Feb 4, mid-market: Thank you everyone for your support. I really don't know what to say. The company keeps getting pounded because GME is having a sell-off, which doesn't make any sense. But that's the market for you. It doesn't always make sense. I still believe 2021 will be a big year for Nokia, although it doesn't look like there is any way we'll manage the crazy play anymore. Still, it was nice to see something that was impossible become possible, even if it was for only a few days. And remember, we can still do it any day. All it takes is for us to work together. If you want. Make up your own mind. I'm still holding. NOK will recover from this. Fair value is at least 4.81, and way more when 5G really gets going. So if you can, I would buy some more now. You'll thank me later for the tip. It may not be the most exciting play, but it is what investing is all about. Slow and steady growth that compounds to make a big change. One of these days I'll be able to post again, when the mods lift the restrictions on new posts and things get a little less crazy around here. When I post again about NOK, I'll post the link here too. Thanks everyone! Feb 4 premarket: Earnings out! They beat expectations a bit, their revenue was a little smaller than expected. Overall, good quarter, good year. Here it is: https://www.nokia.com/system/files/2021-02/nokia_results_2020_q4.pdf Feb 2, end of day: It's getting pretty crazy out there, but here's what you should know. The NOK chart is following the GME chart. It's got way more shares so the bumps and dips are more stable, but that's the main trend. What that means: GME has no underlying value at this level. It is a gamble on the short squeeze. It might pay off, or it might not. If people panic sell like yesterday, it won't. NOK is very different. It has underlying value. So if someone dumps it below its target price, the best thing to do is just to buy and wait for the value to go down. Thursday NOK reveals its earnings, and they are likely to be good based on what Ericsson revealed. Ericsson is one of its main competitors and a very similar company currently trading at twice the NOK price. Feb 1, end of day: Told you it was a value share! Still trading at target, still low risk. Either dumping has stopped, or normies are piling in because of the results. Either way good news, hope you made some money today!Vol today 190m, still way above average. Normal average 30m before we changed it lol. That means since Wednesday over 2bn shares have changed hands. Hope you got em! Ericsson (NOK competitor) results suggest NOK will report good numbers this week, NOK upped to BUY on market watch: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/nokia-upped-to-buy-after-ericsson-results-2021-02-01 Unless my math is retarded (which it is cos ahmsodumb), if everyone (7m) on this sub spends $3000 at current price ($4.55) we BUY THE FLOAT. The more they keep dumping, the more shares we get cheap. Think about it.EDIT: buying the ENTIRE float is NOT the point of this play. I know share price goes up when supply is restricted, just read the play. This is just an example of what happens when they dump a value share on millions of retail investors. BLACKROCK IS IN PEOPLE: https://fintel.io/so/us/nok/blackrock Robin hood increases NOK allowance to 2000 shares for next week (still any allowance is CRAZY because it's a VALUE SHARE THAT HASN'T BUBBLED) https://robinhood.com/us/en/support/articles/changes-due-to-recent-market-volatility/?fbclid=IwAR2SK9VQOI_eBgBF0SK4-R1eQjBkSAe3sd6KMwSBaCPmz38e5cc8siRdhEY You dump a VALUE STOCK on me and think I'm in danger? Added new summary (30 Jan), and Q&A. FIRST OFF: This post is not financial advice or anything except the rant of some idiot retard who is an idiot. I tell you straight up that there is a normal investment side to the NOK play (STILL MEANS RISK, which YOU will have to decide!) and that there is a CRAZY side that is PROBABLY IMPOSSIBLE. If you want to play the crazy play then you’re also a crazy retard idiot just like me. I don’t know shit, I just look at graphs and go WOW. Do your own due diligence, I am not a financial advisor. Don’t ask me if you should buy, I don’t know, can you afford to? Are you comfortable with the risks? I don’t know these things. You do. NOK PLAY: Here’s how it works. YOU DECIDE if you want to take part. 1.It’s not a short squeeze like GME. Get that out of your head. 2.It’s a value/momentum play. The value part is just normal granny&grampa investing. See a good company going cheap, buy and hold. Tell your mom, dad, granny and grampa, cousins, relatives, friends. 3.The momentum part is the crazy part, and if it works the share will SKYROCKET as long as YOU DON’T SELL. GME is the biggest short squeeze in history, the NOK play could be the biggest value buy in history.
The beauty of it is that it works because Wall St is dumping NOK irrationally. That’s why the price is going down (slowly). They think they’re attacking us and slowly winning, but they’re giving us a value share cheap = their money, our pockets. By the time they realize what we did, it will be too late.
Don’t panic, and keep buying the dumps (if you think the company has value), and if we hold the line you could see a miracle.
3310 HANDS Value Part (crazy part in Q&A): The company is healthy, has good financials, it’s a market leader in 5G (it’s main competitors are Huawei and Ericsson, they have about the same market share share of 5G) a lot of potential to be the company that builds 5G for a large part of the world. NOK is currently trading at a standard price for the value it holds. It is not a bubble. Here’s Nokia’s 5G contracts: https://www.nokia.com/networks/5g/5g-contracts/ Here’s Bloomberg shitting bricks that we’ve realized that Nokia is a value bet: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-28/gamestop-may-be-a-reddit-wallstreetbets-game-but-nokia-sure-isn-t Nokia also just unveiled new 1tb tech, the thing AFTER 5G. First on the world. They have it, they’re showing the world it works. Here is their press release from Wednesday: https://www.nasdaq.com/press-release/nokia-and-elisa-push-network-boundaries-with-worlds-first-1t-deployment-2021-01-27 They are so trusted that NASA got them to build a cell network on the MOON. Literally. If you’re NASA, would you hire your retard uncle Earl to build cell towers on the moon? No, you hire someone who CAN ACTUALLY DO IT. Imagine what it takes to build something really big and complicated on the moon? Now imagine who’s the likely guy who can do it. That’s right, NOKIA. Here they are, going to the moon: https://www.nokia.com/about-us/news/releases/2020/10/19/nokia-selected-by-nasa-to-build-first-ever-cellular-network-on-the-moon/ If the Huawei 5G war continues, who do you think US and Europe is going to back, especially since NOK already has the next tech, owns a bunch of patents, is from FINLAND that has never tried to take over the world and has a brand that EVERYONE who lived in 2000s remembers? Here’s a guy who’s been doing the numbers for a while now in case you want to see them: https://www.reddit.com/useJimming/comments/l7f6ua/part_iv_option_chain_analysis_on_nok_and_why_you/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf I don’t know him, I don’t know the numbers as well, but looks pretty good to me. Amazing due diligence. But what do I know, I’m an idiot. So is he. So are you. We’re all fucking retards, just ask Wall Street. I poked myself in the same eye twice yesterday. We’re “dumb money”. They have other names for us too. So, worst case, you just bought into a good company at a fair value. If the crazy play doesn’t work, you just hold on to them and let them become the world leader in 5G. Unlike GME (NOT SAYING SELL!), NOK will not fall 99%. Or if it does, I'M BUYING THAT SHIT because if a HEALTHY COMPANY FALLS 99% you make some CRAZY MONEY on that when it bounces back. Q&A Q: You retards were tricked by bots to buying NOK, there’s no short A: This just full on doesn’t get what the play is about. IT IS NOT A SHORT SQUEEZE. THIS IS NOT GME RINSE REPEAT. GME IS A DIFFERENT PLAY. NOK IS A VALUE PLAY. How many more ways can I say it? Not sure. How many more do I have to? Q: Stop taking attention away from GME you retards A: Nobody is saying sell your GME. Nobody is saying that. GME is too expensive for a lot of people, and GME is VERY RISKY and NOK has genuine value behind it. If the NOK play works, those people who couldn’t afford GME can still get on & get rich. If it doesn’t, they most likely still make money on a good company. Q: This play is impossible / crazy / it’ll never work / there are too many shares you retards A: This is ALMOST true. This play WAS impossible until 1/27/2021. That is why nobody has EVER tried anything like this. But it’s NOT impossible anymore. Look at this graph. Look at it. See that spike? What the fuck is that? I’ll tell you my fellow autistic space boot packin 3310 using NOKSTER. https://preview.redd.it/v473xl00ghe61.png?width=2182&format=png&auto=webp&s=bf5aac455156dbadb919b80afacb5232af0a05b5 That spike was them running out of shares for half an hour. Trade was stopped until they could find more, to avoid an artificial spike in the price. Proof? Look at the volumes. A small sale (red) causes a small dip. Two small buys cause a MASSIVE SPIKE. They ran out, and had to call their friends to liquidate more shares so the price wouldn’t skyrocket "artificially". But that’s IMPOSSIBLE for NOK. NOK has 5bn shares. Nokia should be much more stable because it has so many shares, having a crazy demand spike is crazy. I saw it, and fell off my chair and since I’m such a retard it took me an hour to get back up. So it was impossible, and that’s why Wall Street won’t see it coming. They think this is their attack and they’re about to break through our ranks, but they’re actually playing right into our hands. Wendnesday, we moved 1bn shares. Thursday, when nobody could buy, we still moved 500m. Yesterday, we still moved 360m. We’ve moved so much NOK in the past three days, the average volume of the share has MORE THAN DOUBLED in THREE DAYS. The play is not impossible anymore, but Wall St thinks it is, which is how we can use their own strength and mass against them. But the value buy still makes sense WHENEVER you see someone dump a valuable share. Someone sells you a 100$ bill for 90$? Buy it. They attack? We absorb. They dump, we buy, they run out of shares, we hold. They’re fucked, and they just handed us a bunch of value shares at an undervalue = they just gave us their money. They are just giving it to you. When they realize they can’t buy them back at a lower value, what do you think is going to happen? Q: We don’t do value plays, we do short squeezes you retards A: Go back to April. Look at u/DeepFuckingValue’s position. GME was a value play. It’s only in April that the Short Squeeze became possible. Look it up yourself. Will a short squeeze also happen with NOK? It’s unlikely. Hedge Fund Assholes have been increasing their shorts in NOK in the last few days, but they won’t go over 100% on 5bn shares because they're not as stupid as me. But it doesn’t have to happen. We just need to buy the dumps. If they short, great. More money for us as long as we don’t let them drive the price down with the dumps. Q: Why is NOK not rocketing? A: Because Wall Street is dumping, just like I said they would after the Wednesday spike. That’s the whole plan. They dump, we hold the line, buy the dumps and keep the price steady. The GME short squeeze guys waited for this for UP TO TWO YEARS. I saw it in April. I thought it was crazy. I didn’t jump in back then. If I did, I’d have about as much money as u/DeepFuckingValue. On a value share, you can afford to wait. GME was originally a value play. That’s what I should have realized in April. SO JUST WAIT AND HOLD (if you believe and idiot like me, which you shouldn't, no need to message me about it). It’s been two days since this play even became possible. Q: How do we know it’s working? A: Look at the volume of shares traded. Nokia has 5bn shares. In the last three days, nearly 2bn have been traded. The price is still up from last week. That’s how. This has already been a giant dumping campaign. How come the price hasn’t floored? What happens if we just buy it all up? What happens if they run out, and then their shorts blow, the price bumps up, CNBC tells the world we broke another short wall, everyone piles on, Wall Street realizes they just gave us their shares at an undervalue and try to buy back, we don’t sell, we have all the shares? The Wednesday spike is what happens, except this time there is no stopping it. If they stop trading again and try to dump some more, you just buy up the dump and keep the spike going. Spike stops being a spike and becomes a floor. Q: Where will this max out and when? A: What do you think I’m from the future? I just saw an impossible thing happen on Wednesday, and we need to make it happen again. Look at the graph. Look at it. Set your targets to $3310, that should do it. Q: When should I buy? What should I buy? Should I buy? A: Be your own person. Buy when you feel like it, if you feel like it. Q: Wall street bots are promoting NOK. A: I don’t give a shit. If they are, and we keep buying, they are promoting giving us money. Part 2: (29 Jan) First off, much as I appreciate the love, I can’t play your hand for you. You have to make your own decisions. Do I know where NOK is going to be tomorrow? Nope. Nobody does. All that I have for you is the news from Wednesday that this play is no longer totally impossible:
I think the assholes are going to try to dump you out of the market
It won’t work if we keep the demand up.
The way we keep demand up is we buy, and others will follow us because the company is good.
When they realize it won’t work, they’ll need to start buying back in.
Then it’ll be too late, cos they dumped their shares on US and we are RETARDS who HOLD. That means that when their shorts start to go bust, the price will jump up (a little bit, not like with GME at first – this is a different play based on the health of the company, not a straight up short squeeze. The short position on NOK is much smaller).
When the price jumps up, and the GME guys start cashing out, they need somewhere to put that cash. Some of them pay off student loans, or buy cars or whatever, but the smart ones will go NOK.
