What Was the First Casino on the Las Vegas Strip?

first casino in usa

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[Travel] - In search of a smoke-free casino? Park MGM and NoMad will be the first on Las Vegas strip | USA Today

[Travel] - In search of a smoke-free casino? Park MGM and NoMad will be the first on Las Vegas strip | USA Today submitted by AutoNewspaperAdmin to AutoNewspaper [link] [comments]

How a short/gamma squeeze on Tilray is causing the ENTIRE cannabis market to moon and how to avoid becoming a bag holder when this all comes crashing down

How a short/gamma squeeze on Tilray is causing the ENTIRE cannabis market to moon and how to avoid becoming a bag holder when this all comes crashing down
Obligatory: SIR, THIS IS A CASINO. This isn't financial advice in any way shape or form.
TLDR: This run is going to end with the cannabis stocks back down 50-80% or more from the levels they are at. $CRLBF is the real play here for the smart players that want USA exposure to the legislation. We just like the stocks now, not later.
Ok, listen up normies.
Yeah I'm talking to the newbies specifically because the OGs here already know everything I'm about to share, but your insufferable groupthink and movement mentality shit pissed me off enough to make a post. Don't post DD if you have no clue. Ask someone for help and take your ridicule until someone comes along to help you.
I used to post weekly DD on Sunday here a couple of years ago before one of you literally contacted my wife IRL. Not even kidding. So I made a new account. This is my first contribution back and I'm going to try and ensure some of you don't blow your chance at massive gains here by explaining what is actually going on.
CNBC and anybody telling you that this is just 'momentum' and 'sentiment' is lying to you. The hedge funds are playing these right along with us. Don't ask me for proof, this isn't Twitter. Reasons why they are playing with us:
  1. When there is money to be made, hedge funds and HFT funds are there before you
  2. The floats are so small on these they can take sizable positions on both sides and stand to have massive gains, all the while handing you guys the bags.
That's all you need to know.
So in response to all you posting "real DD" with why these companies are the best and you're going to hold to the moon and never sell:
I'm over it -- I can tell instantly how uninformed you are when I read some poorly thought out DD about why CGC or TLRY or APHA is a long term play because they're talking about USA legislation. These are Canadian companies. Get your head back on straight. You're here for the trade and the bet, not for the fundamentals, and if that's it, then fine, ignore the rest of this post and pick an exit, and if not, read on so you don't hold more bags.
This place has never been one to care for fundamentals, but let me talk some sense into you so you can post some gain porn and I can tell you to fuck off instead of you guys all yelling "MaNiPuLaTiOn ShOrT LaDdErS"
Let's take a look at some of today's gainers:
(changed tickers for automod avoidance)
$USMJay - Penny stock, worth absolute nothing for a reason
$SNDL - Up ridiculous amount, have a billion shares outstanding, just diluted them all the other day
$TeeRTeeC - Terra Tech, they grow weed, from all indications, do it poorly
$OhGeeEye - lol
$HUGE - Probably the only one in the lot worth a YOLO on the chance they get an acquisition like GW Pharma did but they don't have the same product portfolio or prospects GW has.

Now, if you're simply playing this to get in and get out, great for you. The people saying (and believing) "$SNDL $10 EOW! HOLD THE LINE" and stuff like this are just absolutely brand new normies and are clueless, do not listen to them. If you yolo'd on cheap calls in Dec/Jan, congrats, take your gains and don't be like the $GME bagholders.
If you're investing in any of the names I just posted above, expect any money you put in to at some point in the next 12 months be worth approximately 20% of what it is worth now. Literally. They're far worse than the main bunch (CGC, CRON, ACB, TLRY, APHA) but the main bunch is nothing to write home about either.

THIS IS WHAT IS REALLY HAPPENING:

Tilray had 40% short interest. It's not $GME level, but it's pretty high. When the stock crested $40 it really started taking off, why though? Notice this week's FD option chain:

https://preview.redd.it/kyqeiwljeug61.png?width=917&format=png&auto=webp&s=0c1b48e12518515f09582289bd7f8a4f47a09629
Tilray has a 95M share float, those 42 calls represent roughly 1.5M shares held as a hedge just by themselves. Previous to this run up, that represents roughly 5% of the average daily volume of the stock, BY ITSELF. Those are shares that until Monday can be considered removed from the float because they're held as a hedge. They may get loaned out to be shorted, but that will only speed up the squeeze here.
The important part: Today (2/10/21) the stock fell hard after open down to around 44 and found massive support all the way back to up 66. The most sold front week call? $40/$42 strikes. Premium when I screen shotted this? $22.20. Stocks going to pin above $60 for awhile likely, unless people are stupid enough to buy the OTM calls, in which case, it may squeeze itself higher.
Smart hedge funds are going to pile into this, sell you the calls, shove the price up to keep selling you calls, then watch them all evaporate worthless in one of the future weeks in the chain, dump back the shares to help shove the price down, oh and did I mention? They shorted the top.

https://preview.redd.it/ivy78woneug61.png?width=392&format=png&auto=webp&s=0604940c09126dc6d5b96a9cc5f17e4013ae5d9d
It's just another plain old stock acting as a derivative of the option chain gamma squeeze. That's it, with a bit of short squeeze thrown in there and a WHOLE BUNCH of WSB fomo. The shorts are covering and pushing up the volume, likely re-shorting on the way up, and then you have WSB fomo'ing in to round out the total: a massive volume of 200 million shares today. You've got people that think this thing will skyrocket to 500+ (and it may) but the stakes get higher and higher each ladder up you take and the moves become more violent and more likely it comes all the way back down in short time the quicker it goes up.
Might it get there? Sure. But be prepare to take profits when it does because...

ITS CALLED MEAN REVERSION. THIS CANT GO ON FOREVER.

Not to mention, the moves you are seeing are in completely overvalued companies, with horrible fundamentals, and poor prospects.
Oh what's that? CGC got some CBD treats for Martha, seems fitting that something ill is going on in this industry considering she went to prison for insider trading. If the dog treats get you excited about the stock, Martha belongs here more than you do.
200M shares today means people who were long term bag holders cashed out and the shares have turned over the float two times in two days. That also means the shorts have turned over and are now short again. It means the HFT firms are feasting on all of you. It means Citadel is making a pile on the spreads.
What to take away: An amount of shares equal to the entire float has changed hands, or in other words, fewer reason for people to bag hold. Fewer people that have to hedge. Fewer people that have to cover. Fewer people to help stabilize any of these upper price tiers, and keep the price stable by holding, and more reason it's going to collapse sooner (or later).
But, this IS a casino after all...

Let's see what happened with TLRY last time this happened (oh, you're new here? Yeah, this isn't the first time):


https://preview.redd.it/p652mvgreug61.png?width=587&format=png&auto=webp&s=d95f2b0ccf946717859bffb28601dfd29e999e0b
Looks eerily familiar to something else recently. Last time this occurred it traded between $100 and $300 in a single week timeframe.
For those of you that are new: THIS IS NOT NORMAL. STOCKS DO NOT ALWAYS DO THIS. You are in the infancy of a new age of trading, but people still know, fundamentals matter a whole lot more than everyone is leading on, and these valuations are getting extremely overextended.
Eventually, in the first squeeze Tilray bled off until the pandemic hit and it piled down to $2.43 a share. At $2.43/share, I would have bought it. Even at $10/12/14. At these levels? You're just ultimately out of touch but I look forward to the loss porn.
So in short, again: Sir, this is a casino.

Timeline of events, and how to not become a bagholder:
  1. $APHA earnings are good, stocks pop a bit, and level off
  2. Legislators pull a pump and dump since they probably have calls and say planning on some laws regarding changing the schedule of cannabis (notice: we will likely NOT get outright legalization, just re-scheduling)
  3. $CGC earnings are actually awful, with the caveat they have profitability on the horizon
  4. $TLRY gets a UK deal
  5. $TLRY starts going insane - since $APHA is a reverse merger with a .81 value share to share, it starts pumping, people start buying the lower priced cannabis stuff and entire sector starts moving on "overall strength"
  6. There's no strength, there's a gamma squeeze backed by investor momentum, and a short squeeze on Tilray.
  7. This is going to come back down violently then plateau out like GME and pull a slow bleed the rest of the way back down, just like the second graph I posted. There is no fundamental or even POSSIBILITY of better fundamentals immediately on US legislation. The cost to enter the US market will most definitely cause capex and goodwill capital outflows, and set back their profitability since there are established MSO's in the USA already. The USA opening the market to these companies will only further degrade the actual balance sheets/income statements and slow down profits and you know what institutions and shareholders like? Yep. Profits.
  8. Finally, how to not become a bag holder: The market can stay irrational way, way, way longer than you expect. So this may go on for a bit, but refer back to 7. It's coming back down eventually, set expectations and pick your exit, or start to shave off your position as it goes up and let a portion of it run. Eventually, you have to sell to actually realize a gain, don't forget that. Once you do, close the chart, remove it from your watchlist, check back in on it in a month if you want to get back in when you have a clear head.
The Canadian operators are literally the last companies I'd play off a US legislation play, and one of the only ones worth owning in $APHA for the arbitrage play on the shares. But if Tilray comes crashing back down, $APHA will as well along with all of them, and you have to hope you lose a lot less on $APHA crashing than you'll make on the arbitrage between the share price.
THIS IS ALL JUST "SENTIMENT" BASED YOLOING BY THIS SUB. It has probably driven uneducated retail into the trades also - who will also become bag holders.

Let me put this in big letters for those of you that can only read big font and use crayons:

NONE OF THESE COMPANIES HAVE REAL USA MARKET EXPOSURE, THEY ARE CANADIAN COMPANIES. THEY DO NOT HAVE MARKET POSITIONING AND ARE NOT POISED TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF US LEGALIZATION.

IF ANYTHING: IT WILL HURT THEIR BOTTOM LINE AND SET BACK EARNINGS BECAUSE OF CAPEX AND CASH OUTFLOWS TO GET A POSITION IN THE MARKET AND SOME OF THEM WILL GO OUT OF BUSINESS BECAUSE OF IT, WHILE OTHERS WILL FALL OUT OF PROFITIABILITY TO ENTER THE MARKET AND COMPETE WITH THE REAL PLAYERS.

Who are the real players? (Cresco $CRLBF and Curaleaf $CURLF - do your own DD or wait for a post next week\***************)*

Conclusion: Nobody should plan on holding these long term. Don't let someone else hand you bags like I did this morning at open on the pop unless you plan to hand your bags off and find the next play.
You likely will not time the top. Pick a place you're ready to exit the trade, exit the trade or slowly shave your position, close the graphs and don't fomo back in. Just be done with the trade afterwards. You're likely not a cannabis multi millionaire and will not be one, unless you were loaded to the brim with low cost calls from last summefall or unless you literally yolo'd $10M into one of these a few weeks ago, and in that case, you belong here, congrats on your gains and fuck you.
THIS IS A SECTOFOMO SQUEEZE. AND IT WILL END. THIS IS NOT SENTIMENT AND CNBC IS TROLLING US WITH IT LIKE WE HAVE THE POWER.
And if you think WE are the ones driving the price up, the hedge funds are definitely watching and playing and they can bring these down at will at almost any time they want. You're holding a lit molotov, the only question is: will you throw it before it blows up?
The rest of you? Plz fuck off with you 20 shares @ $2 on Sundial, fuck off with the "HOLD THE LINE SNDL $10 EOW", fuck off with your fomo, and fuck off with the "movement" and "lets push this to the sky" stuff and most importantly don't post DD if you have zero clue what is going on.
You know what "lets push this to the sky" sounds like? Market manipulation. We're not in this together, I literally handed one of you a bag to hold this morning and even if they go up for another month, eventually, that bags gonna be heavy and I ain't coming back for it. I ain't tipping you either.
These prices are insanely high for these companies. The multiples are out of control, and if you buy in at these levels, well, best of luck, I hope it works out for you. I'm fighting the fomo of extended gains, and will continue to put my money elsewhere.

SIR, THIS IS A CASINO.

Positions: I had the meme stocks like you literally all of them minus ACB and CGC. I took gains and bought 500 shares of Cresco prob increasing to 1,000 tomorrow, and kept the rest off the table to pay my wife's boyfriend's rent.
Disclaimer: I have Tilray puts I'm prepared to average down on and diamond hand like a real boss because this is coming back down.


