From the guys who brought you The Greatest Short Burn of the Century..

Oh man, oh man, oh man.
Not again.
-Drizzy

Preface:
Please believe me when I say I really wanted to take this month off and enjoy the snow in Tahoe. But as I was driving, something caught my eye...
Make no mistake. This stock is not going to be nearly as volatile or profitable as GME. In fact, this might be so boring that most of you will ignore me yet again. And that’s exactly why I like it. I’ll do my best to make this engaging, but the fact is, this is going to be a slow grind. Both this DD and the stock.
Also, as a bonus, Reddit is currently public enemy #1 in the eyes of the media. Why don’t we do a quick heel-turn and join their side? Are they gonna hate us for buying boring value stocks? They won’t know what hit them. That will be a fun show to watch.
Anyway… let’s take a look under the hood. As always, not financial advice. Just education. NOTHING IS A RECOMMENDATION. We are just sharing knowledge here. Ok SEC?
Intro:
Ford (NYSE: $F -- NOT NASDAQ:$FORD), is another depressed deep value multiple expansion arbitrage play. No short squeeze this time. The GME asymmetry may not be seen again for 10 years.
It might seem boring and unsexy on the surface, but Ford is a fantastic company in the midst of one of the best turnarounds in American history. And with a little help from our friend Mr. Options (or as Buffett called, Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction) we can turn a boring old Ford into a lightning fast Ferrari using the quadruple income option wheel strategy. Don’t try this at home. If you don’t know what CSPs, CCs, or vega are, stick to shares. Those should work just fine.
Let’s break this down into 5 parts: electrification story and leadership, multiples expansion, technical analysis, options, and the trade.
By the way, in 2019, the Ford F-Series was second only to the Apple iPhone, which raked in $55 billion, in terms of total revenue generated. The F-Series generated more revenue than the NFL, MLB, NBA, and the NHL combined, which added up to $40 billion. Just something to think about.

The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round...

Electrification story and leadership:
Let’s jump into history for a second. Ford had a meteoric rise from 1997 - 1999 from $15 to around $32 at the peak. This was due to $F reporting massive earnings increases each quarter:

They were just feasting and feasting. Jim Farley looks like the best person alive to revitalize Ford, capable of tripling the stock in 2-3 years. Look at the last two quarters:

Q3-2020 - Adjusted EPS: 65 cents vs 19 cents expected, Automotive revenue: $34.71 billion vs $33.51 billion expected (due to pent up demand)
Q2-2020 - Adjusted EPS: A loss of 35 cents per share versus a loss of $1.17 per share expected, Automotive revenue: $16.6 billion versus $15.95 billion expected.

Here are excerpts from the Q3 earnings and some other notable highlights:

Farley: Now that plan, which was introduced to the Ford team and many stakeholders on October 1, is very straightforward. Among other things, No. 1, we will compete like a challenger, earning each customer with great products but as well services with rewarding ownership experiences. Number two, we're moving with urgency to turn around our automotive operations, improve our quality, reduce our cost and accelerate the restructuring of underperforming businesses.
And third, we're going to grow again but in the right areas, allocating more capital, more resources, more talent to our very strongest businesses and vehicle franchises; incubating, scaling and integrating new businesses, some of them enabled by new technology like Argo's world-class self-driving system; and expanding our leading commercial vehicle business with great margins but now with the suite of software services that drive loyalty and generate reoccurring annuity-like revenue streams; and being a leader in electric vehicle revolution around the world where we have strength and scale. So now speaking about EVs. To start with, we're developing all-new electric versions of the F-150 and the Transit, the two most important, highest-volume commercial vehicles in our industry. These leading vehicles really drive the commercial vehicle business at Ford, and we're electrifying them.

Quick sidebar here from my buddy M: "Whereas traditional manufact / consumer / industrials are valued on an EBITDA multiple, SAAS has historically been valued on a revenue multiple, which translates to flat out higher valuations. EVs themselves are not necessarily a higher margin product that justifies a higher multiple (at least not that I've seen), but tech services / subscriptions are the real money makers in this game. Hint Hint companies like Apple throwing everything they have at trying to integrate services and subscriptions over the last 5 years"
This further justifies the expansion multiples we expect will catch up to leading EV automakers (see below).

We own work at Ford. And these electric vehicles will be true work vehicles, extremely capable and with unique digital services and over-the-air capabilities to improve the productivity and uptime of our important commercial customers. The electric Transit, by the way, will be revealed next month, and you heard about it here first, for all of our global markets. We believe the addressable market for a fully electric commercial van and pickup, the two largest addressable profit pools in commercial, are going to be massive.
Now you're going to see our strategy of electrifying our leading commercial vehicles and our iconic high-volume products expand very quickly at Ford.
When you look at our results, they reflect the benefit of our decision two years ago to allocate capital to our strongest franchise, namely: pickups, a whole range of utilities across the world, commercial vehicles and iconic passenger vehicles. Additionally, we saw higher-than-expected demand for our new vehicles in the quarter.
Together, these factors, plus the strongest performance from Ford Credit in 15 years, led to a total company adjusted EBIT margin of 9.7%. That's 490 basis points higher than last year.
As an outcome of all this, we generated $6.3 billion in adjusted free cash flow.
The strong cash flow in the quarter gave us the confidence and the ability to make a second payment on our corporate revolver, which we did on September 24. So now we have fully repaid the entire $15 billion facility, and we ended the third quarter with a strong balance sheet, including nearly $30 billion in cash and more than $45 billion of liquidity, which provides us with the vital financial flexibility we need.

Check out this credit downgrade weeks before Ford paid off their revolving credit facility. Smells like GME?
Alright. What about Q4-2020 and beyond? Ford is expected to post a loss. TA is signaling a beat (see the TA section). Ford is spending this money in order further restructure and deliver on the following items in their pipeline:
Bronco:

Within the first month of open reservations, the Bronco had received an estimated 230,000 reservations. 230,000 reservations is an incredibly impressive figure, especially when put into the context of Ford’s total vehicle sales. 230,000 sales would represent 4% of Ford’s total sales.
Current estimates place over 20% of reservation holders as first-time Ford buyers.
The most expensive trim, the limited ‘First Edition’, has already sold out.

Mach-E vs Tesla Model Y. Just the fact that there is debate between the better car is bullish for Ford.

The upcoming 2021 F-150 has positive consumer reviews as well:

The 2021 Ford F-150 Is So Stuffed With New Tech & Gadgets That Even Tesla Owners Are Impressed!
DeMuro - The 2021 Ford F-150 Is Totally New and Really Impressive
Some other nice features: Fold down the shifter, lay seats down completely flat, speakers in headrest, tailgate worksurface (pen/pencil holders, rulers) C clamp, 120V outlet, bottle opener, light), sensing running board, tailgate step and railing, and more. Watch the video.

Ford Raptor launch (just happened today, customers are excited. Look at the comments on YouTube and IG)
Further potential tailwinds:

Ford partnering with Rivian in a $500M deal. Product yet to be released.
Google partnership that caused the intraday spike on 2/2.
Ford is rumored to secure the USPS contract since deal talks are falling through with WKHS.

The Postal Service told Trucks.com that it expects to reach a contract with one or more of the teams bidding for the business in the federal government’s second fiscal quarter of 2021. That works out to the first quarter of next year.

There is a historical inverse relationship between gas prices and car sizing. Tell me if I'm reaching here. But as America continues to head towards electrification and energy independence under Biden, larger gas cars will be more in demand. Furthermore, the aftershock of COVID will continue to propagate the dedensification of cities. Less commuter vehicles, and more travel vehicles. And look who is conveniently positioned to take advantage of all of this?
Dr. Anning Chen is also a killer CEO of Ford China. This is largely intangibles (which Wall Street cannot model), but watch his interviews here and here.
Dr. Chen used the COVID shutdown to improve the operational efficiency of the company. It has not shown on the bottom line thus far, but it will later.
CTO Dr. Ken Washington bio. Ex Lockheed.
Kennard on the board.. PE guy, on the AT&T board and former FCC chairman.
Vojvodich. Ex CRM and ADHZ.
Regarding the above leadership and BOD members, experienced executives are a better fit for running the day-to-day than any other. Add a sprinkle of savvy techfin folk and you have a recipe for a elite transition.

English please? Ford is a strong company. Farley is delivering on his promises and can lead the company towards an operationally efficient turnaround towards electrification. Combine this with a loyal customer base rivaled only by AAPL, and you get another special opportunity. This is the turning point.
Multiples Expansion:
Now here lies the crux of the thesis. Amidst all the EV hype, Ford is being unfairly ignored at an extremely depressed multiple compared to the other companies in the EV space. Here are some comparisons (numbers may be slightly outdated, pulled earlier this week, more relative comparison than absolute):
$Ticker - Market Cap - TTM Revenue MM - TTM EBITDA MM - Revenue Multiple - Ebitda Multiple
TSLA - $810B - $28B - $4B - 29X - 202X
NIO - $92B - $12B - ($7B) - 7.6X - (NaN)
GM - $78B - $116B - $18B - 0.7X - 4.3X
F - $44B - $131B - $10B - 0.3X - 4.4X
That’s an eyesore. Let’s focus on just TSLA and Ford, because why not. Assuming Ford can quickly turn towards electrification (from the evidence above), these two companies are fair comparisons. No Tesla is not a software/energy company, look at their automotive % of revenue. Stop it. It has only recently dropped to 80% due to the expansion of their leasing division. Energy is still a tiny part of TSLA.
Revenue Multiple:
TSLA = 29X
F = 0.3X
EBITDA Multiple:
TSLA = 202X
F = 4.4X
Yes those numbers are correct. Look at them for 60 seconds and tell me what you see. Quick quote from my buddy M:

Just zoom out and think. TSLA is for sure ahead of the rest on their tech and charging infra right now. But in terms of just overall bottom line infrastructure and manufacturing capability; once the GMs, Fs, and VWs of the world can get the ball rolling, they are way ahead in that aspect. Much more experience in production and retail / distribution channels, as well as logistics sourcing. Plenty of battery makers, and self driving tech makers out there too right now. Small to mid scale M&A will probably be the name of the game if I had to guess.

This is why Burry is short $TSLA, but two scenarios can unfold: either the high-flying stocks drop, or Ford rises. I believe we will land somewhere in the middle, with Ford rising as we begin to enter the optimism phase in the final third of our bull market.
Shorting is a dangerous game anyway... So I’ve been hearing on the news...
TA, Options:
Exhibit A from our resident chart whisperer J (who will remain unnamed because you monkeys keep bothering him).
Larger view.
As you can see, the trendline has broken out.
Exhibit B from our resident quant T (also to rename unnamed):

Starting on 1/4 you'll find right tail distributions into any liquidation which represent large buying. Which has led up to a recent run-up and eventually left tail distributions which represent short coverings which lead into the gaps and thinner distributions where there aren't any major bids. Even with the pullback on 1/22 we see more right tail distribution after the profit taking from the recent run-up, which means someone is buying up the inventory.
This is unusual for F, where F trades within tight ranges. On 2/1 you can see a bimodal distribution which means a new player has stepped in, which we assume has additional knowledge apart from the larger players that were already in the market. The recent range between 10.70 and 11.20 indicates that the market has accepted this price range as fair value. Without additional research at first glance we can see that a large player (or players) is buying up a significant amount of inventory.
On 1/4 we find that the volume increased to 77,559,128 from the previous trading of 34,462,454 (125% increase) and 33,127,776 the day before that. Volume has been higher since.
On our first major left tail distribution (which represents short covering) since the buying on 1/4 the volume was at 113,707,973.

