newest-gen Grip.
As an aside: Unrelated to the de-bonding issues, we've also made a number of smaller improvements to the Grip case with each new iteration. For instance, we chamfered the front lip of the case to make edge-swiping more pleasant and reduce dust accumulation along the rim. Those raised parallelogram shapes along the sides of your Grip case that create its distinctive handfeel? We made those way bigger for a better in-hand experience. In short: product development is a complex and multifaceted process. Each new iteration of the Grip case is better than the one that came before, and that applies to more than just failure rates.
Speaking of failure rates: all of these improvements were in place by the time we launched iPhone 11-series Grip cases. The failure rate for these cases decreased exponentially... but didn't disappear entirely.

The Even More Ridiculous Metaphor
With these improvements, we achieved our desired outcome: the case was no longer deforming around the buttons or the charging port. Instead, the structure of the case began to fail literally anywhere else around the perimeter of the phone.
Think of it this way… you’re a roof carpenter. The greatest roof carpenter of all time. Like the son of God, but if he was a carpenter. Unfortunately, you’ve been paired with the Donald Trump of wall-builders.
You're tasked with building a house. You spend all of your time and energy perfecting your roofcraft. You've designed a roof that's so durable, it may as well have been made of Nokia 3310s. Nothing's getting through that bad boy.
The wall guy? Instead of building that wall he said Mexico would pay for, he's been tweeting about the miraculous medicinal properties of bleach while a plague kills hundreds of thousands of Americans.
The point here is that you can build the greatest roof of all time, but the walls need to be strong enough to match.
To strengthen the Grip case's metaphorical walls, we needed to re-design the inside of the Grip case from scratch. More specifically, the mechanical interlock between the springy elastomer and rigid polycarbonate skeleton. We took every tooth at the bonding point between the two materials and made them as large as we possibly could. Then, we added more teeth.

Pictured: Polycarbonate teeth on the newest-gen Grip.
To jog your memory: this is how the teeth used to look...

Pictured: Polycarbonate teeth on the first-gen Grip.
If time proves that these changes aren’t enough, our engineers still have a number of ideas on how to improve the bond between the elastomer and polycarbonate. Will we ever need to implement those ideas? Again - that’s a question only time can answer. Each change might be the silver bullet that puts this problem to bed for good... but there's only one way to find out: it involves real-world testing and, with each iteration, months of careful observation.

PART THREE

So, Where Are We Now?
Have the improvements we've made to the Grip case been successful? You bet.
For the sake of comparison: we began shipping iPhone 11 series Grips on September 30th, 2019. Within six months of that date, we had received 52 reports of structural failures - a big improvement over the early days, but still not good enough.
Fast forward two months. We began shipping Note 10 Plus Grip cases on November 21st, 2019. In the first six months of availability, we received exactly eight reports of Note 10 Plus Grips falling apart. Again, a major improvement over the iPhone series in the same stretch of time. If we'd launched the first Grip cases with a failure rate that low, we wouldn't be writing this post right now and you’d have nothing to read while pretending to do work.
How about the Galaxy S20 series, which began shipping on February 10th, 2020? They're the most recent and improved set of SKUs we’ve made to date, leveraging everything we've learned and making further improvements over the Note 10 Plus. No reports so far. Same goes for the iPhone SE and OnePlus 8 series - these SKUs share all the improvements we've made to the underlying design of the Grip case thus far.
Does that mean these numbers will hold forever? Who knows. That's the thing: every improvement we make, we need to wait several months to see how effective it's been. No amount of internal testing can replace the real-world data of shipping cases to hundreds of thousands of users across nearly 200 countries.
We could always just throw in the towel, make the entire case out of rigid plastic, and call it a solved issue... but that would be the easy way out. The Grip case and its unique design properties can't reach their full potential unless we make incremental improvements - then wait and see how they pan out in the real world.
All of which is to say: it's far too early to say the newest set of improvements have officially solved the problem. While the failure rate is still zero, we need to keep watching. We've made a ton of progress, but we're not going to rest until we've killed this issue for good - without sacrificing the unique properties that make the Grip case stand out in a sea of derivative hard plastic and TPU phone cases.
That's probably enough to inspire confidence in someone who's on the fence about buying an S20 Ultra Grip, an iPhone SE Grip, or any Grip we release in the future. But what if you're one of the people who bought an older Grip model?

"I'm One Of The People Who Bought An Older Grip Model!"
We won't sugarcoat it. The failure rates for older Grip models is way higher than we deem acceptable. Why has it taken us this long to publicly address the issue, then?
Easy: it's not as widespread as you might think. Some humans reading this might be looking at their iPhone X Grip, purchased in 2019 and still intact, wondering what all the fuss is about. That's an important consideration: most people who have functioning, still-bonded Grip cases aren't posting on /dbrand about how unbroken it is. The people who've had issues around total product failure are in the minority.
We're not using the word "minority" as a get-out-of-jail-free card here. It's still a way larger number than we'd ever be comfortable with. We simply don't want our transparency and candor in writing this to be misinterpreted as an admission that every single Grip case we've made for older devices is going to fall apart. Statistically speaking, this is an issue for a minority of Grip owners.
Our philosophy at first was that, while it was unfortunate and frustrating that Grip cases were falling apart, dramatic PR action wasn't necessary. Instead, we resolved to:

Quietly and diligently work in the background to improve the underlying design of the Grip case.
Ship free replacements to anyone whose Grip case had failed.

