Not quite accurate.

It's - WSB can remain retarded longer than you can remain solvent.

I believe the term is “retarded”

Until Monday when the bills are due and their wives(let's be honest, this crazy train is the T train) discover their bank accounts are empty.

Funny, but it suggests the market hasn't learned anything from 2008.

This is a common aphorism, attributed sometimes to Keynes: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/08/09/remain-solvent/

To put it bluntly, this is because of the Federal Reserve. Fundamentals refers to the ability to generate a steady return of profit. This goes back to Graham and Dodd, “value investing” (“the intelligent investor” and “security analysis”) and the perspective of a long term investor where all investments are fungible according to their risk adjusted rate of return.

But since the government can’t fund itself on revenue, but relies on the central bank printing money, all this new currency flows into the economy and into the stock portfolios of the upper classes, which inflates the price of the stock faster than the business can generate a profit. Which means all the old value investing stuff doesn’t tell you how to make the most money anymore. So the “fundamentals” have changed and no one knows exactly what they are.

A trivial (not necessarily smart or optimal, but possible) way for GameStop to avoid that eventuality is to liquidate; close down the business and sell off all the assets - that wouldn't be a bankruptcy, they have more than enough cash and assets to cover their debts, so they would have a nonzero amount of cash left over to distribute to the shareholders.

In essence, you're correct that if the company goes bankrupt, the stock is worth nothing, but you make a mistaken assumption in that a company without a viable business model or future profit must go bankrupt - if they have an asset base, they can restructure or shut down long before their accumulated wealth is spent.

> "fundamentals"

You're right to call this out. It means absolutely nothing.

These massive hedge funds (etc.) throw around billions of dollars on a whim and suddenly they're worried about "fundamentals"? C'mon.

"Gamestop" is a string of letters. Unless it has a pile of unrestructurable liabilities, what's forcing it to become bankrupt vs. being a startup?

Fundamentals isn't everything and is really a way that wallstreet has brainwashed people to invest in companies that provide no returns on their investment. As an extreme case, a biotech company with no sales, no profits, no approved drugs and sinking money into R&D is still worth something, and can be worth a lot.

On a more practical case, if you'd preferred to have invested in Intel on "fundamentals" instead of AMD because INTC has 10x more sales...then go ahead. But you should know, 1 stock went sideways for 3 years and another is up 750%.

And Chamath Palihapitiya said it best when he was on CNBC...who got the TSLA investment wrong? Hedge funds. Who got it right? Retail investors.

At a certain price, fundamentals do actually matter. This is the price discovery phase of a company that's not really well known.

The issue is that at current prices, speculation and forward thinking far outpace any value one could derive from analysis of fundamentals. A very successful strategy is momentum trading. Technical/Trend Analysis is all about understanding momentum trading, and at what entries and stops algorithms set up their strategies.

You can literally just look at the P/E ratio and the yield on google finance. 50 years ago that was all you needed to know.

That's why most people should just stick to index funds.

If the stock is worth a lot, they can sell more to raise cash, to pay off any debtors, and close all the stores. Then GameStop is just a corporation sitting on a large bank account.

AMD in 2015. NVDIA same period. Literally all the positions of Citron that Andrew Left missed the mark with over an order of magnitude difference. Many tech companies.

idk. sometimes the skeptics are right. An easy grab is lobotomy. The studies showed that lobotomy is a good way to tread psychological issues, and doctors mostly agreed. However the premise of “treatment” was flawed. Turns out that the skeptics that pointed to the cases where lobotomy didn’t actually treat the patient were right.

Perhaps economists are basing these so called fundamentals on a false premise.

A stock has value if someone ultimately can extract value from it. As far as I know, there are only 2 ways, dividend and gaining control of the assets.

A stock where neither of both are possible ever (now and in the future) has no fundamental value since you have no way to extract value from it, it's pure speculation. Stock buybacks only have value because something else gives the stock value.

Of course, I don't think the situation described above actually happens in the real world, dividends or ownership will (or at least can) happen at some point.

If nobody buys, does the trillion dollar seller make a sound?

Yes.

Amazon dominates a market and is making outrageous revenue and income. Tesla doesn't compare.

A short position when the stock is at $350 is probably more of the idea that the fundamentals point to a much lower price in the future.