Exhibit C
250k shares of F 10.92; 100k F 11.04; 3.53m F 9.78; 708k F 9.78; 500k F 9.64; 377k F 9.50; 338k F 9.50; 201k F 9.75; 192k F 9.80; 150k F 9.77
These are blocks of shares bought in the past 7 days
Top OI changes:
+19610 F 02/05/21 11 C 43821 38% 13% 48%
+12904 F 02/05/21 12 C 31929 38% 11% 52%
Top OI positions:
170902 F 02/19/21 10 C +807 26% 49% 25%
112480 F 02/19/21 12 C +3207 29% 29% 41%
The percentages are bid mid ask.
Someone is bullish on Ford.
For an earnings play, daily RSI is oversold looking towards an uptick.
Options gamma is interesting to note as well.
Open interest on 2/5 $13 and $15Cs are also notable. Could be covered calls? Could be someone knows something?
Could be Jeff reading too much into the tea leaves. Not financial advice. Just showing you what I see.
The Trade: The simplest way is just to purchase shares and collect dividends as Ford may reinstate them sometime in 2021. Possibly leaps if you feel adventurous.
For the option junkies like myself, and as a tribute to the greatest company in American history, I will use the wheel(s). The GME trade was a very special and momentous occasion. Now that we have a bankroll, we’ll just quietly play theta gang as we enjoy our lives and spend time with our families and loved ones. Here’s a good summary.
This is not for amateurs. I mean, none of this is financial advice anyway, just educational.
But in a nutshell, I will: 1) Buy shares, 2) Sell CSPs 30-45 days out with 0.3 delta, 3) sell CCs with 0.3 delta (will reconsider this if Ford goes vertical) 4) Collect dividends.
The Wheel doesn’t work on everything. Here are the qualifications from the above post, let me know if this sounds familiar:

Profitable company that has solid cash flow
Bullish, or Very Bullish, analyst ratings
Priced around $10 to $50 so that I can afford to take the assignment if needed and I stay away from sub-$10 stocks as a rule
A stable chart without wild gyrations (especially those caused by CEO tweets!)
A nice dividend is always a good thing, both that you may collect it if assigned the stock but also that dividend stocks tend to more stable and predictable.

Hmm...
Conclusion:
Ford is a massive, complex, multinational corporation so I’ve likely missed very many things, but I wanted to get this out before ER so I can flex again. (No market manipulation here lol. My buddy's multi-million dollar block buys didn't move the needle one iota.) There are many things I haven’t covered, and simply don’t know yet. As more facts begin to unfold, and as I spend more time with the stock, I’ll share the information here. Also, every time I post about an equity, it seems to go down. Lol... (GME). With all this in mind, this is still a very risky bet.
Nevertheless, I like what I’ve seen thus far. Ford looks like a fantastically healthy company in the midst of a turnaround towards electrification with a phenomenally depressed multiple according to the market’s appetite. It deserves a multiple trending towards TSLA’s, not a dying auto manufacturer. Jim Farley has shown early to be a great CEO and I think he can continue the transformation. We’ve begun to enter a phase of exuberance, so I’ll choose to long Ford instead of short TSLA.
As a bonus, we have the opportunity to join forces with the boomers and talking heads and bet on one of their favorite companies. Time for America to be on the same side again. We’ve been divided for too long.
I know my GME posts were lucky. I’ll stake my reputation on another bet. One call sure is lucky. What about two? In any case, investing is a marathon, not a sprint. Glad to be a part of this journey with you all. Note: I will not discuss GME in the comments, which all depends on Ryan Cohen. There is nothing further to add until Q4 earnings.
And finally, we’ve officially entered the last phase of our very long bull market. This is not necessarily a sell signal yet, as some of the greatest returns can come in this period and can last for a long time. I will do my best to look for the signal and sound the alarm. The world will be celebrating, and I will be bearish. Burry’s passive indexing bubble call in combination with Thiel’s government debt bubble call will lead us into a dark time of unprecedented proportions. Tail risk hedging won’t work as the declines will be slow at first, and then fast and violent and unrecoverable. Be careful. Listen to Ken Fisher. Thank you very much for your time.
Positions: Bullish shares, LEAPS, on-going quadruple income wheel strategy as Ford reinstates the dividend. Timeframe 12-18 months. Watch out VIGILANTLY for macro risks. Bear market is on the horizon. Drop some Fs in the chat to pay respects.
PT: $32 with a chance of $98 if we start to see exuberance in the broader market.
-JA

Hefty info on Sonic’s future games and management

This is coming from Zippo who has been known to be a credible leaker. They have leaked Mario 3D All Stars and Bowser’s Fury before official announcement. Nintendo has dealt with Zippo before, further proving credibility. I would attach a link, but for some reason it isn’t showing up on posts and comments so I’ll copy pasta it in this post. Take these leaks with a grain of salt btw:
SONIC MANAGEMENT:
Nearly management of the franchise is being done at "Sonic Pillar" in Irvine, California now. They're calling the shots, when it comes to games, merch, social media, etc. SOJ is well aware of how much more popular the franchise is in the west, so they've been entrusted with it's care. That said, here's some stuff that needs to be clarified:
They are NOT a game development studio. Producers, artists and all of that are there to ensure development on the games go smoothly. Development is still being done in Japan at the same studios as always. Iizuka and Hoshino are still the stewards of the franchise, but they're doing so in the US now.
Those 3 changes alone are pretty huge, but I would expect more to come out. There's new hands in the Sonic pie, and this is being described internally as a "new era" for the boy in blue.
Modern Sonic will be the focus of this anniversary. That detail is going to be extremely disappointing to numerous people, which is understandable, but here's why:
Classic Sonic and his series of games are seen as "old hat" at SEGA. From what I understand, Classic coming back is and was never going to be a permanent thing. Yes, I know what you're thinking, Mania was a huge success critically, and that team is immensely talented, but the thing is, SEGA doesn't want the franchise being "defined" by a 2D sprite based game that was done by fan/indie developers.
They want the games they make themselves to be the "shining beacon" of the franchise, for lack of a better word. One other big point is frankly, Classic Sonic has more than been taken care of, at this point, by fans. There are literally hundreds of ongoing fan games being made, such as Sonic Mania Megamix, Sonic Galactic, Sonic Roboblast 2, Sonic 2 HD, etc. SEGA has come out and publically supported all of these fan works, they have no need for a Mania sequel, because fans are already doing those, and then some, from their perspective. Another way to think about this is Dragon Ball. For any person not in the know, the classic Dragon Ball era of 1984-1989 has a much different art style and tone from the rest of the franchise. Akira Toriyama and his editors decided to age up the characters, increase the dramatic tone and action scenes, and completely change the art direction of the series, and for the most part, it's been that way for over 30 years. Sonic Adventure has been commonly compared to Dragon Ball Z for that very reason. Z superceded any need for Dragon Ball, and SEGA sees Sonic the same way.
Modern has much more potential in terms of merch, spinoffs, television, comics, you name it. It's what the franchise has had it's core identity in since 1998, and that's not changing, Prime sounds like it'll be continuing this sentiment.
Also, the modern cast is much bigger, is ever-growing, plenty of potential for spinoffs, has a lot of potential depth in the characters (even if the games haven't done a great job showing that), and while this may not be important for some, the much larger female cast is super important for many in the fanbase. Classic will still be around in merchandise and supplementary material, of course, so don't ever expect him to go away completely. I'd love to be wrong about this one, being perfectly honest, but all signs are pointing to this being the case.
I have heard from that this point on, that they're going back to 2D and 3D gameplay being the sole dimensions in their respective games, which is an extremely good thing. The past 15 or so years has had Sonic Team's games all be a hybrid of the two, but in that execution, they have realized neither dimension has been able to be used to it's full potential, so instead of trying to make people happy with one title that pleases no one, they're making two.
NEW SONIC COLLECTION:
I don't know exactly what's in it, but will be a celebration of 30 years of the blue blur, with games that haven't been in circulation in many years. Sonic Advance, Pocket Adventure and Sonic R all seem like likely inclusions here. Sonic Team/M2 are likely making this in tandem. If I were a betting man, I'd say this one will release in June.
This will NOT include the remakes of Sonic 1&2, by the way. I'd expect the M2 versions to be the ones included, instead. Sonic 3 will also NOT be included
NEW SONIC & MARIO OLYMPICS:
in development, but considering how the pandemic has fucked everything Olympics related, the IOC internally scrambling over a potential cancellation of the Summer Games, and the extremely controversial nature of China holding next year's Winter Games, there's a very good chance that this one may be cancelled altogether. I also strongly believe SEGA and Nintendo want no part in this controversy. It'll all hinge on how this pandemic and the situation with China shakes out in the next few months. I'm 50/50 on this one happening, at the moment.
NEW 2D SONIC:
This is the one I've heard the least about. Iizuka alluded to this one last year, but I would bet money that this is coming rather soon, as well. It's a game with the modern cast, so I think a return to Sonic Advance/Rush formula is what we're getting here. Summer-Fall is pretty much certain. Who's developing it? I'm not sure, to be perfectly honest, but I have a hunch that Dimps is developing this title, as their schedule is strangely empty at the moment. I know they're a controversial developer among many Sonic fans, but I would blame their weaker titles on SEGA's lack of oversight rather than Dimps, themselves. They're an extremely talented and diverse developer in the variety of games they make, so i'm confident in that they can make a great Sonic game again, if it is them developing.
NEW 3D SONIC:
Okay, so this is the big one. This is a make or break title for a lot of people, and it's easy to understand why. I'll do the best I can to elaborate on what I've heard.
What I know:
-It is NOT a boost game. SEGA has realized that they've done all they can with that formula, so this is allegedly a return to more of an Adventure/traditional platformer, which is seen as having much more long term potential.
-Full 3D, no hybrid nonsense here.
-Features return of the spin dash in 3D and character upgrades.
-There are more playable characters than just Sonic, but I wasn't given specifics as to who those were. Tails/Knuckles/Shadow all seem like valid possibilities.
It'll be the first game conceptualized by the "Sonic Pillar" in the US.
-SEGA CS2 R&D has had a number of new hires, post Forces, so a number of the devs involved are brand new to the series. "Sonic Team" is literally nothing more than just a brand name now. No idea if it'll be in the marketing or not.
-The game will be cross-gen, should be on every console under the sun, and a Holiday 2021 release is still on track, last I heard. However, given the very obvious circumstances going on around the world, there is still a chance it may slip into 2022. They're willing to give this game all the time it needs.
-This game is a NOT a tie-in to the movies at all. Paramount is doing their own thing with Sonic.
CAMEOS:
Sonic will apparently appear as a guest in a bunch of games coming this year, Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 being the first game of this year's big push. I don't know what the other games are, but I have a prediction that one of them will be a guest appearance in SEGA's new Super Monkey Ball game, that series will celebrate it's 20th anniversary this year, so expect a pretty big push for that one, as well.
REVEAL PERIOD:
One last tidbit I have, is that they are planning some sort of game reveal as we speak, it should be a digital presentation, similar to what was planned last year. Although, given the tenuous state of things, a press release drop is also a possibility. My guess is that this will air from between the next few weeks and the end of March, and should go over at least a good bit of what I laid out today. We seem due for a reveal here pretty soon, so i'm of the belief that we may be mere days away from something substantial.