How you play it is up to you. I can’t tell you if you should buy, what minute to buy, what app to use and so on. All I can say is I buy the dumps. You need to decide for yourself if you want to do it. You can see the dumps on any app, or even yahoo finance. I buy NOK on NYSE, and I buy straight up shares (so they can’t lend out mine for shorts) but you’re free to do what you want. I’m a retard, you’re a retard, we’re all autistic fucks, we make up our own mind and stick with it. Secondly, what I said yesterday morning would happen, did happen. And it happened exactly like I said it would. So don’t get scared off, just buy the dumps. And they know that they’ll be fucked if we keep buying the dumps. That’s why they stopped us from buying NOK. NOK hasn’t bubbled, stopping us from buying NOK was because they know we’re on to them. They know the dumps won’t work if we JUST KEEP BUYING and HOLDING. The play works, they’re scared, we caught them with their pants down, they’re trying to get ahead of us. OK, so about what happened yesterday with RH and others. I’m so fucking angry about this. What RH and others did is completely insane. Their argument is “you guys are throwing your money away on a bubble, we’re just protecting you”. Bullshit. I won’t comment on GME, I’ll let u/DeepFuckingValue or one of those guys do that. I’ll just say, that short squeezes happen with hedge funds all the fucking time. Why is trading not stopped for them? They have people’s fucking pensions that they’re playing with. But for NOK, it’s TOTAL BULLSHIT. Here’s why:
NOK HAS NOT BUBBLED. Look at the graph. Look at it. It is still down from 2016. NOK is well within normal variation. Long term, you barely see the spike from a couple of days ago. There is nothing to “protect us” from. They’re protecting themselves.
The NOK play is not a straight up short squeeze. The play is HELPED by the shorts that are there, as long as we can keep the demand up and keep the price up against the dumping, but that’s all.
NOK is a healthy company, with new and important tech, a great brand, a lot of potential. You want to see why, read the original post. ANYONE who sees a company like that being dumped for NO REASON would buy. So should you. They are only dumping it because they’re trying to fuck up our play.
Ok that’s enough for now. I’ll see you all when I’ve got my space boots on, in my house on the FUCKING MOON, next to a NOKIA Comms tower, or I’ll see you in VALHALLA with my broke ass. If this doesn’t work, then at least you TOOK ON THE MOTHERFUCKERS and EARNED A PLACE at the table with FUCKING ODIN. UNBREAKABLE 3310! ORIGINAL POST (28 Jan): I get it, it’s not the play. I’m not saying sell your GME. I’m not a bot or a spy or a wall street asshole. I’m a regular guy who’s got a couple of bucks in his bank account and plays videogames and wants a fucking house to live in like my parents had when they were young. If you don’t agree with me, just say so. I’m also not a financial advisor, so make up your own minds you autistic fucks. But, BUT, yesterday we did something they’ve never seen. Yesterday, we made them run out of NOK shares. That’s what that big spike was, and that’s why trading was stopped for 2h. If we keep doing that, it will be the biggest wall street wealth transfer from assholes to retards in history. Because they will keep dumping it until it’s too late. Impossible, you say. Too many shares, you say. Well listen up. Yesterday, in ONE DAY, we traded, or caused others to trade, 1bn shares of Nokia. That is 1/5 of all the Nokia shares in the world. That’s never happened, EVER. Not even when Nokia was the biggest phone company in the world. 3516.16% of average trading volume. Do you get it? They’ll keep dumping their stock, we keep buying them cheap, and then they won’t be so cheap anymore when they try to buy back in. We can move 1bn shares IN A DAY. ONE DAY. 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 Why do they stop trading in NYSE? Cos they ran out of shares temporarily and they don’t want “artificial” spikes in the prices. So they made us retards wait a couple of hours while some assholes called some other assholes to unload their shares into the market, and once they had enough, they started again. That’s why that spike went down right after the freeze. But then we did it again. And they had to stop again. The price just wouldn’t go down. The assholes who’d just unloaded shares were probably back on the phone with the other assholes who’d convinced them. Everyone is watching us. What we do, millions of normal folks do with us, and every wallstreet asshole does against us. What did the asshole brigade do? They started shorting NOK. They will continue to do that, because they think we’re retards (they are correct). But how come the price didn’t go down? It’s got 5bn shares, and everyone whos ever held it was dumping it. How could we ever keep up the demand when there are so many shares out there? How is this going to work? Because the retard brigade was buying it. There’s 3m of us and counting. If we each put 600 bucks on NOK, we get 100 shares, and that’s 300m shares. Now imagine what happens if we put 6000 on it. AND. FUCKING. HOLD. And every dip you see, you buy more. AND. FUCKING. HOLD. They'll keep dumping, we keep buying, until they realize the price isn't going down. Then they start buying, we keep holding, the market runs out of NOK. Price skyrockets. And normies outside were following us. They can see that the stock is still LOW, lower than 2016. This means they don’t think it’s a bubble that’s going to crash on them. So why do the normies follow us on this, and not on GME? (I’m not saying sell GME). Because GME has never, ever been anywhere near where it is now. That scares a normal guy who’s just trying to put in some savings for his family. They think this is some Dutch tulip market shit. Not so with NOK. Even with the spike from yesterday, NOK is still DOWN from 2016. Remember 2016? Remember that being a really big year for Nokia? No, me neither. And let’s not even get started on where it has been in the past. Yesterday's spike barely shows on the graph. You know what is going to be a big year? 2021 and 2022. Why? What else did NOK say yesterday? Well, they revealed that they have a new kind of 1 terabit data transfer networks shit, what do I know, I’m not a techie. But it IS a new kind of technology that’s going to kick 5Gs ass. And my fellow retards of the most honorable retard brigade – Do you think we’re going to need more data this year than last year? Remember how Netflix had to downgrade its picture quality in March because the networks couldn’t handle the amount people were streaming? What do you think is going to happen with the company that solves that? But why would NOK be the company? Well, remember the 5G war with China? US and Europe can’t buy 5G from China, because then China has our networks. But guess who US and Europe aren’t afraid of? Fucking FINLAND. Finland, the land of NOKIA. So tiny that some people think the whole country is a conspiracy theory and doesn’t really exist. Sorry Finnish people, nobody gives a shit about you. Good thing for you, cos you get to build the 5G network on the moon and shit because nobody is scared that Finland will take over the world. Want proof? They are literally building one on the FUCKING MOON: https://www.nokia.com/about-us/news/releases/2020/10/19/nokia-selected-by-nasa-to-build-first-ever-cellular-network-on-the-moon/ And we’re going to send them there. 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 But hang on, why is NOK so low in the first place if it’s so great? Answer: because Microsoft fucked them. That’s right, they sent one of their own assholes to infiltrate the NOK, leak a bunch shit to drive the share price down, and then buy the phone part of the company. These assholes wrecked the company, the Finnish economy, and every middle class shareholder who was just trying to put their kids to college. Imagine everyone who’d be fucked if someone did that to Apple now. Worked like a charm. Firesale. Business restructuring. Lost their phones. NOK never recovered. The asshole they sent from Microsoft? Went back to work for Microsoft, and was paid a shit ton of money for what he did. His name is Stephen Elop. Look it up. So they have tech that nobody else has and a brand that everyone recognizes. But what don’t they have? Money. That’s why they’re building this 1tb magic network thing in tiny fucking possibly fake Finland to show everyone it works. But if we drive the share price up, do you think that’s going to change? So FUCK IT. I’m in for every penny, and I am HOLDING. I’ll see you in my house ON the MOON next to a NOKIA Comms tower, or I’ll see you in VALHALLA you BEAUTIFUL RETARDED MOTHERFUCKERS. TL;DR: NOK is literally going to the moon. Go there with them. 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀
For New Investors Caught in the Euphoria of Pennies.
I am not new to the risk of penny stocks, been playing with pennies for about 8 years now. Luckily, I have had a lot more success than fails but do not take this as "financial advice" and more something to think about. Lets talk $HCMC.. the most hyped stock in my opinion over this past weekend and is being pushed for it to still have momentum. If you truly believe this stock will hit a $1 you need to take a step back and learn how much is needed to move a stock with 105.1B Outstanding shares... to put it in perspective, Apple for example has 16.8B.. Apple the Trillion dollar company. I am not saying you can't take a quick gain but read on what share dilution is and how it effects the stock price. When the court decision does occur with HCMC, expect some movement but to move toward $1 the company needs to do a reverse split. I am sure there is a lot more into how a company can reduce its outstanding shares but that is a common one I have seen in pennies. I won't go in-depth in what a reverse split is but look up on that. This stock will move if truly everyone actually throws some cash in it but don't expect a full dollar with 105 B Outstanding shares. I understand it can be challenging to filter on what will be the next 30% plus gain in one day. Maybe you have seen 100% - 1000% gains on stock websites. Some of you I see asking for recommendations on a $100 to play with on your first investment. You got to know what would be considered a "pump and dump" and a legitimate company. Let's take $INKW for example, this stock had increased close to 80% today. A good amount of people have posted about this stock the past few weeks, and today it moved roughly 80%,. Deals with Walmart, selling out on Amazon, and moving toward Hemp water. There is actual PR (Press Release) with recent information on the stock. It takes 10 mins to learn all this about the company, or what you will see people call DD (Due Diligence). 10 mins of my day before thinking hmm should I jump in? Am I missing the ride? or is this a long term play for me? The market for me is just a bunch of hype and speculation. ESPECIALLY PENNIES. I personally don't see pennies as long-term investments. I get in and get out like my wife's boyfriend when I go to work. but you got to know what works best for you and if you truly believe in the company. Lets take some other popular stocks I have seen posted here: $OZSC, $ILUS, $HITIF (admitting I own this one for my weed play), $TSNP. I have seen these stocks have solid PR but would not jump in unless DD was made. As you grow to be an experience trader, learn how to read candlestick graphs. It can be a snoozer learning but if you understand it, it will help a good amount if you want to buy in dips or see when you want to sell. ITS OKAY IF YOUR STOCK GOES RED. Yes, pennies are more risk. I had days losing everything when I first was trying to invest in them but I also had days with huge gains. Its okay to hold but hold knowing your risk tolerance. Remember, you thought long-term because you believed in this company and it has solid potential. Long-term is long-term so don't let a bad week make you take a big lost only to see it rise again the following. I am in no way an expert in investing nor trying to give you investing advice. This is more for people who really want to understand how to invest, but the high from one of your stocks performing at a 100% and letting your emotions get to you can be a rough lesson to learn when you expect it every time. I didn't understand how to play pennies at all firs starting and for me losing even $100 was a big deal at the time. There is a lot of pump/dump post on here I been seeing from day old accounts. I even look at the companies they are trying to pump. If there is no website, social media is terrible, or real product ... it is a P/D. I ask all experience traders to share their advice on this post so we can combat the bots we have been seeing for the crowd. Good Luck to all the new investors. I consider pennies as a daily gamble more than a long-term. I am sure others view it different. EDIT: Just scrolling through frequent questions - I use TD Ameritrade as my broker. Look into how to use their thinkorswim platform. I recently opened a Fidelity account to avoid OTC Market trading fee’s though. Found an article that gives a good summary of some major brokers for pennies: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.timothysykes.com/blog/best-broker-for-penny-stocks/amp/ I never been a fan of Robinhood. I opened an account when it was up and coming but didn’t like the layout and lack of stocks that were available to invest in. So not sure how it is today but I do know you can’t invest in the OTC Market through this broker. Asking for my thoughts on a specific stock - I really don’t know about some of the stocks that were posted on the comments so I have no thoughts. I see some popular come up, like $OGCN. But I don’t know anything about that company besides it being popular on this subreddit. Messaging me to ask on what company you should Invest in - Sorry, I don’t want to answer that. Awesome how you took this post but again I am not an expert. Just sharing my years of experience. I invest with confidence but the risk will always be there. I don’t want you to jump in a boat I wasn’t aware had a hole in it. What I do when I find interest in a stock but unsure on it is put it on my watchlist. With Ameritrade I am able to keep tabs on its performance, press release, and most of all the dip! But my watchlist consistently change. Advice on learning to read candle sticks - Man, this for sure was challenging for me. Probably because it is boring to learn lol. YouTube taught me. I don’t have any sound advice besides looking there. I can’t find the video that I saw repetitively anymore but just searching for it, I see a good amount of people teaching. When I got comfortable, I experimented with $20 often to see if I had it down. I am sure some people just catch on to it, I wasn’t one of them. But now it is crazy easy to read.
How To Become a Consistent Profitable Trader (My Favourite Set Up)
Hey guys, I’ve had a few comments on reddit and instagram to explain the ATH (all time high) breakout trades I take on a daily basis and so here it is. I’m a full time trader and I hope you guys find this helpful. To explain this in great detail would take hours upon hours however I’ve wrote up a simplified description to make it digestible. “We do not trade ideas we trade set ups” As professional traders you should not be trading ideas, you should be trading sets ups. Something that you can measure, replicate, improve upon and learn from. Not random events. Here’s an example of how a novice traders mind may work: You see an article pop up about a Tesla car that was on auto pilot and crashed into a stationary car causing injury to both the driver and the passenger. Your instant thoughts are “This could effect Tesla’s stock price” and you put it on your watchlist for the day. Now the issue with this is this the specific event Is not measurable. The way in which the stock reacts will be random and you won’t be able to use the stats for any other trades. Making the event a coin flip and therefore a gamble. Focus on set ups not ideas. It’s ok to have an idea for the set up but the set up HAS TO BE THERE. Now lets get straight to it. What is an all time high breakout?