Edit: You know what I forgot to add? Some of the biggest holders, the cannabis ETFs and funds, you know what they did today? They trimmed their positions. And they will continue to do so because of fiduciary responsibility and when you de-concentrate shares into the retail's hands, the moves will get more and more finnicky and more and more violent.
Edit 2: Some normie tried calling me out like I never saw this trade coming or am a hedge shill, https://imgur.com/a/asAVkiC - I had thousands of shares, these are just the trades from this month, and I'm not advocating a buy, I sold mostly all of them this morning except for adding Cresco back in. You want the gain numbers? You do the math, I'm not your math tutor, I sold like 6 minutes after open for most of them. I have Tilray puts for next week and will be buying a few months out at various strikes as it continues to climb.
Yeah, I think these are coming back down in price sooner rather than later, that isn't extraordinary information for a common sense person.
Edit 3: I'm getting piles of messages from people who used to follow my DD back in 2018/2019. Yes, it's the real SoRefreshing, proof: https://imgur.com/a/Pn5LqCe
Edit 4: Eh don't request me with "What should I do with XX" be a big adult grown up and decide your own risk tolerance and exits. I responded to the first 10 or so. Now I have 100. I can't. I disabled chat messages.
Edit 5: jesus with the awards go buy TSLA calls this is WSB not fb/twtr disclaimer: have TSLA calls
Edit 6: Oh look, they're pinning it around the $42 strike. Go figure.
submitted by OhSoRefreshing to wallstreetbets [link] [comments]

Anyone having this issue with the casino? Worked the first day, I’ve been getting this ever since. I live in USA, have 50k chips and have membership at the casino

Anyone having this issue with the casino? Worked the first day, I’ve been getting this ever since. I live in USA, have 50k chips and have membership at the casino submitted by Boss_Trades to gtaonline [link] [comments]

Timeline of Trump's Russia Connections from KGB Cultivation to United State President

The Russia Mafia is part and parcel of Russian intelligence. Russia is a mafia state. That is not a metaphor. Putin is head of the Mafia. So the fact that they have deep ties to Donald Trump is deeply disturbing. Trump conducted FIVE completely private meetings and conferences with Putin, and has gone to great lengths to prevent literally anyone, even people in his administration, from learning what was discussed.
According to an ex-KGB spy...Russia has been cultivating Trump as an asset for 40 years.
Trump was first compromised by the Russians in the 80s. In 1984, the Russian Mafia began to use Trump real estate to launder money.
In 1984, David Bogatin — a convicted Russian mobster and close ally of Semion Mogilevich, a major Russian mob boss — met with Trump in Trump Tower right after it opened. Bogatin bought five condos from Trump at that meeting. Those condos were later seized by the government, which claimed they were used to launder money for the Russian mob.
“During the ’80s and ’90s, we in the U.S. government repeatedly saw a pattern by which criminals would use condos and high-rises to launder money,” says Jonathan Winer, a deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement in the Clinton administration. “It didn’t matter that you paid too much, because the real estate values would rise, and it was a way of turning dirty money into clean money. It was done very systematically, and it explained why there are so many high-rises where the units were sold but no one is living in them.”
When Trump Tower was built, as David Cay Johnston reports in The Making of Donald Trump, it was only the second high-rise in New York that accepted anonymous buyers.
In 1987, the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, Yuri Dubinin, arranged for Trump and his then-wife, Ivana, to enjoy an all-expense-paid trip to Moscow to consider business prospects.
A short while later he made his first call for the dismantling of the NATO alliance. Which would benefit Russia.
At the beginning of 1990 Donald Trump owed a combined $4 billion to more than 70 banks, with $800 million personally guaranteed by his own assets, according to Alan Pomerantz, a lawyer whose team led negotiations between Trump and 72 banks to restructure Trump’s loans. Pomerantz was hired by Citibank.
Interview with Pomerantz
Trump agreed to pay the bond lenders 14% interest, roughly 50% more than he had projected, to raise $675 million. It was the biggest gamble of his career. Trump could not keep pace with his debts. Six months later, the Taj defaulted on interest payments to bondholders as his finances went into a tailspin.
In July 1991, Trump’s Taj Mahal filed for bankruptcy.
So he bankrupted a casino? What about Ru...
The Trump Taj Mahal casino broke anti-money laundering rules 106 times in its first year and a half of operation in the early 1990s, according to the IRS in a 1998 settlement agreement.
The casino repeatedly failed to properly report gamblers who cashed out $10,000 or more in a single day, the government said."The violations date back to a time when the Taj Mahal was the preferred gambling spot for Russian mobsters living in Brooklyn, according to federal investigators who tracked organized crime in New York City. They also occurred at a time when the Taj Mahal casino was short on cash and on the verge of bankruptcy."
....ssia
So by the mid 1990s Trump was then at a low point of his career. He defaulted on his debts to a number of large Wall Street banks and was overleveraged. Two of his businesses had declared bankruptcy, the Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City and the Plaza Hotel in New York, and the money pit that was the Trump Shuttle went out of business in 1992. Trump companies would ultimately declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy two more times.
Trump was $4 billion in debt after his Atlantic City casinos went bankrupt. No U.S. bank would touch him. Then foreign money began flowing in through Deutsche Bank.
The extremely controversial Deutsche Bank. The Nazi financing, Auschwitz building, law violating, customer misleading, international currency markets manipulating, interest rate rigging, Iran & others sanctions violating, Russian money laundering, salvation of Donald J. Trump.
The agreeing to a $7.2 billion settlement with with the U.S. Department of Justice over its sale and pooling of toxic mortgage securities and causing the 2008 financial crisis bank.
The appears to have facilitated more than half of the $2 trillion of suspicious transactions that were flagged to the U.S. government over nearly two decades bank.
The embroiled in a $20b money-laundering operation, dubbed the Global Laundromat. The launders money for Russian criminals with links to the Kremlin, the old KGB and its main successor, the FSB bank.
That bank.
Three minute video detailing Trump's debts and relationship with Deutsche Bank
In 1998, Russia defaulted on $40 billion in debt, causing the ruble to plummet and Russian banks to close. The ensuing financial panic sent the country’s oligarchs and mobsters scrambling to find a safe place to put their money. That October, just two months after the Russian economy went into a tailspin, Trump broke ground on his biggest project yet.
Directly across the street from the United Nations building.
Russian Linked-Deutsche Bank arranged to lend hundreds of millions of dollars to finance Trump’s construction of a skyscraper next to the United Nations.
Construction got underway in 1999.
Units on the tower’s priciest floors were quickly snatched up by individual buyers from the former Soviet Union, or by limited liability companies connected to Russia. “We had big buyers from Russia and Ukraine and Kazakhstan,” sales agent Debra Stotts told Bloomberg. After Trump World Tower opened, Sotheby’s International Realty teamed up with a Russian real estate company to make a big sales push for the property in Russia. The “tower full of oligarchs,” as Bloomberg called it, became a model for Trump’s projects going forward. All he needed to do, it seemed, was slap the Trump name on a big building, and high-dollar customers from Russia and the former Soviet republics were guaranteed to come rushing in.
New York City real estate broker Dolly Lenz told USA TODAY she sold about 65 condos in Trump World at 845 U.N. Plaza in Manhattan to Russian investors, many of whom sought personal meetings with Trump for his business expertise.
“I had contacts in Moscow looking to invest in the United States,” Lenz said. “They all wanted to meet Donald. They became very friendly.”Lots of Russian and Eastern European Friends. Investing lots of money. And not only in New York.
Miami is known as a hotspot of the ultra-wealthy looking to launder their money from overseas. Thousands of Russians have moved to Sunny Isles. Hundreds of ultra-wealthy former Soviet citizens bought Trump properties in South Florida. People with really disturbing histories investing millions and millions of dollars. Igor Zorin offers a story with all the weirdness modern Miami has to offer: Russian cash, a motorcycle club named after Russia’s powerful special forces and a condo tower branded by Donald Trump.
Thanks to its heavy Russian presence, Sunny Isles has acquired the nickname “Little Moscow.”
From an interview with a Miami based Siberian-born realtor... “Miami is a brand,” she told me as we sat on a sofa in the building’s huge foyer. “People from all over the world want property here.” Developers were only putting up luxury properties because they “know that the crisis has not affected people with money,”
Most of her clients are Russian—there are now three direct flights per week between Moscow and Miami—and increasing numbers are moving to Florida after spending a few years in London first. “It’s a money center, and it’s a lot easier to get your money there than directly to the US, because of laws and tax issues,” she said. “But after your money has been in London for a while, you can move it to other places more easily.”
In the 2000s, Trump turned to licensing deals and trademarks, collecting a fee from other companies using the Trump name. This has allowed Trump to distance himself from properties or projects that have failed or encountered legal trouble and provided a convenient workaround to help launch projects, especially in Russia and former Soviet states, which bear Trump’s name but otherwise little relation to his general business.
Enter Bayrock Group, a development company and key Trump real estate partner during the 2000s. Bayrock partnered with Trump in 2005 and invested an incredible amount of money into the Trump organization under the legal guise of licensing his name and property management. Bayrock was run by two investors:
Felix Sater, a Russian-born mobster who served a year in prison for stabbing a man in the face with a margarita glass during a bar fight, pleaded guilty to racketeering as part of a mafia-driven "pump-and-dump" stock fraud and then escaped jail time by becoming a highly valued government informant. He was an important figure at Bayrock, notably with the Trump SoHo hotel-condominium in New York City, and has said under oath that he represented Trump in Russia and subsequently billed himself as a senior Trump advisor, with an office in Trump Tower. He is a convict who became a govt cooperator for the FBI and other agencies. He grew up with Micahel Cohen --Trump's disbarred former "fixer" attorney. Cohen's family owned El Caribe, which was a mob hangout for the Russian Mafia in Brooklyn. Cohen had ties to Ukrainian oligarchs through his in-laws and his brother's in-laws. Felix Sater's father had ties to the Russian mob.
Tevfik Arif, a Kazakhstan-born former "Soviet official" who drew on bottomless sources of money from the former Soviet republic. Arif graduated from the Moscow Institute of Trade and Economics and worked as a Soviet trade and commerce official for 17 years before moving to New York and founding Bayrock. In 2002, after meeting Trump, he moved Bayrock’s offices to Trump Tower, where he and his staff of Russian émigrés set up shop on the twenty-fourth floor.
Arif was offering him a 20 to 25 percent cut on his overseas projects, he said, not to mention management fees. Trump said in the deposition that Bayrock’s Tevfik Arif “brought the people up from Moscow to meet with me,”and that he was teaming with Bayrock on other planned ventures in Moscow. The only Russians who are likely have the resources and political connections to sponsor such ambitious international deals are the corrupt oligarchs.
In 2005, Trump told The Miami Herald “The name has brought a cachet to certain areas that wouldn’t have had it,” Dezer said Trump’s name put Sunny Isles Beach on the map as a classy destination — and the Trump-branded condo units sold “10 to 20 percent higher than any of our competitors, and at a faster pace.”“We didn’t have any foreclosures or anything, despite the crisis.”
In a 2007 deposition that was part of his unsuccessful defamation lawsuit against reporter Timothy O’Brien Trump testified "that Bayrock was working their international contacts to complete Trump/Bayrock deals in Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. He testified that “Bayrock knew the investors” and that “this was going to be the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Moscow, Kiev, Istanbul, et cetera, and Warsaw, Poland.”
In 2008, Donald Trump Jr. gave the following statement to the “Bridging U.S. and Emerging Markets Real Estate” conference in Manhattan: “[I]n terms of high-end product influx into the United States, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets; say in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo and anywhere in New York. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
In July 2008, Trump sold a mansion in Palm Beach for $95 million to Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian oligarch. Trump had purchased it four years earlier for $41.35 million. The sale price was nearly $54 million more than Trump had paid for the property. This was the height of the recession when all other property had plummeted in value. Must be nice to have so many Russian oligarchs interested in giving you money.
In 2013, Trump went to Russia for the Miss Universe pageant “financed in part by the development company of a Russian billionaire Aras Agalarov.… a Putin ally who is sometimes called the ‘Trump of Russia’ because of his tendency to put his own name on his buildings.” He met with many oligarchs. Timeline of events. Flight records show how long he was there.
Video interview in Moscow where Trump says "...China wanted it this year. And Russia wanted it very badly." I bet they did.
Also in 2013, Federal agents busted an “ultraexclusive, high-stakes, illegal poker ring” run by Russian gangsters out of Trump Tower. They operated card games, illegal gambling websites, and a global sports book and laundered more than $100 million. A condo directly below one owned by Trump reportedly served as HQ for a “sophisticated money-laundering scheme” connected to Semion Mogilevich.
In 2014, Eric Trump told golf reporter James Dodson that the Trump Organization was able to expand during the financial crisis because “We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia. I said, 'Really?' And he said, 'Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programmes. We just go there all the time.’”
A 2015 racketeering case against Bayrock, Sater, and Arif, and others, alleged that: “for most of its existence it [Bayrock] was substantially and covertly mob-owned and operated,” engaging “in a pattern of continuous, related crimes, including mail, wire, and bank fraud; tax evasion; money laundering; conspiracy; bribery; extortion; and embezzlement.” Although the lawsuit does not allege complicity by Trump, it claims that Bayrock exploited its joint ventures with Trump as a conduit for laundering money and evading taxes. The lawsuit cites as a “Concrete example of their crime, Trump SoHo, [which] stands 454 feet tall at Spring and Varick, where it also stands monument to spectacularly corrupt money-laundering and tax evasion.”
In 2016, the Trump Presidential Campaign was helped by Russia.
(I don't have the presidential term sourced yet. I'll post an update when I do. I'm sure you probably remember most of them...sigh. TY to the main posters here. Obviously I'm standing on your shoulders having taken a lot of the information or articles from here).
submitted by Well__Sourced to Keep_Track [link] [comments]

[National] - Las Vegas casino workers could strike for the first time in more than 3 decades | USA Today

[National] - Las Vegas casino workers could strike for the first time in more than 3 decades | USA Today submitted by AutoNewspaperAdmin to AutoNewspaper [link] [comments]

TIL Casino Royale was originally called 'You Asked For It' when it was first released in the USA. Bond's name was changed to 'Jimmy Bond.'