Amazon Stock Price Target Prediction & Analysis [Fundamental & Tehnical]

Should you buy Amazon stock or has it run out of growth opportunities? What is my price prediction for Amazon? Read until the end of the post as I reveal my price target for Amazon and why I believe it can deliver insane returns!
~Warning! Very Very Long Post~
[Disclosure: I made this DD 2 weeks ago & I wasn't part of this Subreddit until the last few days]
[Wanted to post this before the next Amazon earnings later tonight!]
Hello everyone and welcome to another stock price prediction! Today we are going to talk about Amazon and what’s the upside for the company! So, let’s go over the company a little before moving on to some fundamental, technical analysis, predictions and my price target for the stock in the next years & months.
So, let’s start by talking a little about Amazon, yeah, I know it’s one of the biggest companies in the world, but I believe Amazon is still undervalued & underappreciated compared to some of the highflyers that have generate insane returns in the past months, though most of them are still far from profitability and don’t have the growth across all the board like Amazon.
Maybe the market doesn't put as much attention in the numbers as I do but I would rather invest in a business which I consider to be healthy and growing rather than a what if stock like many of the recent inflated IPOs. Amazon is a trillion-dollar company growing at a double-digit pace as many companies that are a fraction of their size would kill for this numbers, but this hasn’t helped Amazon since September.
On a global scale e-commerce is expected to increase from 16% to 22% of retail sales by 2023. With the U.S. expected to increase its retail e-commerce sales from $374 billion to $476 billion by 2024.This is another thing that supports the growth that e-commerce has in front of it, both as total and as a % of the total retail sales. With the latest report showing a 24% increase in holiday e-commerce transactions and a 19% increase for the 2020 fiscal year.
E-commerce is showing signs that it will continue to gain share of the total market as a recent report projects that digital sales during the Black Friday-to-Cyber Monday period will grow by about 35% YOY, reaching penetration of around 32% and growing by more 10B, as this continues to eat up market share from more traditional B&M retailers.
I think one of the biggest problems the company has, it’s the actual share price of the company, not the value. We have seen that a stock split can and will attract more buyers and the share price would probably see an accelerated rate of growth, just look at what happened with Tesla and Apple recently. By splitting the stock just like Apple has done a number of times, this allows more individual investors to invest in the company, as they will be attracted by the cheaper share price. Amazon hasn’t done a share split since the dot com era, and it might be time for the company to take advantage of this hot bull market to actually go ahead with something like at least a 5-10:1 split.
So, let’s go a little through the latest quarter results and guidance. The company increased the operating cash flow by more than 55% to over $55B for the latest twelve months, with free cash flow also increasing by $6B, while they managed to avoid significant dilution of the company, with only 7M additional shares being outstanding.
The net sales also increased 37% in the last quarter to just over $96B, an increase of more than $26B over 2019, which is an insane 36% increase y/y yet again.
This year Amazon has also pushed their Prime Day ahead of schedule, which resulted in the two biggest days ever for third-party small & medium sellers, which saw an increase in sales of over 60% over 2019, even bigger than Amazon own retail business.
Amazon continues to expand into multiple revenue streams, with the first Amazon Fresh grocery store opened in California, which is offering both in-store and online products.
We also saw Amazon’s more profitable revenue streams meaning the services revenues increasing, with Amazon Studios continuing to produce original movies and TV-series while also expanding their offering to live sport games.
The company is also seeking to expand into the red-hot Video Gaming market, as they launched a new service Prime Gaming, available for free for Prime Members and also announced Luna which will be a cloud gaming service that will allow customers to play high-quality games on previously owned devices, thus not requiring bigger investments for many customers. They also continued to improve their devices like the Echo, Alexa, Ring and FireTV line of products, which feature more & more AI Improvements.
Amazon has also announced an expansion into the pharmacy business which put a lot of pressure on traditional pharmacy companies like CVS & Walgreens, while also announcing a new Halo service, aimed at helping customers improve their lifestyle.
I like companies that make me a lot of money, but I also like that they are involved in projects aimed at helping poorer communities around the world, with their latest Project Kuiper, being a low-earth orbit satellite constellation that is aiming to provide reliable & cheap internet access around the world.
And last but not least, let’s not forget about the biggest income provider as margin goes, the Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon continued to see significant customer demand for this product with multiple big companies like Global Payments & Moderna using their services. Alongside these 2 companies we also saw AWS providing even more data services for the NFL and many more other companies. AWS has been a terrific revenue stream for Amazon, with AWS having 1/3 of the market share for cloud infrastructure in the first half of 2020, as the compound annual growth of AWS has been 40% in the recent years, just below the other profitable services they offer on subscriptions services, advertising & payments, with the only revenue stream seeing a negative growth being the physical stores.
Overall, the company has seen a 28% compound annual growth in revenues since 2016 and an even bigger 68% growth in earnings/share, which is incredible to say the least.
So, before even starting, you should now that I am bull on Amazon but I am willing to hear other opinions so don’t be afraid to leave a comment down below!
I have made some predictions based on the growth rate of the company, the latest plans announced by them and used some estimates. So, keep in mind this are only projections and are calculated by myself, this is not an investment advice and you should do your own research and so on…
Firstly, let’s start with the Guidance that Amazon gave us for the 4th quarter, as they are expecting net sales between $112B and $121B implying a growth of between 28-38% over 2019. They also provided guidance for the operating income but this is heavily impacted by the problems we had in 2020 and that still continue to be around.
The company also is aiming to optimize the free cash flow which was up 26% y/y for Q3, as they are trying to dilute the shares as little as possible. The total net SALES for the last twelve months is nearing $348B which even adjusted for forex is still up 31%. Amazon has only 12% of their revenues coming the AWS right now, but this is by far the most profitable revenue for the company, as the increases in AWS sales have led to an over 90% increase in operating income from the previous year.
Let’s take a look at the last quarter’s results. We saw a big INCREASE in all 3 big revenue streams for Amazon, with the first 9 months of 2020 brining over $160B in sales in North America, $67B from International sales and almost $33B from AWS. For my projections I actually just added another quarter like this one to the end results, which actually is a conservative estimate of $96B compared to the guidance of $112B, and the growth rate that Amazon’s net sales has seen in the past year, with North America Sales rising by 37%, International by 31% and AWS by 30%.
For the cost of sales, I did pretty much the same, and with cost margin standing at 75% of net sales for the last quarters I think this is pretty safe to say it will remain mostly the same if not even improve due to bigger revenues from the AWS. I also estimated the full yearly costs by adding another identical quarter, just like for the revenues, so that things stay even.
For the other operating expenses, I also took this from their financials as I expect both SG&A and R&D expenses to start to normalize a little after the huge spending to ramp up capacity this year due to the increase in demand, while I also did the same thing for the Capex spending of Amazon, as they have invested massively in the last 12 months to ramp up things.
Meanwhile for the interest income and expenses I also just averaged things out for the full year while maintaining the other sources of income, but these have such a small impact that they don’t even matter.
Amazon has had a pretty wild effective TAX RATE in the past decade, but I decided to see what the avg was for the last 4years, and that was 16%, but for safety and due to the change in administration in the US I decided to bump this up a little to 18%.
And one last number that is important is THE earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, which has seen a 36% increase y/y for since 2016.
I like to value companies based on multiples of future price earnings. So, let’s take a look at what Amazon earnings/share will be by 2025.
I implied for the 3 main streams of revenues which are North American Sales, International Sales and AWS sales a rate of growth similar to the one we had this year but with gradual declines each subsequent year. I also used pretty much the same average cost of sales which includes the actual cost of sales and the fulfillment costs. This has stood at about 75% of the net revenues for the past years and might actually improve, but I do want to stay on the safe side. So, by 2025 the gross REVENUES should reach around $244B, assuming margins stay pretty much in line, though it’s likely they will improve margins, with International sales becoming a little more profitable and AWS brining more & more money.
We also have to estimated what the Capex & Operating expenses would be by 2025. I think Amazon should see somewhat of a slowdown of Capex, R&D & SG&A spending, as they have seen a huge boost in the past year, and I think it should normalize, so I will imply an 8% annual growth for these, which is still very high.
Next, we look at the interest income, expense and other losses or incomes for the company. This numbers are small compared to the vast cash flows of the company that they can even be ignored, but let’s assume they see a 10% decrease both in income and expenses related to interest while also not suffering losses but having a smaller other income by 10%/year. This would results in an almost $114B income pre-tax for 2025.
As I showed you earlier, the effective tax rate for Amazon has been around 16% in the past 4 years, despite the nominal US tax rate. For safety reasons I will use an 18% tax rate, though this should stay closers to 16% on the back of the International taxes. So, with an 18% tax rate, the FINAL income for the company after everything has been taken into consideration should be $93.25B.
For the outstanding shares, I will be conservative and imply a .5% increase in outstanding shares, as the company has been very careful in avoiding the dilution of the stock. So, with that increase by 2025, we should have around 531M shares.
So, BASED on Price to Future Earnings/share we can see Amazon is currently trading at almost 18 times 2025 earnings/share, which compared to the 90 multiple it’s trading right now would be insanely low. I can see Amazon continuing to trade at very high P/E for the foreseeable future. So, with a 25 PE price the company should trade at 4400$, while with a 50 PE ratio, the stock should be close to 9000$/share, which is insane when you think about that number, but maybe Bezos will listen and split the shares finally.
So, after all these estimates what are my price targets? HERE are my actual price targets… I think the bear case 2025 price we can see Amazon trade at is $4828 which would imply a return of over 54%, while my base case and my pretty safe assumption is that Amazon will trade at 6145$/share by the end of 2025, implying a 96.5% return on the current price. My most bullish case though is $7900, which would imply a return of 152%, with that number being mind-blowing given the current valuation of the company… but I guess we do have to start getting used with such high numbers… I guess decades ago when we saw the first millionaire or billionaire, people would have also thought that it was crazy… but crazy is for the limited minds only I believe.
So yeah guys, here is my OVERALL price targets for 2025, my bear case is an average of the 25 & 30 PE ratio, while the normal case is the average between the 30 and 40 PE’s with the most bullish case valuing the company between a PE of 40-50.
So HERE is the full spreadsheet that I have projected for Amazon by 2025, if you do have another opinion or a suggestion please leave a comment down below, I think I have been conservative in most of my projections, but feel free to give your opinion.
Keep in mind, these targets might sound ridiculous, but just look at the growth Amazon has in the past. The company has increased in value by more 450% in just the past 5 years and is over 160.000% up since it started trading. So yes, the valuation is mad right now for the company. So, are you willing to bet against one of the biggest and fastest growing companies in the world?
The company also has pristine FINANCIALS, with more than $112B in current assets vs only $102B in current liabilities, with over $282B in total assets. So, the company is way more than solvable at any point in the near future.
And let’s also take a look at what the estimates are from the analysts. We can see that the analysts expect a similar EPS by 2025, of around $166 compared to $171/shares that my Growth Valuations are projecting. So, it seems that this could be a very reasonable upside for the company.
So, what do I expect in the next couple of days, weeks and months for Amazon?
Let’s look at this CHART, so starting with the high the stock made before the September sell-off. The stock has been trading in this wedge formation for the last couple of months with increasingly higher lows. The stock isn’t overbought and hasn’t been since it saw an RSI of 73 when it reached the all-time highs. I think with this wedge formation building up, with increasing higher lows and with the pattern of trading likely being an Elliot Theory 5 WAVE formation, I think it’s very likely we see a breakout in the near future, maybe just before earnings, and I expect this breakout to mimic the last run the stock had of about 23% up. So, with that 23% increase mirrored that would result the stock should peak around $3900, which I expect to see by the end of the year.
And let’s take a quick look at what 47 analysts on wall street are saying. They are mostly very bullish on the company with an average price target of $3800 and a high price target of $4600 which is insane for a return in the next 12 months, as 46 of the 47 analysts are either bullish or very bullish on Amazon. So yet again, the $3900 isn’t that out of possibilities even as Wall Street’s analysts expect
So, what would I do? Well, I own Amazon stock and I believe it still has tremendous room to grow, so I would start building a position as I expect the company to resume its uptrend sooner rather than later and the next catalyst may be just a couple of weeks away with the last quarter earnings expected to be announced early in February.
And I shouldn’t forget to mention that I believe Amazon is one of the most stable stocks out with very good leadership, and with large institutional holders like Vanguard, BlackRock and Morgan Stanley owning huge amounts of the company.
So, THIS are my projections and my expectations for the company, and if you do want to check out the spreadsheets you can find the link HERE
Thank you everyone for reading🙏 Hope you enjoyed the content! Be sure to leave a comment down below with your opinion on the stock market! Have a great day and see you next time❗

Let's Talk: 2021 Rankings [#1]

Note: Made an edit 12 hours after posting here. I didn't like where Rondale was ranked so I did move him up two spots to more closely match his athletic profile to other players. To make someone upset, looking at these rankings and having spent more time thinking about it I may also move Smith down to 9. I'll leave it for now.