The answer is simple. This is when a stock breaks out into a new ATH.
Why is this such a good set up to take?
Because everybody who’s EVER brought the stock is now in the GREEN “no reason to sell” and everybody who’s shorting the stock is now red “May look to cover”
Here’s how it works: A lot of professional traders, myself included, love the all time high break outs for many reasons. The main being the explosive moves it can often provide. Due to this a lot of day traders, swing traders, investors, funds and algorithms will monitor the market for these potential plays. Meaning they’re often on the buying side. This is why you can see what appears to be a stock doing very little yet the moment it trickles over it’s previous ATH high it can rally for days. It’s called “buying the breakout” You see the market is run on mostly Human emotion, we know this but very few understand how that works. The reason most people lose money in the market is they are untrained and do not have the discipline to handle their own barbaric emotions. Here’s why that’s important. For this example we’ll call the company $STONKS it’s been on the market for 3 years and it’s current all time high is $10. Some bad news comes out and the stock gaps down to $8 causing people to panic sell and the stock to drop even further. Over the next 12 months it drops to a low of $5 until finally reclaiming to today at $9.90. It’s been consolidating between $9 and $9.90 for 10 days. For the past year there has been a lot of people bag holding. Those who brought at the previous all time high have seen their investment drop by 50% and slowly recover. In between this time a lot of people have cut their loses, some have averaged down, new investors have “brought the dip” and we’re now back to where we was a year ago. Now we have a few things at play here.
Those who rode through the entire year, the 50% drop and who haven’t sold now at break even clearly have no intention to sell.
Out of those who brought the dip some will have sold and some and still holding onto their shares even though the price has been stagment the past 10 days.
For the past 10 days people have been buying consistently and have been paying $9 or above for the stock. Showing a growing interest and price acceptance at these prices.
People who shorted the stock are now either at break even or at a loss.
Anybody new who wants to purchase some shares has currently got to pay all time high prices.
The longer we consolidate at these price the more powerful the move can become, why you ask? Because it has more chance of the float being rotated. Understand that the first time $STONKS went up to $10 1 year ago the average price paid by an investor may have been $3 which meant a lot of profit taking occurred. When the bad news hit a lot of those investors jumped ship. Causing more supply than demand and therefore the price to drop. Fast forward to today and the longer it consolidates above $9 the high the AVG price held will be. When this happens the buyers are literally sitting on basically no loss nor no gain giving them no reason to sell. For those unaware, if you short a stock the only way to get out for a loss is to cover your position. This in turn means “buying the stock”. Creating more buying pressure. Short positions will often risk in this scenario the all time high. Meaning if it breaks they start to cover. If they start to cover it increases buying pressure and with buying pressure increasing the stock moves up (extremely simple explanation). So we as traders recognise the stock is setting up for an ATH breakout and here’s what we do. We decide we want to risk $2,000 in the stock. We buy $500 worth at 9.20 known as a starter position and we wait. A week goes by and it’s still chopping between this range. A press release then comes out (a bullish catalyst). The market opens are $STONKS see’s a huge 15 minute candle at open. The largest amount of volume it’s seen in months. On that volume it breaks $10 and instantly jumps to $10.50. We managed to get our other $1,500 in at $10.20 bringing our average to roughly $9.90 a share. We move our stop loss to below the previous ATH with some breathing room AKA $9.50/share. Everybody who now has shares in this stock prior to today is in the green, they’re estactic. Those who held through the entire past year and refused to sell are now mentioning how they’re in profit on an investment they made to work colleagues. Short positions are now aware there’s no resistance and start covering “buying shares”. FOMO buyers who are “trading the news” (not a set up ;) ) are now buying in. Professional swing traders are buying the break out, day traders are buying the opening drive. Everybody is buying.. The stock closes at $12 marking a 25% daily gain. Barrons, CNBC, MSN all post above how $STONKS rallied into ATH due to X,Y,Z The following morning the stock gaps up. People are hyped, pre market goes wild and opens at $16. We instantly sell half… The stock is extremely extended as new investors flurry in, we sell them some more. There’s now 25% left of our original investment. We move our stop loss under PM support and go to focus on the next set up. The same set up. Something we can measure. Something we take day in day out. If the stock goes to 20 then we don’t get annoyed we could have missed out on further profits as it wasn’t our trade. The stock taps 20, massive selling occurs and settles around 14. Where it stays for months, consolidationg. Meanwhile, we’re just waiting for it to once again set up. So how do I find these trades? I use trading view, I create a list of sectors such as EVs, Solar, Tech, AI etc etc and I scan through each day. Literally just flick through. Is the stock near it’s ATH? If not, I go to the next and the next. My indicators are as follows. Volume Profile, RSI (for the daily only) That’s it. If you master just this single set up you can make money consistently. Why? Because it’s measurable, you can improve upon it. You can learn from each event but most importantly you have a set plan where the market is in your favour for the outcome to work. Never under estimate human emotion. I post all my trades on Instagram at the moment but I’ll look into posting my watchlist here too if it’ll help you guys. Feel free to ask questions.
Hello pennypeople, this is my 2nd DD :) Last one is up 38% in 2 trading days! The company I looked at is Kintara Therapeutics Market cap is only $51.79m! ABOUT Kintara Therapeutics ($KTRA) is a clinical stage drug development company. They focus on developing and commercializing anti-cancer therapies to treat cancer patients. They are developing two late-stage, Phase III-ready therapeutics, including VAL-083, a DNA-targeting agent for the treatment of drug-resistant solid tumors. Catalyst Q1 data announcement on:
Market cap $51.79m (low market cap shows potential for price growth)
Avg volume: 736.61K
Shares outstanding: 24.66M
Short interest 154.88K
Public float: 18.24M
At September 30, 2020, the Company had cash and cash equivalents of approximately $22.6 million. In August 2020, the Company completed the private placement of Series C Convertible Preferred Stock for gross proceeds of approximately $25 million, or net proceeds of approximately $21.6 million. The cash and cash equivalents at September 30, 2020, along with the proceeds from warrant exercises received subsequent to September 30, 2020, are expected to be sufficient to fund the Company's planned operations into the fourth quarter of calendar year 2021. For the quarter ended September 30, 2020, the Company reported a net loss of approximately $19.5 million, or $1.33 per share, compared to a net loss of approximately $1.6 million, or $0.21 per share, for the quarter ended September 30, 2019. The increase in the current quarter was largely due to the recognition of $16.0 million of non-cash expenses related to the acquisition of in-process research and development costs associated with the Adgero transaction. PRICE TARGET The average price target is $5.75 with a high forecast of $7.00 and a low forecast of $5.00. The average price target represents a 273.8% increase from the last price of $2.10. Analyst target: KTRA has a rating of buy on marketbeat, yahoofinance, marketwatch. Their Platform Strategy "Our platform strategy is built on a robust understanding of cancer biology. We use modern approaches in our laboratory studies to determine where we can solve problems in the treatment of drug and immune resistant cancer. Our team has identified niches in the continuum of care where our therapeutic may address an unmet need. By showing that our treatments are active where others fail, we can implement clinical studies to demonstrate that our therapies may have the ability to improve patient outcomes." Sources: https://www.kintara.com/about https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/KTRA?p=KTRA https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/ktra/insider-activity https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/ktra/analystestimates?mod=mw_quote_analyst https://www.biopharmcatalyst.com/calendars/fda-calendar?# My position: 6.2% of portfolio @ 2.06 NB! I'm not a financial advisor. This is for gambling purposes only EDIT: If you can get an entry below 3 ur a lucky bastard :D Good luck on withdrawing profits and rejecting all the women who are after your money!
For every dollar that is made here, two dollars are lost
This sub is incredible. There are incredible ideas and ideas that are so dumb that a monkey throwing darts would pick better stocks (oops). Fortunately, or unfortunately, it seems both types of ideas can make you money. To the people buying travel stock during a global pandemic when airliners are flying at 20% capacity (or less) or Hertz... it’s gambling. I support people doing what they want with their money, but following blind idiots who are maxing a credit card for a trade is fucking moronic. At times, it’s like watching a retiree throw away hundreds of dollars a day at a slot machine. I believe for every dollar made here, two dollars are lost. Seeing someone, such as DFV, make $11m off $50k is the greatest advertisement ever. Many will see it and ask, how did he do it? They will “learn,” aka have no fucking idea, what an option is and proceed to lose thousands with the hope of making millions and quitting their job all while simultaneously getting revenge on their wife’s boyfriend. Again, there is great advice here and truly smart people. There are also addicts who will say anything about a stock because they own $100 in an option. I’ve messaged with people who didn’t know the difference between a put and a call while holding 5+ figures of contracts and making less than $20 an hour. My message? Please throw amounts of money at ideas that you’re willing to walk away from. Do not jeopardize your retirement, wife’s boyfriend’s new boat, or your children’s education on a DD from some 16 year old who has $50 in Victoria secret because boobs are getting bigger. On the other side of these trades there are likely people with drones monitoring Victoria secret factories and how many kids walk in and out of the manufacturing plant a day.
Buckle up retards cuz this autist is about to take you on a ride to tendy town. Inb4 you all check my post history and bitch about all my WKHS posts, ya no fucking shit I’m gonna post about a stock I love. Inb4 Inb4 you tinfoil hat wearing GME/AMC fucks attack me, last time I checked there’s more than two stocks on the exchanges. Anyways here goes, Workhorse group is a Loveland, Ohio EV manufacturer. 100% American Made (insert American Eagle boner gif) and completely electric for all you who value the environment or whatever. I’m sure you’ve all come across it at some point especially when I was the top trending stock for like a week at the end of June/July. As many of you might now, this shitshow of a government we have here in the good ol’ USA is looking to upgrade their self combusting USPS fleet via a NGDV (Next Generation Delivery Vehicle) bidding process for a contract to the tune of approximately 8 billion. When all is said and done, including maintenance and upkeep, the contract in the span of a decade or more is about 20b. This NGDV contract is the “betting” portion of this stock and despite what all the retarded naysayers claim, there is a fuck ton more to WKHS besides this contract. This is the cherry on top so I’m starting top down with this masterpiece. Currently, there are three remaining bids from companies involved in this NGDV selection process. Karsan (a Turkish company), Ford/Oshkosh (joint venture), and our beloved WKHS. Karsan - I can’t see this winning even a fraction of a percent of the contract due to it not being American. Not because it’s a bad company but if you check the requirements for the companies, they snuck in a clause that mandated 75% American made parts to be selected. Also, Biden, for the better part of his campaign and to this day has been proclaiming that he will be bringing American manufacturing to the forefront again and we will be buying American (something he and Trump miraculously had in common). For this reason, Karsan is seen as a non-factor. Ford/Oshkosh - The only realistic challenger to WKHS and only bear case being made against it. Undoubtedly, Ford is as American as it gets. But even more undoubtedly, they are shitty and unreliable as fuck. Millions of recalls on Ford vehicles in the past and present. Another big issue with this is that Biden was “zero-emission”. The prototype submitted for the proposal was a hybrid and not fully EV. For this reason, I think Ford receives a portion of this contract no greater than 25%. Another reason I think they’ll get only a minor stake in this is because their prototype does indeed actually fare better in rural routes where charging stations just aren’t all that practical or possible. The whole NGDV process has been going on for about 6 years and there’s no surprise that this inefficient government has been unable to wrap the process up at this point and then Covid took over. Yes there have been delays to the contract award as recently as October 2020. In a lettememo addressed to the USPS Board of Governors, they were urged to not further delay this process as with the current degradation of the existing fleet, doing so would harm the project altogether and further complicate the process of removing these shitboxes that have been around since ‘87. With Covid being the last excuse to delay, and the vaccine now being rolled out, I DO NOT foresee another stalling of the process. Another reason WKHS is my favorite in this race is that DeJoy’s current philosophy on the USPS is to cut costs and to have the entity become for cost efficient. In case you haven’t noticed, ICE vehicles are much more costly to run and maintain that a 100% EV vehicle. Fewer parts means fewer problems and much less maintenance and repair costs. Also, in their recent financial statements, the USPS had requested a 600% increase in their infrastructure spending. I don’t see too many post offices crumbling to the ground, so this can only mean they’re gearing up to install a metric fuck ton of charging stations. By going fully EV, billions will be saved over time by the post office, an entity that’s currently burning cash like it’s their fucking job. THE LAST DELAY IN THE NGDV SLATES THE CONTRACT TO BE AWARDED FISCAL 2021 Q2 WHICH MEANS JANUARY-MARCH 2021. Enough about the contract though, let’s talk other aspects. WKHS is currently partnered with UPS in testing by out their fleet and also more importantly their drone delivery capabilities. WKHS currently owns the patents to vehicle borne drone launching technology. This isn’t talked about enough. Many people think the future of this company hinges on that shitshow of a contract when in reality the really exciting part is this drone tech. It would be extremely helpful and useful in efficient package delivery especially when there’s a whole fleet management system capabilities that the company offers. As the autonomous tech and drones sector begin to grow exponentially, WKHS has a head start on it (the commercial delivery aspect). Institutional holdings lies at almost 50%. The big boys and big girls (BAE Cathie Wood) are in on the company and they are in heavy. My wife Cathie must be seeing something in the future of this company if she’s grown her holding to over 2.2m shares and she’s not gonna throw some money into a gamble on a fucking government contract. Many claim that production is an issue but this is more a scare tactic than an actual issue. Sister company Lordstown Motors (Ticker: Ride) is led by former WKHS CEO. They have offered their factory, which has the capability to pump out about 600k vehicles a year, if WKHS needs it. Important to note that WKHS has a 10% stake in Lordstown and will receive royalties on the first 100k Endurance EV pickup trucks that Lordstown sells. So there’s another form of revenue the company has going for it. It’s a growth stock with a lot of potential and it’s logistically gearing up to grow. Received 200m financing from an institutional Investor during the late summeearly fall, and it entered into an agreement with Hitachi, to be assured in the logistics of the company. Hitachi is a pretty serious company to be partnered with unless you plan on slinging out vehicles. Most recently, a 6,320 truck order came in from Pritchard which totals around 250m give or take a few bucks. This is all while IKEA a company that aims to go fully electric by 2025 is testing out a fleet of WKHS C1000 vehicles. Connect the fucking dots and join the ride fellow autists. I’ve been long WKHS since January of 2020 and there’s plenty of room to run. High risk high reward with this growth stock but that’s why we’re all here right? Positions - 1000 shares, 11x $60c 2/12 (USPS BOG meeting Tuesday so these are scratch off lottos basically), 5x $60c 2/19 (see previous calls), 11x 45c 4/16. Let’s ride this horse to tendy town fellas 🤝 Edit: I’m a retard blah blah blah THIS IS NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE I JUST LOVE THIS STOCK blah blah blah EDIT 2 - WKHS vehicles are being showcased at the super bowl as Pritchard is using WKHS trucks to take people to and from the super bowl and various surrounding locations. Essentially they are marketing themselves by providing shuttle services. Edit 3 - WKHS is currently at about 30% short sold so a contract announcement in their favor will easily rocket this to 100+ as shorts scramble to cover. It sneaky made the list of highly shorted stocks. Edit 4 - 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 (FOR THE VISUAL LEARNING RETARDS) Edit 5 - TLDR: WKHS is 100% American made EV Last Mile Delivery Vehicle. Has Patents pending for its drone delivery tech. Frontrunner for USPS 8.2b+ Government Fleet Contract (NGDV Contract). Heavy institutional ownership including BAE Cathie Wood. 30% Short Float to be squeezed on contract announcement.