TIL Casino Royale was originally called 'You Asked For It' when it was first released in the USA. Bond's name was changed to 'Jimmy Bond.' submitted by dnjowen to todayilearned [link] [comments]

$SNE, MASSIVE DOUBLE DICK INSIDE. Poised to moon long-term (Computer vision boom, EV boom, autonomous driving tech, gaming boom, music streaming boom, cross-media IP, vertically integrated anime streaming monopoly, online medical services boom, shift to mirrorless cameras)

$SNE, MASSIVE DOUBLE DICK INSIDE. Poised to moon long-term (Computer vision boom, EV boom, autonomous driving tech, gaming boom, music streaming boom, cross-media IP, vertically integrated anime streaming monopoly, online medical services boom, shift to mirrorless cameras)
Listen up retards. Do you happen to feel regret because you always think “ohhh if I yoloed my savings on TSLA/AMD/NVDA 🚀 leaps years ago I could be rich by now!!!”
Well if you didn't know already, it doesn’t really matter what happened in the past. Hindsight will always be 20/20. You shouldn’t be harsh on yourself on your past self that your past self wasn’t retarded enough to yolo their savings into AMD/TSLA/.... Your past self doesn’t have the same knowledge that your current self has. It’s fine. If you judged those stocks with the best DD you could do at the time and didn’t think they were worth it, then you did a good job.
If you always think about what you could/should have done in the past, then you don't have the right attitude to play the stock market casino imho.
The single most important thing is to be able to look ahead. There are always plenty of opportunities around. There are thousands of rockets that are still on earth right now. Some may depart this year, others will stay a little longer on earth. The true strength lies in being able to identify those rockets with the knowledge you have right now. And if you still miss most rockets that will take-off this year that's fine, maybe you'll learn, get better and you'll do better next year.
Now, what if I told you there’s a big rocket that’s parked right right here on earth and it has decent chance for take-off this year? Maybe it won't quite reach the moon this year yet, but hey leaving the exosphere should already be a cool milestone.
It has rock-solid fundamentals and will see lots of growth in the following years/decade.
It’s a company that has the fundamental technology to power all the computer vision tech, which is bound to boom this decade.
The company we’re talking about is of course Sony, and it is extremely undervalued right now.
Its P/E is only 14. They have a P/S of 1.65, a PEG of 0.92 (< 2 is already somewhat exceptional for a company/conglomerate of Sony’s size, under 1 is a steal)
Much lower than all of its same-sector peers. This indicates significant undervaluation.
Next up Sony has a P/CF 13.2, ROE of 20% (S&P 500 average is 14% which would already be considered pretty good. 20% ROE is excellent), PEGY of 0.89, P/B of 2.65 and finally Sony has $41.6B in cash on hand. This makes Sony one of the cheapest tech/entertainment/EV/semiconductor growth stocks you will find on the market.
(ROE of 20% + PEGY of 0.89 + PEG of 0.92 means this company is a growth stock based on the numbers alone, but we’ll dig into the actual company and overall outlook in a moment)
I challenge all retards to find a company with similar benchmarks in one of the mentioned sectors, seriously.
Quite frankly doing this DD honestly blew my mind. I kept looking everywhere for reasons why the company could be so undervalued and why they may struggle in the future. Very important to look at all the challenges the company faces to make sure I’m not just doing confirmation bias DD. But all I could find was the opposite. After several weeks and months of working on this DD, I can only conclude that it is overall a very solid company for a bargain price. The new CEO is taking the company in a great direction imho and I'm begin to think he could be Sony's Satya Nadella.
So if you want some easy tendies, maybe consider $SNE while it is still cheap, I’d say.
For the autists out there who care about analyst ratings, SONY ($SNE) currently has 18 BUY ratings, 2 OVERWEIGHT, 4 HOLD and 0 SELL. (= analyst consensus is a STRONG BUY). Very little analysts cover this stock compared to other entertainment/tech companies, so this adds to my assertion that the stock is very much under the radar. Which means you have time to get in before it gets noticed by the larger investing world and before it starts to get a more fair valuation (P/E of around 30 would be more fair for this company I think, but still cheaper than many same sector peers). But, anyway the few analysts who do happen to cover this company are basically all saying it’s an instant-buy at its current price.
Most boomer investors still think big Japanese tech companies are dinosaurs that have long been surpassed by China, South Korea and Apple etc ages ago. Young boomers may think Sony = PlayStation and that it's it. But the truth is that PlayStation, while very important (about 24% of Sony's total revenue last year), is a part of a larger story.
Lots of investors in general associate Sony with the passé Japanese electronics companies from the 80’s and the 90’s. Just like a lot people may think BlackBerry is a struggling phone company.
While Sony may not be the powerhouse in consumer electronics it was in the 80’s and the 90’s, in a lot of ways they are more relevant than ever before. Despite being a well-known brand and being known as the company behind PlayStation, for some reason its stock still seems to be under the radar among both retail and institutional investors. And boy, are they mind-blowingly undervalued. Even if a big part of its business would collapse tomorrow, they would still be slightly undervalued. And I am about to tell you why.
(& btw compared to Japanese tech/entertainment stocks $SNE is still super cheap (Canon, Nikon, Toshiba, Sharp, Panasonic, Square Enix, Capcom, Nintendo, Fujitsu all have P/E ratios ranging from 18 to 77 and none of them have the combination of global clout, fundamentals & growth prospects that Sony has))
2021 Sony as a corparation is not the fucking Sony from 2005-2015’s, just like BlackBerry in 2021 is not the fucking Blackberry from 2012. Just like Garmin in 2021 is not Garmin from 2011. Just like AMD in 2021 is not AMD from 2012.
No, in 2021, Sony is the global leader in imaging technology and people do not fucking realize it. Sony has 50% marketshare in the CMOS image sensor market. There’s a very good chance the smartphone in your pocket has Sony image sensors (unless it’s a Samsung phone). Sony image sensors are powering a big part of today's vision/camera technology. And they will power even more of tomorrow's computer vision tech.
In 2021, Sony is a behemoth in video games, music, anime, movies and TV show production. Sony is present in every segment of entertainment. Sony’s entertainment branches have been doing great business over the past 5 years, especially music and PlayStation. Additionally, Sony Pictures has completely turned around.
In 2021, Sony is the world’s biggest music publisher (and second biggest music company overall). Music streaming has been a boon for Sony Music and will continue to be.
In 2021, Sony is among the biggest mobile gaming companies in the world (yes, you read that right). And it’s mainly thanks to one game (Fate/Grand Order) that nets them over $1B revenue each year. One of the biggest mobile gaming companies + arguably biggest gaming brand in the world (PlayStation).
In 2021, Sony is an EV company. They surprised the world when they revealed their “Vision-S” at CES 2020. At the reception was fantastic. It is seriously one of the best looking EV’s. They already sell sensors to Toyota. Sony will most like sell the Vision-S's tech to other car manufacturers (sensors for driving assistence / autonomous driving, LiDAR tech, infotainment system).

40 sensors in the Sony Vision-S
Considering the overwhelmingly good reception of the Vision-S so far, I suspect the Vision-S could be another catalyst that will put Sony as a company on the radar of investors and consumers.
We've seen insane investment hype for anything even remotely related to EV over the past year. We've seen a company that barely had a few EV design concepts (oh wait, they had a gravity-powered truck though) even get a $30B market cap at some point lmao.
But somehow a profitable company ($SNE) that has an EV that you can actually drive, doesn't even have a fair valuation?
In 2020’s Sony’s brand value is at their highest point since 12 years. In 2021, it is projected to be a its highest point since 2001 assuming same growth as average yearly growth from 2015 to 2020. Keep in mind brand valuation is a bit bullshitty as there’s no standardization to compare brands from different sectors, let alone non-consumer-facing brands with consumer-facing brands. But one thing we can note is that Sony both as B2C brand and as a B2B company is on a big upwards trend.
https://interbrand.com/best-global-brands/sony/
https://careers.uw.edu/blog/2020/03/17/these-are-the-10-biggest-video-game-companies-in-north-america-shared-article-from-zippia/
In 2021, Sony is an entertainment behemoth. They have grown their entertainment branches by a huge amount over the past 5 to 10 years (they made some big acquisitions in the music space especially and they’re now also all-in in anime). I don’t think people realize how big Sony is as an entertainment company. I dug up the numbers and as of Q3 2020, PlayStation is the second biggest video game company in the world (Tencent is #1) in revenue (I suspect Sony might dethrone Tencent after Sony’s FY Q3 2020 is released). But Sony already comes very close to Tencent especially if you add Fate/Grand Order (which is under Sony Music and not under PlayStation) under PlayStation.
There’s no single other company that has this unique combination of a dominant/important position in all entertainment segments. (video games + music + movies + TV series + anime + TV networks). I guess Tencent maybe?
In 2021, Sony has amazing momentum in the camera space. If you’re familiar with the enthusiast photography space, you should know this. Basically, the market is slowly shifting from SLR to mirrorless cameras. This is because mirrorless cameras tend to smallelighter, have faster AF, better low light performance, better battery life and better video performance. Sony is the company that has been specializing in the development for mirrorless cameras for over a decade while Canon’s bread and butter has always been SLR cameras. Sony is in the lead when it comes to mirrorless cameras and that’s where the market is shifting towards. Because the advantages of mirrorless have become more and more apparent and Sony’s cameras have become technically superior, Sony has gained quite a bit of market share over Canon and Nikon in the last few years. In 2019, Sony overtook Nikon as the #2 camera manufacturer. Sony is in an upwards trend here. (they have the ambition to become the world’s #1 camera brand) Sony also has very good marketing for their cameras. (Sony has a lot of YouTubers / influencers / brand ambassadors for their cameras despite being a smaller brand than Canon)
(just search on YouTube and/or Google “switching to Sony from Canon” just to give you an idea that they do have amazing brand momentum in the camera space. You won’t get as many hits for the opposite)
A huge portion of Sony’s profit comes from image sensors in addition to music and video games. This is in addition to their highly profitable financial holdings division & their more moderately profitable electronics division.
Sony’s electronics division, unlike other Japanese brands, has shown great resilience against the very strong competition from China & South Korea. They have been able to maintain their position in the audio space and as of 2020 are still the global market leader in high-end TV’s (a position they have been holding for decades) and it seems they will continue to be able to maintain that.
But seriously this company is dirt-cheap compared to any of its peers in any segment and there’s various huge growth prospects for Sony:
  • CMOS image sensors & Sony’s overall imaging prowess will boom due to increased demand from automotive sector, security & surveillance industry, manufacturing industry, medical sector and finally from the aerospace & defence industry. On the longer term, image sensors will continue to boom due to increased demand for computer vision & AI + robotics. And for consumer electronics demand will remain very high obviously.
  • Sony is aiming for 60% market share in the CMOS image sensor market by 2026. Biggest threat here is Samsung here who have recently started to aggressively invest in image sensors and are challenging Sony. Sony has technological lead + higher production capacity (and Sony will soon open a new plant in Nagasaki), so Sony should be able to hold off Samsung.
  • The iPhone 12 Pro has 3 cameras + a lidar sensor. Apple now buys 3 image sensors (from Sony) + LiDAR sensor (from Sony) per iPhone 12 Pro they manufacture. Remember the iPhone X and iPhone XS? That one had “only” 2 rear cameras (with image sensos from Sony of course). Basically, Sony will be selling exponentially more image sensors as more smartphones get equipped with more and more cameras.
  • Now think about how many image sensors Sony can sell to Apple if the iPhone 13 will have 5 cameras + LiDAR sensor (I mean the number of cameras on smartphones certainly won’t decrease)
  • Gaming (PS5 hype, PSN game sales are booming, add-on content is booming, PS+ subscribers count is booming and finally PSNow & first-party games sales are trending upwards as well). Very consistent year-on-year profit & revenue growth here. They have a history of beating earnings expectations here. The number of PS+ subscribers went from 4M to 48M in just 6-7 years. Investors love to hype up recurring revenue and subscription services such as Disney+ and Netflix. Let’s apply the same logic to PS+? PS+ already has more subscribers than HBO Max in the USA.
  • PlayStation (video games in general) has not even scratched the fucking surface. Most people who play video games now are millennials and kids. Do you think those millennials will stop playing video games when they grow older? No, of course not. Boomers today also still watch movies and TV. Those millennials have kids and those kids are now also playing video games. The kids of those kids will also play video games etc. Basically the total addressable audience for video games will by HUGE by the end of the decade (and the decades after that) because video games will have penetrated all age ranges of the population. Gaming is the fastest growing segment of the whole entertainment business. By a large margin. PlayStation is obviously in a great position here as you can guess from the PS5 hype, but more importantly imho, the growth of PS+ subscribers (currently a bit under 50 million) and PSN users (>100 million MAU) over the past 5 years shows that PlayStation is primed to profit from the audience growth.
  • On top of that you have huge video game growth in the China where Sony & PlayStation is already much better established than Xbox (but still super small compared to mobile games and PC gaming in China). Within the console market, Xbox only competes with PlayStation in North America. In the rest of the world, PlayStation has an enormous lead over Xbox. Xbox is simply a lesser known and lesser desirable brand in the rest of the world
  • Anime streaming (basically they have a monopoly already + vertical integration, it might still be somewhat niche right now, but it will be big within 5 years. Acquiring Crunchyroll was a very good move)
  • Music streaming (no, they don’t have a music streaming service, but as music streaming grows, Sony Music also gets a piece of the growing pie through licensing/royalties, and they also still have a little 2.8% stake in Spotify)
  • Apple, Amazon, Netflix, AT&T and Disney are currently battling it out in the streaming wars. When there’s a war you have little chances of winning, you shouldn’t be the one waging the war. You should be the one selling the ammo. Basically Sony Pictures (tv shows + movies) is in that position. Sony Pictures can negotiate good prices for their content because Apple, Amazon, Netflix, AT&T are thirsty for content and they all want their own exclusive content. Sony Pictures does not need to prop up their own streaming service just like Sony Music doesn’t need their own music streaming service when they can just license out their content and turn a profit. There will always be demand for TV & movies content, so Sony Pictures is well positioned is as an independent content provider. And while Apple, Amazon, Netflix, AT&T and Disney are battling it out on the forefront, Sony is quietly building their anime empire in the background. Genius business move from Sony here, seriously. They now have anime production & distribution.
  • Netflix has 200M subscribers and they currently have a 250M market cap. Think about what Sony will have in 5 years? >30M Crunchyroll subscribers (assuming all anime will be consolidated into Crunhyroll) & >100M PS+ & PSNow subscribers? Anime and gaming is growing faster than movies and TV shows. (9% CAGR for anime, 12% CAGR for gaming vs. 5% CAGR for the whole movies & TV show entertainment segment which includes PVOD, SVOD, box office, TV etc etc). And gaming as a whole is MUCH bigger than SVOD streaming. Netflix gets 99% of their revenue & profit through subscriptions. For the whole Sony Group Corporation, their subscription services (games + anime) it’s currently only 4.5% of their total revenue. And somehow Sony currently has a meagre $128B market cap?
  • PlayStation alone is bigger than Netflix in terms of operating profit. PlayStation has a MUCH higher profit margin than Netflix. For Q3 2020 Netflix posted $790M operating profit and PlayStation posted $988M operating profit. Revenue was was $6.44B for Netflix vs. $4.77B for PlayStation. (and btw Sony’s mobile gaming revenue (~$1B / year) is under Sony Music, it is not even in those PlayStation numbers!!!)
  • Think about it. PlayStation alone posts bigger operating profit than Netflix (yes revenue is bit smaller, but it’s the operating profit that matters most). And gaming is growing faster than movies. And PlayStation is about 24% of Sony’s total revenue. And yet Netflix has a market cap that is equal to the double of Sony's market cap? Basically If you apply Netflix’ valuation to PlayStation then PlayStation alone should have a bigger market cap than Netflix' market cap.