To date, we've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on shipping fees alone for replacement Grips. As you can imagine, that number gets a lot higher once you add in the cost of actually making the thing. We've been fine with writing these costs off as sort of an R&D expense, since every example of a deformed or de-bonded Grip provides invaluable data on how to improve the product.
Where our strategy backfired was in the narrative that began to take root as Grip cases continued to fall apart. Look at it this way: the failure rate of older Grip case SKUs is anywhere between 1% and 20%, depending on how early we released the SKU. Since the improvements we've already made to the underlying design were rolled out incrementally with each new phone release, that number has been on a steady downward trend.
For the purpose of this thought experiment, we'll go with the earliest, shittiest Grip cases - putting us at a long-term failure rate of 20%.
So, 20% of customers for this device have a Grip case fall apart at some point in the product's lifespan. Every single one of those people writes in to our Customer Experience team about the issue. They all receive a replacement, free of charge.
Since this replacement is identical to the first Grip case they'd received, it also has a 20% failure rate. We're now dealing with percentages of percentages. Stop panicking, we'll do the math for you: that means 4% of these hypothetical Grip owners will have a second Grip case fail on them in the long run.
Four percent is a lot better than twenty… but it's also a lot of people who've been burned twice. These people are going to be extra vocal about how shitty the Grip case is. To be fair, they've got every right.
So, we've got four groups of customers for this SKU:

Group A: Has had two or more Grip cases fail (4%).
Group B: Has had exactly one Grip case fail (16%).
Group C: Bought a Grip which has not failed (80%).
Group D: Has not purchased a Grip case (NA%).

Group A is livid about the repeated issues they've had - rightfully so.
Group B, having been burned before, reads about Group A's experience. They take it to mean their replacement will inevitably fail on them as well, and they'll one day get the dubious honor of joining Group A.
Group C, despite not having had any issues yet, reads the experiences of Groups A and B. Then, a significant portion of this group begins to operate under the assumption that it's only a matter of time before their Grip falls apart as well.
Group D reads all of the above and decides they don't have enough confidence in the Grip case to ever purchase one.
A narrative begins to form that this hypothetical failure rate is close to 100%. Worse yet: people with newer phones, unaware that each new iteration of the Grip case has a dramatically reduced failure rate over the last, start to assume their case also has a 100% failure rate. That's where our original strategy - the one where we quietly improved the product in the background while offering replacements for defective units - backfired on us.
This narrative only exists because we've continued to leverage existing stock with too high a failure rate, which, in hindsight, was like pouring gasoline on a gender reveal forest fire of disappointment and regret. This brings us to our next chapter.

Mass Destruction
At this point, you're probably aware that a number of Grip SKUs for older phones have been listed as "Sold Out" on our website, and haven't been restocked since.
We stopped production on these cases because we knew they'd have all the same issues as the original production runs. See, it's not as simple as pushing a "make the Grip not fall apart" button at the factory - we'd need to redesign the case from scratch, implementing all of the design improvements we've made up to this point, then re-tool our existing machinery to produce this new version. We'll have more to say about re-tooling a bit later - for now, focus on the fact that some Grips have been listed as "Sold Out".
If someone's Grip case falls apart while listed as "Sold Out", we don't have any replacements to send them. Instead, dbrand's Customer Experience team has been issuing refunds wherever possible, and store credit otherwise. Just in case you're wondering what we mean by "where possible": PayPal doesn't allow refunds on transactions that are more than six months old. Store credit, on the other hand, can be offered indefinitely.
What we've come to realize is that we're never going to be able to escape this downward spiral until we rip the band-aid off and stop stocking these old, flawed SKUs.
Today, we're ripping the bandaid off. As you're reading this, we're disposing of all of our old stock. All of the flawed Grip SKUs are now listed as "Sold Out".
Head over to our Grip listing and take a look at what's available. Everything that you can currently buy is up to spec with the improvements we've made over the past year - meeting or exceeding the standard of quality set by the Galaxy S20 series, the iPhone SE, and the OnePlus 8 series. In some cases - take, for instance, the iPhone 11 series - this means we've already re-tooled our production lines to meet that quality benchmark.
If a Grip case is listed on "Backorder", it means we've begun the process of re-tooling the SKU to match the improved quality standard you've spent the last five hours reading about.
However, if a Grip case is now listed as "Sold Out", that means no more reshipments.
If you own a sold out Grip case that hasn't fallen apart yet: that's great! Don't assume that your Grip is doomed to fail just because we devoted 5661 words to explaining why it might fall apart. You've still got better odds than you would at a casino.
As always, if you run into any issues with your case, sold out or not, shoot an email to one of our Robots. They'll still take care of you - it just won't be with a replacement case… for now.

Mass Production
Remember when we said we'd talk more about re-tooling a bit later? That's right now.
So, why are so many Grip models not being fixed? Why haven't we re-tooled these old SKUs with all of the quality improvements made to the case's build quality? It's a little complicated.
Taking the improvements we've made to the most recent suite of Grip models and retroactively applying those changes to older SKUs isn't a simple task - it would require us to throw out our existing production tools and create new ones, from scratch. Suffice it to say that doing so is a wildly expensive endeavor.
To recoup that cost, we'd need to produce more Grips than we're likely to ever sell for aging, irrelevant hardware. Let's use the Pixel 3 as an example.
If we replaced every single de-bonded Pixel 3 Grip, that would account for about 3% of the MOQ (Minimum Order Quantity) on a re-tooled Pixel 3 Grip case. Now we're sitting on 97% of that MOQ as overstock. Pixel 3 owners have had their phone for nearly two years now. If they want a phone case, they already have one. They're not looking for new Pixel 3 cases, they're getting ready to buy a new phone. Simply put, it’s no longer a viable market.
Now, say the Pixel 3 was a significantly more popular phone - enough that we'd be shipping out, say, 50% of the MOQ as replacements on day one. Now, that's a lot more tempting to us - we'd still lose boatloads of money, but at least it would go towards some consumer goodwill.
To figure out how much money we'd lose on re-tooling, we gave our bean-counting Robots a giant jar of beans and told them to get to work. They emerged three days later. When asked how many beans were in the jar, they gave us a blank stare. When asked if it was possible to re-tool any of our production lines for old Grip SKUs without losing obscene amounts of money, they said:
"Absolutely not."
Still, we're no strangers to throwing away obscene amounts of money to make the internet happy. Remember Amazon gift cards? Those were the days. The only question that remains is "How much money are we willing to set on fire?"
We can't tell you yet. Why? Because we're currently running a detailed cost-benefit analysis on the subject of re-tooling old production lines, on a SKU-by-SKU basis. That's business talk for "the bean-counting Robots have been given more beans to count."
The objective is to determine the viability of producing new-and-improved Grip stock for older phones: how many units would be tied up in replacements for that model, how many we could reasonably expect to sell to new customers, and how much overstock would be left from the MOQ.
From there, we can determine what the financial impact of re-tooling would be and make the final decision on how much cash we're dumping into the ocean somewhere off the coast of the Seychelles. We'll have our results by early next week.
These re-tooled models, if produced, would feature every improvement we’ve made thus far to the Grip case line, plus a few that have yet to be released. Remember how the S20s, the iPhone SE and the OnePlus 8s haven't had any reported failures yet? Picture that, but for the phone you've got.
If we go ahead with re-tooling production lines for your phone, a few things will happen:

The Grip case for your phone will go from "Sold Out" to "Backorder".
Our Customer Experience Robots will shift their communication strategy from "we no longer support your phone," to "we'll get you a replacement once we've got improved units in stock."

