Investment & Investing

GME up 145% now, £122. Halted before closing bell, still cracking in after hours.

Reddit has gone down as well, too much WSB traffic

Wow, not even just WSB, the whole of reddit.

Wonder if it’s just the traffic.

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Lol

Strong price action after hours

Well, the underlying issues haven't disappeared. They are still massively shorted (still over 100%) on a company that isn't that bad (from a bricks and mortar perspective). And has the strong opportunity to become a strong player in the online retail sector because its already got its brand recognition and mind equity.

I still say its a good bet, and if the new ownership and leadership team do the right things, the stock price should climb.

I wouldn't believe it would be meteoric climb though, if I didn't know the current back story, but a war is being waged and this is the battleground. So I fear it may shoot up again but will crash back down. BUT buying now secures a good price for when it inches up.

Tl;dl - not investment advice, but I am holding onto my gme stock long term. No point selling as I bought a high 😂

Also, if you get now, you get to enjoy the emotional roller coaster of the high up to 500 and then crash back down to 60 or 70! (conjecture on the numbers. Made up on the spot. Not based on anything)

(conjecture on the numbers. Made up on the spot. Not based on anything except recent experience)

FTFY.

People in the US have their tax returns, Christmas debts have been paid or decreased, millions who hadn’t bought stock prior to GME 1.0 have now crossed that mental hurdle. On the other hand, all the world’s sharks are gathered for a feeding frenzy.

You couldn’t pay for publicity like this.

Does anyone understand £ -> $ conversion rates? I get paid a significant portion of my salary via USD stocks, and noticed that the current rate is <0.71 vs my last two conversions were 0.77 and 0.758.

Why? Is this the new normal? (market speculation I guess but still..)

Vaccine roll out in UK and optimistic outlook for unlocking earlier than expected, with Brexit not being a total disaster has seen the £ do well lately

Hasn't all the money they've been printing in the US had an impact too

@rogan you can just sit on them and choose not to sell right? My wife has the same and she will just hold until fx in more favourable

@greentricky makes sense

Yeah can hold but ideally would get it into my S&S isa before the end of march and it seems to be getting worse (for me) week on week atm.

Does anyone understand £ -> $ conversion rates? I get paid a significant portion of my salary via USD stocks, and noticed that the current rate is <0.71 vs my last two conversions were 0.77 and 0.758.

Why? Is this the new normal? (market speculation I guess but still..)

@greentricky is right but there are some other major influences as well. The Chinese state bank is diversifying reserves, selling USD and buying pounds and Euros. There's also some sort of kerfuffle around predicted inflation rates that I don't quite understand.

https://www.poundsterlinglive.com/gbp-live-today/15061-the-untold-story-of-pound-sterling-s-steamrolling-2021-rally

I would have thought the FX gains are likely to offset the downside of not getting in to your fy21 isa allowance but you should be able to work that out better

As some others have pointed out on here to me, unless you are using your S&S isa as a kind of pension substitute and plan to have vast sums in there for retirement, it's possibly not worth sweating maxing it out if in doing so you inflict some other kind of financial punishment on yourself.

@Howard guess that works on the assumption it will go back?getting paid is so complicated

Well this is a 5year low against the £ (or close to) - I don't imagine it to get much worse, so just a case of waiting for a good FX. That's what we're doing but different situs etc. Does stock make up a significant element of your total comp - is this negotiable?

like 35% - ain’t nothing negotiable at megacorp

My partner is paid in GBP but we live in NZ, so we are constantly tracking the exchange rate.

We found this website is pretty useful for post-rationalising the reasons behind the fluctuations:

https://news.torfx.com/categories/gbp-to-nzd/

I'm sure there is a page for GBP to USD on there too.

thanks, some interesting articles for sure

There's also some sort of kerfuffle around predicted inflation rates that I don't quite understand.

Had a meeting with my pension advisor earlier in the week, he said I should adjust my outgoings forecast to include a 6% inflation rate. He didn’t elaborate, only to say it’s what he’d heard.

Not sure where to post this, but it's an interesting read on the US (and to a lesser extent, global) Venture Capital sector;

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/02/the-crisis-of-venture-capital-fixing-americas-broken-start-up-system/

Good read, thanks

https://prospect.org/power/gamestop-mess-exposes-the-naked-short-selling-scam/

TLDR- Ted Kaufman, recently co-chair of Biden-Harris transition team, tried to curtail naked short selling of stocks years ago but wasn’t success because Big Money. He’s now uniquely positioned to enact meaningful change at a time of turmoil.

The hard locate idea isn't obviously unreasonable for medium-frequency trading, but it's not really workable for market-makers - assuming regulators and exchanges continue to require them to make two-sided markets.

None of these proposals seem to address short derivatives positions either, so I don't know what you'd expect to happen - presumably underlying and derivative prices just diverge because you can't arbitrage them any more. That will increase slippage on things like tracker funds, but I guess most voters won't notice until they wonder why their SIPPs performed slightly worse than expected, some decades later.