Debrief From My Third Annual 100 Hearts in 30 Days Challenge. (127!).
Hi, I’m sharing data from my recent 30-day a20 heart kill challenge. I was able to kill 127 hearts in 212 runs, a substantial increase both in total hearts killed (previous best was 102) and winrate (don’t remember previous but it wasn’t very close to 60%). This is my third time attempting the challenge. It’s mostly just a ton of fun. It isn’t intended to be a competitive category and I’m sure that it’s possible to go much higher still, especially with strategies that sacrifice winrate, for example forfeiting at the end of bad act ones. Runs are played rotating through characters. I started on Ironclad and ended on Watcher. These runs can mostly be interpreted as me trying to win as often as possible, with the obvious caveats that I’m also trying to complete runs in <1.5 hours and playing 8+ hours a day without a day off for 30 days. Quite a few runs in the dataset were lost to simple calculation errors because my brain was melting, or to not pursuing lines which would trade time for marginal advantages like a better number on Ink Bottle. On a more macro level I tended slightly toward taking high-risk/high-reward lines in runs which were falling behind in order to either get them over with or give myself a higher chance of winning if I continued - stuff like taking more Act 2 Elite fights, fighting Double Orb Walkers, etc. - I don’t think this had a large effect on my winrate (mostly I did this in spots where both options seemed very close in value anyway) but it’s worth noting because it is different from how I’d play when trying to purely maximize my chance to win. You also may want to ignore the runs where I bought Prismatic Shard or took early Signature Move and tried to kill every enemy with it if you’re interested in analyzing “serious” play xD. But I think there are only three of those or something like that. I have been known to meme a little at times. Link to Folder of Run Histories Link to IMGUR album of in-game Run History screens Overall thoughts on the attempt: It took me a while to switch into 1.5-hour run mode. I’d been playing 2-3hr runs for the last 4 months, and the first few days involved a LOT of calculation errors and turns where I spent a long time looking for very specific lines, which works if I’m giving myself a comfortable amount of time to play but fails when I’m time-crunching myself. There were turns where - for example - I’d look for lethal for five minutes when it was immediately obvious that I could just full block and kill next turn, or spend five minutes trying to work out a good reshuffle that was only ~5% likely to be doable to begin with, and spending mental energy on these lines compounded into making mistakes when I didn’t make time to spend mental energy on the things which were more generally important in the run. To give you a numerical idea, I started the challenge 39w-41l over the first 80 runs. Variance definitely exists in a dataset of that size, but that is a LOT worse than how well I was doing once I settled in. Once I dialed in I started doing much better. Especially in the middle of the challenge, lines felt effortless to find and maximizing the minutiae of the game (Ink Bottle on right number types of things) was often automatic. I also started to vibe very well with the limits of each run - there were very few runs where I was dying to elites I could have avoided, or building decks which ultimately couldn’t handle the late-game boss gauntlet. Some of the wins in this period were VERY good wins which I’d be proud to have played even in a non-challenge settings. I managed 52w-26l rotating during this period, including holding 75% winrate for 50+ runs, an 11-0 rotating winstreak (new world record at the time - congrats to Baalor and Terrence, who managed 11-0 and 13-0 respectively later in the same week! Completely insane!, and to CrimsonBlur who managed 10-0 last year on a much harder patch), a 12-0/18-1 Watcher streak (new personal best), and a 9-0 Defect streak (one run short of my previous best from late last year). My Silent and Ironclad did quite well here too. I’ve had moments when I’ve been sharper on calculations or more dialed in on specific characters, but in terms of overall rotating play this is the best period of play I’ve ever managed. Then there was the decline. Turns out doing this involves some mental fatigue. I put a ton of my remaining mental energy into my 11-0 winstreak and never got back to full. I closed out the challenge with 23w-17l, including MANY losses to extremely simple mistakes. Things like not resting before an elite when it was very obvious I was taking 30+ against Gremlin Nob, or entering Wrath with no way to leave it on the turn before the Heart attacked me. What was most interesting to me during this final “exhaustion” period was how many runs I lost on Defect and Watcher to misevaluating my deck’s ability to perform in important fights. I don’t usually have to think at all to be able to have a good idea of whether my deck can win a fight like Book of Stabbing or Time Eater, but at this point in the challenge I was often getting things like that completely wrong, or my brain just wasn’t even registering that it needed to consider them. These mistakes were accompanied by building some quite bad decks which leaned heavily into trying to do things that weren’t actually good enough to overcome the challenges they faced, and an uptick in calculation errors didn’t help at all. I finished the challenge VERY tired but very glad to have committed to it. One of the most enjoyable months of my life, and there were times in there where Slaying the Spire felt like seeing the Matrix. I can’t wait to do it again. Ironclad-specific thoughts (25w-28l): I was 15-5 over my last 20 with Ironclad before the challenge and was expecting to win a lot with him, but I ran poorly and played poorly for a lot of the challenge. Probably the simplest way to describe it would be that I had a string of runs with poor Act 1’s, which led to me overcompensating and putting too much stuff into my deck for Act 1 and Act 2. Then I died a lot to Act 3 and 4, whoops. I adjusted properly for the middle of the challenge, then fell off a cliff when I started getting exhausted. I think the fact that he got played after Watcher runs, which are often calculation-heavy and also which often impose a sense of invincibility on the player, didn’t help much. I relic-swapped the vast majority of these runs, which I found to be less good than it used to be with the buffs to self-damage synergies. Toward the end of the challenge I was only relic-swapping if there wasn’t a very good other option. I still find that Ironclad performs very well on 4 energy, but it’s rough that his character-specific relics aren’t great and that the sustain from his regular starter relic matters a bit more now that Rupture and Hemokinesis are so much better, since you're often taking extra damage in hallway fights in order to have extra power in boss fights. Most of my Ironclad wins are built on strong Act 1 relics and boss relics. His synergies mostly don’t feel strong enough to win on their own, unless you assemble a Corruption or Barricade exodia and/or get multiple Offerings to get everything online. It’s hard to draw cards with him to accelerate your deck, and it’s hard to deal damage without taking damage and hard to block while achieving anything else. It also lowkey tilts me that several of his best cards don’t get better in multiples. If Defect gets offered a second Echo Form it massively improves the deck, but if Ironclad gets offered a second Corruption or Barricade it’s like… maybe you take it to get it in play earlier, sure, but it definitely doesn’t let you play your first three cards twice every turn. General advice: just get Snecko Eye and Corruption every run, ideally with Reaper and Feed alongside. Failing that, the best ways to combine damage and survivability are usually going to be Strength + Reaper with some passable Block cards and good Max HP or Block + Anything; Body Slam isn’t the be-all end-all here, if you have the ability to survive turns with copies of Shrug It Off+ and Exhaust + Feel No Pain you have enough time to kill enemies with a variety of things. Silent-specific thoughts (34w-19l): Not a fan of the Blade Dance buff. Prior to it Silent was possibly my favorite character. The tension between generally needing attack-based damage to survive Act 2 but having difficulty scaling it enough to defeat the endgame gauntlet often led to runs where every floor felt challenging (with the exception of Wraith Form runs. Imagine having a card just make the player invincible for >50% of the game). Now it feels generally easy to not only demolish Act 1 and 2 with attacks, but also scale them into a lategame deck. By the end of the challenge I was building a deck around an attack-generating common that I sometimes hadn’t even gotten one of yet instead of picking Crippling Cloud+’s I was offered, which was not a good feeling at all. I don’t think there’s ever been a common that dominated a character’s strategic space this heavily before. Keep in mind that this is alongside other buffs as well. It used to be that a deck that dealt damage with a lot of attacks needed creative solutions to Time Eater and the Heart and stomped everything else, but now it’s often the case that it just stomps everything full-stop. It doesn’t help that Silent’s starter relic plus Acrobatics and Calculated Gamble were already so strong at accelerating. Now you can play your attack common on turn 1 and discard four Shivs to draw four more cards toward your copies of Adrenaline and Footwork etc., so not only does it deal 16 for 1, count as five cards for Ink Bottle, play four attacks for Shuriken, and have the ability to be targeted at separate enemies, but it can also combine with a strong Uncommon to be Skim+. This is too strong :/. General advice: Take enough damage cards/relics to kill things and then make sure you can survive 40 incoming damage on the turns you need to - relics and potions are sometimes all you need, but damage options are also so strong that you can get away with dedicating a significant portion of your deck to mitigation. Also: don’t Relic swap unless the other options are incredibly bad. Bag of Preparation is insanely good and with this character you can get two. Defect-specific thoughts (29w-24l): Defect is a beautiful character right now and often provided the most entertaining run of the day. The general yin-yang pull of needing to be able to survive vicious fights in Act 2 and 3 but also needing to be able to scale into a deck that beats the lategame gauntlet compartmentalizes into lots of interesting decisions about when it’s okay to add so-so orb-scaling cards to your deck, and how exactly you’re going to throw together a combination of 25 atrocious attack cards, Ball Lightning, Doom and Gloom, and Electrodynamics to deal damage to things. (My advice is to just get offered Ball Lightning, Doom and Gloom, and Electrodynamics so you don’t have to think too hard. Static Discharge does okay sometimes too). I love the way runs “typically” revolve around fairly normal attack-based clears of low-hp enemies into fairly normal block-scaling to survive lategame fights long enough to kill them however you’d like, but sometimes completely go off the rails. I got to play a ridiculous 3x Hyperbeam/3x Meteor Strike run (without Snecko Eye), for example. I also love being offered Stack. Hello World + Stack scaling led to a couple of other immensely enjoyable wins. It’s very funny to me to have a Defragment+ and Glacier in my deck, be thinking “oh yeah, I have premium uncommons that block super well!”, and then be offered Stack and be forced to admit that an unupgraded common usually blocks better than they do. I think Defect is the best-positioned character in terms of Whale Bonus balance right now. I’ve found it to generally be correct to relic swap unless there is a very strong alternative or a path which allows me to get a lot of value out of my Lightning Orb. General advice: Kill early and midgame stuff with whatever option gets in the way of your lategame scaling least. Compile Driver and Sweeping Beam draw cards, Electrodynamics and Static Discharge remove themselves from your deck (also Static is OP with Frost Orbs against multiattacks), Ball Lightning and Doom and Gloom are 2+ attacks worth of damage in one card, etc. Then make sure you scale and can accelerate into that scaling. Fission, Seek, Skim+, Turbo+, Bag of Preparation, Bottles, etc. to get your deck to a point where it’s outputting 40+ block per turn and the run is over. Watcher-specific thoughts (39w-14l): The great thing about Watcher is that almost every run you lose is entirely your fault. Probably somewhere between one and three of these runs were lost to an unlucky result of close-to-correct play, and every other one was me building my deck wrong for a fight, piloting it wrong, picking the wrong potion or relic, etc. I haven’t generally enjoyed Watcher in the past, and have mostly not been playing her for the last year (or when I have I’ve been occasionally forfeiting Act 3 because I’m bored of clicking on Cut Through Fate and Tantrum over and over again), so I felt like I actually learned a significant amount about the character in this challenge. My general Watcher-heuristics right now are: Pretty much every type of synergy draws cards, makes block, and some of them even make energy, so it’s fine to have lots of different synergies in the same deck as long as they aren’t too awkward to get rolling. If you just take the best card offered to you every time you should still easily be winning 70+% of your runs. Getting better at Watcher seems to largely be about first realizing that Talk to the Hand, Mental Fortress, Tantrum, and Rushdown are obscenely overpowered, and then realizing the ways in which every single other card is obscenely overpowered as well. (Except Pressure Points, lol). Hexaghost can kill you if you don’t take enough damage cards, Act 2 Elites can kill you if you don’t have enough health banked for them or didn't take attacks properly, Time Eater can kill you if your deck is very bad at dealing damage or very bad at blocking, and the Heart can kill you on turn 2 or 3 if you are bad at accelerating your synergies. Other than that it’s unclear that Watcher can ever die unless you click the cards wrong or get incredibly incredibly incredibly unlucky AND don't have potions available to compensate for it. I actually quite enjoyed Watcher this challenge and look forward to playing her more. The lategame gauntlets were sometimes a lot more interesting than I thought they would be, with my win to go 10-0 in my 11-0 streak being one of the coolest Heart fights I’ve ever played. It’s just a bit unfortunate that like, her cards are so strong that I take Pandora’s Box over anything, the most interesting thing about most fights she plays is working out how to Lesson Learned with Ink Bottle on the right number, and the times that you do legitimately lose are to ridiculous things like drawing three copies of Omniscience in your opening hand. (And that she’s so strong that you find yourself questioning if that was your fault and you should’ve not taken the third Omniscience so that this couldn’t happen when that happens to you). I personally tended to avoid Boss Relic swap on her because it didn't seem like I needed four energy to win anyway, and the upsides that the Boss Relics turn off often seemed more impactful than the bonuses they were providing, but you can certainly win almost every run with her by Relic swapping too. Overall Takeaways: The game is a bit easier than I’d like right now. It seems hard for the devs to add more ascensions, but balance is starting to break a bit at a20 and I hope they go very easy on the buffs in the future. The Blade Dance buff was a massive correction to a problem that I don’t think was actually a problem. I don’t like that Boss Relics are so strong that trading Boss Relic is a common start, and don’t like that the cardpools have gotten so strong that Transforming cards is generally correct. Balancing such that high-variance options are correct leads to an increase in the frequency of runs where the balance breaks very quickly. I'd personally prefer if these options were usually slightly -ev, so that they were available for runs where you needed a chance to highroll but incorrect the rest of the time. Last challenge I felt like I was engaged ~80% of the time, with ~10% of the time I was unengaged being because the run was completely won already and ~10% of the time I was unengaged being because the run was almost certainly lost and I was treading water until something killed me. This time those numbers were more like 75/20/5. Game is very very good though, and I hope you enjoy this set of runs if you decide to check them out! <3, jorbs