None of these things will happen until we've run the simulations on which phones are getting restocked. Why are we posting this today, then? We could have waited a week and had concrete answers to offer about the future of our out-of-stock Grip cases. Well…

Take Our Survey
This is it: your chance to have some say in how much money we set on fire as a goodwill exercise for this whole R&D clusterfuck.
Those simulations we're running? They'll be great for telling us how much money we're going to lose on each Grip SKU, but it won't tell us anything about how much money our customers want us to lose on each Grip SKU.
To that end, we've prepared a survey for people who have purchased a Grip case. We'll be taking your feedback into consideration during our decision-making process.
We have only one request: don't be a jackass. Answer the questions honestly.
Click here to take the survey.

In Closing...
We're sharing a special moment right now. We're all seeing a light at the end of the tunnel.
For us, that light is "we're almost done with a year-long R&D effort to stop the Grip case from falling apart."
For you, the light is "the end of a 5661-word marathon of a Reddit post."
We just want to take a minute to recognize that we couldn't have gotten this far without your collective support. At any point in the past year, we might have pulled the plug on the Grip project entirely if we'd reached a critical mass of negative sentiment from our customers. Instead, we've got an army of devotees who have no problem paying us for the privilege of being our guinea pigs.
Product development isn't a one-and-done process. It's easy to forget, but our skins weren't always to the world-class, record-setting, Michael-Jordan-in-his-prime standard you expect from us today. If you happen to have an iPhone 4 skin lying around, apply it and let us know how it goes. You'll immediately appreciate how many process improvements we've made. We weren’t born as the greatest skin manufacturer in history. We got there through a process of methodical improvement. Each jump in quality was driven by a bottomless well of user feedback, sourced from millions upon millions of customers. That, and the competition was comically inept.
It's the same story for the Grip case. Your continued support has enabled us to make huge strides in developing a product that's on the cusp of blowing everyone else out of the water. We're going to keep working until it gets there.

TL;DR VERSION

Please note that by reading this tl;dr, you’re missing out on several outlandish metaphors, including classics such as:

Plastic injection molding melted cheese into your face hole.
What if Jesus and Donald Trump built a house?
How to turn yourself from “rare to well done” and “solid to paste”.
Pencil Perverts.

WHY DOES THE GRIP FALL APART?

The Grip case is made from two materials: a polycarbonate skeleton and an elastomer frame.
The elastomer frame provides the majority of the case's impact protection and grip, but is prone to deformation.
We prevent deformation by bonding the material to a polycarbonate skeleton (i.e. the rigid back plate on the Grip case).
The bond between the two materials was not as strong as we'd originally anticipated, causing the elastomer to de-bond from the polycarbonate skeleton and the case to sometimes fall apart.

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO FIX IT?

Through a series of design revisions, we've made countless improvements to promote a stronger bond between the two materials.
These changes have incrementally reduced the failure rate of Grip cases. Our most recent SKUs are yielding extremely promising results.
Each time we improve the Grip case, we need to play a months-long waiting game to observe the real-world effects.

HOW ABOUT THE GRIPS YOU'VE ALREADY SOLD?

Since we're using you as guinea pigs for the purposes of product development, we've been uncharacteristically generous with our warranty policy.
However, that warranty policy only lasts as long as we have stock. Once we're out of Grips, we're out of replacements.
We've finally reached the point where we need to rip off the bandaid and dispose of all of our Grip stock produced during 2019.
If your Grip for any of these older phones falls apart, you can no longer get a replacement.
You should still write in to our Customer Experience team if it happens to you - we'll work something out.
On the bright side, our Grip SKUs from 2020 onwards have dramatically reduced, if not outright eliminated, the failure rate of previous models. We have no reported cases to date.
It's not economically viable to re-tool production lines to apply our improved industrial designs to any of the Grip cases that are currently marked as "Sold Out".
We're probably going to do it anyways.
We're running the simulations right now to determine which older devices will be re-tooled.
Take our survey to help determine which devices we'll be re-tooling.

This is not financial advice. Do your own research. Personally I am long SLV calls. Hard. If I get this right I will retire.
IMPORTANT UPDATE 8/26 11:27 AM PST:

https://preview.redd.it/ogwqq16w3ej51.png?width=1119&format=png&auto=webp&s=95eff3a4e57b6c56466d2eeb7e9979adde168848
UPDATE 8/26 4:47 PST - Just gonna throw this out there... If you have any contracts you can actually take delivery on and are on the fence, do it. That only makes this worse for them.
UPDATE 8/26 9:58 PST - I like the action so far. My calls are up 56% and we got settlement and Powell tomorrow. - so far so good. SLV is lagging /SI by 1% too, so room to just even catch up.
UP-FUCKING-DATE-RIGHT-IN-THIS-BIZNITCH: BEHOLD!!! https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/lbma-comex-collusion-intensifies-cme-mass-approves-267-lbma-gold-and-silver-bar-brands This is so dope.
Anyway....
TLDR version: Buy OTM SLV calls tomorrow morning somewhere around $4/$5 above whatever it opens at tomorrow, and then expect fireworks on Wed and Thurs. This is a win big or lose the entire bet trade.
Let me sum it up this way... You know how TSLA squeezes to the moon cause of all the OTM calls that the MM's have to cover by actually purchasing TSLA shares, which jacks the price in a disgusting feedback loop? I'm just saying there's no reason you can't have that in SLV and THIS, I think... or at least I'm pretty sure, is the most likely week for that to happen because the banks are too fare in the hole by 50K contracts.
THE BACKSTORY
If you watch the Commodities Futures Trading (https://www.cftc.gov/) weekly report on precious metals report (near the bottom here at “Commodity Exchange Incorporated” “short format) https://www.cftc.gov/MarketReports/CommitmentsofTraders/index.htm)
You can see that from last weekly, large commercial traders were net short about 46,000 silver contracts. That's 240,000,000 ounces. They can't fucking get them.