PS+ growth and software digital ratio growth

  • Sony Vision-S & autonomous driving tech (selling sensors + infotainment system to other car manufacturers). Sony surprised everyone when they revealed their Sony Vision-S electric vehicle last year at CES 2020 (in-house design and made in cooperation with Magna Steyr). And it’s currently being tested on public roads. Over the past year we have seen absurdly big investment hype into anything even remotely related to EV’s (including a few questionable companies). We’ve even seen an EV company with a gravity-powered truck get a $30B market cap in June last year. Meanwhile Sony, out of nowhere, revealed what is arguably (subjectively) one of the best looking EV’s. It got very positive reception at CES 2020. An EV that you can actually drive. But somehow their stock is still dirt-cheap based on their current fundamentals alone? Yet some companies that had pretty much nothing but some EV design concepts got insane valuations purely due to hype?
  • LTE chips for IoT & Industry 4.0 (Altair Semiconductors)
  • Cross-media IP (The Last of Us show on HBO, Uncharted movie etc). Huge unrealized potential synergy here (it’s about to change). We have seen that it can turn out super well when you look at The Witcher, Sonic the Hedgehog and Detective Pikachu. When The Witcher released on Netflix, sales of The Witcher 3 significantly increased again. Imagine the same thing, but with Sony IP’s. Sony Pictures is currently working on 7 video game IP based TV shows and 3 movies. We know The Last of Us tv series is currently in production for HBO. And then the Uncharted is currently in post-production and scheduled to be released in July this year currently. If Uncharted turns out to be successful, it will mark a big, new milestone for Sony as an entertainment company imho.
  • Aniplex (Sony Music Entertainment Japan subsidiary for anime production, distribution & mobile games) had a fantastic year in 2020. (more on this later) There is a lot of room for mobile games growth with Aniplex. Thanks to Aniplex, Sony might beat their earnings forecast.
  • Drones. DJI just got put on Entity List in USA and Sony started developing drones for prosumer / professional a few years ago. Big opportunity for Sony here to take a bit from DJI’s dominance. It only makes sense for Sony to enter the drone market targeting the professional & prosumer video market, considering Sony’s established position in the professional audio/video/photography space
  • Currently Sony also has several ventures & investments in AI & robotics
  • Over the past decade, Sony has also carefully expanded into medical equipment tech & biotechnology. Worth noting that Sony also has an important 33% stake in M3 inc (a medical services through-the-internet company with a market cap of $65.5B) (= just their stake in M3 Inc is worth $22B alone, remember Sony, with their large, diversified revenue streams & assets only has a market cap of $128B?)
  • Sony Pictures has a great upcoming movie slate (MCU Spider-Man, Uncharted, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Venom 2, Morbius, Spider-Verse sequel, Hotel Transylvania 4, Peter Rabbit 2, Vivo, The Nightingale). They will profit from the theatre reopening and covid recovery. They may even become more favourable among movie theatre chains because they won’t release their movies on the same day on streaming services like Warner (and yeah movie theatres are here to stay, at least for a while imho)
  • All the above comes on top of established, mature markets (Financial Holdings & Electronic Products)
  • Oh yeah, btw though TV’s are a cyclical and mature market and are not that important for Sony Group Corporation’s bottomline*, Sony TV’s will continue to do well for the following successive years: o 2020: continued pandemic boost
  1. 2020-2021: PS5 / Xbox Series X/S
  2. 2021 Summer Olympics (tv sales ALWAYS spike during the olympics) (& the effect is more pronounced for high-end TV’s, = good for Sony because Sony’s market share is concentrated in the high-end range (they are market leader in the high-end range)
  3. 2022 FIFA world cup (exact same thing as for the olympics)
  4. You could say it’s already priced in, but the stock is already ridiculously undervalued so idk…
You would think this company somehow has a bad outlook, but that could not be further from the true, let me explain and go over some of the different divisions and explain why they will moon:
Sony Entertainment
While Netflix, Disney, AT&T, Amazon, and Apple are waging the great streaming war, Sony has been quietly building its anime streaming empire over the past years.
  • Sony recently acquired Crunchyroll for $1.175B (it is a great deal for Sony imho and will immediately be more valuable under Sony. Considering the growing appetite for anime I honestly do not even understand why AT&T sold it, they could have integrated it with their other streaming service (HBO Max) but ok)
  • With Crunchyroll Sony now has the following anime empire:
  • Aniplex (anime production & distribution, subsidiary of Sony Music Entertainment Japan) F
  • Funimation
  • Manga Entertainment UK (production, licensing, and distribution, UK)
  • Wakanam (licensing and distribution in Europe)
  • AnimeLab (licensing and distribution in Australia & New Zealand)
  • Crunchyroll (3 million paying subcribers, 90 million registered users and 50 million social media followers)
* Why anime matters:

Anime growth
“The global size is expected to reach USD 36.26 billion by 2025, registering a CAGR of 8.8% over the forecast period, according to a study conducted by Grand View Research, Inc. Growing popularity and sales of Japanese anime content across the globe apart from Japan is driving the growth”
(tl;dr anime 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀, Sony is all in on anime and they have pretty much no competition)
Anime is the fastest growing subsegment of movies/video entertainment worldwide.
  • Sony also has a partnership with Bilibili for anime distribution in China:
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201903/26/WS5c990d93a3104842260b2737.html
  • Bilibili already partnered with Sony Music Entertainment Japan to bring Aniplex’s hugely successful Aniplex’s Fate/Grand Order mobile game in China.
  • Sony acquired a 5% stake in Bilibili for $400M in March 2020 (that 5% stake is now already worth $2.33B at Bilibili’s current share price ($BILI) and imho $BILI still has lots of upside potential considering it is the de facto video creation/sharing/viewing à la YouTube/Twitch for GenZ in China)
https://ir.bilibili.com/news-releases/news-release-details/bilibili-announces-equity-investment-sony

Sony Music Entertainment Japan
Aniplex
  • Sony Music (mobile games) generated $400M revenue from its mobile games in Q2 FY2020, published through Aniplex (Sony Music Entertainment Japan, “SMEJ”) subsidiary
  • They are the publisher of Fate/Grand Order, one of the most profitable mobile video games of the past 5 years (has generated $4B in revenue (!!) by the end of 2019 and is still as popular as ever). Fate/Grand order is the 7th most profitable mobile game in revenue worldwide as of 2020 (!)
Fate/Grand Order #9 game by revenue last year as of Q3 2020

  • Aniplex launched Disney: Twisted Wonderland in March this year. In Q3, it was the #10 most downloaded mobile game in Japan. (Aniplex now has two top ten games in Japan)
  • Fate/Grand Order was the #2 most tweeted game in 2020 and #3 was Disney: Twisted Wonderland. You can see that Aniplex has two hugely successful mobile games. (we are talking close to $1B of revenue a year here). It is the #2 game in Japan by total revenue from Q1 2016 to Q3 2020 and the #9 game in worldwide revenue from Q1 2020 to Q3 2020.
Aniplex has two very popular mobile games
  • SMEJ earns about > $1B from mobile games in revenue from mobile games and there is still a lot of future growth potential here considering Japan’s mobile game market grew a whopping 32% yoy from Q3 2019 to Q3 2020.
  • Aniplex recently co-distrubuted the movie Demon Slayer: Mugen Train in Japan in October 2020. It became the highest grossing film of all time in Japan with a total gross box office revenue of $380M. In the middle of a pandemic. It still needs to release in South Korea, China and USA where it will most likely do great as well.
Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) (Game & Netwerk Services business unit):

  • We all know 2020 was a huge year for video games with the stay-at-home pandemic boost. The whole video game sector brought in $180B of revenue in 2020, a whopping 20% increase yoy.
  • But 2020 will not be just a one-off temporary exceptional year for video games. The video game market has a CAGR of 13% which means it will be worth $291B in 2027. Video games is by far the segment with the highest growth rate in the whole entertainment industry.

US video game market growth (worldwide growth has a 13% CAGR)

PlayStation revenue and operating profit growth

  • PlayStation obviously has a huge piece of this pie and over the past years has seen consistent yoy revenue and profit growth. Think about it, for every FIFA/Call of Duty/Assassin’s Creed sold on PS4/PS5, Sony gets a 30% cut. There have been sold a billion PS4 games so far.
  • 5 years ago 20 to 30% of PS4 games were purchased digitally. Flashforward to 2020 and it’s 60-75% and the digital ratio looks set to still increase a bit. This means higher profit margin for game publishers and for Sony at the expense of retailers
  • SIE has seen huge success in its first-party games over the past 5 years. Spider-Man, God of War, Horizon: Zero Dawn, The Last of Us Part 2, Uncharted 4, Ghost of Tsushima, Days Gone, Ratchet & Clank have all been huge successes. This is really big and represents a big change compared to the previous generations where Sony never really hit it big as a games publisher even though most of their games were considered quality games.
  • SIE is now not only a powerful platform holdeprovider, but also a very successful games publisher with popular IP’s (Uncharted, God of War, The Last of Us, Horizon, Ghost of Tsushima, Ratchet & Clank). This is an enormous asset, because firstly it increases the chances of success for cross-media opportunities (Sony Pictures can make TV shows and movies out of it to expand the popularity of those IP’s even more). And secondly, it is an obvious selling point for PS5. The more popular and bigger their exclusive content, the more they can draw people to their platform/service. This should increases PS5 total marketshare over its competitor.
  • The hype for God of War: Ragnarok will be absolutely through the roof. Hype for Horizon: Forbidden West is also very good already (10 million yt views, 273K likes which is very good). Gran Turismo 7 and Ratchet & Clank will also do very well in 2021. (I suspect that GoW oand Horizon might be delayed to 2022)
  • PS5 reception has been extremely good. Demand is through the roof as well all know. The only problem is that they cannot quite capitalize on the demand due to lack of supply, but overall, it is a very good thing that demand is very high, and that reception has been very positive. The challenge will primarily supply and production-related for the following 6 months and to be able to maintain brand momentum. Hopefully, they won’t push disappointed/inpatient customers to competitors.
  • Considering there’s backwards compatibility from PS4 to PS5, users will want all their PSN content to transition with them as well, so I expect them to lose very little marketshare to Xbox. Also, I do not know if Americans realize it, but Xbox is not nearly as big as PlayStation in the rest of the world as it is in the USA. PlayStation just has global brand power that Xbox just doesn’t have, so Xbox isn’t much of threat at all I’d say. Where I live, in Belgium, In Europe everyone is talking about the PS5, nobody really seems to care about Xbox Series S/X that much. Comparing PlayStation to Xbox in terms of mindshare is like comparing Apple to Motorola (not meant to be a diss to Motorola, I have a Motorola phone myself, just saying that Xbox has significantly less mindshare / brand power in Europe).
  • SIE is likely working on PSVR 2, this could be big.
  • Sony has a small stake in Epic Games (1.4%) and they have a good business relationship with them, so this might also make them open to release first-party games on Epic Games Store after exclusivity period on PS5.
  • Remember the Travis Scott concert in Fortnite? I believe that was one of the reasons why Sony invested in Epic Games. It serves as an example how music can sometimes converge with video games, and this can play to Sony’s strengths.
  • PlayStation also has way superior presence in Asia compared to Xbox. Have been expanding into China as well. Another great opportunity for revenue growth.
  • PS+ subscribers grew from 5.7 million by the end of 2013 to 46 million by October 30th, 2020. This is an average growth rate of 28% over the past 5 years. Considering most of the growth was early on, it will slow down, but I predict that they will have about 70 million PS+ subscribers by the end of 2023. This is huge and represents a stable, recurring source of income. Investors who keep hyping Netflix/Disney+ will love this, but it seems they have yet to discover $SNE.
  • There is a reason why Amazon, Google, Nvidia have been aggressively investing in video games & games streaming. They know the business is huge and is about to get even bigger. But considering the established, loyal PlayStation userbase, the established global brand of PlayStation and the exclusive games, PlayStation should be able to easily standoff competition from Amazon, Google and Nvidia (GeForce Now) in the next few years. So far, Amazon’s venture into game development, publishing & streaming has completely failed. Stadia and GeForceNow seem to have a bit more success, but still relatively niche. Therefore, I think PlayStation is well-positioned to remain one of the leaders in the industry for the following decade.
I'll get to the other divisions later, I figured this is a good first step.
But so far the tl;dr
Image sensors: 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀
IoT/Industry 4.0 chipsets: 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀
PS5/PSN/PS+: 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀
Online medical services (M3 inc.): 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀
Anime: 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀
Fate/Grand Order: 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀
Demon Slayer: Mugen Train 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀
Sony Music / music streaming (the performance of Sony Music’s in Sony’s business is seriously understated. The numbers speak for themselves): 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀
Sony Electronics 🚀
Sony Financial Holdings (very stable & profitable business, even managed to grow slightly during pandemic when most insurance companies performed more poorly): 🚀🚀🚀
Still have to cover Sony Pictures, but their upcoming movie slate looks pretty good honestly (Spider-Man sequel, Venom: Let There Be Darkness, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Uncharted, Morbius, Hotel Transylvania 4 so that's worth one rocket as well imho 🚀
tl;dr of tl;dr:
🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀

Disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor. I am an idiot that's trying to understand why $SNE stock is so cheap.
Positions: SNE 105C 21st January 22
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The ECP is stupid, let's plan production.

