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Flash-mob finance

Modern communication infrastructure can facilitate swift simultaneous action by a large number of people. If used to coordinate a surprise attack, an organized mob can overcome a store or even the capitol building. Is Wall Street the next target? GameStop

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3 years ago

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Modern communication infrastructure can facilitate swift simultaneous action by a large number of people. If used to coordinate a surprise attack, an organized mob can overcome a store or even the capitol building. Is Wall Street the next target?

GameStop is a brick-and-mortar retail chain that was losing money even before the pandemic. Yet the price of its stock increased 1,900% in January on the basis of no particular improvement in fundamentals. The rocketing price seems to be a classic short squeeze, with a new twist: the grip of the squeeze came not from a deep-pocketed individual but by the internet-coordinated action of a large number of small investors.

GME price, Feb 5, 2016 to Jan 29, 2021. Source: Google Finance.


To understand what a short squeeze is all about, let’s start with a simple example in which the issues will hopefully be very clear. Suppose there is a company that you are convinced is going to be able to make one more dividend payment of $1 to each shareholder before it goes out of business next year. Even though the company is headed for bankruptcy, the stock has some intrinsic value, namely the $1 that each owner of a share will receive as dividend. If the stock sells for $2, it would be overpriced, and you might try to profit by selling the stock short.

To do that, you could try to borrow a share from a dealer so that you can sell a share for $2. You would have to put up funds (known as margin or collateral) to prove that you are able to cover the $1 dividend payment and capable of buying the stock outright if you were forced to. If after your short sale other market participants start buying a lot of shares and drive the price up, you’ll have to put up more funds to prove to the lender that you still are able to buy back at the higher price to fulfill your original sell. If you can’t do that, the dealer who originally lent to you will use your collateral to buy the shares outright and close out your position. The buy orders from the closed-out shorts can then add to the buy orders from the rest of the market to drive the price skyward.

In the case of GameStop, the buy orders that drove the squeeze came from large numbers of people getting information from financial news discussion sites.

So do the squeezers profit at the expense of the shorts? Let’s follow our hypothetical example one step further. Suppose that the shorts had it exactly right — the hypothetical company is about to go out of business. Next year the squeezers who bought the stock get their $1 dividend, but that’s all they’ll get. And they paid much more than a dollar to buy each share, for their buy orders were what originally drove the price up. They can only make a profit if before the company goes bankrupt they sell the stock to somebody else who’s willing to pay more than a dollar for it.

And to whom do they sell the stock? As Shakespeare might say, aye, there’s the rub. If they sell to the original shorts, there’s no squeeze — the whole operation only works if the shorts can’t find anybody to sell to them. So where will the squeezers find the person who’s willing to pay more than $1 for the security? Another chat room, perhaps?

In our hypothetical example, every buy order in the original squeeze paid more than $1 to acquire something whose value, if held to maturity, was only $1. The mob as a whole therefore had to lose money. The shorts whose positions were closed out certainly also lost money. So who gained?

The answer is, the people who bought into the squeeze early and then sold their positions to the gullible parties farther back in the mob. The mechanics are basically those of a chain letter. The original buyers may make some handsome profits, but only if they sell in time. The followers, on whose participation the whole process depends, must lose big. A profitable squeeze requires some gullible victims who end up absorbing the losses that are a necessary component of the strategy.

The feature that makes this hypothetical example crystal clear was the assumption that the company would be out of business in a year. That allowed us to see unambiguously that, as events turned out, the stock had an indisputable fundamental value, namely one dollar per share. But the math works out exactly the same for a company that’s going to pay dividends for two years and then go out of business. In that case, the fundamental value is the discounted value of those two dividends, no more and no less. It’s also the same math for a company that’s going to pay dividends for five years and then be bought out by some other company. The fundamental value is the discounted value of the five dividends plus the discounted liquidation value. Real-world examples may have lots of details and lots of contingencies. But the underlying principle is still the same. Any asset has an intrinsic fundamental value, which is the discounted value of cash flows that accrue to the owner of the asset. If you pay more than this, squeeze or no, you paid too much, and are counting on selling it to somebody else who is even more gullible than you.

The moral is, you can get hurt trying to stand in the way of a crowd, and you can get hurt trying to join a crowd. Personally I prefer to take long positions all by myself based on fundamental values.

And I for sure am not buying GameStop.

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International

Home buyers must now navigate higher mortgage rates and prices

Rates under 4% came and went during the Covid pandemic, but home prices soared. Here’s what buyers and sellers face as the housing season ramps up.

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22 mins ago

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March 17, 2024

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Springtime is spreading across the country. You can see it as daffodil, camellia, tulip and other blossoms start to emerge. 

You can also see it in the increasing number of for sale signs popping up in front of homes, along with the painting, gardening and general sprucing up as buyers get ready to sell. 

Which leads to two questions: 

  • How is the real estate market this spring? 
  • Where are mortgage rates? 

What buyers and sellers face

The housing market is bedeviled with supply shortages, high prices and slow sales.