https://preview.redd.it/35v20v6ak5j51.jpg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=79f170156b1e5f85180eee6bc61f164f19254f9e
There’s only about 1,000,000,000 in circulation. Physical silver is going for a $7-$8 premium versus /SI.
The thinking is that this large discrepancy in physical vs paper will lead to MANY more /SI holders seeking delivery next Thursday when settlement occurs.That leaves the banks with 3 options.

Write more paper contracts short and try to hammer the price. That would lead to more exposure I'm not thinking they want.
Take their lumps and attempt to fill as many settlements as possible. They risk losses in the billions and fines
Most likely. They attempt to buy the contracts back, driving a huge temporary jump in prices. Basically the reverse of oil in april. I expect SLV to go crazy on Wednesday and Thursday this week.

Someone else also get this, cause the option volume and open interest at $40 strike is the highest on the board. The point is, what is to prevent a $TSLA or $AAPL like squeeze in $SLV this week?! The highest open interest strike on SLV for 8/28 is $40. And it isn't even close. There are 2000 contracts open. No other strike is more than 1300. That trade alone will drive the price of SLV.
THE PLAY
The play is to pick up options on Tuesday (tomorrow) that expire on Friday, and our out of the money. (I personally went with $28 strike, but I have a few lottos too). If scenario 2 happens, I make money. If 3 happens, I retire. If 1 happens, we try again next week and the hole is deeper and I lose money.
I posted this down in a comment but it was worth pasting up here: This is a chance to fuck over a bank that has been fucking any retail investor investing in SLV. Maybe. It's complicated. The banks are hammering both gold and silver today. They seem to hit the hardest on Tuesdays. They can bomb the price to separate the price of SLV from /SI. With any luck, this is the week they can't kick the can and BAZANG - tendies for all as they try to unfuck themselves.
Now, what makes this even more crazy is that JP Morgan Chase's metal desk is essentially a bunch of criminals, or so I've read about: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-16/jpmorgan-s-metals-desk-was-a-criminal-enterprise-u-s-says
They, or someone, has been F'ing with SLV price each week. The more the bomb the paper, the lower the price and the better chance they have to cover without getting their asked kicked. But now, it's undo-able. It is, I think, the week of reckoning. I have already made an offering to the Tendie Gods, so I hope I'm good. We'll see:

https://preview.redd.it/z9ydknnbk5j51.jpg?width=1512&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4573d08d61b6571d45113473cff5cc1e665f58e2

https://preview.redd.it/rz8z3ddjk5j51.png?width=3339&format=png&auto=webp&s=71b975167bb45be5cdb4943d3a7c195e54ad4826