It's not a debate about whether to plan things. It never has been. Things are already planned and that's how conservatives like it. The question is how things should be planned and by whom. In capitalism, production is planned by the rich, who have no goal in mind but their own profit. To frame the debate as though it were about capitalism versus central planning, like attempts at characterizing capitalism as an 'emergent order,' has only ever been propaganda for the rich.
Why can't things be run differently? In 1920, an economist tried to devise an answer when he wrote about the economic calculation problem (ECP). To make economic decisions requires we have a common value to compare things by. How else do we know what to produce? A shipment of steel could be used to make cars. It could also make pipes, or microwaves, or any other number of things. How do we decide? There isn't a simple, objective answer you could produce in a lab test. It's a matter of finding the right proportion of what everybody wants. So the critical question is, what do people want? How do we determine that? The argument people are making when they invoke the ECP is a socialist economy couldn't determine this, and will thus always mismanage resources. (This is the origin of the 'commie no food' meme.)
The capitalist price system does provide some information about demand, as prices do reflect how real people are spending their money and thus implies an expression of preference. But how much information this actually produces is exaggerated, along with just how meaningful that information is, while its various problems and shortcomings are swept under the rug. Ludwig von Mises, the economist who first described the ECP, meanwhile does nothing to make the case for why no other method to gauge demand is feasible. He asserts the price system itself couldn't be replicated in socialism, but only because his grasp of socialism was basically if one big company bought the whole economy and prices were arbitrarily set by bureaucrats sitting in a room somewhere. The only point he made in the end is planning requires information, which is mundane.
There's numerous ways to gauge demand. The one I'm most interested is just plainly asking, which I have no problem calling the survey method. Take a random sample of the population every so often, have them rank things by importance. That's it. It would create the same type of information as the price system currently does, if not better. What interests me about this method is its simplicity. It could of course be built upon and expanded over time, and other methods could be incorporated in addition to it, but a general belief of mine is that movements require simple ideas as their foundation, and on this subject I can think of nothing more straightforward and easy to understand than 'to determine what people want, ask them.' It's the ideal starting point.
A big objection I always hear to this idea is people wouldn't answer realistically. People would say they want caviar and lobster every meal, or something like that. But obviously we could present choices and trade-offs in such a way that reflects how difficult things are to provide. It's not a choice between bread and lobster, it's a choice between lots of bread and some lobster, because lobster takes more labour and resources to obtain. The suggestion we couldn't figure out something so basic helps to betray how much of the 'skepticism' about socialism is just dull status-quo bias. The argument is practically 'an idea must be bad if I can imagine it being implemented poorly.'
The other big objection is people don't know what they want. After all, how they reply to a survey doesn't always align with how people really behave. And I suppose that's true, but I also don't accept that it's a disadvantage. In fact, I assert the opposite. This objection touches on a big reason why socialist planning would be so advantageous.
There are those who think what people say they want can be discarded. It's what people do, in practice, that matters. To put that differently, it's not people's stated preference that we should care about, but only their revealed preference. That's what reflects our true desires. To put it mildly, this couldn't be more wrong.
If asked clearly and given time to think and produce a deliberate answer, what people say they want is a much better way to determine their values than observing what they do when put in a system designed to influence their behaviour otherwise. The simplest example: a person can be on a diet and want to lose weight, but if we leave a box of doughnuts in the break room every day their behaviour might not reflect that.
And the capitalist economy is one big 'break room with a box of doughnuts.' It's an environment we have no control of, built to modify our behaviour in whatever way is most profitable for the rich. There's obviously a significant disconnect between what people truly want from life and how they end up behaving in capitalism, and to suggest that's not a problem because however they behave is their 'true selves' is an astoundingly stupid oversimplification of human behaviour. It's logically akin to arguing drug addiction isn't a problem because the addict chooses to keep doing drugs, which proves that must be what they want.
Most people fall into traps they'd vote against if they could. Like how supermarkets put all those impulse-buy candies and chocolates near the checkout till, or put common staples like rick, milk, or eggs at the very back of the store to ensure you have to walk through all the aisle to get to them. CostCo, the second largest retailer in the world, regularly moves all their inventory around for no fucking reason beyond ensuring people don't know where anything is and they have to wander around the store looking for stuff, because that way they're forced to walk by and look at more products, and on average end up buying more. Can you imagine if we had an economy that was designed to be efficient, instead of there being whole industries dedicated to this kind of manipulative bullshit?
And capitalists love peddling addiction. Tobacco isn't as cool as it used to be in the West, but it's still a huge problem in some countries, and nicotine products are making a comeback. Meanwhile, alcohol is still going strong. Where I live, they've been putting beer and wine in supermarkets now, predictably always near checkout. And let's not forget sugar and caffeine are highly addictive, and many products have both, including products marketed to children. Did you know in the USA, obesity has doubled over the last two decades?
Gambling can be addictive. That includes not only predatory bullshit like casinos and lotteries (which should all be burned to the ground), but an increasingly large part of the video game industry, as developers incorporate more and more gambling elements into popular titles to better manipulate people into spending money they'll regret.
Pornography is addictive. Food in general can be an addiction. Arguably shopping, consumption, the thrill of going out and spending money and getting to open new things, can itself be an addiction.
This could veer off into a debate about when exactly a behaviour becomes an addiction, but the exact application of that terminology is far from the point. No, the point is how in the moment of consumption, people aren't as rational and in-control-of-things as it's convenient to portray them. So much of our consumption is impulsive, irrational, and manipulated for the benefit of producers. A system where normal people were able to exert actual control over production would naturally be much, much better at determining what things people truly value than what we have.
And as far as I could tell that was the best critique of the survey idea they could muster.
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“The Canadian Epstein” — Disgraced fashion mogul Peter Nygard's own SON is helping police investigate his alleged sex crimes