2020 series:

2021 series:

Notes on the 2021 Class
Scouting List 2020
- ^{Yes, an inconsistent title, it’s scouting the 2020 school year, but technically it’s 2021 prospects exclusively.}

^{Quick note: I am not going to be providing a formula change relative to last year, and I'll be citing past work in this post rather than bringing in new concepts. To that point I suppose we will talk more about rankings today. I'm going to avoid tiering in this case but will certainly enter discussions below; I intend to describe more of my takes in the comments rather than the body of the post.}

Contents:

2020 Season Recap
Draft Capital Expectations
Positional Rankings
Top 12 Rankings

2020 Season Recap

Like every year, the sands shift under our feet every couple of weeks. We had players opt out, we had players lose the season due to injury, we had players lose their careers due to medical events. We see this frequently, Mike Williams and DK Metcalf having their careers threatened by neck injuries, Ahmonn Richards losing his career due to a neck injury.
This year we nearly lost Justyn Ross due to a birth defect (and given Clemson’s history may be likely to return to school) and lost Journey Brown (my pre-season RB3) to a career ending heart defect. Throw in Ja’Marr Chase’s opt out--which gave Terrace Marshall the lead spot at LSU, Javonte Williams usurping Michael Carter and thundering into the top RB conversation, Kylin Hill opting out; the sands shifted.
For all that sand shifting, I do not feel my rankings in this iteration are changing much. There were some stand out performances that re-organized my WR rankings, and my uncertainty around Hubbard has only grown, but the complexion of the rankings are fairly solid now 8 months later.

Draft Expectations

I reference my thought process around this in the 2020 Let's Talk under the heading "Setting Draft Capital Expectations." The cliff notes version is I currently use historical precedent to determine just how many players we can expect to go in rounds 1-3 each year. This was born out of countering the idiocy of takes like "30 wide receivers are going to go in the first 3 rounds" when there have never been more than 17 taken. Generally, we know that draft capital is a large portion of opportunity and the wide body of top ranked prospects any given year will come out of day 1 and day 2.
This doesn't mean we disregard everyone that falls out of that conversation--this year there are a number of players I am intrigued with that I currently don't project to have day 1 or day 2 draft capital--but it gives us a place to start.
Since 2013, we know on average 5 QBs, 7 RBs, 12 WRs, and 6 TEs go Day 1-2. Over that course of time we have not seen more than 8 RBs or 16 WRs go in the first two days of the draft and from past examination since 2002 it was only in 2007 that 17 WRs went in the first two days. The general thought here, like we observed in 2019, you may get a record 13 receivers go in the first 2 rounds but then you are only going to get 2 in round 3..on average. Any year can be an outlier, but we don't set expectations on outliers.
Having said all of this my current expectation for the coming class is:

Round	QB	RB	WR
1	3	0-1*	4-6*
2	1-2*	3-4*	4-6*
3	1-2*	3	2-3*
Total Taken	6	7	12

* My current read is there is a player(s) between rounds.
One quick note, every year there tends to be a small school guy that creeps into the day 2 conversation. This year, I wouldn't bet against 13-15 receivers being taken, however I believe there is value in being measured and conservative in these numbers as we must thin the herd and think about who deserves to be in the conversation instead of assuming every player that is ever mentioned is just in the conversation. That's how you get Equanimeous St. Brown Round 1 lock.
^{PS: Dang I did a pretty good job ballparking players last year. Maybe I should have spent more time on it this year to make sure I do just as well.}

Positional Rankings

First, no, I don't talk about tight ends until after the draft. It's outside of my wheel house. A lot of people I respect LOVE Pitts though.
As I've spoken in the past, draft capital is a good guide, and often times out performs ADP in straight rankings, especially early in a players career (opportunity > talent, but talent eventually brings the opportunity). However, if we are looking at success rates, or the probability of finding success by draft position, we find there isn't a significant difference in rate of success between a runner taken 65th overall and a runner taken 90th overall. A receiver taken 25th overall or a receiver taken 65th overall.
More succinctly, if you know DK Metcalf is a hard worker, comes from a football family, has a production profile that mirrors hall of famers when extrapolated out and has gone to a good team--you ignore what people are saying and take the 9th drafted WR as your WR1. Take the 6th drafted WR (Michael Thomas) as your WR1. It may fail, the best odds in fantasy predictions are a coin flip, the BEST odds, so don't haggle between the difference of 20% and 15% odds.

Quarterback

Trevor Lawrence, Clemson (Top 3)
Justin Fields, Ohio State (Top 5)
Zach Wilson, BYU (Round 1)
Mac Jones, Alabama (Round 2)
Trey Lance, North Dakota State (Round 2)
Kyle Trask, Florida (Round 2-3)

Haven't fallen in love with a specific QB yet, but I think there is a lot of noise around each player. Find your favorite and cling to him.

Running Back

Najee Harris, Alabama (Round 2)
Travis Etienne, Clemson (Round 2)
Javonte Williams, North Carolina (Round 2)
Jermar Jefferson, Oregon State (Round 3)
Michael Carter, North Carolina (Round 3)
Chuba Hubbard, Oklahoma State (Round 2)
Kenneth Gainwell, Memphis (Round 3)

Honorable Mentions:

Trey Sermon, Ohio State
Kylin Hill, Mississippi State
Brian Robinson, Alabama
Javian Hawkins, Lousville

I'm not saying there won't be first round runners, but if there are, I think they seep into the 20s or 30-32 like last year.

Wide Receiver

Ja'Marr Chase, LSU (Top 15)
Terrace Marshall, LSU (Top 40)
Justyn Ross, Clemson (Round 2)
Rashod Bateman, Minnesota (Top 40)
Jaylen Waddle, Alabama (Top 20)
DeVonta Smith, Alabama (Top 30)
Seth Williams, Auburn (Round 3)
Elijah Moore, Ole Miss (Round 2)
Rondale Moore, Purdue (Top 40) [+2]
Chris Olave, Ohio State (Round 2)
Tylan Wallace, Oklahoma State (Round 2-3)
Dyami Brown, North Carolina (Round 3)

Honorable Mentions:

Amon-Ra St. Brown
Dazz Newsome

Let it all burn.
Before everyone goes thermonuclear in the comments, 5-11 are a fairly large tier for me. I think Rondale Moore is roughly where Tyreek was coming out of college, more game tape being used as an extension of the ground game than as a true wide receiver. I think in the right situation (with the reading I've done on Rondale Moore) gives him a similar career arc to Tyreek. But if you are asking me to give up someone like the more technically savvy players ahead of him for Rondale and I need to hit on that pick? It's scary so far out from the start of the season.

Top 12 Rankings (Superflex)

Trevor Lawrence, QB, Clemson
Ja'Marr Chase, WR, LSU
Najee Harris, RB, Alabama
Justin Fields, QB, Ohio State
Travis Etienne, RB, Clemson
Javonte Williams, RB, North Carolina
Terrace Marshall, WR, LSU
Rashod Bateman, WR, Minnesota
Justyn Ross, WR, Clemson
Zach Wilson, QB, BYU
Jaylen Waddle, WR, Alabama
Rondale Moore, WR, Purdue

I always do my top 12 rankings a little differently than my positional rankings because here I think player value has to come into play. I may not be as high on some people on Rashod Bateman, Rondale Moore--but at some point you are taking him in a draft because of the value and the potential trade outs late in the summer and early in the season. It quickly becomes situational and an examination of upside.

Let's talk.

Gamestop, WallStreetBets, and Finance

This story is only ramping up, with numerous politicians jumping in today. The post made yesterday was specifically about Discord banning their server. But that is A) really tangential, and B) very much in the middle of the procedure. And when people enter in the middle, we often have a bad habit of assuming what came before. So I wanted to start with the basics of finance so it's all laid out simply.

It begins with a magic box

Suppose there is a magic box that spits out $10 every year.
Every January 1 a $10 bill comes out of this box. You don't know how and you don't care, but you have every faith it will continue to happen. How much would you pay for the box?
Seriously, try to come up with a number.
It's not obvious if you've never studied this kind of thing. The entire field of finance exists to answer questions like that. But let's say for the purposes of our discussion the "reasonable" price is $500. (If you're curious about the actual calculation, look up "Present Value of a Perpetuity".)
We'll say there's a whole bunch of these magic boxes out there, all exactly the same. But not infinite. So if someone new comes along and wants a box, they have to find a previous owner and offer a trade. Maybe you'd take $500 for it if you wanted the money now instead of waiting. Or maybe you really like your box and you insist on $520 or $530 for yours. If all the people buying and selling the boxes make the trade prices publicly known, what you have is a market. And the prices of the boxes will go up and down based on various factors.
But it should be clear that regardless of what anyone is paying for it, this magic box continues to work exactly the same.

Eat my shorts

So you have your box. I come to you and say "Can I borrow that? I will give it back to you in the future, and in the meantime I will pay you the $10 every year that the box would have." So to you it makes no difference. To the box it makes no difference. But to the market, it might. Because I can then go sell that box, planning to buy it back later. And if I do that a lot, all these boxes I'm selling might make people less interested in buying. Which means the going price is lower, and the box I sold for $500 maybe I can buy back for $400. Then I return it to you and keep the difference as profit. (Minus any annual payments I had to give you.)
This is "short selling", or "shorting". Instead of buying then selling, I would sell then buy. It's made possible because I was able to borrow.
Now let's ramp it up. I borrow more and more boxes, selling each time. I even borrow the same box again from the person I sold it to, just to sell it to someone else. And the price at which I do it goes cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. Eventually I'm so successful the last buyer bought a magic money box for $50. I have successfully shorted the price that low.
So let's ask the question: is this bad? Consider different points of view:

If you had held on to your box and suddenly found you needed a quick $500, you'd be pretty unhappy if no one was paying more than $50.
If you loaned yours to me you don't care. You're still getting your annual $10 and will eventually get the box back.
The box doesn't care. Not because magic boxes don't have feelings (who knows?) but because it still works exactly the same.
If you were looking to acquire a box, you'd be absolutely thrilled that I had made them so cheap.

So good/bad depends on who is speaking. But I would point out that the first group is hypothetical and probably not that big. But the fourth group very definitely exists. My shorting offered a lot of valuable boxes to a lot of people at a very low price. In any other context you might even call that a public service.
In all likelihood, the biggest loser of this scenario is me. I took something of proven value and made people temporarily question that. But if they have either rationality or patience, they're not going to sell me these boxes back at $50. And I do have to buy them sometime because I owe a whole lot of them.

Group hug

In fact, sometimes it's not up to me when I start returning the boxes. Suppose that while I'm trying to short the price down, it actually goes up to $600. You were fine with me borrowing before because you knew that I'd already have the cash to buy it back at a lower price. But at a higher price, you'd probably want some reassurance. This is known as a "margin call". (Margin being the broker's term for borrowing.)
When the price goes higher than expected, as the short seller I either need to dump a whole bunch more cash in the account to make you more confident, or I need to start buying back the boxes immediately and returning them to the lenders. But of course if I start panic buying a bunch of boxes, that's going to have the exact opposite effect that selling them did. The market price will go up. And the higher it goes, the more margin calls I get on the ones I still owe. This loops on itself over and over, and is known as a "short squeeze".
Basically everyone in this situation wins except me. Lenders get their boxes back immediately. People who bought them cheap now get to sell to me at a higher price. People who held see the price shooting up. This is why shorts are painted as the enemy - because in terms of our bet, it's everyone against me. But remember that the short itself wasn't a problem. All I did was make this valuable magic box available at a low price.

You don't actually believe in magic, do you?

Of course, magic isn't as reliable as it used to be. For years the box spit out a $10, sure. But at the start of 2021, each of the boxes only gave out $7...
Well that changes things, doesn't it? $500 may be a fair value for $10 a year. But if the box doesn't pay as much, it's not worth as much. And what if next year is lower than $7? What if someday it stops giving out money entirely?
Now the *intrinsic value* of the box has changed, and may continue to do so. If I were to short in this environment, that makes a lot more sense, does it not? If the price is going to go down, I'd sure like to be selling now and buying later.
This still puts us on opposite teams. Whether you bought your box a long time or got it cheaply from me, you hope I'm wrong and come next January it goes back to giving $10s. Again, you win if I fail. I guess that makes me the enemy. But don't mistake that for me breaking the box. I didn't affect it. I just have a different prediction.

The box is Gamestop. It was a metaphor!