IMPORTANT UPDATE 8/26 11:28 AM

I'M TENDIE MOTHERFUCKING RICCCKK

Previous editions:
(All strawpoll results counted as of the next post made)
Part 1, Adams v Jefferson in 1796 - Adams wins with 68% of the vote
Part 2, Adams v Jefferson in 1800 - Jefferson wins with 58% of the vote
Part 3, Jefferson v Pinckney in 1804 - Jefferson wins with 57% of the vote
Part 4, Madison v Pinckney (with George Clinton protest) in 1808 - Pinckney wins with 45% of the vote
Part 5, Madison v (DeWitt) Clinton in 1812 - Clinton wins with 80% of the vote
Part 6, Monroe v King in 1816 - Monroe wins with 51% of the vote
Part 7, Monroe and an Era of Meta Feelings in 1820 - Monroe wins with 100% of the vote
Part 8, Democratic-Republican Thunderdome in 1824 - Adams wins with 55% of the vote
Part 9, Adams v Jackson in 1828 - Adams wins with 94% of the vote
Part 10, Jackson v Clay (v Wirt) in 1832 - Clay wins with 53% of the vote
Part 11, Van Buren v The Whigs in 1836 - Whigs win with 87% of the vote, Webster elected
Part 12, Van Buren v Harrison in 1840 - Harrison wins with 90% of the vote
Part 13, Polk v Clay in 1844 - Polk wins with 59% of the vote
Part 14, Taylor v Cass in 1848 - Taylor wins with 44% of the vote (see special rules)
Part 15, Pierce v Scott in 1852 - Scott wins with 78% of the vote
Part 16, Buchanan v Frémont v Fillmore in 1856 - Frémont wins with 95% of the vote
Part 17, Peculiar Thunderdome in 1860 - Lincoln wins with 90% of the vote.
Part 18, Lincoln v McClellan in 1864 - Lincoln wins with 97% of the vote.
Part 19, Grant v Seymour in 1868 - Grant wins with 97% of the vote.
Part 20, Grant v Greeley in 1872 - Grant wins with 96% of the vote.
Part 21, Hayes v Tilden in 1876 - Hayes wins with 87% of the vote.
Part 22, Garfield v Hancock in 1880 - Garfield wins with 67% of the vote.
Part 23, Cleveland v Blaine in 1884 - Cleveland wins with 53% of the vote.
Part 24, Cleveland v Harrison in 1888 - Harrison wins with 64% of the vote.
Part 25, Cleveland v Harrison v Weaver in 1892 - Harrison wins with 57% of the vote
Part 26, McKinley v Bryan in 1896 - McKinley wins with 71% of the vote
Part 27, McKinley v Bryan in 1900 - Bryan wins with 55% of the vote
Part 28, Roosevelt v Parker in 1904 - Roosevelt wins with 71% of the vote
Part 29, Taft v Bryan in 1908 - Taft wins with 64% of the vote
Part 30, Taft v Wilson v Roosevelt in 1912 - Roosevelt wins with 81% of the vote
Part 31, Wilson v Hughes in 1916 - Hughes wins with 62% of the vote
Part 32, Harding v Cox in 1920 - Cox wins with 68% of the vote
Part 33, Coolidge v Davis v La Follette in 1924 - Davis wins with 47% of the vote
Part 34, Hoover v Smith in 1928 - Hoover wins with 50.2% of the vote
Part 35, Hoover v Roosevelt in 1932 - Roosevelt wins with 85% of the vote
Part 36, Landon v Roosevelt in 1936 - Roosevelt wins with 75% of the vote
Part 37, Willkie v Roosevelt in 1940 - Roosevelt wins with 56% of the vote
Part 38, Dewey v Roosevelt in 1944 - Dewey wins with 50.2% of the vote
Part 39, Dewey v Truman in 1948 - Truman wins with 65% of the vote
Part 40, Eisenhower v Stevenson in 1952 - Eisenhower wins with 69% of the vote
Part 41, Eisenhower v Stevenson in 1956 - Eisenhower wins with 60% of the vote
Part 42, Kennedy v Nixon in 1960 - Kennedy wins with 63% of the vote
Part 43, Johnson v Goldwater in 1964 - Johnson wins with 87% of the vote
Part 44, Nixon v Humphrey in 1968 - Humphrey wins with 60% of the vote
Part 45, Nixon v McGovern in 1972 - Nixon wins with 56% of the vote
Part 46, Carter v Ford in 1976 - Carter wins with 71% of the vote
Part 47 - Carter v Reagan v Anderson in 1980 - Carter wins with 44% of the vote
Part 48, Reagan v Mondale in 1984 - Mondale wins with 55% of the vote
Part 49, Bush v Dukakis in 1988 - Bush wins with 54% of the vote
Part 50, Bush v Clinton v Perot in 1992 - Clinton wins with 71% of the vote
Part 51, Clinton v Dole in 1996 - Clinton wins with 91% of the vote
Welcome back to the fifty-second edition of /neoliberal elects the American presidents!
This will be a fairly consistent weekly thing - every week, a new election, until we run out.
I highly encourage you - at least in terms of the vote you cast - to try to think from the perspective of the year the election was held, without knowing the future or how the next administration would go. I'm not going to be trying to enforce that, but feel free to remind fellow commenters of this distinction.
If you're really feeling hardcore, feel free to even speak in the present tense as if the election is truly upcoming!
Whether third and fourth candidates are considered "major" enough to include in the strawpoll will be largely at my discretion and depend on things like whether they were actually intending to run for President, and whether they wound up actually pulling in a meaningful amount of the popular vote and even electoral votes. I may also invoke special rules in how the results will be interpreted in certain elections to better approximate historical reality.
While I will always give some brief background info to spur the discussion, please don't hesitate to bring your own research and knowledge into the mix! There's no way I'll cover everything!
Al Gore v George Bush, 2000
Profiles

Al Gore is the 52-year-old Democratic candidate and the current Vice President. His running mate is US Senator from Connecticut Joe Lieberman.
George (W.) Bush is the 54-year-old Republican candidate and the Governor of Texas. His running mate is former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney.

Issues and Background

Roughly two years ago, President Bill Clinton became the first President in over 100 years to be impeached by the House of Representatives. He was eventually acquitted in the Senate. Clinton was accused of grand jury perjury related to his extramarital sexual relationship with 22-year-old White House intern Monica Lewinsky. He was also accused of obstruction of justice. The full report from the independent counsel can be read here.
- Vice President Gore has said that President Clinton made a mistake, and has even called Clinton's behavior "inexcusable," but has claimed that "the people" want to move on to other issues. Likely aware of some polling evidence that Clinton may be a drag on his numbers, he has distanced himself from the President during the campaign, emphasizing that he is his own man. Stories in papers like the Washington Post and the New York Times regularly describe leaked frustrations from Clinton loyalists and Clinton himself about this distancing. Joint appearances are being minimized. In one of the primary debates, Gore stated:
  
  As an American who was serving as vice president, I was critical of the president. As an American, I also defended the office of the presidency against an effort by partisan Republicans in the House and Senate to deliver a thoroughly disproportionate penalty for a serious and reprehensible personal mistake on the part of the president. He should not have been removed from office for that offense. And fighting against their efforts to remove him from office and undo the act of the American people in twice electing him, I think I was serving the public interest well.
- The Bush campaign, and Bush himself, have emphasized that they will bring "honor and dignity" back to the White House. In his convention speech, Vice Presidential nominee Dick Cheney said:
  
  George W. Bush will repair what has been damaged. He's a man without pretense, without cynicism, a man of principle, a man of honor. On the first hour of the first day, he will restore decency and integrity to the Oval Office.
The federal budget is set to be in surplus for the third year in a row this year, and many government agencies and forecasters are expecting well in excess of $1 trillion in total surpluses over the coming decade. Thus, one major election issue is what each candidate will do with this surplus.
- Governor Bush described his plan for the surplus in the first debate as follows:
  
  I want to take one-half of the surplus and dedicate it to Social Security. One-quarter of the surplus for important projects, and I want to send one-quarter of the surplus back to the people who pay the bills. I want everybody who pays taxes to have their tax rates cut.
  
