저자: KenGriffin · 외국인
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결론: 공매도 포지션은 원칙적으로 주식을 되사서 갚아야 하며, 현금 정산은 기업 인수 등 예외적 상황에서만 가능하다. 공매도 구조: 공매도 포지션은 이론상 손실이 무제한이어서, 포트폴리오에서 숏 비중은 롱보다 작게 가져가는 것이 일반적이다. 예외 상황: 현금 정산은 공개 매수(인수합병) 등 주식이 소멸하는 제한된 상황에서만 주로 발생한다. GameStop 주가: 발언 시점 주가는 주당 약 179달러, 시가총액은 약 140억 달러로 언급되었으며, 1년 전 대비 약 1,000% 상승한 수준이라고 설명했다. 주가 지속 원인: 과거 대규모 공매도 포지션은 대부분 청산되었고, 주가 유지는 회사의 새로운 방향성과 신규 투자자(Chewy 창업자)에 대한 시장 기대를 반영한다는 해석을 제시했다. 회사 전략: 자사주 매입, 대규모 자본 조달로 사업 전략 유연성을 확보했으며, 오프라인 매장 중심에서 e-커머스 전환이 성패의 핵심 변수라고 봤다. 비교 사례: Blockbuster 몰락과 GameStop의 대비, Hertz의 파산 후 회복 사례를 들어 기업 성패 예측의 불확실성을 강조했다. 개인투자자 평가: 개인투자자는 'dumb money'로 불리지만 Tesla, Hertz 등에서 성과를 낸 사례를 들어 현재가 개인투자자에게 가장 좋은 시기라고 평가했다. 출연자 전망: 특정 자산에 대한 명확한 단기 가격 방향 예측은 없고, 장기적으로 기업 가치 변화에 따라 시장이 사후 평가할 것이라는 입장이다.
다듬은 글
If you're shorting a stock, you know, if you're a fund and you're shorting a stock, you can't, and correct me if I'm wrong. You can't close that short position without surrendering that stock, can you? Which means that I can't, if I'm short on something and I offer $100 to close the position, $500 to close it, $1,000 to close it, $ 10,000 to close the position.
I can't close the position without the actual stock price because, basically, in theory, there is potentially unlimited risk if the stock price continues to rise. Is that technically true? Well. In 99.99% of situations, and this was one of those 99.99%, you had to buy back the actual shares if you were short and trying to cover your position.
So, for all practical purposes, one should see that if someone is shorting a stock, someday they will have to buy back those shares on the market as a normal transaction. Mhm. By the way, out of curiosity, what is the exception to the 0.01%? You know, sometimes, professionals over the years, I've seen people willing to liquidate a short position for cash instead.
Mhm. But that's almost always in the context of things like public takeover bids for a company. Okay. TRUE. So, if a company is going to be bought for stock or, sorry, for cash, let's call it that , General Electric is going to buy a company, they're going to pay $24 per share. Once the offer closes, if you were short on that stock, given that the offer closed and the company was bought, you can, under those circumstances, settle your liability in cash.
Yes. But what you describe is a particular type of confined situation with presumably minimal risk. The shares no longer exist, the company was bought, so how do you resolve that contractual situation between the parties ? Right? But if there is unlimited future potential risk , you can't get a counterparty that will agree to settle for anything other than the actual stock.
One of the challenges you face as a short seller is that your risk is unlimited. TRUE? And that is why , when people create portfolios of long and short positions, their short positions are usually much smaller than their long positions in relative terms, since the risk on the short side is unlimited compared to that of long positions.
And that brings us to the second thing, which is simply, you know, I just checked the price of GameStop shares. I confuse the terms GameStop shares and " stonks" in my head all the time now. Um, but the GameStop stock price, you know, we're here almost a year later and still, um, the market capitalization of the stock price is still $179 per share.
Um, which is, you know, 1,000% more than a year ago. Um, and the company's market capitalization is almost $14 billion. And if you just look at the chart, it's not quite there yet, you know, it's not at the all-time high it reached during that really crazy period, but it's not that far off . It reached over 300 and is still at 179.
It certainly hasn't fallen back to where it started. Um, does that surprise you? And I guess, you know, the logical implication is that there are still, you know, the suggestion I think that price might be giving us is that there are still funds out there shorting that they haven't been able to buy back in, and the Reddit horde is still torturing them?
Or is there some other explanation for it? Or maybe, by the way, the company is much better, right? That's the other possibility. But are you surprised that this action has continued? Because I think a lot of the comments at that time were obviously that this was going to go back to, you know, almost zero.
