DD from over 2 years ago….
“Some of you may have seen
my recent post about VWover the weekend, or
my older post about the "BRK Indicator". This post will expound on these as GME relates to Berkshire Hathaway.
NOTE: This is all based on visual pattern recognition from charts I will provide. The following is simply my own opinion/theory on what I see, and is not backed by any hard data aside from charts and letters/interviews/articles with Buffet/Kenny and other past GME research. If anyone wants to do a more quantitative analysis of this type of work, please have at it. This is not that. I'm not a quant. I have asked some quants to take a look when they have time, including pwn.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
I imagine most apes here have at least heard of Warren Buffett, value investor extraordinaire, and one of the richest men in the world. He was a disciple of famed value investor Benjamin Graham, whose teachings have influenced all the value investors since, including our very own DFV. Warren Buffett is the head of a company called Berkshire Hathaway (BRK). BRK is an interesting company: it basically just owns other companies. They own huge chunks of Apple, Coke, and Geico, to name a few.
Warren Buffett's image is carefully crafted to be that of a kindly old grandpa. He still lives in the same small house he purchased a billion years ago in Omaha, Nebraska. He buys breakfast at McDonald's and counts the change out like a normal person (he could buy all of McDonald's if he really wanted to). He only invests in good companies he truly believes in and holds them for eternity. Warren Buffett is the OG Diamond Hands. However, I submit, based on the evidence I'm about to show, that Mr. Buffett more closely resembles Montgomery Burns than an elderly Captain America.
Here's some of what Warren Buffett has had to say about short selling over the years:
It's a whole lot easier to make money on the long side. You can't make big money shorting because the risk of big losses means you can't make big bets. It's ruined a lot of people. You can go broke doing it.
Nice, so he doesn't like shorts. Ok cool. What else has he said about shorts?
I would welcome people wanting to short Berkshire. In fact, I'd lend them stock and earn extra income. They're a certain future buyer. If anyone wants to naked-short Berkshire, they can do it until the cows come home. In fact, we'll hold a special meeting for them."
Moreover, Buffett has used this share-lending strategy with some of his other companies. The Berkshire CEO related a story in which a large brokerage company approached Buffett wanting to borrow USG (USG) stock to sell short.
"We charged them a lot," Buffett said. "We even forced them to hold it for a certain period of time so we could continue to earn money on the borrow."
Buffett has said a lot about shorts over the years, but this is sufficient for our discussion here.
A Brief Primer on Currency Pairs
A currency pair is basically one currency traded against another, for example, EUR/USD = 1.25 means one Euro is worth 1.25 USD. The thing is, you can do these sort of pairings with any two stocks. For example, here's a period of time in 2019-2020 where we have GME (Yellow) and POPCORN (Blue). GME/POPCORN is shown in green. You can best conceptualize this trade as
LONG GME and
SHORT POPCORN. It's like a hedge, make sense?
https://www.tradingview.com/x/yWCHab2V/
These pairings can be of interest to traders because they can show when one stock might start to breakaway from others it usually moves with. Maybe you want to compare CPU STOCK #2 to the Nasdaq index, for example.
https://www.tradingview.com/x/4AMVe4Q0/
In this example, you can see that in the past few days, CPU STOCK #2 has started to trend upward against the index, meaning it might be a good time to jump in. Sure enough, the stock is rising compared to its peers.
So, what does this have to do with GME?
POPCORN IS GME'S LEASH
Remember that chart of GME vs Popcorn from 2019-2020? Looked like a normal, kinda squigly chart. Well, take a look at what has happened to the pairing in 2021-2022:
https://www.tradingview.com/x/XWceMNCy/
Do you guys see this? Starting in June, Popcorn and GME suddenly became
very closely linked. Since then, the two stocks have always traded within a certain range of each other. A good friend of mine observed that POPCORN often acts like a "leash" on GME, and this is exactly what is shown in this pairing. Neither stock can escape the confines of the lane they're trading together in. What we are seeing here is very likely the result of a
SWAP where Kenny (or Susquehanna, or whoever) took their GME short position and swapped it with an POPCORN long position to hedge the short position. They don't have to report this long position because swaps don't have to be reported. Then they pay to promote POPCORN on social media and here we are.
But wait, there's more.”
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