  Vice President Gore's main criticism of the Bush plan has been that because the tax cuts are across the board, a large amount of the surplus dollars will wind up going to the wealthiest Americans. Bush has countered that as President, he doesn't want to be in the business of picking winners and losers when it comes to tax relief.
- Vice President Gore says that for every $1 of the surplus he will use for tax cuts or new spending, he will use $2 for deficit reduction. Gore intends to set the United States on a path to eliminate the national debt by the year 2012. He also proposes $500 in targeted tax cuts intended to reach low and middle income families. Bush accuses Gore of intending to increase the size of government dramatically, which Gore denies.
Just recently, the FDA approved abortion pill RU-486. Governor Bush has said he will respect the FDA's independence, but is concerned this will lead to an increase in abortions. Governor Bush describes himself as pro-life, but says "a lot of good people disagree on the issue" and that the issue is not a litmus test for any potential Supreme Court nominations he could make. He argues there are pro-life objectives that can be accomplished which exist on broader common ground, like parental consent laws on abortion and the banning of "partial-birth abortions." Vice President Gore is pro-choice but says he would be willing to sign a law banning partial-birth abortions "provided that doctors have the ability to save a woman's life or to act if her health is severely at risk."
Following US participation through NATO in the Kosovo War and the overthrow of Milosevic in the recent Yugoslavian elections, the United States maintains a presence in the Balkans. Gore supports continued US involvement and support in the region "until the mission is complete," while Bush would like to see a more immediate reprioritization of where some resources are deployed, pending consultation with NATO allies. The New York Times summarizes their differences:

Mr. Gore is an interventionist, and over the years has repeatedly pressed for more vigorous United States involvement in hot spots around the world, including Bosnia and Kosovo. Mr. Bush denies he is an isolationist, but says United States troops should not be used for nation-building abroad. He would start by bringing home the 11,400 troops in the Balkans, once this country's NATO allies had agreed.
Following reforms in the 1980s, the Social Security system is not in particularly dire shape, though the trust fund could eventually run out by the 2030s if no further changes are made. Governor Bush has proposed a dramatic reform of the system which would allow workers to divert 2 percentage points of their 12.4% payroll tax into personal investment accounts. The Gore campaign argues that this plan will mean that the Social Security trust fund will run dry over 10 years earlier than currently expected.
Over the next 10 years, Medicare by itself is expected to run significant surpluses. Vice President Gore proposes taking Medicare "off-budget" in the same way as Social Security, putting Medicare funds in a metaphorical "lockbox" so they cannot be used for new spending or new tax cuts.
This campaign has seen significant discussion on the topic of education. Unlike other prominent Republicans, Governor Bush does not want to get rid of the Department of Education. He is an ardent advocate for standardized testing and wants to help more states set up such testing. Under Bush's plan, a school which shows poor results for three years in a row will see its students granted the option of a voucher which can be used for tutoring or private school tuition - for each student who chooses a voucher, the school will lose a proportional amount of federal dollars. Gore's plan calls for universal preschool, and for schools which show poor results two years in a row to reorganize with new leadership and even potentially new teachers.
The Columbine High School massacre remains on the minds of many. On guns, the main difference between the candidates is that Gore supports licensing for new handguns at the state level, while Bush does not. Gore also supports restoring the three-day waiting period under the Brady Law. Both candidates support instant background checks at gun shows. Governor Bush argues for greater enforcement of existing laws and raising the age when one can carry a handgun from 18 to 21. For Columbine specifically, Gore argues that some gun control measures could have possibly prevented the school shooting. In contrast, Governor Bush argues "it's really a matter of culture," that "somewhere along the line we've begun to disrespect life."
A few years ago, Vice President Gore helped broker the Kyoto Protocol/Treaty, an international commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The agreement was signed by the Clinton Administration but effectively killed by the Senate via a resolution that strongly signaled they would refuse to ratify it. Governor Bush says global warming is "an issue that we need to take very seriously," but also says, "I don't think we know the solution to global warming yet," and that we need to have "the full accounting, full understanding of what's taking place."
Just days before the election, it has come out that 24 years ago, Bush was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol. Bush says that the report is true, but argues that he has always been candid and remorseful about the fact that in his youth, he occasionally drank too much. Asked about why he had not previously disclosed this particular incident, he said he did not want his daughters to find out and for it to undermine his parenting.

Debate Excerpts
Quotations in excerpt titles refer to moderator's prompt, block quotations are from named candidate(s).
First Presidential Debate (full transcript)
(1) Bush on whether he would "try to overturn the FDA's approval last week of the abortion pill RU-486":

I don't think a president can do that. I was disappointed in the ruling because I think abortions ought to be more rare in America, and I'm worried that that pill will create more abortions and cause more people to have abortions. This is a very important topic and it's a very sensitive topic, because a lot of good people disagree on the issue. I think what the next president ought to do is to promote a culture of life in America ... I know we need to change a lot of minds before we get there in America. What I do believe is that we can find good, common ground on issues of parental consent or parental notification. I know we need to ban partial birth abortions. This is a place where my opponent and I have strong disagreement.

(2) Gore on the budget:

I think that we have got to balance the budget every single year, pay down the national debt and, in fact, under my proposal the national debt will be completely eliminated by the year 2012. I think we need to put Medicare and Social Security in a lockbox. The governor will not put Medicare in a lockbox. I don't think it should be used as a piggy bank for other programs. I think it needs to be moved out of the budget and protected. I'll veto anything that takes money out of Social Security or Medicare for anything other than Social Security or Medicare.

(3) Bush on "nation-building":

The vice president and I have a disagreement about the use of troops. He believes in nation building. I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders. I believe the role of the military is to fight and win war and therefore prevent war from happening in the first place. So I would take my responsibility seriously. And it starts with making sure we rebuild our military power. Morale in today's military is too low. We're having trouble meeting recruiting goals. We met the goals this year, but in the previous years we have not met recruiting goals. Some of our troops are not well-equipped. I believe we're overextended in too many places. And therefore I want to rebuild the military power. It starts with a billion dollar pay raise for the men and women who wear the uniform. A billion dollars more than the president recently signed into law.

(4) Gore on education:

We agree on a couple of things on education. I strongly support new accountability, so does Governor Bush. I strongly support local control, so does Governor Bush. I'm in favor of testing as a way of measuring performance. Every school and every school district, have every state test the children. I've also proposed a voluntary national test in the fourth grade and eighth grade, and a form of testing the governor has not endorsed. I think that all new teachers ought to be tested, including in the subjects that they teach. We've got to recruit 100,000 new teachers. And I have budgeted for that. We've got to reduce the class size so that the student who walks in has more one-on-one time with the teacher. We ought to have universal pre-school and we ought to make college tuition tax deductible, up to $10,000 a year.