Well, I think it's an incredibly complicated situation. First of all, the company's management team did a great job buying back their own shares, you know, about two years ago at much, much lower prices. So, the company bet on its own future and bought back a good number of shares. I think it was in the single digits per share, you know, about two years ago.
And that's in general terms. I'm not an expert on GameStop per se, but if my memory serves me right. That's what they did about two years ago. And then a major new investor emerged , the founder of Chewy. He has an incredible reputation as an entrepreneur and really knows how to connect with the consumer on a deep level in an e-commerce environment.
And if anyone is going to find a way to turn GameStop into a successful e-commerce platform, he 's on the list of people to do it. Yes. And that's the point. Can they transition from having a huge global store presence with relatively high distribution costs to becoming an e-commerce-focused company with a broader vision capable of attracting consumers in a profoundly different way?
And the current market price reflects people's opinions on that very issue. The current short position in the stock is, in fact, quite insignificant compared to what it was just a year or so ago. Virtually all short sellers have long since disappeared from this stock. They have given up trying to understand how to value GameStop with the founder of Chewy at the helm.
Yes. If you look, by the way, if you look at the 5-year chart, it looks, pardon the metaphor, it literally looks like a corpse that suddenly came back to life. It's just a flat line for four years, and then there's this crazy spike, you know, during the Reddit drama, and then there's this kind of volatility, but fundamentally, like you said, a kind of new normal, at least for the last, I don't know, nine months.
You already know. Yes, the question here is. And, you know, I play on my Xbox. I just bought Call of Duty Vanguard. I downloaded it. Yes. I didn't go into a store. Yes. Well, I mean, that was the assumption, right? Before the guys on Reddit figured out the short selling situation, right? That was the assumption, wasn't it?
This is it. That was the assumption. The assumption was that the world would switch to digital downloads so quickly that GameStop wouldn't be able to change its cost structure fast enough to adapt to this new world, and they would suffer the same fate as Blockbuster. Yes. Exactly. TRUE. And Blockbuster reveals our age to you and me once again; For many people, video tapes are just something they seem to see in movies.
They don't actually know that we used to go to Blockbuster and rent them. Well, actually Ken, there's a new Netflix movie that just came out to rub salt in the wound. I think Netflix is making a movie. I think it might have already been released, it's called "The Last Blockbuster". And it's literally a movie about the last video rental store.
So, finally, I think they're celebrating the victory in the end zone. Quite funny. So the question is, will GameStop's management team find ways to connect with consumers that are different from what they were doing three or four years ago , ways that create value and that they get paid for? Yes. And the reason I brought up the five-year chart is to support your point.
I just want to explore one more level, which is, you know, this is a situation where you can tell a very different story. And the story is basically : they were in trouble, then they had this exogenous event caused by the mechanics of the stock market. And then, as you say, they have taken advantage, in the best of cases, of the exogenous event to build a better future for themselves.
Definitely. Definitely. And they raised a tremendous amount of capital, right? To create a reserve fund that gives them the flexibility to pursue diverse business strategies. Yes. And it's like this unusual reverse movement , where it's...and by the way, we see it in our business, and it's speculation creating reality, right?
As potentially in a very positive way. So the markets will judge that in hindsight , right? Were the people who bought GameStop stock from the company over the past year brilliant or not? And we will find out based on the success or failure, and the merits of where GameStop takes its business. Yes ok.
OK. Incidentally, that's what makes the US capital markets work. Differences of opinion drive our capital markets . I remember that a few months ago Hertz was reported dead in the middle of the pandemic. They were bankrupt. Mjm. And they went to raise money on the stock market and the SEC said they couldn't make an offer.
You're, you're bankrupt. Yes. That's right. And now Hertz is an incredible success story. Yes. So I think we all need to have a certain level of humility about our ability to predict how any enterprise will progress, prosper, or fail. Well, I think that's the best thing here: it turns out the retail investor is very smart.
Sometimes called " dumb money," but in reality, again, it was smart with Tesla, paradoxically smart with something like Hertz, who was bankrupt. And potentially intelligent with many others. One of my favorite things is that if you Google "Apple IPO Massachusetts", there's an article in the Wall Street Journal about how the state of Massachusetts, to protect the public, banned their participation in Apple's initial public offering, which is now the largest company in the world.
So , it turns out that sometimes retail investors are smart. And, you know, I'd say right now is a better time to be a retail investor than ever before. I think it's always important to remember that many of your retail investors are inherently optimistic, and when they see a great product and a company led by an inspired CEO, they're willing to invest their money in it .
They are willing to believe in the future of the United States. They are willing to believe Tesla's story . Yes. Yes. And to be rewarded. To be rewarded and to motivate more entrepreneurs to build more companies like that one. Uh-huh.
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