Would like to write about my experience with the GameStop run up, and what I learned about life out of it
Hey guys. I made a post roughly 60 days ago about a 30k “YOLO” on GME. I purchased the 25c 4/16 with roughly 77 contracts. My cost basis was about 5 dollars a contract since I bought before earnings. I diamond handed them through the rough days where we saw GME drop heavy after earnings. Two nights before GME took off, I sold my position. I keep going back, and I keep asking myself. Why? Why did I sell? I was so confident this would play out. I Fucking went all in and sat on my position through all of the ups and downs. Truth is, I don’t know why I sold. I believe I was bored, and just wanted to trade something. I couldn’t stand not trading. When the run up began, I felt sick. I threw up, and my body wouldn’t stop shaking. Life changing money for me. I kept checking the value of the contracts that I had, every 15 minutes and counting all the money I would’ve had if I didn’t throw my contracts away. I began shaking and crying. Hating myself for being such a paper handed bitch. So I went all in again on a GME weekly. I watched that weekly call double my original position, and then eventually ride to 0. That’s right. I blew up my account. I’ve only been trading options for less than a year but at the top of GMEs run my position would’ve been roughly 4mil. I’ve gone from 20k -> 60k -> 3k -> 20k -> 36k -> 0 Everyone including friends and family keep asking if I’ve heard about GME. Yeah bitch, I heard about it. It hurts to talk about. I tell my story, and they all tell me how sorry they feel for me when I tell them I could’ve been a multi millionaire. Do you want to know why I don’t have millions right now? Because of these mother fucking paper hands. As I watch you retards gamble your life savings at the top of GME, diamond handing it to the bottom, I can’t help but to think that you guys are fucking retarded. You’re all retarded but you’re like me. You belong here, and I certainly belong here. As we speak, I’m pulling funds out of the retirement account and going back at it. Why? Is it because I’m a Retard? Maybe. But I’m a Retard with a dream, and that can be scary thing and I realize that. Godspeed to you all. https://imgur.com/gallery/x3pCUKS Loss Porn
Some of you may know me from my previous posts, many of which are among the most upvoted of all time on this subreddit. Just kidding, I’ve never posted here. I’m coming up on day 70 of SR and I figured I would make a post detailing what I’ve discovered. Introduction I began whacking off when I was 12. The negative effects were immediate. I went from a popular and liked individual to a member of the untouchable class. Never knew what caused that. Now I do. At 13, I started working as a blackhat internet marketer. In other words, I was a scammer or con artist. I had immediate success and became “kid rich” in high school. From there, I continued ripping people off until I was 24. (You can read about all of my various scams and schemes in a 255-page book I wrote about my life, and how I changed my life, here. It's free.) And we're back. Along the way, I became a drug addict. At 14, I discovered weed. At 16, I discovered psychedelics. At 17, I discovered MDMA and other stimulants. My home life sucked (divorced and depressed parents), so I dove straight into the world of drugs. Overall, from the time I became a teenager, my life revolved around drugs, video games, and scamming people. I also whacked off very generously, considering it to be normal and healthy. I thought it was a waste product. Not an uncommon story. Accidentally Discovering SR About a year ago, I hit rock bottom, which you will read about if you decide to read my book. In essence, I was completely broke and living at home, with no friends, and my girlfriend had just dumped me. Coincidentally, I was also whacking off a ton during this time. Go figure. A string of wild synchronicities led me to read the book Outwitting the Devil by Napoleon Hill. Think and Grow Rich was the catalyst that led me to get “kid rich” in high school, so I basically just followed Mr. Hill’s recommendations on how to outwit the devil to the letter… and it worked. I became genuinely happy for the first time in my life. I was crying tears of joy every morning when I woke up. Frankly, at the time, I was not convinced that lust was a bad thing, because getting attention from women made me feel so good. Still, since the rest of the formula for outwitting the devil was working so well, I decided to completely repress my lust. I even managed to quit drugs under the guise of considering them to be gluttonous. Life was good. The results were unbelievable. I moved to a new city. After being antisocial my entire life, people were going out of their ways to converse with me. I had tons of friends. Very attractive women were going out of their way to make themselves known to me. I didn’t know what on earth was happening, but my life was better than it had even been before, despite the fact that I was more broke than I had ever been before. Turns out money doesn't equal happiness. Who knew? After about two months of completely repressing my lust, I decided to have sex. With all of this new attention from women, my lust then spiraled out of control. Repression doesn’t work. Knowledge is the key. Knowledge allows you to want to retain. At the time, I had the belief, but not the knowledge behind the belief, which inevitably led to a lack of faith. Fast forward a couple months and I was back to where I was before: scamming, doing drugs, etc. Lust truly is the root of all sin. Lose control of your lust and you’re probably going to lose control of the rest of your life to some extent. Whoops I once again hit rock bottom in October 2020. I took a big gamble on a big adventure, and it failed. In fact, I came within a minute or two of certain death, and my plans were ruined. Now, I had $300 to my name, no car, no housing situation, and no more possessions than I could fit into a large backpack. I crashed at a friend’s house and spent two months mostly moping around. At the end of November 2020, I read a random Reddit linking to montalk dot net and had a bout of gnosis. Here is where things get interesting. Randomly, I messaged a random Reddit user, and he linked me to The Practice of Brahmacharya. I was sold. I started doing SR, controlling my passion, and being careful to remember that pleasure comes but never stays, the human body is only clay, and everything will pass away. This was the knowledge I needed to WANT to control my lust. Before, after reading Outwitting the Devil, I was doing it almost against my will. Results Magnetism. The point of SR, to me, is not to attract women. But there’s no doubt that doing SR will attract women. In fact, it will attract everything and everyone. But the attraction is mostly mental. People subconsciously sense your high vibration and they look at it curiously. You’ll get a lot of love, but also a lot of hate if people are comfortable enough to confront you. Your thoughts begin to influence reality more than ever before. Invisibility. This is mostly a joke, but I swear it’s real. When you’re vibrating at a very high level, you become invisible to others. Not literally. But I’ll give you an example. I’m walking down this road and the air is completely still. Two women are approaching, gossiping in a negative tone. As they pass, I say hello. They jump, completely startled, and looked at me as if I had just appeared out of nowhere. I was in their field of vision for, like, a minute. They should have noticed me. This has happened a couple times. I’m aware this bullet contradicts the previous one. Calm. I used to be an explosively angry person. In fact, I used to get violent fantasies. I used to really hate the sheep. I didn’t understand how they couldn’t see through the lies! May as well exploit them. Now, I love the sheep, even though they still chirp at me occasionally, especially with all of this asinine /\/\@$K usage. (I’ve taken a hardline stance and will not put one on for even a second. Since I’m still self-employed as a copywriter, it’s possible to do since my workplace (read: bedroom) doesn’t require it. I’d recommend doing the same if you are sick of the bullshit. We need your help.) Ability to disconnect emotion from thoughts. Emotions come and go. The error is when you let external influences affect your thoughts. There will be times when you are tense or sad. For example, it’s hard to feel totally good emotionally if you are tired. In the past, I let these emotions go straight into my neural network, which would lead to entire days full of bad emotions, which I masked with drugs. Now, I relax into the emotions, meditate on them, and they pass quickly. I usually learn something in the process. The thought of being able to control my emotions without drugs is awesome. Ability to heal trauma. If you are not powered by your semen (lol), you’re not as strong and solid as you could be. This makes it nearly impossible to face the trauma of your past, before you woke up. Now that I have healed my trauma, at least to an extent, my life is just wonderful. I’m a complete stranger to my past scammer self, which is fantastic. IMO, the point of life is to realize your trauma, heal it, then link up with the Holy Ghost, Sophia, and help others heal theirs, too. If you’re doing SR but still not loving life, consider reflecting on uncomfortable moments from your past. Don’t repress them, just like you don’t repress your lust. Loving life, man. If you ignore the ethics of my blackhat marketing, I was always rich in comparison to my peers, and I barely worked. I was also pretty jacked. I happened to be born with a conventionally attractive face and am quite tall. Despite these intrinsic advantages, life always sucked. Now, life always rocks, no matter what is happening. Do I still get down sometimes? Sure. You can’t feel euphoric always. But now I realize that stumbling blocks are part of the equation, and I take them in stride. I get excited for bad moments because I realize I’m about to learn something big which will make my life even better in the long run. Difficulties / Relapse I have not yet physically relapsed. But I have definitely let my mental state get out of control before, to the tune of looking at Instagram models, etc. This has happened twice. It SUCKED! Felt crappy for days afterwards. When I feel it bubbling up nowadays, I take a deep breath straight into my cranium and hold it for a few seconds. It dissipates. I also channel it into my third eye if it’s a lesser urge and I feel like I can actively control it. Learned these two tricks from posters on here. If I'm out in public, I straight up look away. I never really looked, considering it to be disrespectful. But man, don't feel bad about looking off to the side if there's an attractive woman walking in front of you. IMO, the mental leads to the physical, and not the other way around. It’s the same as any other addiction. You can’t physically force yourself to stop if you don’t want to stop, because your mind controls your body. So, work on your mind instead of putting all of this effort into repression. Books can provide the knowledge you need to want to stop. Once you want to stop, it’s easy to do so. Summary As far as other aspects of my life go, the past two months have been a wild ride, as I’ve healed an absolutely massive amount of trauma in that time. One night, I did the karma meditation on ascensionhelp dot com and ended up screaming at the top of my lungs for two hours, uncontrollably, almost involuntarily. Scamming people for a decade, then realizing all of that karma in a short span of time, will do that to you! This post has been all over the place, but I just wanted to let everyone know that SR is a very key part to living a good life. Better financial circumstances? SR can help with that. You want peace? SR. Happiness? SR. You want to stop scamming people, even though you’re damn good at it, it’s easy, and there’s no one to stop you? SR. (Side note: I did get sued by Perkins Coie when I was 17 due to one of my early scams, and I was also visited by a 3-letter agency for a particularly illegal scam, but nothing ever came of either of those instances. I’d like to say I talked my way out of them, which I did, but looking back, it was blatant intervention from my Higher Self which allowed me to talk my way out of them in the first place. Thanks, dude!) SR is not the end-all-be-all to success in your chosen realm, but damn does it ever help. I really like this community because you guys understand the physical, but a lot of you are well-versed in the metaphysical realm too. If you want to do SR to get ahead in the physical world, that’s cool, but understand that the real power of SR is allowing yourself to access the metaphysical and spiritual concepts of this world that are hidden to the masses. Many posters here can give me a run for my money, which I very rarely experience in real life. Peace! EDIT: Turns out I can't reply to comments on this post since I have no less than 25 karma on here. To u/UniqueUsername203: Fair question. This is an epic trollzor account, minus this post. I've had to branch outside of poker since I'm banned there for 30 days. If I really wanted to scam people again, I know of better avenues than spamming and pretending to be a girl, though I did that in an automated fashion circa 2010. Didn't work that well, only made like $20 - $40 per week and it was weird as fuck (even though I never directly talked to any of my victims).