(5) Bush on what he would do in the event of a financial crisis:

Well, it depends, obviously. But what I would do first and foremost, is I would get in touch with the Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan, to find out all the facts and all the circumstances. I would have my Secretary of the Treasury be in touch with the financial centers not only here, but at home. I would make sure that key members of Congress were called in to discuss the gravity of the situation. And I would come up with a game plan to deal with it. That's what governors end up doing. We end up being problem solvers. We come up with practical, common sense solutions for problems that we're confronted with. In this case, in the case of a financial crisis, I would gather all the facts before I made the decision as to what the government ought or ought not to do.

(6) Gore on campaign finance reform:

And that's one of the reasons I've said before, and I'll pledge here tonight, if I'm president, the very first bill that Joe Lieberman and I will send to the United States Congress is the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill. And the reason it's that important is that all of the other issues, whether prescription drugs for all seniors that are opposed by the drug companies or the patient's bill of rights to take the decisions away from the HMOs and give them to the doctors and nurses, opposed by the HMOs and insurance companies, all these other proposals are going to be a lot easier to get passed for the American people if we limit the influence of special interest money and give democracy back to the American people.

Vice-Presidential Debate (full transcript)
(1) Cheney on Iraq (full moderator question included):

MODERATOR: This question is for you, Mr. Secretary. If Iraq's president Saddam Hussein were found to be developing weapons of mass destruction, Governor Bush has said he would, quote, "Take him out." Would you agree with such a deadly policy?
CHENEY: We might have no other choice. We'll have to see if that happens. The thing about Iraq, of course, was at the end of the war we had pretty well decimated their military. We had put them back in the box, so to speak ... Unfortunately now we find ourselves in a situation where that started to fray on us, where the coalition now no longer is tied tightly together ...The Russians and French are flying commercial airliners back into Baghdad and thumbing their nose at the international sanctions regime. We're in a situation today where our posture with Iraq is weaker than it was at the end of the war. It's unfortunate. I also think it's unfortunate we find ourselves in a position where we don't know for sure what might be transpiring inside Iraq. I certainly hope he's not regenerating that kind of capability, but if he were, if in fact Saddam Hussein were taking steps to try to rebuild nuclear capability or weapons of mass destruction, you would have to give very serious consideration to military action to -- to stop that activity. I don't think you can afford to have a man like Saddam Hussein with nuclear weapons in the Middle East.

(2) Lieberman on whether gays and lesbians should have "all the constitutional rights enjoyed by every American citizen":

The question you pose is a difficult one for this reason. It confronts or challenges the traditional notion of marriage as being limited to a heterosexual couple, which I support. I must say I'm thinking about this, because I have friends who are in gay and lesbian partnerships who said to me, isn't it fair. We don't have legal rights to inheritance, visitation when one partner is ill, to health care benefits. That's why I'm thinking about it. My mind is open to taking some action that will address those elements of unfairness while respecting the traditional religious and civil institution of marriage.

(3) Cheney on the same question as above:

This is a tough one, Bernie. The fact of the matter is we live in a free society, and freedom means freedom for everybody. We shouldn't be able to choose and say you get to live free and you don't. That means people should be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to enter into. It's no one's business in terms of regulating behavior in that regard. The next step then, of course, is the question you ask of whether or not there ought to be some kind of official sanction of the relationships or if they should be treated the same as a traditional marriage. That's a tougher problem. That's not a slam dunk. The fact of the matter is that matter is regulated by the states. I think different states are likely to come to different conclusions, and that's appropriate.

(4) Lieberman on Hollywood:

Al Gore and I have felt for a long time, first as parents and then only second as public officials, that we cannot let America's parents stand alone in this competition that they feel they're in with Hollywood to raise their own kids and give their kids the faith and values they want to give them. I've been a consistent crusader on that behalf. John McCain and I actually requested the Federal Trade Commission report that came out three or four weeks ago which proved conclusively that the entertainment industry was marketing adult-rated products to our children. That is just not acceptable. One finding was that they were actually using 10 to 12-year-olds to test screen adult-rated products. When that report came out, Al Gore and I said to the entertainment industry, stop it.

Second Presidential Debate (full transcript)
(1) Bush on whether our country's wealth brings "with it special obligations to the rest of the world":

Yes, it does. Take, for example, Third World debt. I think we ought to be forgiving Third World debt under certain conditions. I think, for example, if we're convinced that a Third World country that's got a lot of debt would reform itself, that the money wouldn't go into the hands of a few but would go to help people, I think it makes sense for us to use our wealth in that way, or to trade debt for valuable rain forest lands, makes that much sense, yes. We do have an obligation, but we can't be all things to all people. We can help build coalitions but we can't put our troops all around the world.

(2) Gore on Iraq:

I was one of the few members of my political party to support former President Bush in the Persian Gulf War resolution, and at the end of that war, for whatever reason, it was not finished in a way that removed Saddam Hussein from power. I know there are all kinds of circumstances and explanations. But the fact is that that's the situation that was left when I got there. And we have maintained the sanctions. Now I want to go further. I want to give robust support to the groups that are trying to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and I know there are allegations that they're too weak to do it, but that's what they said about the forces that were opposing Milosevic in Serbia, and you know, the policy of enforcing sanctions against Serbia has just resulted in a spectacular victory for democracy just in the past week...

(3) Bush on Serbia:

I think it's a triumph. I thought the president made the right decision in joining NATO and bombing Serbia. I supported them when they did so. I called upon the Congress not to hamstring the administration, and in terms of forcing troop withdrawals on a timetable that wasn't necessarily in our best interest or fit our nation's strategy, and so I think it's good public policy, I think it worked, and I'm pleased I took -- made the decision I made. I'm pleased the president made the decision he made. Because freedom to go in that part of the world, and where there's a lot of work left to be done, however.