Disgraced fashion mogul Peter Nygard's own SON is helping police investigate his alleged sex crimes By Guy Adams Investigates For The Daily Mail
15 Jan 2021
Link to article
'He has become my arch-nemesis. I no longer regard him as my father . . . He is a monster. I am now here to serve in any way I can, to support survivors and the justice process and also to help expose the people who covered up his crimes.'
Kai Bickle's world came tumbling down one night in May 2019, when he attended a dinner party at a lavishly decorated mansion overlooking the golden sands of Venice Beach in Los Angeles.
The host was his father, Peter Nygard, a Canadian fashion tycoon famed for the hedonistic lifestyle he pursued at a global portfolio of high-end properties, including vast residences in Winnipeg, Toronto and Montreal, as well as New York, and, most notoriously, a Mayan-themed 'private luxury resort' in the Bahamas.
Modelling himself on Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, the flamboyant Nygard, now 79, kept a revolving harem of girlfriends. Those caught up (often completely unwittingly) in this web had included actresses Susan Anton and Jennifer O'Neill, stripper-turned-reality star Anna Nicole Smith, and a former Wheel Of Fortune card turner by the name of Vanna White.
His Caribbean parties, meanwhile, tended to attract a better class of A-lister. Past visitors to the island property had ranged from Jane Seymour and Bo Derek to Robert De Niro, , Michael Jackson and Joan Collins, not to mention and , who were photographed there in the early 2000s on an innocuous family holiday.
The 2019 bash, during one of Peter's occasional business trips to LA, was to be a more down-to-earth affair. Roughly 20 guests, including Kai, 38, and his younger brother Jessar (one of roughly ten offspring Nygard has fathered via more than seven women) had been invited for food and drinks, followed by a late-night poker game.
That was the plan, at least. But Kai never made it to the card- table. Instead, he fled the lavish premises in a state of distress, shortly after dinner, believing that he had just witnessed his father attempting to sexually assault an eight-year-old girl.
Details of this ugly development are (it should be stressed) strongly disputed, and we shall examine them later. But the incident would kick-start an extraordinary chain of events that culminated just before Christmas, with the arrest of Peter Nygard on nine charges of sex trafficking and racketeering.
Currently behind bars, with his $900 million (£660 million) business empire in tatters and the FBI poring over his computer hard-drives, the fallen tycoon has now been accused of rape or sexual assault by at least 57 women. Several of Nygard's accusers were children when the alleged crimes took place, and many claim they were drugged.
At least 57 women have accused him.
He will appear in court in Canada next week, seeking bail as he fights extradition to the USA.
It is, perhaps, the most high-profile and shocking sex case since handcuffs were slapped on Jeffrey Epstein. And in a remarkable twist, it turns out that a leading figure in the increasingly public campaign to prosecute Mr Nygard is his aforementioned son, Kai.
Upcoming documentary: ‘Unseamly’ Canadian Designer Peter Nygård True Crime Documentary
Behind the scenes, I can reveal that Kai has spent the past 18 months secretly helping both the U.S. and Canadian authorities investigate his own father's alleged crimes. Keeping his role hidden from Nygard and his associates for several months, he has worked tirelessly to assist victims, and their legal teams.
On the personal front, he has changed his name (taking up his mother's surname to become Kai Zen Bickle) and used his influence over various Nygard companies to block efforts to move his assets offshore, fearing that would allow him to flee. 'We have been engaged in a brutal battle against my father and his enablers,' is how Kai summed things up when we spoke this week.
'He has become my arch-nemesis. I no longer regard him as my father . . . He is a monster. I am now here to serve in any way I can, to support survivors and the justice process and also to help expose the people who covered up his crimes.'
Perhaps most remarkably of all, Kai recently helped two of his younger siblings, one of whom remains a minor, to sue Peter Nygard over claims he 'engineered' the rape of his own sons. In an extraordinary lawsuit filed in August, the boys claimed that their leathery, multi-millionaire father instructed one of his long-standing girlfriends (who was also a sex worker) to 'make a man' out of them.
The first of these alleged attacks (which, again, are vehemently denied by Nygard) took place in the Bahamas 2004, when the son was 15 and the woman was in her mid-20s. The second occurred in Winnipeg in 2018, when the younger child was 14 and the woman was in her 40s. Court papers filed by the boys stated that the unnamed girlfriend was instructed to seduce Nygard's son by showering in his bathroom so that he 'could see her naked'. Then she raped him.
Afterwards, she allegedly told the boy he 'wasn't bad' for a 'baby.' The next morning, Nygard's girlfriend brought him breakfast in bed, kissing him on the lips and announcing: 'Mommy's got you.' Kai says he first became aware of this appalling incident last spring, and was 'sickened' to hear his brothers' claims.
He would often yell and scream at his staff.
'We all spoke and decided the best course of action was to file a lawsuit publicly in the hope that other survivors would feel safe to come forward and also file criminally against Nygard,' he says. 'We were originally going to have me in the suit as my young brother's guardian, but in the end decided not to because it would reveal to Nygard that I was working against him . . . At the time I was [secretly] doing everything I could to improve the odds that he would get arrested.'
To appreciate the extraordinary journey taken by Kai, we must wind the clock back to the mid-1980s, when his father was one of Canada's most talked-about self-made millionaires.
The son of penniless immigrants from Finland, Peter Nygard had launched his empire in the late 1960s, with an $8,000 (£6,000) investment in a struggling fashion firm. By the time he was 30, the company had become one of North America's most successful suppliers of leisure and sportswear, while his flamboyant eccentricities, which included keeping parrots in his office and filling the lobby of Nygard HQ with bronze busts of himself, turned him into an object of public fascination.
In 1987, the party-loving entrepreneur purchased a 4.5-acre patch of the island of New Providence in the Bahamas and set about turning it into a 'dream home' where he could indulge his champagne lifestyle. Over the ensuing years, he built 150,000 sq ft of Mayan-themed buildings, stretching over a dozen 'cabana-style' residences. The buildings at Nygard Cay eventually included a casino, a disco hut (with cameras beneath the dance floor, reportedly to shoot images of revellers from below), and the world's largest sauna, a 6,000 sq ft lodge made from 2ft-thick Canadian pine logs.
In the grounds were fake volcanoes that belched dry ice, a flock of peacocks, stone cobras which hissed steam at sunset, 60 ft towers festooned with hundreds of flaming torches (lit nightly by staff) and giant statues of nude women, purportedly modelled on some of Nygard's favourite girlfriends.
At weekends, he would host lavish parties, which appeared on various TV documentaries, including Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous.
The place became a magnet for freeloading celebrities and, while Kai believes they generally had the most fleeting and brief relationship with Nygard, photos of their visits were then plastered across company literature and websites.
Prince Andrew, to cite one example, was recorded for posterity wandering with the long-haired fashion magnate on the beach, wearing blue shorts and boat shoes.
Born in the 1980s, Kai spent the first three years of his life in the Bahamas until his mother, Patricia, left Nygard, with whom she'd had three children but never married.
They moved first to California and then to the Pacific Northwest in the U.S. Over subsequent years, he had almost no regular contact with the fashion tycoon aside from occasional visits during school holidays, where he met various half-siblings.
'He would have one family weekend per year at his lake cottage, and a few days set aside for Christmas,' says Kai of the somewhat unorthodox arrangement. 'During those times, the days were filled with activities like horseback riding or mini golf.
'He could be a very charismatic person when he wanted to be and the family weekends were very light and brief.'
In the very limited time he spent with his father during childhood, Kai saw nothing that gave him reason to suspect that Peter Nygard was guilty of criminality, though he did have a highly volatile personality.
'He would yell and scream at his staff often, and that always was upsetting to everyone around it, but he would describe his yelling as 'passion' because of his 'high standards',' Kai says.
Nygard's children were further told that he 'lived a consensual, non-monogamous lifestyle,' Kai says. 'He made speeches at dinner to family when we were together to talk about how he hoped everyone got a wonderful partner and wished that he could find that special someone, but that it wasn't the life for him.
'He also had girlfriends that were persistently with him, always two or three, and often they were around for years. He wasn't embarrassed about it. He flaunted it on TV, it was part of his brand, something he showed the whole world. He was proud of it.'
Be that as it may, rumours of predatory behaviour by Nygard —and worse — had occasionally reared their ugly head, only to be quickly suppressed: a relatively easy task before the internet.
In 1980, for example, he was charged with the rape of an 18-year-old, but the charge was dropped when the complainant refused to testify. In 1996, three female employees meanwhile filed sexual harassment complaints in the Canadian province of Manitoba.
It looked like his hand was on her thigh, rubbing.
One, a 39-year-old communications manager, said that, when called into Nygard's office, she would 'find him in a state of undress . . . with his hands down the front of his pants, fondling himself.' He settled by giving the women $18,500 (£13,600) and denied any wrongdoing.
Then, in 2010, a Canadian TV network put out a Panorama-style documentary about Nygard, focusing on alleged sex abuse and harassment of former employees.
It quoted a former stewardess on his private plane who alleged that on one journey — during which Nygard was accompanied by a troupe of topless women — he lost his temper with staff, shouting: 'You are nothing! You are garbage! I am God!'
The programme also alleged that Nygard had engaged in 'inappropriate sexual contact' with a young woman who had been brought to his home in 2003 from the Dominican Republic. Nygard denied that either incident had happened, and sued to stop the documentary being broadcast.
Fast forward to May 2019, however, and those ugly incidents were largely forgotten. Kai, who was by then in his late 30s, had worked for his father's companies for just over two years after leaving college, but quit to pursue a career in activism and health science.
Nygard's trip to Los Angeles afforded them a rare opportunity to catch up, so he attended the aforementioned dinner party in Venice Beach.
As the night wore on, he recalls becoming uncomfortable about his father's behaviour towards an eight-year-old girl, who was attending with her mother, one of Nygard's old girlfriends.
'He's got her sitting right next to him at dinner, which is usually his girlfriend chair. And he's a creature of routine. So I'm already thinking this is weird.
'He's trying to act like the Papa. It was just weird . . . I'm noticing things. I'm noticing that he's telling her little secrets at dinner. Putting his hand close to her ear and going all hush-hush.' At the end of dinner, most of the other 20-odd guests got up to adjourn to the card table. However, Kai adds: 'I'm still watching him. Her chair gets pushed back. He brings her round to him.
'She was on his right side. He brings her to his left side, with his arm around her waist, and I see his elbow change and start moving as if — it looked to me, I couldn't see, but it looked like his hand was on her upper thigh, and rubbing. That's what it looked like to me . . . Everything in my body told me he was doing something terrible.'
'I had a huge adrenaline rush and I immediately told the mother to get her daughter away from him,' he adds. 'I stood up next to him and looked in his eyes. At that moment, for me, it was like all the walls were crashing down around him . . . And I realised that, yeah, he's probably trying to groom that girl.'
Nygard vigorously denied wrongdoing, and even called Kai 'sick' for thinking as much. But Kai was unconvinced.
Then, in February last year, ten women filed a bombshell lawsuit in New York claiming that the fashion magnate had used wealth and status to 'entice underage girls' from 'young, impressionable and often impoverished backgrounds' into his home, where they would be 'plied with alcohol' and (some allege) date-rape drugs, before being taken to Nygard's private quarters, where he would 'assault, rape and sodomise' them. Court papers claimed they were then coerced into joining a globe-trotting harem of sex workers paid thousands of dollars from Nygard's company funds and trafficked around the world on his company's private jet, which reportedly boasts a stripper pole.
One alleged victim, who was just 14 at the time, claimed Nygard raped her and paid her $5,000 (£3,700).
Another said her encounter with Nygard began with him showing her pornography after which he raped her, 'causing her extraordinary trauma and pain', the suit states.