"I think I've lived long enough to see competitive Counter-Strike as we know it, kill itself." Summary of Richard Lewis' stream (Long)
I want to preface that the contents of this post is for informational purposes. I do not condone or approve of any harassments or witch-hunting or the attacking of anybody.
Richard Lewis recently did a stream talking about the terrible state of CS esports and I thought it was an important stream anyone who cares about the CS community should listen to. Vod Link here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/830415547 I realize it is 3 hours long so I took it upon myself to create a list of interesting points from the stream so you don't have to listen to the whole thing, although I still encourage you to do so if you can. I know this post is still long but probably easier to digest, especially in parts. Here is a link to my raw notes if you for some reason want to read through this which includes some omitted stuff. It's in chronological order of things said in the stream and has some time stamps. https://pastebin.com/6QWTLr8T
Intro
"The last month has convinced me, that we are going to be heading into a dark place for Counter-Strike esports in 2021."
"I think I've seen the scene essentially kill itself."
"For the past 5 to 6 years, we've basically been in a holding pattern of people coming into our game wanting to run it, wanting to run all of the esports and wanting to profiteer and its been sort of a concerted effort to drive them off and push them away."
"We're spread way too thin."
"If Riot don't get involved and stop the scumbags that have moved over to Valorant from getting their feet under the table, Valorant is going to have real problems."
RL thinks too much has happened all at once for us to do anything except watch it play out, like:
Recent CSPPA strike against BLAST
ESIC failures and them not being supported enough
Teams cheating i.e. coaches/bugs
Widespread match fixing
The Pandemic
"People who try to hold bubble events are so incompetent and fuck up and people get the 'rona and its their fault."
"People who say Flashpoint is a bubble is full of shit and is a lie and people are now suffering for that lie."
"To save money they let people go home and break the bubble for a week."
"Not just Flashpoint peoples decision, they have a partner that handles the production." (hinting FACEIT)
"People are trapped in hotels essentially under house arrest because of COVID restrictions and has fucked peoples lives up."
"It's all too much, all of this incompetence, all of this greed, maybe we ride it out."
RL says he has talked to the Riot devs (the ones working on Valorant) and says, "They are so cognizant of all the fuck ups and all the problems we have in Counter-Strike."
He continues to say that this is factored into their business plan and that we never had a competitor, but just so happens to have one coincide, when we are at our worst.
CSPPA - Counter-Strike Professional Players' Association
"Who does this union really fucking serve?"
RL believes that the CSPPA is a mockery.
He points out the hypocrisy that they wouldn't strike for the pros who were kicked out of ESL Pro League, or for Jamppi or dream3r.
He also says ESL paid CSPPA and are racketeering and many other TOs have to pay them to get their "seal of approval"
He says they would strong-arm TOs saying "well if you don't give us the money, these guys are so we'll just have to commit to playing their event."
Also points out that they will strike against a competitor they are not in agreement with (Flashpoint)
RL: "It's what it says about every other time you haven't done it and it's about every time you don't do it now moving forward." "The issues they've chosen to ignore this year alone are embarrassing."
Then he points out that there was no strike for Valve qualifiers even if we have no major but Jamppi and dream3r can't play in them.
"and Valve have said 'Oh yeah we know actually their stories are accurate, Jamppi didn't cheat, now in a legally binding document. Yep dream3r did have his account hacked in a LAN café', but they still can't play. Where is the fucking solidarity? Gone. Doesn't exist. It's not important [because] it doesn't affect you." "That's what the union does right now, it looks after all the tier 1 people."
He says the CSPPA doesn't represent all players all the time and has driven a divide where you have the haves and have-nots
"We have a tier of players that operate with impunity and do not help their tier 2 or tier 3 players out at all." "If you are not a tier 1 player you do not matter, they don't event ask your opinion."
He tells chrisJ to admit and own the fact that the reason he didn't speak up during the ESL Pro League debacle is because it didn't affect him
"They are looking after some players at the expense of other players. How the fuck is that a union?"
He says the BLAST situation is a reasonable dispute and supports the players but is not the right time for a strike and have not even identified the correct enemy
He thinks players are lashing out now due to previous incidents and are upset that BLAST are working with ESIC
He stated that CSPPA shouldn't beefing with ESIC and they should be working in harmony
He says what they need to do is talk with the teams/organizations that have sold that right to BLAST
RL: "Your employers, the people who pay you that massive exorbitant salaries, when you don't stream and you don't do interviews and you offer no value beyond your ability to click heads and you get 25k dollars a month." "Why don't you talk to them about it? Oh right. You're happy to take away BLAST's paper, but you don't want to risk your own."
"I am seeing such unbelievable cowardice from the players here with the battles you choose."
"Where was the strike action when in the qualifiers for the world championship, there were teams and players engaged in huge conflicts of interest?" "Where was the strike action when your image rights were taken and sold to every league you've ever been in every union type organization you've ever been associated with like, WESA, to your org every time you sign a contract, to the leagues you play in."
"Your image rights are essentially worthless now, there's about 10 fucking separate parties that have them, and how many of them are giving you anything for it? Not much pretty much your org by the way."
"That's a big issue. Your image is you, your image is your brand. What are you doing about that? Nothing."
He is also angry at SirScoots who is "popping off" at people on Twitter who all want the same thing, which is 'A unified Counter-Strike scene for everybody, that works for everybody, that has a sustained ecosystem that nourishes everybody.' "We don't have that now."
He also says their rankings are a joke
"Just so happened, oh look TACO, that very important prominent member of the board, we pushed his team artificially up when they weren't even in the fucking top 20, not by a long shot."
He also says the ineptitude of the CSPPA cost Flashpoint a monitor sponsor
"Is it really a player association or is it like a fucking agency at this point"
ESIC - Esports Integrity Commission
"They have been put in an impossible position."
RL says that Ian Smith, the founder of ESIC and who was done work in mainstream sports, is a good and honorable man who has dedicated his life to integrity and sports. He takes on both sides, ensuring match fixers are punished, but also doing appeals and ensuring those punishments were fair.
"ESIC is a tiny organization" and are in need of money, "They didn't run a grift like the CSPPA did."
"Saying 'you want our support and you want the players to turn up you better pay us.' They don't do that."
"Had startup seed money from MTG and since then they've been pecking shit with the hens."
Ian Smith made sure that the money given by MTG (Modern Times Group, parent company of ESL, ESEA, DreamHack) was nothing more than startup money and wouldn't be in debt to them
Ian Smith sat down with other TO's not part of MTG and wanted to partner with them. They declined and called ESIC "ESL spies and we will never align ourselves with you"
"They only were just able to afford, hiring a PR guy on a full time salary to deal with the press and send out those releases you've seen, this year."
"They have a tiny group of staff investigating these things and they have taken on the biggest problems in our scene: the cheating, the match fixing."
ESIC have had "unprecedented levels of cheating to deal with, because there's something wrong with our scene ever since we went online. There's something wrong with it, everyone's lost their fucking pride and self-respect and they got no passion for it anymore, so they think fuck it, what's in it for me?"
He calls out coaches who are talking about players rights when they would rob and steal from them.
Also says more coaches being banned are coming
He also points out flaws in community's reaction to the punishments to coaches bans: "Half of the cunts still have jobs and some of the cunts got new jobs. We didn't even shun the cheating coaches."
ESIC have "found I think another 2 or 3 exploits like that one and they are investigating them all right now, it's going on right now."
"I know that there are going to be more names getting banned, again."
"So they're doing that on a skeleton crew while, investigating 3 continents worth of match fixing in MDL and semi-pro level CS." "They're doing this with half a dozen people." "They don't have any money or any help. People barely even fucking cooperate with them, they are treated like pariahs. It's ridiculous."
"Why are the CSPPA popping off at ESIC on my Twitter timeline, when you should be working together." "because its all about what's in it in for me." "2020, the online era of CS: 'What is in it for me?' How can I cheat, how can I get my paper, how can I bleed this scene one last time before I fuck off and play shooty shooty bang bang Riot Games babys first fps."
RL says that in the CIS region, teams have gone to tournaments and have been eliminated multiple times by the same team. We found out they were cheating and those players who lost, have been cut from their roster, careers ended because of cheaters.
Stream Sniping
"They're all at it in the online era, they're all at it, they're all cheating, they're all using exploits, probably that see through smoke bug got used a bunch of times"
RL talks about how there is no integrity from dead (the player), always denying when caught doing something
On the topic of 'BLAST never said we couldn't stream snipe': "Lies, BLAST never said you could do that, they had to sort of retcon it." "because what happened after that they fucking started snitching and squealing"
"Suddenly you had like, 10 of the top 15 teams in the world, staring into the abyss of being banned for 6-12 months in line with ESIC recommendations."
He says that ESIC was put in a tough situation and couldn't enforce the bans because it would have resulted in killing CS. What resulted was, BLAST, ESIC, and teams came together and gave them a warning and told them, in RL's words "don't do this again or you're gonna get got."
He then says the top teams brushed this off and didn't give a fuck
The new MiBR team playing Flashpoint, that wasn't involved in the previous incidents are doing it again (stream sniping). He gave credit to Flashpoint for the quick resolution and punishment and respect for cogu's response to the situation.
"ESIC came out and said, once more, 'Guys, zero tolerance from now on.'" RL then got upset at community's reaction calling ESIC "pussies" for their non enforcement and said if we want competitive CS we cant ban the top 10 teams.
He points out how players have no integrity and will do anything for an edge as long as they won't get detected or banned or it's within a grey area.
"All of this shit was mad avoidable, even in the pandemic era."
He talks about why aren't we filming them. Why aren't there representatives for leagues and tournaments making sure players aren't cheating?
Match Fixing
"How many years have we let our scene be fucking pillaged by these greedy cunts?" "We just let it happen."
RL says that gambling and skins betting which existed in moderation was "accelerated and blown up by the Call of Duty greedy fucks."
"Never forget TmarTn was on the board of EnVyUs." "His website, CSGOLotto, they had a bunch of off-the-books sponsorships." "NBK promoted them. People forget."
"Those people who had access to the skins, go to the players" "Even people like s1mple, best player in the world, even he scammed knives and skins off fucking fans."
Owners of skin casino sites would approach pros and lend them skins to use in tournaments and possibly keep them after reaching a deal
Players would tip off inside info about matches and teams in exchange for skins. Info such as: roster changes, how they played in scrims
They would use this info to bet and subvert the odds on their sites. "That happened religiously, I can't even tell you how many times it happened."
"I had access to the biggest database of information, from an inside betting circle in NA, and it would take information and screenshots from other pro players, who were feeding them info in exchange for money or skins."
"Some of these players are still playing." "Incredibly, there are players still in the CSPPA today, complaining about the BLAST recordings, that were embroiled in this murky shit back then."
RL also says that there were tournaments where teams contrived with each other, who should throw, who should win.