OK, push the "magic box" analogy to the back of your mind. Stocks really aren't all that different. When you buy a stock you own a piece of a company. You bought it from a previous owner. You hope they will make money and someday send you your cut (called a "dividend"). But these things are unpredictable, which is why stock markets move around.
Always remember the order though: The magic box affects the price. The price did not change the box.
If Gamestop is a good company, all the shorts do is make the stock cheaper for people who would like to own it. They can't drive the company out of business and "cost thousands of people their jobs". Which is something I've been seeing people say. It's kind of why I wrote this. You can't make the magic boxes stop just by selling a bunch of them.
However, if Gamestop is legitimately having problems, the price is going to go down and the shorts are just the first ones to figure that out.
(1)

The special investors

I've been entertained by WallStreetBets for years. And there's a way I like to describe them:
1/3 smart people acting dumb because it's funny. 1/3 dumb people not knowing it's a joke. 1/3 people who think they're in the first group but are actually in the second.
WSB has made the news a couple times. The biggest story before this involved using an account glitch (at newbie broker RobinHood) to borrow a million dollars and then gamble it at 20:1 odds. Who they are (or at least pretend to be) are wanna-be Jordan Belfort. (The guy from Wolf of Wall Street). It's not reflective of your save-for-retirement investor and it's not some new Occupy Wall Street movement. Causing a short squeeze like the one I described above is something they might do because it's funny, and because some gamblers will get paid off, and because it's funny.
That's basically what happened here. Many short sellers had bet against Gamestop. Management had added new members to their Board of Directors (basically the shareholder's representatives) including Ryan Cohen, the founder of pet-food-seller Chewy. His suggestions about significant change to the company had inspired some optimism. WSB members saw that as an opportunity and tried to rally people into the stock to cause a short squeeze. And from there it caught on.
Make no mistake. When something like this hits the news, causing either casual investors or anti-Wall Street bandwagoneers to follow with their own money, that makes the joke so much better.
But remember the stock price does not affect the underlying company. The shorts pushing it down to $4 or the buyers/squeeze pushing up to $400, neither affects how Gamestop operates. This isn't about saving the company. It's what happens when serious predictions meet treating-money-like-a-video-game.

Short answers about shorts

Is there going to be a government bailout?
Not of the hedge funds. We're only talking about 1-2 funds. And I assure you, there are hedge funds on the other side as well. Nobody wants to see a fund manager fail more than their rival managers. The industry is fine. And hedge funds are by their very nature not open to average investors because of the risk involved.
Will anyone else get one? I don't know. This is America. So probably.
How will this end?
I don't know the accurate value of Gamestop stock any more than anyone else. But I can tell you it's a lot closer to $10-15 than it is to $250. If you're in for the joke, it's hilarious. But the higher the spike, the more appealing it is to sell - both to new shorts and to long-term holders. No one wants to be the last one holding.
Marijuana company Tilray might be a model. In 2018 the stock was first issued at $17 per share. Buyers (including a great deal of WSB hype) pushed it up to $300 within 3 months. Last year it hit a low of $2.43.
Who will be the biggest loser?
Probably RobinHood. This app-based broker targets a less experienced audience which makes them perfect for WSB-style comedy. And for reasons not entirely clear, earlier today they banned the purchase of Gamestop (along with others including AMC, BB, and BBBY) on their platform. This has already sparked a class-action lawsuit and promises of legal investigation from as diverse a group as AOC and Ted Cruz.
That action may actually be the bit that leads to lasting change. If it turns out that Robinhood was pressured by their own market connections, who were motivated by the hedge funds involved, we might see stricter rules about firewalls between roles. But that is speculation. I could guess several reasons why they might have acted that don't rhyme with "Bon fearacy". But they should be made to answer.
Is this like 2008?
No. Other than that they're both about finance, and therefore about the prediction of the value of future events. But these are predictions about the value of selling used video games. Not comparable to a drop in home values - the most widespread, leveraged market in the world.
-----
Footnote:
(1) For completeness, I should add a caveat. If a company is in trouble but not dead, they may seek out new investors so they have money to stay alive longer. A low stock price makes that harder to do, and short sellers certainly don't help that. But crucially here, genuine problems must exist first.

"Why you can believe the Bible" -- debunking a video

This video attempts to explain why one should believe the things the christian bible says, specifically because:

it's a reliable collection of historical documents written by eyewitnesses, during the lifetime of other eyewitnesses. They report supernatural events that took place in fulfillment of specific prophesies, and claim that their writings are divine rather than human in origin.

THESIS: The arguments and evidence presented in the video completely fail to support the above position.
It's a huge post: feel free to only tackle a specific section or 2, I think they're mostly self-contained.
In some cases I say that I suspect the speaker of being dishonest. If you don't like that, just know that he straight up calls people "ignorant, or evil, or both" [34:07] and "fools" [56:03] (stated as a fact, not merely his opinion) for using specific arguments or not accepting his conclusion. I think he opened up the Pandora's Box of guessing others' intent and so I've done it as well, though I've tried to be as responsible as possible. If you think I've been unfair, please let me know why.
TL;DR and conclusion next, for your convenience...

TL;DR & Conclusion

The speaker first presents the question: "why the bible?" (I've tried to phrase this more rigorously as: "why should anybody consider the bible authoritative on the truth of the Universe?") The speaker then presents his answer, and dissects it to address and support each claim within it.
However, his methodology for investigating the question actually rests on the premise that "there is no higher authority than the bible" (in his own words, 12:35-ish). This is a direct answer to the question he's investigating, and therefore any answer which rests on this premise is circular. I demonstrate that important portions of the speaker's argument do seem to rest on this premise and other lines of fallacious reasoning, and so his answer seems to be based on invalid reasoning and should not be trusted.
The speaker also fails to present compelling evidence for any of the claims which make up his answer, and often relies on fallacious arguments. His arguments include:

Questionable interpretations of biblical passages: citing passages widely believed to be forgeries as if they are eyewitness testimony, and reading "between the lines" and other forms of motivated interpretation
Unsound interpretations of the history of the bible: preferring a "very early" authorship of New Testament books, against the consensus of modern scholars and without giving any justification; and citing absence of evidence as evidence of absence (argument from silence), in a case where the old adage actually holds true
Errors in analyzing probabilities: preferring less likely explanations over more likely ones, or not applying Occam's Razor where it would help
Straw men, an appeal to consequences, an argument from popularity, affirming the consequent, and other fallacious arguments

Even ignoring the circularity of his methodology, the speaker fails to come close to proving his point. That's not to say he's wrong: the bible could be an authoritative source of information about the Universe, and he's just failed to piece together a valid argument which supports that position. I don't think that's the case (and I've done just a bit to rebut that position), but it's possible. However, after viewing this video and considering all the poor arguments it presents, I still think it's far more likely that christianity and its bible originated entirely due to mundane natural events, maybe akin to what's proposed here.
In my own experience, however flawed the arguments presented in this video are, I've seen them used a lot. I hope that some readers might see how to debunk an argument they consider sound, so that those folks can reconsider their position and build stronger arguments in the future.

Video Overview

First off, this video attempts to answer the question "why the bible?" In the context of the video it's pretty clear what he means, but it's vague out of context, so I'll rephrase it more rigorously:
"Why should anybody consider the bible authoritative on the truth of the Universe?"
For the most part the video is a systematic dissection of the speaker's position.

The "Egregious Flaw" in Methodology

At [12:35] the speaker says the following, to rebut the objection that 'proving the bible using the bible constitutes circular reasoning'. He's trying to get in front of this objection because most of his reasoning is, in fact, an attempt to prove the bible using the bible.

The question is "why I choose to believe the bible". ... The answer to that question for me resides in the bible itself. Now why would I appeal to the bible in this way? Because there is no higher authority than the bible. See, if I were to appeal to another authority, then I would be conceding that there is a higher authority than the bible. So this might be a problem in any other area, and any other field -- however, I'm making the argument that this is the higher authority, and therefore by definition I cannot appeal to another authority.

He asks the question "why do I consider the bible authoritative?", and he investigates it under the premise that "there is no higher authority than the bible". The main premise underlying his entire investigation is a direct answer to the question he's investigating: this is the definition of circular reasoning.

But doesn't he make a good point? Wouldn't any other premise corrupt his investigation and bar him from reaching the conclusion that "there is no higher authority than the bible"?
No, that's ridiculous, and here's why...
For one thing, when the speaker says that his question is different from any other question in any other field, and yet fails to give a sufficient explanation for how it's different -- that's special pleading. Sure, maybe it's impossible to investigate whether any given thing is the ultimate authority. But even if that's the case, it doesn't make circular arguments valid.
Including an answer as a premise forces one to interpret all the evidence in a manner consistent with the premise, or to only consider evidence that's consistent with the premise -- which of course forces the investigation to reach the conclusion stated in the premise. That's what a premise is: a foundational assumption which guides all subsequent reasoning. It is not constraining in any way to assume that a thing might not be authoritative, in order to investigate whether or not it is authoritative -- it's the only honest way to investigate any question.
The speaker should be more than willing to assume that he might be wrong, and then undertake a fair investigation from there. If he's right and the bible is the ultimate authority on the Universe, then he can only demonstrate that by comparing it to extrabiblical reality. And again, if he's right, everything in the Universe should agree with the bible -- and even the nay-sayers ought to accept that as proof!
Why is he unwilling to strike the killing blow to his opponents' arguments, if he's certain that he's right?

In the following sections I'll show how this circular reasoning appears to lead the speaker back to his assumed conclusion.

The Speaker's Answer

Presented at 11:05: see very top for quote.
I'll address it claim by claim, as done by the speaker...

Claim 1: "... it's a reliable collection of historical documents ..."

At 15:08, the speaker cites the following as evidence in for this claim:

The bible was written on 3 different continents
In 3 different languages
By over 40 authors from multiple walks of life: kings, generals, fishermen, tax collectors, doctors, historians
In 66 volumes, covering hundreds of subjects
Over more than 1500 years

So what? In all these ways it's similar to the Hindu scriptures, but does the speaker give any credence to those? Though he does mention other religious texts [3:57] and even presents them as alternatives to the bible, he doesn't discuss these so-called "strengths" of the Hindu scriptures (or any others) in his lecture: I think either he's unaware of them, or his premise -- that the christian bible is the highest authority -- has caused him to exclude Hindu and other scriptures from his investigation, because analyzing them the same way he analyzed the bible would cast doubt on his assumed conclusion. So, "why the bible?" when the Hindu scriptures and perhaps others are so similar in the ways the speaker cares about? Who knows? He didn't address it, though he should have.
But even if there were nothing remotely comparable to the bible in these ways -- why should it matter? Does the number of languages used to compose something somehow affect is authority? For that matter, does composing one work on the corner of 3 continents somehow make it more authoritative than another one composed on the edge of the Indian subcontinent, or in the middle of North America? And why should we care how many people wrote it, or their backgrounds, or how many separate books it's composed of, or how long it took to write?
I know what he's getting at: he's trying to say, "how could this many people, over such a long time, across such large swathes of multiple societies, all be wrong in the same way?" Well, that's a fallacy called 'argumentum ad populum', an argument from popularity. Just because a bunch of people believe something, that doesn't make it true, or even likely to be true. All the bible authors were Jews and early christians living in Eastern Mediterranean societies; they were well aware of earlier Jewish oral and written traditions, and likely tried to constrain their work to enhance rather than refute the existing traditions; and the works which weren't popular or didn't agree with existing traditions were not included as canon! The bible's internal consistency (such as it is) doesn't indicate that its contents are true -- it indicates that its authors prioritized internal consistency.
The speaker has made an argumentum ad populum, derived from evidence heavily affected by sample selection bias and observer bias. It's a terrible argument, built on terrible evidence. After a bit of thought, anybody who isn't operating under the speaker's circular premise should be able to see the problems with this argument.

At 17:40, the speaker seems to claim that the author of Luke was a historian, and that we should trust them at their word when they make claims, because as a historian they researched the claims before publishing them:

Luke was not an eyewitness -- he doesn't claim to be an eyewitness. He's a historian who claims to have traced the information from the eyewitnesses. ... The fact that this man was not an eyewitness, but collected information from individuals who were eyewitnesses [...], and has followed everything closely for some time past, and he wanted to write an orderly account. ... Luke's goal is history and chronology.