Three of his existing ten accusers were 14 at the time. Three more were 15.
Within days, dozens more alleged victims had come forward. By the summer, some 57 survivors were pursuing legal action — and the number of alleged victims had reached 100.
Kai again confronted his father, only to be told it was all 'lies' and asked to speak out publicly in his father's support. But days later a friend texted Kai to complain about a recent visit to Nygard's house in Los Angeles.
'He said he'd brought a female friend with him, who had one or two drinks and had started to feel very high. Nygard took her up to his room and aggressively had sex with her, not using a condom.
'When I heard that, I knew he was not only as bad as people said he was, but was a dangerous criminal and had to be stopped.' He duly alerted the authorities about the friend's message. In a podcast called Live To Walk Again, released this week, he revealed that he began helping both the police and the alleged victims' lawyers, who he regards as 'heroes'.
Over the summer, Kai also used official positions held in Nygard firms to block two apparent efforts to move assets overseas, amid concerns that the tycoon might flee to evade justice.
PODCAST EPISODE: Peter Nygard Discusses His Father
'Through the course of ten months I also helped several survivors to file criminally against him, and spent countless hours on the phone with survivors, lawyers and authorities,' he says. Last month Nygard was arrested on U.S. charges at a home in the Royalwood area of Winnipeg. He spent Christmas behind bars and has consistently denied any wrongdoing, saying he 'expects to be vindicated' in court.
Kai has renounced his inheritance and is working on 'making the world a better place' by campaigning to close legal loopholes exploited by sex offenders.
'I'm very happy earning my own money, as I have all my life. We've never had a trust fund or an allowance, and since his money has been made through pain and suffering, I won't accept a potential inheritance,' he says.
His father's cash, he says, should instead go towards compensating victims. 'My focus now is to help the healing process.'
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Posts talking about corruption in Lebanon.

Posts talking about corruption in Lebanon.
Hezbollah:
  1. Here are some of the terrorist attacks they have done throughout the years and in different parts of the World [Multiple sources]
  2. Hezbollah critic & thawra activist Lokman Salim was assassinated in Nabatieh. He was missing since yesterday and today they found his body. [Other links are in the comments]
  3. Hezbollah representative interviewed about the current situation in Lebanon and Israel on Al-Jazeerah
  4. Lebanese Activist Hussein Nasrallah was arrested at the airport once he arrived in Lebanon because of his anti-hezbollah views
  5. "I was waiting for an answer from Hezbollah and an explanation, instead of accusing me of being an agent" Cardinal Al-Rahi
  6. Hezbollah Relation to Venezuela
  7. Seven years (2020)ago today Mohammed Chatah was assassinated. This was his last tweet 32 minutes prior to his murder.
  8. Documentary showing the brutality of harakat Amal and Hezbollah thugs on October 23rd, 2019.
  9. Hezbollah says it has doubled its guided-missile arsenal. 2020
  10. Posting about an Iranian general on the road leading to the airport
  11. Here are some proofs of Nassrallah protecting the corrupt leaders and some of the corruptions Hezbollah has done in Lebanon. [Multiple sources, mainly videos]
  12. Hezbollah supporters launched a campaign against journalist and political analyst Kassem Kassir who is considered close to Hezbollah because he criticized their relation with Iran. NBN deleted the episode from its website, while Kassir was forced to issue an apology
  13. Hezbollah launched an online attack against MP Slim Osama Saad. Hezbollah accused Saad of treason after he issued a statement condemning the killing and rejecting political assassination. Hezbollah supporters even called for Saad’s murder, considering him a spy for condemning the assassination.
  14. Despite the total lockdown & people having to close their businesses, hezbollah is celebrating the "41st anniversary of the Islamic revolution in Iran" in Baalbak.
Progressive Socialist Party:
  1. Here are some of the corruptions the Progressive Socialist Party have done [Multiple sources]
Future Movement:
  1. Here are some of the corruptions the Future Movement have done since the foundation of Solidere up until today [Multiple sources]
  2. Dailystar: Hariri is back from vacation(07/01/2021)
  3. Banks in Turkey start legal proceedings against Saad Hariri's company in Turkey for failing to repay a 5 billion USD debt. Hariri is facing extreme pressure from the Turkish government. This is the main reason he flew to Turkey and met president Erdogan. Politics
  4. FPM used its power to reopen a warehouse, for one of its own members, that was closed by the police for selling subsidized materials on the black market for premium prices. This warehouse and its products were bought with a loan from BDL
Lebanese Forces:
  1. Here are some of the corruptions that the Lebanese Forces have done throughout the years [Multiple sources]
  2. Samir Geagea was found guilty of the assassination of Dany Chamoun and his entire family.
  3. WikiLeaks: Geagea Informs Sison that He Has 10,000 Fighters Ready to Combat Hizbullah
  4. The history of the Lebanese Forces is full of terrorism equivalent to Al Qaeda
  5. Leaks reveal Geagea pleaded with Saudi Arabia for money to finance the bankrupt party
Free Patriotic Movement:
  1. LBC-A look into Gebran Bassil's performance as Foreign Affairs Minister
  2. US imposes sanctions on Lebanese politician Gebran Bassil
  3. Gebran roast on CNN
  4. Wikileaks Wire showing discussions Michel Aoun had in 2007 with the US Embassy about an Israeli peace deal and the disarmament of Hezbollah, among many other things
  5. President Khara Aoun considers that the demand for an international investigation into the Beirut Port case aims at wasting time.
  6. Michel Aoun becomes the first Lebanese president to ignore greeting Muslims on their Eid
  7. Full Interview: Former Lebanon Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil | CNBC International
  8. Bassil's armored Audi car was a gift from Marada's Suleiman Franjieh, who got it from Bashar al-Assad
  9. Claudine Aoun, daughter of president Michel Aoun owns a marketing company that has contracts with MANY entities in the government, basically getting paid without doing any job.
  10. Here are some of the corruptions the FPM party have done throughout the years [Multiple sources]
  11. Wikileaks cable about how Aoun views Tripoli and other regions. (English Version in the comments)
  12. Michel Aoun Photoshopping His Meetings
  13. Tracy Chamoun, Lebanon's resigned ambassador to Jordan: Gebran Bassil stands as a barrier to forming a government as a form of punishment for the Lebanese
Amal:
  1. Nabih Berry saying exactly the opposite of what he's doing today
  2. Nabih Berry saying the opposite
  3. The Parliament Militia
  4. The daughter of Berri's cousin is having a huge bachelorette party with musicians, big cakes, and others.
  5. Documentary showing the brutality of harakat Amal and Hezbollah thugs on October 23rd, 2019.
  6. Here are some of the corruptions the Amal Movement have done throughout the year Discussion [Multiple sources]
  7. Hezbollah supporters launched a campaign against journalist and political analyst Kassem Kassir who is considered close to Hezbollah because he criticized their relation with Iran. NBN deleted the episode from its website, while Kassir was forced to issue an apology
Riad Salameh:
  1. Offshore Firm Tied To Lebanon Central Bank Governor Sold Stock to Bank He Regulates
  2. Our BDL Governor: بنك "عودة" شريك الحاكم وصاحب الأرباح الأكبر من هندساته
  3. The politicians and the banks engineered the economy for their own benefit. While banks smuggled politicians and big depositors' fortune, the Lebanese people are begging to get their own money. Here are all that is wrong in the banking sector and how the leaders are working with them [Multiple sources]
  4. Switzerland and EU officially asked the Lebanese authorities to help in a forensic investigation regarding transfers (400m USD) related to Central Bank governor Riad Salameh, Bank Intra, Casino Du Liban, and MEA
  5. Around $1.5 billion has been allocated to the humanitarian sector to support Lebanon in 2021 alone. BDL wants that hard currency channeled through it to control inflation, so rather than dispersed to beneficiaries in USD it will give it out in LBP using the rate $1=6240 LBP
Other government organizations and institutions:
  1. The judicial formation was always influenced by the sectarian parties and Lebanon’s political and sectarian system has long interfered in the judiciary’s work
  2. Here are some of the corruptions of high ranking officials and footages of ISF and LAF using excessive force on people [Multiple sources]
  3. Report about Judicial Corruption, on LBC (12/12/2020)
  4. Minister Tariq Majzoub: The laptops that were said to have been damaged by the explosion turned out to be sold by the company that was supposed to store them. These laptops were meant to go to students in public schools and universities for free.
  5. Here's a video with context about the stolen laptops that the education minister talked about yesterday.. Listen to TechnoMania representatives giving various excuses: no Microsoft license, damaged in Beirut port blast, Insurance... In short: 2400 laptops were stolen and sold!
Internal Security Forces (ISF):
  1. Protesters in Lebanon are targeted by French military-grade tear gas
  2. Here are some of the corruptions of high ranking officials and footages of ISF and LAF using excessive force on people [Multiple sources]
Elections:
  1. All the sectarian parties invested in their political campaigns through deceptive electoral programs, blatant lies, false promises, bribes, small services, and government employment to win people's votes. Here are the promises of the main political parties to fight corruption throughout the years. [Multiple sources]
Religious Institutions:
  1. The sectarian leaders always seek protection behind religious authorities and all the politicians use religion and sectarianism for political purposes. Most of the high ranked religious figures are involved in politics. Here are many political interventions and statements of some religious figures [Multiple sources]
  2. Stories of mothers fighting for their children’s custody and defying the injustice and corruption of Ja’afari courts. This video shows mothers’ battle for custody rights and how they face off the fatwa upheld by the courts
Banking Sector:
  1. Banks are still involved with Qard Al-Hassan
  2. The politicians and the banks engineered the economy for their own benefit. While banks smuggled politicians and big depositors' fortune, the Lebanese people are begging to get their own money. Here are all that is wrong in the banking sector and how the leaders are working with them [Multiple sources]
All:
  1. Lebanese Officials Reportedly Attempting to limit Probe into Beirut Blast From The Start
  2. Ex-Minister of Interior Marwan Charbel confesses that they used to send police and security forces dressed as civilians into protests and gatherings and ask them to start destroying and sabotaging to discredit the peaceful protests that are going on.
  3. Emigration(Joke)
  4. The gates of Hell are beginning to open. Lebanon is being torn apart between political parties who still seem to be oblivious to what's happening around them.
  5. Ogero chairman, Imad Kreidieh, gets paid a higher salary than the USA President. He employed, as a favor, tens of high-level consultants in Ogero, most of them while they were still students, and have no connection with the telecommunication sector(some are theater major)
  6. A once of a lifetime internet speed.
  7. "Immigration" turned into an obsession for the Lebanese... 70% of immigrants are between 25 and 35 years old!
  8. Beirut Municipality: Fake Afforestation with 5 million dollars
  9. Almost 1,000 protestors were arrested since 17/10/19, including 58 minors. Some arrests included violent kidnappings and residential raids. Oppression in Lebanon during this period is equal to that of Sudan and is 3x that of Algeria.
  10. How the parties control YOU!
  11. Beirut
  12. Lebanese Finance Minister Ghazi Wazni: "The political forces that I belong to refuse to sign with any forensic auditing company". Forensic auditing firm Kroll was set to review every transaction at Lebanon's Central Bank and expose the corruption of many politicians
  13. Jad Ghosn explains how politicians use sectarianism to improve their own conditions while deteriorating the conditions for their own sects.
  14. The reason why almost all traffic lights are not functional in Beirut. Spoiler: Corruption - and they won't be functional any time soon.
  15. Political elite EXPOSED! we were also able to hack into documents of the political elite and found some shady stuff to share with you.
  16. Why we still don't have a government.
  17. Lebanese foreign minister requests secrecy of Swiss judicial investigation
  18. Subsidized picon is being sold in Nigeria.
  19. Corruption, incompetence and mismanagement are the reason behind Lebanon's collapse. While it is necessary to implement reforms and create a rescue plan, the sectarian leaders are instead negotiating to divide their governmental shares. Here are some corruption and incompetence in different sectors [Multiple sources]
https://preview.redd.it/lwwxpnoply761.jpg?width=960&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a38f1c67bbf37f0f4ed49d3800d3687f4f7ad5c1
submitted by DarthLebanus_1 to lebanon [link] [comments]