Mortgage rates are still high and may limit what a buyer can offer and a seller can expect.  

Related: Analyst warns that a TikTok ban could lead to major trouble for Apple, Big Tech

And there's a factor not expected that may affect the sales process. Fixed commission rates on home sales are going away in July.

Reports this week and in a week will make the situation clearer for buyers and sellers. 

The reports are:

  • Housing starts from the U.S. Commerce Department due Tuesday. The consensus estimate is for a seasonally adjusted rate of about 1.4 million homes. These would include apartments, both rentals and condominiums. 
  • Existing home sales, due Thursday from the National Association of Realtors. The consensus estimate is for a seasonally adjusted sales rate of about 4 million homes. In 2023, some 4.1 million homes were sold, the worst sales rate since 1995. 
  • New-home sales and prices, due Monday from the Commerce Department. Analysts are expecting a sales rate of 661,000 homes (including condos), up 1.5% from a year ago.

Here is what buyers and sellers need to know about the situation. 

Mortgage rates will stay above 5% 

That's what most analysts believe. Right now, the rate on a 30-year mortgage is between 6.7% and 7%. 

Rates peaked at 8% in October after the Federal Reserve signaled it was done raising interest rates.

The Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey of March 14 was at 6.74%. 

Freddie Mac buys mortgages from lenders and sells securities to investors. The effect is to replenish lenders' cash levels to make more loans. 

A hotter-than-expected Producer Price Index released that day has pushed quotes to 7% or higher, according to data from Mortgage News Daily, which tracks mortgage markets.

Home buyers must navigate higher mortgage rates and prices this spring.

TheStreet

On a median-priced home (price: $380,000) and a 20% down payment, that means a principal and interest rate payment of $2,022. The payment  does not include taxes and insurance.

Last fall when the 30-year rate hit 8%, the payment would have been $2,230. 

In 2021, the average rate was 2.96%, which translated into a payment of $1,275. 

Short of a depression, that's a rate that won't happen in most of our lifetimes. 

Most economists believe current rates will fall to around 6.3% by the end of the year, maybe lower, depending on how many times the Federal Reserve cuts rates this year. 

If 6%, the payment on our median-priced home is $1,823.

But under 5%, absent a nasty recession, fuhgettaboutit.

Supply will be tight, keeping prices up

Two factors are affecting the supply of homes for sale in just about every market.

First: Homeowners who had been able to land a mortgage at 2.96% are very reluctant to sell because they would then have to find a home they could afford with, probably, a higher-cost mortgage.

More economic news:

Second, the combination of high prices and high mortgage rates are freezing out thousands of potential buyers, especially those looking for homes in lower price ranges.

Indeed, The Wall Street Journal noted that online brokerage Redfin said only about 20% of homes for sale in February were affordable for the typical household.

And here mortgage rates can play one last nasty trick. If rates fall, that means a buyer can afford to pay more. Sellers and their real-estate agents know this too, and may ask for a higher price. 

Covid's last laugh: An inflation surge

Mortgage rates jumped to 8% or higher because since 2022 the Federal Reserve has been fighting to knock inflation down to 2% a year. Raising interest rates was the ammunition to battle rising prices.

In June 2022, the consumer price index was 9.1% higher than a year earlier. 

The causes of the worst inflation since the 1970s were: 

  • Covid-19 pandemic, which caused the global economy to shut down in 2020. When Covid ebbed and people got back to living their lives, getting global supply chains back to normal operation proved difficult. 
  • Oil prices jumped to record levels because of the recovery from the pandemic recovery and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

What the changes in commissions means

The long-standing practice of paying real-estate agents will be retired this summer, after the National Association of Realtors settled a long and bitter legal fight.

No longer will the seller necessarily pay 6% of the sale price to split between buyer and seller agents.

Both sellers and buyers will have to negotiate separately the services agents have charged for 100 years or more. These include pre-screening properties, writing sales contracts, and the like. The change will continue a trend of adding costs and complications to the process of buying or selling a home.

Already, interest rates are a complication. In addition, homeowners insurance has become very pricey, especially in communities vulnerable to hurricanes, tornadoes, and forest fires. Florida homeowners have seen premiums jump more than 102% in the last three years. A policy now costs three times more than the national average.

Related: Veteran fund manager picks favorite stocks for 2024

 

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Uncategorized

Default: San Francisco Four Seasons Hotel Investors $3 Million Late On Loan As Foreclosure Looms

Default: San Francisco Four Seasons Hotel Investors $3 Million Late On Loan As Foreclosure Looms

Westbrook Partners, which acquired the San…

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3 hours ago

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March 17, 2024

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Default: San Francisco Four Seasons Hotel Investors $3 Million Late On Loan As Foreclosure Looms

Westbrook Partners, which acquired the San Francisco Four Seasons luxury hotel building, has been served a notice of default, as the developer has failed to make its monthly loan payment since December, and is currently behind by more than $3 million, the San Francisco Business Times reports.