Well, Luke probably wasn't a historian in any modern sense of the word, so "history and chronology" in any modern sense probably weren't his real goal. Modern historical research didn't really happen in ancient times, so I'm reluctant to accept that when the author of Luke says he has "followed all things closely for some time past", he actually means he's found enough objective evidence to support the claims he's heard. It's not what he explicitly says, and that was not the common practice at the time, so I find it hard to believe that's what he meant.
Also, I don't think Luke 1:1-4 (cited by the speaker) implies that Luke tried at all to investigate the claims he received from others. Instead, this passage can easily mean that the author of Luke was told some stuff by people who claimed to be eyewitnesses, and he's just writing those things down because he believes them based on the story alone. It's not even clear that the author talked to the eyewitnesses -- he could have just talked to the "ministers" in verse 2, who told him they got it from eyewitnesses.
The Lucan author could be recounting pure hearsay, 100 retellings deep, as if it's fact -- or he could have gone to the ends of the Earth to verify what he heard. But he doesn't describe his sources or methods, so we don't know, and it's hazardous to guess... Yet the speaker hazards a guess, and tries to pass off that guess as truth. In this case, I think he's forcing his interpretation of the passage to match his assumed conclusion, and to do so he's made a lot of seemingly unwarranted assumptions.

Then at 27:47 the speaker says this:

"There have been more than 25,000 archaeological digs related directly to the subject matter of the bible. ... Not one of them has contradicted anything that we have in the bible, and the overwhelming majority of them have confirmed and affirmed the things that we find in the bible."

First off, I don't accept this claim at face value -- I'd like to see some citations, but the speaker doesn't give any. Also, biblical claims like the Genesis flood have been thoroughly debunked (though I think archaeology only played a small part). I bet a lot of archaeology has proved parts of the bible wrong, and Wiki seems to agree with me so I think I'm right to doubt the speaker's claim. But that's irrelevant to the point I'm going to make, so I'll move on...
I accept that some places and events in the bible are factual. That's no problem. These were people writing about their society and their time, so it would be ridiculous if nothing in the bible were factual. But the fact that it contains some facts does not imply that all its contents are facts.
"My name is Andrew Joslin. I live in the United States. I have black hair. I love cats."
Those 4 statements are internally consistent, and 3 of them are true -- so does that mean they all are? No. One of them is false.
In just the same manner, some things in the bible can be true, and verified by archaeology and science, while other things in the bible might be false. Just because we verified the Babylonian Captivity with reasonable certainty (Jer 52), that doesn't at all support the claim that a deity had anything to do with it (Jer 52:2-3).

Claim 2: "... written by eyewitnesses ..."

First off, from 19:31 - 20:50, the speaker very strongly implies that he thinks the traditional authors -- the apostles Matthew, Mark, Luke, John -- are the real authors of the 4 gospels. Over and over he says "Matthew is writing...", "his favorite words are...", "that's why we have his gospel written the way it's written", and other phrases which make it very unlikely that he is personifying the books, and far more likely that he is talking about the authors themselves and believes they are the same as the tradition says. But those authors are merely the church tradition, and this tradition is very much doubted by modern scholars.
Additionally, multiple times in the video [13:54, 40:30] he cites 2 Peter as if it's authoritative on what Peter experienced and thought. But modern scholars believe this book to be a forgery and not written by Peter, so I don't know why anybody would consider 2 Peter authoritative on what Peter experienced or thought. If 2 Peter is a forgery then the reference at 51:20 is also problematic, because I suspect that a person who forges a book by Peter may also be so bold as to claim that all scripture is divine in origin, as an attempt to give more credence to their own forgery.
All this makes me wonder how much the speaker actually knows about how the bible was written -- and if he does know what modern scholarship says about these things, I wonder whether he might just be throwing out the modern scholarly consensus in favor of his personal, pet beliefs (his premise that the bible is the ultimate authority). Neither is a good option, and either way you cut it this lowers my trust in the speaker.

Finally, at 21:20 the speaker claims that John was an eyewitness to... something. He cites John 1:1-3 to support this:

1 That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— 2 the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us— 3 that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.

Okay, the author clearly says that he has both seen and heard certain, unnamed things, which have apparently convinced him of the truth of the message he is about to relay in the rest of his gospel.
I grant that the author is saying he "saw and heard" things -- but what? It seems like poetic language, and it doesn't make any distinction between the things the author has personally seen, and what he has heard second- or third- or nth-hand from others. True, the author may have personally experienced some stuff as an eyewitness, but it's unclear from these verses what that stuff was, and how much of the remainder of this gospel is hearsay versus eyewitness testimony. I'm not even sure that the author of John ever claims to have seen Jesus -- perhaps the rest of John proves me wrong, but from this passage it's entirely possible that the things the author experienced firsthand were more akin to what modern parishioners experience in church, than to personally witnessing the things Jesus said and did. People today say they are convinced by their own experiences without ever having seen Jesus in the flesh, so perhaps that's what the author of John is saying in this passage.
But even if the gospel of John were eyewitness testimony, that's still not great... Wiki says that "most scholars believe that John reached its final form around AD 90–110", so this would be eyewitness testimony that is, per most scholars, at least 57 years old at the time it was written down. We know for a fact that eyewitness testimony can be very unreliable. This study demonstrated the unreliability of eyewitness testimony for a somewhat mundane event. These are known cases where mistaken or perjured eyewitness testimony resulted in a wrongful conviction and death row sentence, and here's a study which indicates that high stress negatively impacts the quality of eyewitness testimony (specifically, it affects the eyewitness's ability to accurately recall the events).
If a crucifixion of a man named Jesus or Jeshua did indeed happen, then eyewitnesses to that event might have had some difficulty accurately retelling what they saw, even the first time they retold the story. This could be compounded with the eyewitnesses having heard rumors that he was a prophet, which might render their interpretation of what they saw vulnerable to suggestion. The long time period between the writing of this gospel and the events it describes is also problematic, because during that time it was passed on as an oral tradition, and continued retelling as a shared oral tradition can cause the recalled experiences to degrade in accuracy and become poisoned by later changes. That's how memory recall works: it's subject to errors and changes each time we do it. It happens to everybody, and to individuals as well as groups. It's not necessarily lying: errors can and do accumulate very quickly despite people's best intentions to be truthful.
So from the passages presented by the speaker, it's far from a certainty that the author of John was an eyewitness to the events described in the gospel of John. And even if he were, eyewitness testimony is extremely problematic, and frankly I'd consider it more likely that this eyewitness testimony has been corrupted by the factors described above, than the purported supernatural events in the story actually happened as described. Maybe there's more evidence to be found in John, but I find the speaker's use of this passage alone insufficient to support his argument: to call this evidence is wishful thinking or motivated interpretation at best.

Claim 3: "... during the lifetime of other witnesses ..."

At 23:22, in support of this claim the speaker says there's a huge problem "dating the problem late". I don't know what problem he's referring to, because he didn't explain it as far as I could tell. He then cites 1 Corinthians 15:1-8 as support for "... during the lifetime of other witnesses ..." -- however, in those verses Paul explicitly says that he's recounting a story he's been told. I've heard some speculation as to whether this may be some type of early christian creed, in which case it would have been meant as a statement of faith, rather than a discussion of facts in evidence (I find this plausible, but I can't back it up with evidence so I'm treating it as mere speculation).
But all speculation aside, in 1 Corinthians 15:1-7 Paul literally admits that he is not personally attesting to the veracity of what he's saying: he's repeating something he was told. Obviously he is personally attesting his own experience in verse 8, but all the rest is stuff that he was told and cannot attest to personally.
So Paul was told that "the 500" and a bunch of other people witnessed the resurrected Jesus, and that most of them are still alive. Therefore, when the speaker later [24:22] says this:

"If you do the math, there are at least 301 eyewitness to the resurrection who are alive when 1 Corinthians was written.

... I don't think the speaker has any justification to reach this conclusion. Even if Paul believed it was true, does that mean we should believe it? Again, Paul need not be lying here, nor do his sources need to be lying, in order for this passage to be a falsehood. Everybody in the chain from the eyewitness(es) to Paul could be doing their best to report the events accurately, and they could still have gotten it wrong.
Not knowing how long the chain from the eyewitness(es) to Paul actually was, again I'd say it's far less likely that the events described in the story are true, than that the message Paul delivers here was corrupted by false memories and erroneous retellings -- or even outright lies or exaggeration*** -- and therefore false. (***We don't know the pedigree of the story before it reached Paul, so we can't say that every middle-man retelling of it was honest. Even if you would die defending Paul's honesty, that still says nothing for all the people in the chain that passed this information to him.)

The speaker uses these verses again at 29:06, where he says this:

But what we find here in this text is, again, over 301 eyewitnesses to the resurrection who were still alive when 1 Corinthians was written. Why is this important? This is important because that means that the gospel message, that the message of the bible, is falsifiable. ... When you're testing the veracity of a claim, if somebody's making a claim and that claim can't be falsified, that means you can't test the claim. Not a very strong claim, if you can't test the claim -- that means I just gotta trust you, because there's nothing I can do to falsify your claim, I just gotta trust you. This claim is falsifiable. When Paul wrote it, it was a falsifiable claim, and yet it was never falsified. That's a piece of evidence that has to be weighed.

First off, even if the claim was falsifiable at the time it was made, it's not falsifiable now, and now is when we are being asked to believe the claim. People of Paul's time may have been able to interrogate these supposed eyewitnesses, but we can't -- and we can't even be sure they ever existed -- so their testimony can't falsify Paul's account for us. It's unfortunate that the evidence we need to falsify Paul's claims may be lost to time -- but that doesn't mean we should believe what he says, and as far as we can tell it actually renders his claims unfalsifiable to us. Per the speaker's own logic, this is a good reason to doubt what Paul says.
Second, as explained above, I don't accept that there were "over 301 eyewitnesses to the resurrection" still alive in time to read 1 Corinthians. Even if there were living eyewitnesses at that time, the following problems must be overcome before claiming this as evidence:

Maybe 1 Corinthians wasn't published anywhere these eyewitnesses could have seen it, in time for them to falsify it. It's a letter to the church of Corinth (far from Judea, where we'd expect most eyewitnesses to remain), written in a language foreign to them (Greek), at a time when few people could read
Maybe eyewitnesses saw it and didn't falsify it because it matched their (incorrect) understanding of what happened. It is possible for everybody to be wrong in roughly the same ways, that's how witness collusion and legends work
Maybe eyewitnesses saw it and did falsify it -- but one of the following happened:
- They chose to leave the area instead of risking voicing their objections to a popular belief
- Their objections were overshadowed by the louder and more numerous voices which ended up informing the books of the bible
- They voiced their objections verbally and never wrote them down
- Their written objections were lost over the centuries (including the purposeful destruction of "heretical" texts by the church, rulers, and individuals)
- We just haven't found the document yet

All of the above are perfectly reasonable explanations for why we don't have a specific, ancient document in our hands.
Also, for what it's worth, I'd like to mention that here the speaker is literally using absence of evidence as evidence of absence: this is an argument from silence, and it's fallacious here because it affirms the consequent by completely ignoring other very plausible explanations. Arguments from silence are perfectly fine when the absence of the thing necessarily implies the falsehood of the claim: for example, the claim "I have a green horn sticking out of my forehead" is falsified by the absence of a green horn sticking out of my forehead. Arguments from silence also be okay evidence (though not very conclusive) when there are good reasons to believe that if the claim were true we should likely have the evidence we lack. But here it is a no-no because what we know about the production, preservation, etc., of ancient documents gives us the most likely explanation for why we don't have the evidence.
So yeah, that's a horribly fallacious argument... And this one's obvious enough, and the speaker seems intelligent enough, that I'm going to just say it: of all the arguments the speaker makes, this is the one that most makes me suspect dishonesty. Maybe he's chosen to present this paper tiger in place of a good argument because he knows he has nothing better. It makes me suspect he's consciously chosen not to investigate his question, but instead seeks to prove his foregone conclusion by any means necessary.
Not that he's outright lying -- I think he really does believe his foregone conclusion. But I think he hasn't set out to honestly investigate it, and this awful argument is, in my opinion, a direct result of that flaw in his methodology.