[OC] The Best MLS Player from Each Country That's Fielded One: Part 1 (UEFA)

Throughout its first 25 years, Major League Soccer has seen players from all different corners of the globe, each with their own career story. Whether it be a guy like Tim Melia or Chris Wondolowski who were scrappy guys that came out of nowhere to be stars in this league, or world famous names such as Zlatan, Beckham, and Henry, the league's history of big names is as diverse as they come.
Let's take a look at the best player from each country around the globe. This will be based on national team allegiance. Today, we'll be leading with Europe!
Please note that this is my opinion, and in some cases the decisions were tough; I'll be sure to add in honorable mentions where I can, or add notes.
Albania: Shkëlzen Gashi ( COL 2016-18)
Short list to pick from here, as Gashi's only competition is Jahmir Hyka and Hamdi Salihi. Gashi gets the nod, if nothing else, for his huge 2016 season, where he scored 10 regular season goals (one of which was that year's Goal of the Year) as the Rapids damn near won the Shield. The madlad then went and one-upped that with his absurd equalizer in the playoffs against the Galaxy.
His last two years weren't as fruitful, but man, when he was on he could pull something out of nowhere.
Armenia: Yura Movsisyan ( KC 2006-07, RSL 2007-09 & 2016-18, CHI 2018)
Four choices here, although in the end it's Movsisyan winning out over Harut Karapetyan, who played a couple seasons in the 90s for the Galaxy, San Jose, and Tampa Bay. The fourth pick in a strong 2006 MLS SuperDraft out of Pasadena City College, Movsisyan is mostly associated with RSL, who acquired him in a 2007 trade. With the Claret and Cobalt, he would tally 15 goals in 53 regular season appearances, and in 2009 he'd hoist the club's first MLS Cup. That'd be his last game with RSL until 2016 after some time in Europe with Randers, Krasnodar, and Spartak Moscow (even sharing the Russian PL Golden Boot in 2012/13 with Wanderson). He'd put up a similar clip of 16 in 57 before being waived and finishing his MLS career with four scoreless games with Chicago.
Austria: Daniel Royer ( NYRB 2016-pres.)
The choice here was largely Royer vs. Andreas Ivanschitz, who was a regular starter for Seattle's first MLS Cup, but I can't say no to a man with over 100 MLS matches played and three straight 10-goal seasons. In all comps, the former Austria Vienna man is just two goals behind Thierry Henry for third on the Red Bulls' all time goal scoring list.
Belarus: Sasha Gotsmanov ( COL 2005)
Gotsmanov qualifies by default as the only Belarusian player in MLS history. The Minsk native (and son of former Soviet and Belarusian international Sergei Gotsmanov) played one (1) single game for Colorado in October 2005, against RSL.
Belgium: Laurent Ciman ( MTL 2015-17, LAFC 2018, TFC 2019-pres.)
Shouts to Roland Lamah, who had his moments in Dallas, and Jelle van Damme, who played a season and a half for the Galaxy, but Ciman is the obvious choice. While he's fallen off a cliff as he's gotten older, he's a three-time All-Star and won Defender of the Year in his first MLS season; in his second, he played for Belgium at Euro 2016. At 35, he's lost a step and probably should only be used in emergencies, but at his best he was an elite MLS center back that could also be deployed at right back.
Bosnia & Herzegovina: Haris Medunjanin ( PHI 2017-19, CIN 2020-pres.)
The first one where I'm not totally confident in my pick, as Baggio Hušidić made this tricky (and as a Union fan I'm afraid of bias). But at his best, Haris is an assist machine (30 in four MLS seasons so far), and a threat on set pieces; the madlad even scored an Olimpico this year. His left foot is probably the best the Union have ever had. While his commitment to defense was nonexistent, give him the ball and he could spray a pass anywhere.
Bulgaria: Hristo Stoichkov ( CHI 2000-02, DC 2003)
One of three former Ballon d'Or winners to play in MLS (the others being Lothar Matthaus and Kaka, although "playing" is generous for the former), Stoichkov spent the last four seasons of his career in MLS, scoring 22 goals in 72 regular season matches for Chicago and DC. In his first season, a 9 goal in 18 match outing for the Fire, he also won the US Open Cup, scoring the opening goal of the final, a 2-1 win over Miami. (The winning goal, by the way, was scored by our old friend Owen Goal.)
Croatia: Damir Kreilach ( RSL 2018-pres.)
Mr. Miyagi's favorite MLS player for his crane kick equalizer in the playoffs, the former Rijeka and Union Berlin man has proven to be an excellent utility piece and core part of RSL throughout his time there, scoring 26 goals and chipping in 14 assists in 86 regular season matches and playing all over the damn place (naturally a central midfielder, he's probably still RSL's best forward). At 31, he still has a lot to give.
MLS has seen a huge influx of Croats lately, though; before Kreilach's 2018 signing there had only been four Croatian players in MLS history, two of whom barely played. Currently, there are five on active rosters.
Czechia: Luboš Kubík ( CHI 1998-2001, DAL 2001)
Czech players have had a good hit rate in MLS. In his lone MLS season, Bořek Dočkal led the league in assists, and Zdeněk Ondrášek was a very solid piece for Dallas, albeit one whose MLS time was brief.
But no. We have to go with Kubik. The sweeper was Best XI twice, in 1998 and 1999, and won Defender of the Year in 1998 helping Chicago to a MLS Cup-Open Cup double. He'd win another Open Cup two years later, before being traded to Dallas in 2001 and retiring due to injury.
So many lethal counterattacks started on the foot of this man, and he is rightfully seen as one of the greatest defenders the league has ever seen.
Denmark: Jimmy Nielsen ( KC 2010-13)
I debated going WAYYYYYYY off the board here and throwing out Miklos Molnar. His time in MLS was brief, just the 2000 season before he retired, but the man was the best attacking piece on a Cup winner. He could have balled out if he didn't retire early.
But nah. We're going with Casino Jimmy, one of the keys towards Kansas City's early 2010s turnaround. A two time All-Star, Nielsen was Goalkeeper of the Year in 2012, a year that also saw him win the Open Cup with the Wiz (on penalties, because KC and penalties, name a more iconic duo at this point). In 2013, he capped off his career by winning MLS Cup, again on penalties, while playing with broken ribs.
England: Bradley Wright-Phillips ( 2013-2019, LAFC 2020)
This league, man.
The list of English players to have represented in MLS is a long one, full of iconic names. Ashley Cole. David Beckham. Frank Lampard. Steven Gerrard. Jermain Defoe. Wayne Rooney. Hell, even Bradley's brother Shaun.
But nope. Many of those guys are the butt of many MLS jokes. BWP, on the other hand, is one of the greatest goal scorers the league has ever seen, with two Golden Boots to his name and well over a century of league goals. He was a part of 3 Shield winning teams, and made CONCACAF's Best XI in 2018.
And it all started with a quiet trial in 2013 after Charlton dumped him. This. League.
And This. Man. Even as a fan of Philly who doesn't care much for the Red Bulls, I respect this dude and everything he's done. I hope he gets another year after winning Comeback Player of the Year this year.
Estonia: Joel Lindpere ( NYRB 2010-12, CHI 2013)
The only other option here was Erik Sorga, who could dethrone Lindpere as he came to MLS at a very young age. But it's unlikely, as Lindpere was quietly very solid for the Red Bulls during his time. The Tallinn native was a two-time All-Star, and in 2010 he was named the Red Bulls' team MVP.
Finland: Alex Ring ( NYC 2017-2020, AUS pres.)
T O P I C A L
There's a few fairly talented Finns in MLS right now that could make this interesting (I really like Robin Lod's game, and Lassi Lappelainen would be excellent for Montreal if he'd stop getting hurt). Ring however has proven his worth across 4 seasons, including time as NYC's captain. Over 10,000 MLS minutes, mostly for good teams, as a defensive anchor, he will be a fantastic tone-setter for the new Austin team.
France: Thierry Henry ( NYRB 2010-14)
Oh man, as an Ireland fan I wanted to give this to literally anyone else. I am still bitter, dammit.
His best competition is probably Aurelien Collin, who has a closetful of trophies (including a Best XI and MLS Cup MVP). But no...it's Henry.
When a big name comes to MLS, what people want to see is someone who treats the league with respect. Henry did that. Not only was he dominant on the pitch, a three-time Best XI nomination, he also respected the history of the club he played for and gave 100%, even though he was getting up there in the years. He's a Red Bulls and MLS legend...as much as I curse that godforsaken hand
Georgia: Valeri "Vako" Qazaishvili ( SJ 2017-20)
It looks like the San Jose chapter of Vako's career is done and dusted. While the former Vitesse man struggled for consistency, he did put up 26 goals and 13 assists across four MLS seasons for the Quakes, including 10 while being coached by Mikael Stahre, which should probably get him and Wondo some sort of award.
We'll see what's next for him, if he leaves MLS or goes back to Europe. His only competition was Quakes teammate Guram Kashia.
Germany: Bastian Schweinsteiger ( CHI 2017-19)
I'm...actually not sure about this one. I actually changed this while writing, as I very nearly chose Julian Gressel; the former Rookie of the Year has two 10-assist seasons under his belt, and Kai Wagner has also been one of the league's better fullbacks for Philadelphia; Schweinsteiger was solid enough for Chicago in his advanced age for some very frustrating teams (and even moved positions to center back!)...but man, I don't know.
Germany is weird. For a country with such a great footballing tradition, the pickings are fairly slim. Arne Friedrich had one good year for Chicago before injuries claimed his career. Lottar Matthaus was as committed to this league as Schalke are to winning football matches. Stefan Aigner was stifled by Anthony Hudson going galaxy brain. Torsten Frings...existed.
I dunno.
Greece: Alexandros Tabakis ( ATL 2017)
The only Greek in MLS history...and our second one game wonder. Atlanta's FOURTH string keeper in 2017, he managed to sneak into a game against Minnesota with Brad Guzan on international duty, Alec Kann injured, and Kyle Reynish sent off during the match.
Atlanta lost 3-2. He's now in USL.
Hungary: Nemanja Nikolić ( CHI 2017-19)
Dániel Sallói and Krisztián Németh had their moments, but the winner is Nikolić, who came to MLS from the Ekstraklasa and immediately won the Golden Boot. His totals diminished in the three seasons he spent with Chicago, but 51 goals in 96 appearances isn't too shabby at all - it's second in Fire history behind Ante Razov.
Iceland - Guðmundur Þórarinsson ( NYC 2020-pres.)
Not much choice, 3 guys, all of whom were mostly bench guys. I almost went with Kristinn Steindorsson here on the merits of "he didn't have a penalty saved by Rodrigo Schlegel."
Israel: Gadi Kinda ( SKC 2020-pres.)
It was either him or Dedi Ben Dayan, really. And I nearly went with the former Colorado left back, but nah, Kinda is very much the superior player. The midfielder born in Ethiopia, Kinda shone brightly in his first season in KC, with 6 goals and 4 assists in his debut season. He'll be a DP next season.
Italy: Sebastian Giovinco ( TOR 2015-18)
A signing that changed an entire club.
Before Giovinco, the Reds were a laughingstock. He came in, won a Golden Boot and MVP right away, led the league in assists, made Best XI three years in a row, led them to their first playoff game, their first MLS Cup final, their first MLS Cup win, and a historic treble. And they damn near won CCL too.
The Atomic Ant was must-see from Day 1. It's not just because of him that Toronto is now one of MLS's elite...but he was a huge part of changing that culture. 83 goals in 142 games in all comps. And he dished out his fair share of assists too, with a telepathic partnership with Jozy.
Latvia: Raivis Hščanovičs ( TOR 2010)
Not much to write about here. 14 games for a bad Reds team. Gets in by default with no other Latvian MLS players.
Liechtenstein: Nicholas Hasler ( TOR 2017-18, CHI 2018-19, SKC 2019)
Another one by default. 66 games as a utilityman. Won MLS Cup and the Shield, though.
Lithuania: Vytautas Andriuškevičius ( POR 2016-18, DC 2018)
Only other choice was Edgaras Jankauskas, a forward who played 14 games for the Revs. Vytas played 37 for Portland and zero for DC.
Luxembourg: Maxime Chanot ( NYC 2016-pres.)
Another one by default but this one's an actually really solid player that finished fourth in Defender of the Year voting in 2019. We take those.
Malta: Etienne Barbera ( VAN 2012)
2 games in 2012. Only Maltese player in MLS.
Montenegro: Branko Bošković ( DC 2010-12)
Pretty much every other Montenegrin player played less than 20 games in MLS. Bošković played 43 before returning to Europe for family reasons. 7 assists in his final season though, which is technically something.
Netherlands: Johan Kappelhof ( CHI 2016-pres.)
Much like Germany, bright footballing tradition, very shaky MLS history. Which is weird because the Eredivisie exports a lot of guys to MLS.
Also, I'm excluding Kelvin Leerdam, as he is probably changing his international allegiance to Suriname.
So I'm going with 2017 All-Star Kappelhof, who I think is still fairly solid.
But really the choices aren't great. Dave van den Burgh? Roland Alberg scored a hat trick once I guess? Danny Koevermans was decent but injured all the time?
Maybe it's a hot take. It probably is.
North Macedonia: Oka Nikolov ( PHI 2013)
Never actually played, only in a friendly. Watch this space though as North Macedonia is apparently courting LAFC's Danny Musovski.
Northern Ireland: Johnny Steele ( RSL 2012, NYRB 2013-14)
Another case of shaky opposition, it was either Steele or Steve Morrow, who played 41 games for Dallas in the aughts.
Steele played regularly for a Shield winner, the 2013 Red Bulls. Easy peasy.
Norway: Vadim Demidov Ola Kamara ( CLB 2016-17, LAG 2018, DC 2019-pres.)
Adama Diomande is the main competition here. Kamara's first stint in MLS was a smashing success, scoring 48 goals in 90 regular season matches for Columbus and the Galaxy (he was traded for Gyasi Zardes before 2018). A brief foray to China followed, and while he's back in MLS with DC he hasn't quite been the same.
Still a good player on his day, maybe just the Bennyball effect.
Poland: Piotr Nowak ( CHI 1998-2002)
When I think of early Chicago, Nowak and the earlier-mentioned Kubik are the first two names that come to mind. Kubik held down the back while Nowak was the chief creator in the midfield. Three-time best XI, three-time All-Star, and MLS Cup MVP.
...can I drink my water now?
Portugal: José Gonçalves ( NE 2013-16)
Gonçalves fell off a cliff in his latter years, but in his first MLS season he won Defender of the Year and in his second he was a key part of a team that made the MLS Cup final and damn near won the thing.
Runner up here is Nani who is probably closing in.
EDIT: I also forgot to mention Pedro Santos, thanks to the Crew fans who pointed that one out. I still think Gonçalves pips him for his 2013 if nothing else, but Santos is probably closer than Nani.
Republic of Ireland: Robbie Keane ( LAG 2011-16)
A LOT closer than you think; Time Person of the Century Juventus legend Ronnie O'Brien was two-time best XI himself.
But nonono. This is Robbie freaking Keane. When we see these big name Euro guys interested in MLS, this is the man we want them to be.
Hypercompetitive and holding guys accountable on and off the pitch, and scoring for fun. 83 goals in 125 MLS regular season appearances. Best XI four times. 2014 MVP. MLS Cup MVP in 2014. A closetful of team awards including 3 MLS Cups.
This man was a baller, and frankly his departure was the beginning of the Galaxy decline into irrelevance, but that's a story for another time.
Romania: Alexandru Mitriță ( NYC 2019-pres.?)
Question mark because he's on loan and I have no idea if it'll be permanent, but he was punted out by the Pigeons just as he was really starting to break out. He scored 12 goals in his debut season last year but filled in nicely this year while Maxi Moralez was injured. EDIT: NYC fans have informed me he wasn't punted out, but was loaned out to be closer to his pregnant wife. My apologies.
Honorable mention: Alex Zotincă, who played for the Wizards and Chivas USA in the aughts. Brave man.
Russia: Igor Simutenkov ( KC 2002-04)
Not a lot to pick from here either. 49 games, 12 goals for this forward from Moscow, who now serves as an assistant coach at Zenit.
Scotland: John Spencer ( COL, 2001-04)
Give Johnny Russell another few years and he'll pass Spencer, but for now I'm leaning the latter. Spencer as a coach was frustrating as hell, but as a player he was Best XI twice and an MVP finalist once. Dude could score goals despite battling injuries in his time in MLS.
Just don't let him sign Kris Boyd. Then you lose to Cal FC. No one wants that.
Serbia: Aleksandar Katai ( 2018-19, 2020)
FROM A SPORTING PERSPECTIVE.
And mostly due to a weak pool. Runner up was probably someone like Miloš Kocić.
18 goals in 62 games for Chicago before getting yeeted back to Serbia for Bad People Reasons
Slovakia: Albert Rusnák ( RSL 2017-pres.)
He has tenure on Ján Greguš, who's the closest competitor, but Rusnák is also good. He followed up a 14-assist debut season (4th in the league) with back to back 10 goal seasons before struggling this year with injury.
Slovenia: Robert Berić ( CHI 2020-pres.)
Once he got acclimated to MLS, the goals came, and Chicago has its successor to Nikolić up top. He finished with 12 goals in his debut season, tied for second in the league with Ruidiaz and Zardes.
Also, from what I saw early on, seems like he's a dark-arts type of guy that gets in your head. That's fun.
Spain: David Villa ( NYC 2015-18)
I really didn't want to put him here due to recent allegations, and the fact that Pozuelo has already matched his MVP and two Best XI performances....
77 goals in 117 games though, that's tough to pass on.
Sweden: Zlatan Ibrahimović ( LAG 2018-19)
It's Zlatan.
He pretty much dragged a sorry LA organization to something resembling competitiveness.
What the hell did you expect?
(Anton Tinnerholm made this hard, though)
EDIT: Forgot Gustav Svensson as well in my honorable mentions.
Switzerland: Stefan Frei ( TOR 2009-13, SEA 2014-pres.)
Pretty self-explanatory, one of the most accomplished keepers in MLS history and with a closetful of hardware. And all it took Seattle to get him was a late first round pick that pinged around so much that it was eventually traded for a coach.
Turkey: Sercan Güvenışık ( SJ 2012)
5 games that year. No one else has flown the Turkish flag in MLS.
Ukraine: Dema Kovalenko ( CHI 1999-2002, DC 2002-05, NYRB 2006-08, RSL 2008, LAG 2008-10)
I'm afraid he'd break my legs if I didn't. One of the most physical and downright dirty players the league has ever seen. Made nearly 300 appearances though, and has one each of the 3 major US trophies (MLS Cup, USOC, Shield), all with a different team.
Wales: Andy Dorman ( NE 2004-07, 2013-15)
Dorman was a key part of that real good Revs team from the mid-aughts, and just beats out Carl Robinson. He made 112 appearances in his first stint, and played in 3 MLS Cup finals, though they famously lost all three. The Revs brought him back in 2013 after some time in Scotland and England, and was playing semipro in the area as recently as 2018.
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Tuesday, 26 January 2021

Tuesday, 26 January 2021
Live Updates
First Post:
https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/kuwg1e/i_have_a_discount_trading_bot_which_gives_out/
Background:
Bot Overview:
It's showing an opportunity that you may have missed otherwise, so you can decide for yourself if you want to pursue the discount of a stock for potential profits. Backtesting has not been done, do not YOLO your life savings into whatever stated risking it all. Rather use this as a side tool.
Key:

At Close of Monday

Batch 1:
Maybe:

Batch 2: Company | Current Price | Average Price
Call:
Potential Call:

At Open of Tuesday

Batch 1:

Maybe:

Batch 2: Company | Current Price | Average Price
Call:
Potential Call:

Batch 3:

Donation Link:
I have created a donation link (as many of you guys requested that I do) just as an addition to help support and motivate me to continue.
www.paypal.me/WallStreetTrader
Update:
Will update close it in an hour of this post.
Suggest tickers, I will add them to the database.
Adding batches
Close Batch 2 Added 10:03 pm Monday, 25 January 2021 (GMT-5) Time in New York, NY, USA
Close Batch 1 Added 8:26 am Tuesday, 26 January 2021 (GMT-5) Time in New York, NY, USA
Open Batch 2 Added 9:59 am Tuesday, 26 January 2021 (GMT-5) Time in New York, NY, USA
Open Batch 1 Added 10:06 am Tuesday, 26 January 2021 (GMT-5) Time in New York, NY, USA
More tickers added.
submitted by DumplingGoddessTe to WallStreetTrader [link] [comments]

Monday, 25 January 2021

Monday, 25 January 2021
Live Updates
First Post:
https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/kuwg1e/i_have_a_discount_trading_bot_which_gives_out/
Background:
Bot Overview:
It's showing an opportunity that you may have missed otherwise, so you can decide for yourself if you want to pursue the discount of a stock for potential profits. Backtesting has not been done, do not YOLO your life savings into whatever stated risking it all. Rather use this as a side tool.
Key:

At Close of Friday

Batch 1:
Maybe:

Batch 2:
Call:
Potential Call:

At Open of Monday

Batch 1:

Maybe:

Batch 2:
Call:
Potential Call:

Batch 2 (11am GMT-5 Dip):
Call:
Nothing great is showing just the same probably not synced, just buy whatever you were thinking about buying during this dip. CRSP (Batch 1) is decent but I'm too tired to comprehend what's going on. VIX is at 8% day so expect things to go temporarily.

Batch 3:

Donation Link:
I have created a donation link (as many of you guys requested that I do) just as an addition to help support and motivate me to continue.
www.paypal.me/WallStreetTrader
Update:
Will update close it in an hour of this post.
Suggest tickers, I will add them to the database.
Adding batches
Close Batch 1 Added 7:26 am Monday, 25 January 2021 (GMT-5) Time in New York, NY, USA
Close Batch 2 Added 7:35 am Monday, 25 January 2021 (GMT-5) Time in New York, NY, USA
NEW: Will be adding estimated selling price for open.
Open Batches will be updated 30minutes after open.
Open Batch 1 Added 10:06 am Monday, 25 January 2021 (GMT-5) Time in New York, NY, USA
Open Batch 2 Added 10:12 am Monday, 25 January 2021 (GMT-5) Time in New York, NY, USA
Open Batch 2 Rerun 11:15 am Monday, 25 January 2021 (GMT-5) Time in New York, NY, USA
submitted by DumplingGoddessTe to WallStreetTrader [link] [comments]

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