"There's a handful of people that are trying to fucking clean it up, and you think you get something over the line and you see something like the CSPPA and it's run by corrupt fucking chuckle heads, and now you've got another corrupt body you have to fight on a fucking daily basis, it's demoralizing."
"It's too far gone. Our entire semi-professional scene is compromised."
"It's rife guys, I'm not going to lie any more. It's not just China, it's not just Russia, it's here, it's NA, it's Europe, it's Australia, so much more than you think, so much more than we can prove."
"I get sent chat logs all the time […] and they're morons, these players, short-sighted, amateur, morons and they're doing it on WhatsApp." People would get cut from the bets because they want to make more money, then they leak the logs. He says, from the chat logs, they spread "little" bets across every site they can (400 to 1k dollars) to prevent shifting odds
He says the scumbags who've fucked off to Valorant will do the same there if Riot doesn't do something and says Valorant "is an esports scene heading for a very early fall based on the sheer volume of scumbags that are already there."
"That's tier 2 CS in a nutshell these days. They know they're never going to play in a major, so what's the punishment?"
"All of these tier 2 fucks that are fixing games now they are like the fucking mafia compared to iBuyPower" "These guys are working with organized criminals to fix entire seasons worth of games. That's what's going on in your tier 2 CS."
"I'm literally being told that there are players fixing games at all levels of Chinese esports and motherfuckers with guns are turning up to team houses and stuff."
North America
"Everyone in NA has left we've lost a continents worth of support during this pandemic and Valve haven't said a fucking word."
RL says the Call of Duty "goblins" that destroyed CS for years are the same people who are now trying to leave CS. "The nerve to treat a game where the fans, and the community, and the TO's were nothing but good to you." "To just kick the players out now and go and leave and say 'It just doesn't make financial sense.' Oh you'll slither back when we have a major though for them stickers won't you."
There's a cascading effect in NA where people don't bother with CS anymore and people like Chaos suffer.
He says NA team owners are incompetent for always wanting it easy and always wanting a guarantee on their investment without skill or nuance.
RL says he would be able to market a team correctly and would have a good ROI and also points out how TSM wouldn't even be bothered to tweet that their team, which was one of the best in the world, was playing at the Major.
He also says not all NA owners are like that, compliments and respects Jason Lake who nearly lost everything to keep Complexity going.
He then calls out the incompetence in Infinite Esports when they acquired OpTic Gaming and bought an Indian CS team.
He says HECZ is not to blame here and that they couldn't tell forsaken was cheating when it was so obvious.
They measured his reaction time to the likes of dev1ce and s1mple
When an enemy showed up on his screen he won that duel something like 44% of the time
"was like the number 1 player in the world statistically"
He brought a laptop to their bootcamp and refused to use the high end PCs that hey provided
He respects Andy Miller (NRG CEO) and HECZ but says that the attitude of not being able to easily monetize their teams is "piss weak" and there needs to be a risk.
He says Chaos EC shouldn't be cutting their roster and should be competent enough to be able to figure out how to make money off their team.
He says there are still opportunities in NA and people are panicking and pulling out, and says Valorant will be the same if not worse.
He also says "bums" who couldn't even get out of groups in NA competitions, are making crazy money in Valorant and says it will continue to inflate.
He also said that he heard rumors that EG (Evil Geniuses) are done.
He also thinks that the rumors of a Valve franchised league from before was sparked up from "these lazy fabled weak NA fucking team owners basically trying to see if Valve would bite at the hook if it was dangled and they didn't"
Slasher says NA team owners are really in favor of franchised leagues because they want to make more money. "Most of the powerful team owners right now are on board with ditching this third party organization structure, or they are trying to play this power politics with all the TOs, and that is contributing to a lot of the problems there"
RL says that Riot has proved they can run a franchised league (LCS) and will be profitable in 2021 which is what a lot of team owners care about and says the competition will only serve to snatch people away from CS.
RL continues to say, "I am so sick and tired of what we have done to this scene, I am just exhausted with it." "I think we have legitimately fucked it, I really think we have. I think we're staring into almost like a CGS (Championship Gaming Series) wasteland in NA." "Counter-Strike esports is a fucking joke."
Talent
"TO's have treated CS talent like absolute human garbage for years now."
RL says that people like Sean Gares and ddk switching over to Valorant isn't for financial reasons because they are making less over there.
He points out that TO's can't even give talent a 3 month in advance calendar.
Because of the pandemic TO's won't hire certain people and some people are working more hours for the same money.
He says we as a community don't respect journalists enough which is why we don't have good journalists.
He also says DeKay is leaving the scene soon and that Thorin is close to leaving also
He says he had to talk a caster down from quitting and was struggling to find reasons.
He says that DreamHack told Vince they would hire him but not if he wants to stick with dusT and says that this is the norm in esports. "Constant leveraging of people against each other." and says this is why we don't have a talent union.
New gen casters are getting put into shit situations and the community's reaction to them is adding fuel to the fire
He says the reason Moses left was because of the terrible conditions
He says that Anders had to constantly leave his family and kid because someone fucked up or broke promises and had to constantly tell his kid to their face that "daddy can't be home this weekend."
He says that esports has always been a lie to sell you this dream, "Meanwhile there's about 2% of the cunts getting all the checks."
Valve
"Anything that Riot does, is better than Valve's inaction"
Slasher says that the larger aspect of esports as a whole compared to other entertainment mediums and Valve's lack of inattention are the bigger problems. He continues saying that the fact that Valve let their game be ran as an esport, they need to take on the responsibilities of it.
Both Slasher and RL wants Valve to take control but not on the level of Riot Games, there needs to be a balance.
In case it was ever a question: Gabe Newell has been to 0 CSGO Majors.
RL calls Valve out saying they could have done something during the gambling era.
He says Valve used to come to the majors, but doesn't think they do anymore.
RL had met with Valve at the Cluj-Napoca Major and had tried to appeal iBP's indefinite punishment and had also gave Brax's life story:
A recent family member passed away, they had lost a lot of income, they had to live in trailer, iBuyPower did not pay any salaries, and was pressured by family to make money who didn't support his career.
RL said that Valve told him, "How dare you try and make us feel guilty." "We shouldn't feel bad about enforcing the only thing that matters that we need to make players afraid of: cheating and match fixing"
RL also tried to share other info about match fixing and nothing came of it
RL points out that Source 2 or a new engine is not something you will want based on the experience of transitioning from CS 1.6 to CS:S. "Valve's track record with brand new engines being launched, not fucking great from what I remember."
Slasher says "If there is anything the community should do, is pressure Valve to hire a community manager."
They say that we need a commissioner, a community manager (not the person who runs the Twitter who posts memes all day), then we need to have a circuit
RL reiterates that Valve doesn't care about CS esports and says they need to change the culture at Valve to make them care about CS esports
Slasher says a systemic problem is making it so working on CSGO would be a bad decision for you as an employee for Valve
He also hasn't talked to Valve in ages and have sent over bugs and cheats and doesn't get emails back anymore
Slasher says we should be directing attention at the developer leads, pointing out Ido Magal, if he even is still the project lead
RL thinks that Ido and Brian are the only people that "vaguely even give a fuck about CS" and were the only people that RL recalled that actually read Reddit and paid attention from time to time
"It is really fucking precarious. Somebody has got to step the fuck up and start giving a shit"
Slasher suggests org owners, with CSPPA, with ESIC, with TOs have a concerted effort against Valve
"Riot Games are doing better things than Valve in the esports space" which is something RL didn't think he'd say.
"People who used to be talent, working with unions, arguing with other talent, when the unions fucked them over, can't understand their perspective, TOs fucking over broadcast talent, broadcast talent wanting to leave and go and work for orgs, orgs having no money, Valve might take coaches away because all the coaches are cheating, ESIC has about 4 people in a fucking call doing the investigations, everyone thinks they're spies for ESL, ESL are just the evil fucking overlords wanting to rule the scene and will just somehow, like cockroaches outliving a nuclear bomb, and Valve are in a fucking holiday in Hawaii thinking about the next Dota character because they don't give a fuck about us."
Closing Statements
"We've peaked. If we want to sustain and exist, now is the time to figure it out. No esports lasts as long as this, we've already done 8 years. We've already broke the records. We have got to figure out a way to coexist and drive the negative forces out and we need to do it as a collective and we're not doing that."
RL compared the Counter-Strike scene to the people on the Titanic who ran around with guns robbing people while the boat was sinking.
"We have given up on being a respectable esports scene." "We are now a conduit to make money for those who want to just milk it, just have one last ride, one last roll of the dice. It's done." "What a fucking mess. What have we done to our fucking scene?"
"There's just too much self-interest driving all of this." "I don't see a way we stop the dominoes." "When it's that bad, when there's that many dishonest people that ESIC have to come out and say that if we punish them all there's no one left. What does that tell you?"
"How many opportunities have we had to clean house? How many times have we said, 'this must never happen again', and another scandal." "The entire skins betting operations was the biggest criminal conspiracy in esports ever executed and no one has been punished for it." "The people who could be driving that don't want to."
"Right now people are fans of those organizations because the scene has value. It is worth being a fan of Astralis because they are excellent at Counter-Strike. It is worth being a fan of s1mple because he is the best player in Counter-Strike, maybe the exception of ZywOo. If the scene is devalued, if the scene loses its meaning, those things lose its meaning too, and people will leave, people will stop tuning into the games. I have seen it happen in multiple esports, this is not my first time at the rodeo. I am getting big Brood War vibes right now and I don't like it."
"The role you play in all of this as fans, as viewers, as listeners, as consumers of esports content, it's absolutely imperative that you know who the good guys are. It's absolutely imperative that you use your voice. It's absolutely imperative that when things are bad, you know who, at least, is trying to make them good, and you have to apply your criticism to the right targets."
He continues saying it's no good in continuing to attack ESIC and saying how they are bad, ESIC have it hard
He says CSPPA are on the right side of the argument on BLAST but have been on the wrong side of many arguments many times.
"If you are not willing to stand along side the weakest member of the union, with the least amount of influence, and the least amount of power, then it is not a union at all and you shouldn't pose as one." "You wanna serve a bunch of special interest do it, everyone else in esports fucking does, but do not pose as something you are not." "We love the players. I've been fighting for players rights for as long as I've been able to, but the CSPPA is not what we needed."
"They are not applying the pressure to the right people, they are not fighting the right battles, they are not helping their weaker members."
He says what orgs have done by keeping or hiring coaches is bad. "When you give up on holding an appreciable standard, you've lost the scene" "Competition matters, rules matter, punishments matter, achievements matter, excellence matters" "If you start stripping that away, you have nothing" "You guys need to take that knowledge and apply it sensibly."
"Valve has sold you all down the river, they sold everyone in the esports scene down the river, tournament organizers are selling their talent down the river. Don't hate on them for sounding tired after a 16 hour day. Don't hate on them because the hype for a matchup they've seen for the 20th time in the past 3 months, they can't be as excited or it sounds contrived. Support your guys, they're there for you, these are your people."
"This community has got to start acting like one for the first fucking time. Just put the petty shit away, let's try and fix this fucking scene while we still have one to save."
"You can't rely on Valve, you can't rely on ESL, you can't rely on the CSPPA, you can't rely on anyone." "Once again, it's gonna be the likes of us, the amateurs, the people who give a fuck, rolling up our sleeves and grafting." "I'm old and tired and I don't want to have to do it again. People need to pick up the torch and do it."
"Like Michal did, like Dudenhoeffer did. You see something wrong, fix it. You see somebody doing something wrong, call it out. If you think something could be better, let people know."
"Vote with your wallets if you're not happy with the direction Valve goes in. If when we do get to the Major, they serve up another subpar, same old bullshit stickers and signatures package again, do not buy it."
"You're a powerful block and if you use it correctly we can fucking avert this disaster."
"I'm not doing another year in this broken, bust-up fucking scene, where everyone is miserable, everyone is broke, everyone is tired, and everyone is trying to fucking rob everyone else, blind, while the fucking people who are meant to be protecting you, are just fucking enhancing it and lining their own pockets."
"I'm not doing it anymore and you shouldn't want to do it either."
"I stand by every fucking thing I said. I mean it, because this game fucking matters to me, this scene fucking matters to me. I put my life into this, my adult life, and to see it in this state is fucking sad."
Also on my blog with better formatting, cute footnotes and inlined images. Note that not much here is new material, mostly rehashing existing points.
Disclaimer
This article started out as research for my betting against Bitcoin on the stock market. This isn't financial advice. As a matter of fact, I encourage all readers you to not buy or short crypto, through any market or derivative. Use your money for productive uses. Here's a TL;DR:
The current parabolic price increase in Bitcoin is a bubble that has started popping.
A stablecoin called Tether is either one of the largest frauds or money laundering operation in history, and is providing most of the liquidity in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Proof of concept: No argument here, but now that the market cap of cryptocurrencies is closing in on a $700B, this seems moot.