At 30:44 the speaker states that the NT was written "very early", which I guess is supposed to support the "by eyewitnesses, in the lifetime of other eyewitnesses" prong of his answer. Yet he gives no evidence for this "very early" claim. I think these are the points where he tries to support the argument, but both seem to be non sequiturs (fallacies):

At 31:30 the speaker argues against a straw man of the popular "telephone game" argument
- It's a straw man because the telephone game argument is a description of how both transcription and translation errors accumulate in hand-copied texts over time -- however, the speaker presents it as if everybody who ever translated the bible had the same source material to translate or transcribe from. That's simply not true. It's been proven that differences exist in the earliest known copies of every book of the bible, and these differences grew over time. Medieval scribes didn't have the originals to copy or translate from: they were working from copies of copies of copies, etc. Indeed, Bart Ehrman says that the earliest scribes tended to make more errors than the later ones.
- It's a non sequitur, because it was brought up in the context of trying to prove that the NT was authored "very early", and it actually has nothing to do with that, so it's probably a relevance fallacy of some type. The "telephone game" argument explains how copies of copies become less and less true to the originals. It does not comment on the date of the originals, yet that's what the speaker is trying to prove here.
At 34:54 the speaker claims that we have over 6000 manuscripts or fragments of the NT, which is more than we have for other ancient texts of similar age
- This is a non sequitur for a number of reasons, at least one of them a relevance fallacy. First, the books cited by the speaker are generally quite a bit older than the books of the NT -- by many hundreds of years, in some cases. Second, the number of fragments has nothing to do with when the books were written, which is the point the speaker is trying to prove.

I feel that these two arguments actually distract the audience rather than supporting the speaker's claim. I don't know whether this was his intent, or a mistake, or I'm just being dumb -- mainly because I have no idea how he thinks these points support his claim. At the very least they distracted me, and after re-watching them multiple times I still couldn't make any better sense of these arguments than as non sequiturs based on straw men.
If you think he's supported his "very early" NT authorship claim at all with these points, then please let me know how.

But regardless of my poor understanding of this section of the video, or the speaker's lack of evidence, or whatever happened here, I don't think it even matters. Even if the NT books were written "very early", it would not mean that the lack of contemporaneous objections to the NT's claims constitutes evidence in favor of the NT's claims. Again, arguments from silence are not appropriate here, and I really do suspect that the speaker is being intellectually dishonest here, as discussed toward the beginning of this section.

Claim 4: "They report supernatural events that took place ..."

At 40:30 the speaker cites 2 Peter in support of this claim. Aside from the problems I already mentioned with 2 Peter, and how (in my opinion) the speaker's usage of that book diminishes his credibility --
Why would it matter that the authors claim that supernatural events happened? Should we just... believe them? It's one thing to say "I saw X". It's another entirely to say "I saw X, and I know that Y caused it". The first is a statement of one's own experience, whereas the second is an experience plus an inference. Why should we believe that these peoples' inferences about the supernatural are reliable, and that the reported events (assuming they actually occurred) were actually supernatural?
Note that my objection isn't based on demeaning ancient peoples. I don't think this problem really gets any easier with more knowledge. Inferences about the supernatural should always be treated as speculation, until and unless we find some way to objectively investigate the supernatural. We don't have a way to do that now, so we should not believe the claims (yet).
More support for this claim is given at 41:33, but it suffers from the same problem.
The speaker should be treating these claims as what they are -- claims, which need to be substantiated before anybody should believe them. He's not doing that. I don't know if he just doesn't suspect that they could be wrong, or if he's turning a blind eye to a problem he's aware of. Either way, it's just very unsatisfying, and consciously or not I wonder whether his circular premise "there is no higher authority than the bible" has crept into this part of his analysis, too.

Claim 5: "... in fulfillment of specific prophesies ..."

The speaker supports this argument with Isaiah 53 at 43:02, and with Psalm 22 at 45:44.
I read Isaiah 52:13 - 53:12, and to me it's not that impressive. It's not a specific prophesy, because it doesn't tell when the thing will happens, and many people (and even whole nations) of that area and timeframe probably fit that description. Jesus is just the guy that got super popular (though he was not the only one).

I agree that Psalm 22 seems to describe somebody being crucified. Or it could be another method of torture that I don't know of, but let's just assume it's crucifixion for the sake of argument. However, it shares the same problems as Isaiah 53: it doesn't give any specifics, so it could be talking about literally anybody from that time and place who was crucified. Jesus quoting the first line while on the cross could easily have been a detail made up by the gospel authors (or the people who participated in the oral tradition), as a way to heighten the image of Jesus as the messiah. They wanted to tell a compelling story, and that would be a great way to make it more compelling to a Jewish audience.
Anyway, the speaker says that at the time of writing Psalm 22, crucifixion had not yet been invented -- but he didn't cite any sources so I don't know if he's right or wrong. I looked it up quickly, and Wiki says "The psalms making up the first two-thirds of the psalter are predominantly pre-exilic and the last third predominantly post-exilic", I think referring to the Babylonian Exile from 586-539 BCE. Since I can't read Wiki's reference I don't know if Psalm 22 is in that pre-exile group, but I'd guess so, and that's the most generous assumption I can make so let's work with that. That gives us an early 6th Century BCE date as the latest possible date for Psalm 22 being written down...
... And here's a reference saying the Persians were crucifying people "systematically" in the 6th Century BCE, and that they probably got the idea from the Assyrians and Babylonians, so those countries may have been doing it earlier than that. So contrary to the speaker's bald assertion, there's some plausible overlap (as far as I can tell) between when Psalm 22 was first written down, and when crucifixions were performed in the region. Yes, I'm working off of the manuscript date rather than the actual date it was composed, but I think that's fine: Psalm 22 began as an oral tradition, and perhaps the crucifixion details were added into it before it was written down, once people became aware of the practice. I think that's far more likely than Psalm 22 being a prophesy, and since we can't reconstruct the original oral tradition we'll just have to wonder.

Also, prophesy in general has a few big problems:

People who know of the prophesy can work to fulfill it
People retelling a story can alter the details of the story to make it seem like the prophesy was fulfilled
It's sometimes not clear whether something is a prophesy at all, or what is being prophesied

Both "fulfilled prophesies" cited by the speaker suffer from all these problems.
The authors of the New Testament obviously knew the OT books well, and were motivated to make Jesus seem like the Hebrew messiah -- that's why they wrote the gospels in the first place. That would give them a strong incentive to either make up parts of the gospel stories wholesale to better match the prophesies, or to selectively interpret the things they heard or experienced in a way that makes the events fit the prophesy better.
And even if there wasn't much embellishment, couldn't it be that Jesus and the apostles actively worked to fulfill as much of those "prophesies" as possible? A great quote from Matt Dillahunty: "If I go to a restaurant and order a steak medium rare, and the server gives me exactly that, is he fulfilling prophesy?" In my opinion, nope, he's merely following instructions, just like Jesus and the apostles may have merely been following a script. I understand that some people might still call this "fulfilling prophesy", but given the other 2 problems I think this idea of "fulfilled prophesies" is still on super thin ice.
Finally, Isaiah 53 is often interpreted by Jews as a prophesy for the nation of Israel, not the messiah. And I think they believe Psalm 22 is just a poem or song, not a prophesy. You can claim they're prophesies, but it's not clear that they were intended to be, or what exactly they predict, so when they're "fulfilled" (especially as questionably as in this case) I'm not sure how much that really means.

This isn't a great case for the "... in fulfillment of specific prophesies ..." claim. It looks like wishful thinking to me, again perhaps motivated by the speaker's premise that the bible is the ultimate authority. Or maybe I'm wrong and somebody here can do a better job supporting this position than the speaker did.

Claim 6: "... and claim that their writings are divine rather than human in origin."

At 51:20, the speaker cites 2 Peter 1 to support the claim that the bible authors claimed their writings are divine in origin. I've already noted my objections to using 2 Peter (a likely forgery) as evidence for anything that Peter the apostle experienced or thought --
But just as with claims for supernatural events, even if 2 Peter is not a forgery, why would it matter that the authors claim the bible is divine in origin? As discussed above I think it's very unlikely that Psalm 22 or Isaiah 52/53 are fulfilled prophesies, so now where are we?
We're left without any supporting evidence for the claim. They said it, so should we just believe it? As with claim 4, this is just very unsatisfying, and I wonder whether the speaker's circular premise had something to do with it.

Final Bones to Pick

I wish I could address his points at 52:12 and 53:15, even though they're not directly related to the rest of the talk -- but I'm out of space.
The first is an appeal to consequences built on an equivocation fallacy, and in the second he describes the questions one must ask in any historical investigation -- questions which he addressed poorly or not at all in this video.
These two attempts to twist logic into a shape that supports his point -- well, they disgust me.

A compilation of post-inauguration reactions from QAnon group chats

These are excerpts from a few private QAnon group chats that I observe. I originally posted these on the megathread. They're listed roughly in the order the comments were made, immediately following the inauguration ceremony and through the next day. I made significant effort to vet that these comments are not from trolls or bots. You can really see the narrative-building in action throughout these comments.
Pt. 1 (1/20 afternoon)

We’re are all the mass arrests? Oh my gosh I’ve wasted so much time in rabbit holes and nothing to show for it but making me look like a complete idiot. I am livid and sad today.

Aren't we supposed to have faith? I have a hard time believing that Sidney Powell and Gulliani have played their reputations on the line and General Flynn knows what comes next if they don't move. But remember, the military is in charge

Can’t believe all that never really listened or believed... pathetic behavior of so called patriots... giving up now means you never believed to begin with.. you hoped.

What if president Trump was part of it.... they tricked us

So I have listen to what was said and how this was a plan to take back our country and Trump would be our President and not Biden. So nothing has happened and Biden is President now. There was talk about the Military would take care of this and nothing is happening. I think that Q was BULLSHIT and hasn't been heard from for months. So we are ALL fucked and we will be labeled as traitors . Good luck with the Q BS

This is where we find the real patriots from the band wagon patriots. Faith. Have faith. hold the line

its not over until its over, waiting on the EBS, who is with me?

I refuse to believe that Trump would walk away and leave us with all these injustices. He knows of all their crimes. I’m sure there has to be some kind of military plan we don’t know about. I’m not gonna say hold the line but I am going to say pray.

Don't you all think this has been a way the ds kept Trump supporters and conservatives suppressed and away from standing up and worse to compile a list of all so called dissenters??

I have not lost hope.. I have followed a for more then 2 years.. will not lose faith.. even if arrests dont happen I will always have faith in the American Patriots in our country :flag_us::flag_us::purple_heart::purple_heart:

I never said I knew the layout for the day I only know the fight isn't over. DJT said the best is yet to come yesterday. I have faith. I am a true patriot. I will never run. I fear no evil.

I have one more ounce of hope. Mike pompeo came on to do his final address on national tv at exactly 1:21 yesterday.

I'm disappointed that codemonkeyz seems to have thrown in the towel and is working on "something" that he's going to try to sell, but i must be crazy....i still have faith! i've lost friendships, my own husband thinks i'm bonkers, so i'm dug in now. God wins, no matter what, so i'll continue to be kooky until it's the end

I have faith but now my husband has lost it threatening to live or just shoot his self

I'm willing to lay my life down for my children and grand children's freedom. But we've been lied to for so long. I can't be the only one answering texts right now from the ones who doubted us to begin with.

they are getting away arrest them now

People the military is in control now. It might take them a couple of months to get all the perps,but it's coming people, it's coming!!!

They are all in cars. Going to detention center?

Well this offically is my last day in the group i have followed this for over 3 years to be slapped in the face with the reality that i am crazy and this was all bullshit.

