Part 4 — GME —Still happening?
I was 15 years old when it happened. My mom and dad decided computers were a skill that we needed to have, and spent $2000 of their hard earned money for us at Best Buy on an IBM Pentium 60 PC. The year was 1996.
My parents didn’t have a lot of money growing up. In the 90s, every family I knew had two cars, except mine. We weren’t poor — and I always had what I needed — — but we weren’t surrounded by stuff. The $2000 was a major purchase back then. I remember feeling the gravity of it. I was a freshman in high school.
I saved up my money and bought one game. It was the Star Wars: X-Wing Collectors CD. It had the entire Star Wars x-wing series (at the time) on one CD. Two problems. 1) My mom wouldn’t let me install it because of grades 2) It wouldn’t run on my computer.
Well, I got my grades up. Got an A- in my freshman math class. BUT, I still couldn’t get the game to load. In those days, technology didn’t just “work”. Sometimes it involved a fair bit of finagling.
The cool thing was my mom had a fax machine (the old school type that had the rolled paper and thermal ink). She also was decades ahead in that she had a home office. We weren’t allowed in. My mom made a special exception, and allowed me to use her fax machine to FAX the LucasArts technical support department. We probably sent 100 pages of faxes back and forth detailing two files on my computer (autoexec.bat and config.sys). They helped me coordinate the text in these files. After weeks of work — — the game loaded! I spent that whole summer playing that game. It was heaven (I was a late bloomer so girls took a back seat to spaceships).
I think about the things that shape us, and the things that make us how we are. My parents spending so much money on that computer allowed me to become comfortable doing things I maybe shouldn’t have (you really shouldn’t have been editing those files haha) to make something work. Years later, when I had a company, I was the defacto IT guy. We ran our multi-million dollar company on a $400 Dell from Best Buy for about 2 years.
I bought that game, and some others, at a store in my local mall. It was Babbages. Then they became Electronics Boutique. I haven’t been to that mall in decades, and I didn’t even know the company was around, until last year.
I realized last summer, when I started trading Gamestop ($GME) in the $4–6 range, that my beloved store…. was actually GameStop. Full circle.
After hanging around in the $180 range for a while, GME broke out yesterday up to $220. I was still holding 600 shares @ ~$120 cost basis that I bought as part of some spreads. I sold @ $211. I’ve never had $100k+ in a single stock before. Made me nervous. We got 30 hot wings to celebrate.
At the same time, I did open 6 late June $270 calls.
Here’s why….
- The practical reason is that the GME shareholder meeting is June 9 (6/9). There’s a ton of anticipation. The retail shareholder enthusiasm is still crazy. My friend said it best — GME is maybe better thought of as an analogue rather than a stock. It’s more like BTC than AAPL. They also released some teases yesterday about NFTs and Crypto and a bunch of stuff they’ve NEVER talked about before.
- The un-pratical reason is that there is a pretty large number of folks who believe that the GME share allocation is totally fraudulent. That more people own shares than shares exist. That the DTCC, and closing rules, and hedge funds and short squeezes…. somehow all these things have combined to have a coming squeeze that will make everything up to now look small. They’re probably wrong. But on the tiny, tiny, tiny percent chance that they’re not, I replicated my 600 shares with those 6 late June calls. If GME goes to $999999/share, I’ll park my yahct right next to theirs.