Cheap Payment Network: Nonsense, since BTC transactions are currently >$10 and this worsens the more people use it.
Anonymous Darknet Currency: I'd have said "no argument here", but apparently it's surprisingly easy to trace BTC nowadays. However, crypto ecosystem as a whole seems to do a decent job at laundering money as we'll see later.
Reserve Currency for Crypto: Since a reserve currency should be useful as a means of exchange, and I wrote several thousand words on how BTC is not that, my position is pretty clear. Also, the fact that a cryptocurrency indexed to the US dollar has trounced BTC as the main means of exchange in the crypto ecosystem speaks for itself.
Programmable Shared Database: You know what's programmable, shared and a database? The database we use at work. Just learn to implement access control lists on your SQL server.
Uncorrelated Financial Asset: Given BTC crashed just like the rest of the market when COVID showed up, this doesn't hold up
The stupidest version of the "uncorrelated asset" argument I hear is "Bitcoin is a great hedge for inflation!" You know what's a good "hedge for inflation"? Literally anything. The definition of inflation is "the price of money". If the price of money goes down (inflation) then everything else has a positive return by comparison. People who say "bitcoin is a good hedge for inflation" shouldn't be trusted to manage their own money, let alone give financial advice to anyone.
Censorship Resistant e-Gold: This is a roundabout way of saying "BTC is a store of value"! Which, again, can only be said by people who've never read the definition of "store of value" in a textbook.
I already went into detail into this, but BTC is a terrible store of value because it's volatile. Assets that can lose 20% of value overnight don't "store value". BTC is a "vehicle for speculation". The only way price is sustained for BTC is that you can find some other idiot to sell it to. Just as a reminder, 50% of Gold is used for things that aren't speculation, like Jewelry, so you'll never have to worry finding a seller there. Here are some real uses for bitcoin:
Gambling is fun. You buy BTC, the price might go up! Or down! This is exciting.
Hackers, money launderers and other criminals certainly find cryptocurrencies useful.
Reminder: BTC is an ecological scourge The current cost to mine a BTC is around $8000 in electricity. This electricity mostly comes from subsidized coal in China. And given the current amount of BTC generated each day, we're using about equivalent to the electricity from all of Belgium, largely in coal, to keep this going. I don't mind wasting time on intellectual curiosities, but destroying our planet for glorified gambling is not something I'm happy about. I want cryptocurrencies to go away entirely on this basis, philosophically.
Current BTC prices are a bubble
Before we go into tether, reminder that at the time of writing, the plot of BTC price against the S&P500 looks like this BTC price has increased by ~800% since March. Still, no one uses it for anything useful since the last bubble in 2017, or the other one before that in 2013. This is another bubble however you put it. BTC is not "new technology" 10 years the internet became popular, Google and Amazon already existed. We're 8 years after the popular emergence of deep learning and it has already revolutionized machine translation, computer vision and natural language processing in general. You could argue that deep learning and the internet existed before their emergence, but so did cryptocurrencies. Look up b-money and hashcash for instance. Bitcoin has existed since 2008 and emerged in popularity around the same time as deep learning did, yet we're still to find actual uses for it except speculation and criminal uses. It's a solution waiting for a problem. Institutional investors are also idiots The narrative this time is that "institutional investors" are buying into BTC. This doesn't mean it's not a bubble. Many of the institutions were buying through Grayscale Bitcoin Trust. Rather, many of them were chasing the premium over net asset value that hovered around 20%. Basically, lock money in GBTC for 6 months, cash out and collect the premium as profit. Of course, this little Ponzi couldn't last forever and the premium seems to be evaporating now. Similarly, totally-not-a-bitcoin-ETF-wearing-a-software-company-skinsuit Microstrategy (MSTR) trades at a massive premium over fundamentals. There will always be traders chasing bonuses from numbers going up, regardless what is making the number going up. The same "institutional investors" were buying obviously terrible CDOs in the run-up to 2008.
Tether is lunacy
Tether is a cryptocurrency whose exchange rate is supposed to be pegged to the US Dollar. Initially this was done by having 1-to-1 US Dollar reserves for each tether issued. Then they got scammed by their money launderer, losing some $800M, which made them insolvent. Anyway, now tether maintains their reserves are whatever they want them to be and they haven't gotten audited since 2017. You know, normal stuff. There's a problem to backing your USD-pegged security with something that isn't US Dollars. Namely, if the price of the thing you're backing your US Dollars against goes down, you're now insolvent. If you were backing $10B in tether with $10B of bitcoin, then the bitcoin drops by half, you're insolvent by $5B. And then this spotlessly clean company they somehow added $20B to their balance sheet in the second half of 2020 Reminder: one side of that balance sheet is currently floating around the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Cryptocurrency traders own it as an asset and sell it to others. The other half of the balance sheet is whatever tether wants. There are only two possibilities that explain tether's growth:
It could also be a happy mix of both. One particularly interesting date is 30/8/2020, where tether added $3B to its balance sheet overnight. This is interesting because it predates the subsequent movement in bitcoin price and large movements in other cryptocurrencies. The story from tether and tether's bank's CEO is that this money largely comes from foreign nationals through an OTC desk which implies the transaction goes as following:
That OTC desk converts the money to USD and sends it to tether's correspondent US bank. The OTC desk gives tether to the foreign national.
Wait tether has a correspondent US bank?
Oh, I forgot to mention, no bank wants tether as a customer because they obviously break KYC/AML compliance. So tether first boughtinvested in a bank called Noble which then lost its relationship with Wells-Fargo when they realized tether were lying to them about AML. Poor tether lost its legal access to USD. Tether has been banking in the Bahamas with a bank called Deltec since. First they had a money launderer called Crypto Capital Corp to send funds to customers, who stole the $800M from them and subsequently went to jail. But worry not! Tether found a way to get banked in USD afterwards. Curious coincidence, an executive at Deltec was randomly blogging about buying small US community banks in 2018. You know, that thing money launderers do. So tether's story is that in 2020, they took in roughly twenty billion USD of shady foreign money into the small community US bank their deltec bankers bought. These transactions are necessarily breaking KYC/AML. The foreign parties to those transactions wouldn't take such a rickety route to convert billions into cryptocurrencies if they weren't laughed out of the room in serious banks. But of course, Deltec will say it did KYC on tether. Really solid KYC, clearly, since they're the last bank on earth taking tether's business. Tether says they do KYC on their customers (the large OTC desks). And I'm sure the OTC desks would be shocked, shocked if the cash money they get in Russia and China turns out to be dirty. So everyone can pass the buck of responsibility down the road and claim "We do KYC on our customers". Sure you do, tether. If you did such great KYC, you wouldn't have such problems finding banking relationships. I mean when even HSBC is not doing business with you you're apparently more obviously moving criminal money than fucking drug cartels. And, according to tether's people, this money is what's backing tether's reserves. Money that will get frozen the instant a prosecutor even looks at it. Reminder: the above is the charitable, positive case for tether. The less charitable case is that they took crayons and added zeros to their balance sheet, and that there's a couple billions waiting to burn a hole in the crypto ecosystem. Anyway, the $25B garbage fire that is tether will make a great book/netflix series at some point and their hilariously stupid CTO going on podcasts while flinching on questions about how BTC ended up on their balance sheet will be a fun part of it. But I'm not here to write a book, I'm here to make money by shorting all of this. For my purposes, even in the positive case tether is a ticking time bomb waiting to burn a hole in the crypto ecosystem, because...
KYC and AML are coming for cryptocurrencies
If you listen to "crypto news", all incoming crypto regulation is just great, because that means crypto is becoming legit. However, companies investing in crypto are very angry about them. This is because crypto transactions break the FinCEN travel rule, where KYC information should "travel" along transactions, to prevent money laundering obfuscation schemes. Of course, according to the crypto industry this is "stifling innovation". A more reasonable take is that by being leaving the crypto industry outside normal financial regulations, we're enabling a "race to the bottom". As we saw with shadow banks in the 2000-2007 era this leads to "creative banking". I don't want my bankers to be creative, I want them to be solvent.
Tether's effect on the crypto ecosystem
When tether implodes, it's taking most of the crypto industry along for a fun ride. Tether can implode in one of a few ways:
A BTC price crash triggers it. If
Regulators decide they've had enough of AML avoidance and regulate them.
The NYAG investigation, which is waiting for an update in a few weeks, finds something and shuts them out.
Let's assume tether falls to $0 for simplicity. The analysis is the same directionally if tether significantly "breaks the buck". This doesn't happen instantly, but it happens quickly. The peg breaks, and most people holding tether will try to sell it for other crypto (BTC, ETH, etc.). This puts downward pressure on the price of tether, incentivizing even more people to "pass the buck". Automated inter-exchange arbitrage bots might try to exploit emerging gaps in bid-ask spreads, only to end up with worthless tether instead, as their operators rush to pull the plug. Then, we have a small village of cryptocurrency enthusiasts being out some $24B. With the trading bots turned off and the trading lubricant (a dollar pegged asset) gone, the bid-ask spreads blow up. You get a predictable flight to safety -- that is, to real money. This puts downward pressure on BTC. While all of this is happening, there are all sorts of fun second-order effects happen. A lot of DeFi derivative products are priced in cryptocurrencies, so having normally stable prices shuffle around (eg. USDC price moving above $1 in a flight to safety) triggers a tsunami of margin calls. Some exchanges might insolvent (they're the ones redeeming tether for USD after all).
If BTC price drops below $8000, fun things happen
Currently, the price to mine a BTC is roughly $8000. Most of the mining comes from huge mining farms using subsidized coal in China, and mining costs more the more hardware there is to mine it. Since the price of BTC hasn't substantially dropped below cost to mine we're in for a fun experiment if the price drops below this threshold. Most of these farms should turn off so that the price to mine comes back to breakeven in a case of prisoner's dilemma. But if too much hardware turns off, this leaves mining hardware idle and the door becomes wide open to a 51% attack. It's not clear at what price below breakeven cost to mine a 51% attack becomes a serious threat, but once this threshold is crossed, we're in the "irreparable harm to BTC" risk zone. And for a person like me, who just wants to see crypto disappear forever this is very exciting. Maybe those mining farms could be replaced with nice forests soaking up all the carbon they emitted for posterity. One can hope.
How do I bet against all of this?
Microstrategy (MSTR) is, at this point, a bitcoin ETF wearing the skinsuit of a dying software company. Michael Saylor, MSTR's CEO, is quite the character. I wrote a lot about his lack understanding of what a currency is, but it's on another level to look at the early stages of a bubble pop and decide this is a good time to buy $10M more of the stuff, as seen here However, this bubble is tame by Michael's standards. Look at the historical stock of his company What's happening on the left is that Saylor pumped the numbers with accounting fraud then the SEC took issue with the fake numbers. The stock dropped 90% practically overnight. Their accountants, PWC, paid $51M in fines. Saylor and friends paid fines, partly with company stock. You could also short GBTC, but when Mr. Saylor provides you with an options market instead, why not use it? Shorting on crypto exchanges that might become insolvent in the very event you want to happen with this bet is a bad idea, on the other hand.
Mike can't cash out
The bitcoin market is illiquid and leveraged when it comes to real money coming in and leaving the ecosystem. Buys in the $10M-$100M seemingly move the price of BTC by upwards of $1000 in the last weeks. This means hundreds of millions of real money means tens of billions in movement in BTC market capitalization. Now imagine what cashing $1.1B of BTC into real money would mean for the price. And this is purely in market terms, before the PR damage from bitcoin's demigod abandoning ship would have second-order effects. Saylor has painted himself into a corner. Even if he wanted to cash out, he can't.
MSTR fundamentals: Why it should be valued below $10
In early 2020, MSTR was a slowly dying business. The EBITDA has been rapidly evaporating in the last 5 years At that point, MSTR a stock price of $115 meaning a market cap of $1.1B. This included some $560M of cash they were sitting on. I presume the remaining $550M was an implicit sales premium for the inevitable private equity firm investors expected was going to relieve them of this stock and make the business profitable again. Of course, they didn't sell. Instead, they took the $560m they were sitting on and bought $400m of BTC at prices $11k and $13k in late summer 2020. Then, in early December, they took on $600m of debt to buy BTC with at $23k. They also bought $10m more in January at a price of $30.5k. At this point, we can mostly value MSTR like a trust.
Price the underlying software business as being worth $600M, as the market did before the bitcoin nonsense. If BTC went to $0, this is what we'd value it at, and the MSTR stock should be around $65.
But wait! MSTR took on $650M in debt in December. Their actual value with a BTC priced at $0 should be much, much lower than $65 depending on how you value the debt. You could make an argument it should be in the single digits.
They hold 70,784 BTC. At current prices ($32,000) this is worth roughly $2.2B. With the current market cap of MSTR ($577 stock price), this means MSTR is currently priced at an eye watering $3B premium over fundamental value.
GBTC's 20% premium-to-NAV is a joke compared to the MSTR premium.
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