Look.. is Q a joke on us Patriots ? I think we are all Q.. a family of Q.. whether or not Q was created by Dems.. Q brought us Patriots all together.. helped us to find faith.. showed us we weren't alone.. gave us extended family.. if Dems created Q it backfired on them.. I for one am proud of my "family" :blush::flag_us::purple_heart:

I am not trying to be negative I still have the faith but as far as holding the line I don't know supposedly have Chinese military men sitting on the border of Canada and the United States and Mexico and the United States just waiting for buying to take office to infiltrate our country makes no sense to me I just never dreamed in a million years that all these people that we followed and believed would desert us the way they have no no nothing no communication what are we supposed to do let China come in and take a take over our country commonly in Harris's already said that we need to take our they need to take our children from us and re-educate them in camps why has FEMA set up camps

Really??? Being a Patriot and believing in Trump. But being lied to by Q, watching your election stolen, all 3 branches lost. They will undo everything we fought for and we can't stop them. So if I am PO'd with others we are allowed to vent and yell if we must.

This movie sucked. I want my money back. Im afraid to watch the credits

Just like a death, it will take time to recover. I knew our politics was LOST. I put so much hope in this Q stuff. Now it has let me down. Sorry if I feel hopeless unless we go to war

When things fall in place and happens like we were told.. how many that are calling it quits, bashing the information you were given... will be claiming that you knew it would happen all along? Can kind of understand how Jesus must of felt on the cross and just a very few were left there still believing....

Where's Q, E, Flynn, Juan O seven, Charlie Ward, Simon Parkes, Sydney Powell, Lynn Woods, Pompeo, Trump, Mike Lidell, Rudy? Anybody making statements on 4 years of playing dungeons and dragons???

Let's wait in 3 days and see what happens. Jesus rose again in three days.

This is how i feel. . . If Things were not to go as planned (trust the plan) Trump or Pompeo or Gen Flynn, or SOMEONE like them, would say to the MILLIONS of us "ok guys, stop the nonsense, it's over" BUT, they have not. They have continued to say, "it is not over" so I still have faith in the plan.

I was bothered by the fact that the video of DJ and Melania getting off the plane was shot blurry and from so far away. Also they were wearing masks which I thought was strange.

You guys have become like an AA group or something for me. My family won't speak to me, my friends now think I'm nuts. The media is calling us terrorists....Jesus, let's see some resolution before it gets irreparable.

My internet keeps glitching, and every time I get excited thinking its transitioning to the EBS

Pt.2 1/20 evening

I just dumped genhyten channel.... EBS. ... then... "remember something might go wrong".... then 45 min.... Ummmm.... ain't buying it.... something might go wrong.. yeah.. .I bet it does and no EBS coming.

What about the fact they swore in the fake joe Biden. I thought the other one with the bum chin would show up to get sworn in. I always figured this dumber joe was just to take a bullet.

Military took control once Biden went through the act of swearing in. Once the constitution was violated by participating and accepting a fraudulent election, the military took over the reigns without needing to do it with a coup.

I have nothing to watch on TV anymore. I can't watch the news. They lie. I cant watch sitcoms and movies because I know the lies and satanism of Hollywood. I can't watch Baseball because they support BLM and the false narrative. NO NFL period. Alot is changing for me.

Trump has said so many encouraging things just in the last couple of days, short of telling us exactly when he will be back.

Nothing Biden does to revoke any orders, to put any new laws in place... none of it will be legal. That’s why the military had their backs facing as he drove by. That’s why he didn’t have the presidential plane pick him up. They know it’s not legit.

Exactly! That inauguration was just sad...fake happy KH is the only one who looked like she was ready to party..

I have heard something about Trump being officially our president again March 4, because it takes 30-45 days I’ve heard this in a few places over the last month or two.

He had to step aside so the Military can take over. Otherwise, he would he accused of using the military to stage a coup

I found out with the oath, he actually didn't say it all. He skipped most of the oath and was sworn in at least 10 minutes before the inauguration was supposed to happen, meaning Trump was still president!!

wouldnt it be funny if we keep waiting for the next milestone and voila, its 2024 that would suck

I have to admit, I don’t understand what people mean when they say we are watching a movie.

I did not let my kids go to school today(even though its only virtual only since they are closed for covid) bc I just knew they were going to teach them about it today after yesterday in my daughters 2nd grade class they made her watch their acceptance speech. So they learned from me today. Its so horrible we are having to protect our kids from school!!

I can wait till jan 27th at 306 pm (second marker) can you. I have hope in all this .

So does the corporation dissolve at midnight?

Going down tomorrow to unregister to vote. Doesn't "F"ing matter anymore they've made that perfectly clear. Q was a psyop the whole time...

Hey all you left over Q nut jobs...where were all of these mass arrests at today? Where were the Marshals Service out making all these arrests of the Clinton’s and Obama and others? Where is the martial law that was supposed to have kicked in with the 20,000 National Guard troops at the inauguration? You delusional fucks have been preaching that shit for the last 6 months. So what happened??? Could it be that “Q” was actually wrong? Or could it be that you are all just bat shit crazy?

Okay, well, I'm guessing that you haven't figured out that the real "Q" isn't online. In fact, the real "Q" is Military Intelligence and is never online. I'm guessing you also haven't figured out that Social Media sites like this one are full of leftist shills posing as Trump supporters. Their task: to make us look as stupid and crazy as they can in order to discredit us so that we can be more easily demonized. It's a tactic straight out of the leftist handbook. Anyway, now you know.

I have a feeling this is not over yet. Something in my gut.... I'm holding onto the hopes that the military is going to let the new administration run amok until the March 4th real inauguration day.. How much more dirt will pile up on these guys when they think they got the keys to the kingdom..

Looks like everything is right on schedule. Insurrection act is in effect. Flynn is in charge. USA Inc dissolved. Hold on a little longer. March 4th will be our day. I hate promised dates as much as you do but this will all be over soon.

The wrinkled flags with the gold hair around them for the speech, was a farewell speech to the american corporation, we will be back was our signal to hang in there its almost over. Because when he comes up we will have our America without the corporation and he will be sworn in as the 19th president of America the country before it fell to the global corporation. The election fraud is significant and will be overturned. The PRE RECORDED INAUGURATION was aired at 7am in spain which is 1am in Washington D.C is district of colombia(NOT USA SOIL) in which the gates with the locks on the outside of the fence are a signal of no ones leaving. President Trump is still the president, hes just letting his best friends named the military handle this one. Best is yet to come, is we are getting our republic that we fought for in 1776 BACK. Not the globalist Corporation we needed because of debt. JUST HANG IN THERE AND BLOCK THE FUCKIN TROLLS. There was no flag flying because there is NO ACTING PRESIDENT, FEMA leaders are president and vice president while the swamp is drained.

I had to calm down.....x22 and the Marshall report made it clearer to me. Never doubted my President, but I didn’t understand the complexities.....I’m in awe of Donald Trump🇺🇸

Have faith in the Plan...look it up...the District of Columbia is a Sovereign State owned by the Vatican which is in the process of having it"s assets stripped. There will be a new capital of the US of A and Trump will be the Overlord or King...to be decided. Biden is just the President of the Corporation...hold the line and stick to the Plan...no violence :flag_gb::flag_gb:

Type in antifa. Com like on Google and it redirects you to the White House

Barbara only communist sympathizers are on fascistbook 🤡

Were at war people All you scum mfs who let that shit in our country fk u forever fk u i stand for the people whos sacrificed whos died from fighting the very thing u mfs let in fk u foever people like bon jovi garth brooks fk u come around me you fking socialist scum fk u u just steped on the very people whos sacrificed for our freedoms fk u We are not backing down its inly gonna get fking worse people died for me ill die for them

Pt. 3, 1/21

I just watched Simons video today. Its reassuring that they WERE planning on arresting all of them on inaguration, but very upsetting that they are threating the lives of hundreds, to maybe up to thousands of people just to not get arrested. I cant wait for the military to fix the problem, find a bomb maybe, get around their threat and kill these satanist, terrorist, pedophilic, group of people. The day i see them all get executed will be the best day of my life. They threaten america, they are going to die.

The democrats threatened the military so they wouldnt arrest them. Peoples lives are at stake. Thats why they arrent moving in to arrest them yet.

May have gotten a little drunk last night and stayed up until 3:30 a.m. seemed to be a popular idea though.... I am usually in bed by 8 or 9 p.m. but the day seemed to call for some " think in drink in " anyone else? The guy at the liquor store said that everyone seemed to be doing the same thing yesterday.....
Q has done more to put Biden in office than all the other leftist groups combined.

Not believing in Q or WWG1WGA is like the Catholic Church not wanting peasants to know how to read.

Anyone else notice the hunger games dresses all the women were wearing yesterday? Symbolism will be their downfall. I need to watch that movie again.

i just want the EBS to kick in, that is all i dont care when, but just kick in

I think right now we all have to keep this between us for a while longer. It will unfold soon enough. Think of it as a delicious secret.

Folks all I know is, this is the BESTEST GROUP I have ever been in bar none. I've been in groups from AOL,YAHOO, and others and the diversity of people and the comments makes for a tight knit group, which I love to come into and express my opinions and listen to yours. I love you all!!!:heart::heart::heart:

I bet those 50,000 people are feeling the impact of this military fake goverment. It’s such a HUGE ELABORATE plan that the job loss and the military family threats is all part of the storm. How long! How long will this go on! I’m asking genuine questions. Does Biden have that power LR. the military. It’s one or the other. Can’t be both!

Red 4,5,6 didn’t happen! Total BS. When someone tells you to Hold the Line, they’re saying STFU, stay home, and do what you’re told, or else! Sorry, I never bought the Q BS. 26 years military told me you never tell the enemy anything publicly, and disinformation, although smart, what Q and Dave told us was to give us false hope and demoralize us. Folks, if you watch Newsmax, OAN, and read Epoch Times you will be much more informed. You know why the conservative news isn’t talking about Q and X22? Because they would lose their fan base. Die hard conservatives who are hooked on Q and X22 don’t wanna hear negativity, but are now pissed they got played! Thank your CIA for that. Now use that anger and let ’s do stuff to take our country back!

I really don’t like not hearing from President Trump. The best part about COVID was seeing him talk every night. You know, in the beginning.

Can anyone tell me why the military is now breaking down equipment, fencing, and troops being transported out of DC? I ask because I thought they were supposed to be in charge now. My son's company is returning to Ft Andrews

What happen to Sydney Powell. She fell off the face of earth.

I'm guessing Sydney Powell is sitting quietly in the wings, seeing as she is a military lawyer

Gonna sign off today. I still have faith in The Plan. I did NOT see a defeated man step on or off of that plane. Hope that you all find some peace. Im going to eat some POPCORN!!!

I think inauguration was possible cgi. For some reason Jill B shoes were tan then a bit later they were teal and then a bit later they were tan again. Strange

I spent a good bit of time this morning adding a dislike to every Biden video I could find on yt

Everybody should (gently) troll FB group “the other 98%” Debunk all their propaganda post with facts that expose the fake news. Maybe we can wake up a few of the sleepers!

So yall say to fill tubs. We have grinder pumps. Without power the fill up what do we do then??

While everyone is listening to that Hunter video thumbs down all the white house vids there aren't many! Keep disliking them its easy we can do that from home we are in and out of these vids all day

So who saw the satanic ritual video floating about with Trump at the end saying he was part of the club but he got out. I thought nobody got out alive?

Soooo ok the military is drawing down in DC. So yes its over. So what lies you all selling today

I learned that following any of these X22, Simon Parks, Charlie wood etc .. they have good content that can make sense but why on earth would anything they are predicting come true? They are openly talking on platforms that anyone n everyone can access. Trump, MIlitary, Top notch strategy intel won’t be shared publicly in any way shape or form! They are good at decoding Q that’s it. The rest of their time lines are BS

What matters is that Biden is on House Arrest in the White House and is under investigation. Him, Pelosi, and all involved will fall. The swamp will be drained, hopefully..peacefully, otherwise the military will restore order. I however am full of rage I would love to unleash, but watching them get a taste of their own bullshit will be just as satisfying.

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GME EndGame part 3: A new opponent enters the ring

Previous Important Posts

What’s happened thus far

Why did GME go up on Friday?

Why did GME come down?

A repeat on Monday

A new opponent enters the ring:

Now what?

Margin impacts:

My speculation

Things to be careful about

1/26 Update

GME - EndGame part 4: The Saga Continues