(4) Gore exchange with moderator on eight major interventions of the last 20 years:

MODERATOR: ...in the last 20 years there have been eight major actions that involved the introduction of U.S. ground, air or naval forces. Let me name them. Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, the Persian Gulf, Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo. If you had been president for any of those interventions, would any of those interventions not have happened? GORE: Can you run through the list again? MODERATOR: Sure. Lebanon. GORE: I thought that was a mistake. MODERATOR: Grenada. GORE: I supported that. MODERATOR: Panama. GORE: I supported that. MODERATOR: Persian Gulf. GORE: Yes, I voted for it, supported it. MODERATOR: Somalia. GORE: Of course, and that again -- no, I think that that was ill-considered. I did support it at the time. It was in the previous administration, in the Bush-Quayle administration, and I think in retrospect the lessons there are ones that we should take very, very seriously. MODERATOR: Bosnia. GORE: Oh, yes. MODERATOR: Haiti. GORE: Yes. MODERATOR: And then Kosovo. GORE: Yes.

(5) Gore on "nation-building":

This idea of nation building is kind of a pejorative phrase, but think about the great conflict of the past century, World War II. During the years between World War I and World War II, a great lesson was learned by our military leaders and the people of the United States. The lesson was that in the aftermath of World War I, we kind of turned our backs and left them to their own devices and they brewed up a lot of trouble that quickly became World War II. And acting upon that lesson in the aftermath of our great victory in World War II, we laid down the Marshall Plan, President Truman did. We got intimately involved in building NATO and other structures there. We still have lots of troops in Europe. And what did we do in the late '40's and '50's and '60's? We were nation building. And it was economic. But it was also military. And the confidence that those countries recovering from the wounds of war had by having troops there. We had civil administrators come in to set up their ways of building their towns back.

Third Presidential Debate (Town Hall) (full transcript)
(1) Bush on health care:

I'm absolutely opposed to a national health care plan. I don't want the federal government making decisions for consumers or for providers. I remember what the administration tried to do in 1993. They tried to have a national health care plan. And fortunately, it failed. I trust people, I don't trust the federal government. It's going to be one of the themes you hear tonight. I don't want the federal government making decisions on behalf of everybody.

(2) Gore on the estate tax:

I'm for a massive reform of the estate tax or the death tax. And under the plan that I've proposed, 80% of all family farms will be completely exempt from the estate tax. And the vast majority of all family businesses would be completely exempt, and all of the others would have sharply reduced. So 80% -- now the problem with completely eliminating it goes back to the wealthiest 1%. The amount of money that has to be raised in taxes for middle-class families to make up for completely eliminating that on the very wealthiest, the billionaires, that would be an extra heavy burden on middle-class families. And so let's do it for most all, but not completely eliminate it for the very top.

(3) Bush on morality and protecting children:

You bet there's things that government can do. We can work with the entertainment industry to provide family hour. We can have filters on Internets where public money is spent. There ought to be filters in public libraries and filters in public schools so if kids get on the Internet, there is not going to be pornography or violence coming in. I think we ought to have character education in our schools. I know that doesn't directly talk about Hollywood, but it does reinforce the values you're teaching.

(4) Gore on morality and protecting children:

I've been involved myself in negotiating and helping to move along the negotiations with the Internet service providers to get a parents' protection page every time 95% of the pages come up. And a feature that allows parents to automatically check with one click what sites your kids have visited lately.

Platforms
Read the full 2000 Republican platform here.
Read the full 2000 Democratic platform here.
Internet Resources
Bush/Cheney Website
Gore/Lieberman Website
Videos
Debates
First Presidential Debate
Vice-Presidential Debate
Second Presidential Debate
Third Presidential Debate (Town Hall)
Advertisements
Bush personal responsibility ad
Bush education ad
RNC prescription drugs ad
Gore anti-Bush energy ad
Gore anti-Bush Social Security ad
Gore "keep the faith" ad
Bonus:
SNL's Gore v Bush Debate
Strawpoll
>>>VOTE HERE<<<
...
...
...
(Okay here's the real poll, vote here)

Financial Betting Online - Wagering On Markets And Commodities

BlitzPredict

08-05 18:36 - 'Muslims and it's 'religion' are just ancient history in the next 2 or 3 decades. They have no place in the modern financial markets. Just don't bet on Islam if you want to make some real cash (thank me later)' by /u/justfgz removed from /r/Bitcoin within 131-141min

The Destructive Power of the Financial Markets --- Speculators are betting against the euro, banks are taking incalculable risks and the markets are in turmoil. 3 years after the Lehman bankruptcy, the financial industry has become a threat to the global economy again.

Summer war in the Middle East? --- Indeed, it is a question worth multiple billions of dollars, as it has been codified into an elaborate ritual featuring ever-shifting alliances, "incidents", threats, ever-accelerating arms procurement, and large speculative bets on the financial markets.

Summer war in the Middle East? --- Indeed, it is a question worth multiple billions of dollars, as it has been codified into an elaborate ritual featuring ever-shifting alliances, "incidents", threats, ever-accelerating arms procurement, and large speculative bets on the financial markets.

This week 12 yrs ago--Lehman Bros collapsed......(Best Interest) Explaining the Big Short and the 2008 Crisis

+3000% in 2020... My Journey to the Golden 7 Figure Mark

If you think the growing electric-car market would exist without Tesla, think again

It is time to be honest about the WNBA

Bloomberg: Nikola founder Milton's fall reveals what his backers feared

[Discussion] What would you do in Subaru's place? How would you use RBD?

If you think the growing electric-car market would exist without Tesla, think again

I’m all in

Nvidia’s Stocks May Plunge 12% Following Its Deal For Arm

5 Strategies in Quant Trading Algorithms

What it was like trading on Wall Street

Arbitrage

Positive expected value bets

Relative Pricing

Correlations

Mean reversions

Bankrupting Institutional Investors for Dummies, ft GameStop

The truth about the dbrand Grip...

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

TL;DR VERSION

THE most serious DD you'll see for quite a while. Prepare for tendie overload.

/r/neoliberal elects the American Presidents - Part 52, Bush v Gore in 2000

Betfair trading and financial markets interview - Peter Webb - BetAngel software