Westbrook, which acquired the property at 345 California Center in 2019, has 90 days to bring their account current with its lender or face foreclosure.

Related

As SF Gate notes, downtown San Francisco hotel investors have had a terrible few years - with interest rates higher than their pre-pandemic levels, and local tourism continuing to suffer thanks to the city's legendary mismanagement that has resulted in overlapping drug, crime, and homelessness crises (which SF Gate characterizes as "a negative media narrative).

Last summer, the owner of San Francisco’s Hilton Union Square and Parc 55 hotels abandoned its loan in the first major default. Industry insiders speculate that loan defaults like this may become more common given the difficult period for investors.

At a visitor impact summit in August, a senior director of hospitality analytics for the CoStar Group reported that there are 22 active commercial mortgage-backed securities loans for hotels in San Francisco maturing in the next two years. Of these hotel loans, 17 are on CoStar’s “watchlist,” as they are at a higher risk of default, the analyst said. -SF Gate

The 155-room Four Seasons San Francisco at Embarcadero currenly occupies the top 11 floors of the iconic skyscrper. After slow renovations, the hotel officially reopened in the summer of 2021.

"Regarding the landscape of the hotel community in San Francisco, the short term is a challenging situation due to high interest rates, fewer guests compared to pre-pandemic and the relatively high costs attached with doing business here," Alex Bastian, President and CEO of the Hotel Council of San Francisco, told SFGATE.

Heightened Risks

In January, the owner of the Hilton Financial District at 750 Kearny St. - Portsmouth Square's affiliate Justice Operating Company - defaulted on the property, which had a $97 million loan on the 544-room hotel taken out in 2013. The company says it proposed a loan modification agreement which was under review by the servicer, LNR Partners.

Meanwhile last year Park Hotels & Resorts gave up ownership of two properties, Parc 55 and Hilton Union Square - which were transferred to a receiver that assumed management.

In the third quarter of 2023, the most recent data available, the Hilton Financial District reported $11.1 million in revenue, down from $12.3 million from the third quarter of 2022. The hotel had a net operating loss of $1.56 million in the most recent third quarter.

Occupancy fell to 88% with an average daily rate of $218 in the third quarter compared with 94% and $230 in the same period of 2022. -SF Chronicle

According to the Chronicle, San Francisco's 2024 convention calendar is lighter than it was last year - in part due to key events leaving the city for cheaper, less crime-ridden places like Las Vegas. 

Tyler Durden Sun, 03/17/2024 - 18:05

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Government

Mistakes Were Made

Mistakes Were Made

Authored by C.J.Hopkins via The Consent Factory,

Make fun of the Germans all you want, and I’ve certainly done that…

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20 hours ago

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March 17, 2024

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Mistakes Were Made

Authored by C.J.Hopkins via The Consent Factory,

Make fun of the Germans all you want, and I’ve certainly done that a bit during these past few years, but, if there’s one thing they’re exceptionally good at, it’s taking responsibility for their mistakes. Seriously, when it comes to acknowledging one’s mistakes, and not rationalizing, or minimizing, or attempting to deny them, and any discomfort they may have allegedly caused, no one does it quite like the Germans.

Take this Covid mess, for example. Just last week, the German authorities confessed that they made a few minor mistakes during their management of the “Covid pandemic.” According to Karl Lauterbach, the Minister of Health, “we were sometimes too strict with the children and probably started easing the restrictions a little too late.” Horst Seehofer, the former Interior Minister, admitted that he would no longer agree to some of the Covid restrictions today, for example, nationwide nighttime curfews. “One must be very careful with calls for compulsory vaccination,” he added. Helge Braun, Head of the Chancellery and Minister for Special Affairs under Merkel, agreed that there had been “misjudgments,” for example, “overestimating the effectiveness of the vaccines.”

This display of the German authorities’ unwavering commitment to transparency and honesty, and the principle of personal honor that guides the German authorities in all their affairs, and that is deeply ingrained in the German character, was published in a piece called “The Divisive Virus” in Der Spiegel, and immediately widely disseminated by the rest of the German state and corporate media in a totally organic manner which did not in any way resemble one enormous Goebbelsian keyboard instrument pumping out official propaganda in perfect synchronization, or anything creepy and fascistic like that.

Germany, after all, is “an extremely democratic state,” with freedom of speech and the press and all that, not some kind of totalitarian country where the masses are inundated with official propaganda and critics of the government are dragged into criminal court and prosecuted on trumped-up “hate crime” charges.

OK, sure, in a non-democratic totalitarian system, such public “admissions of mistakes” — and the synchronized dissemination thereof by the media — would just be a part of the process of whitewashing the authorities’ fascistic behavior during some particularly totalitarian phase of transforming society into whatever totalitarian dystopia they were trying to transform it into (for example, a three-year-long “state of emergency,” which they declared to keep the masses terrorized and cooperative while they stripped them of their democratic rights, i.e., the ones they hadn’t already stripped them of, and conditioned them to mindlessly follow orders, and robotically repeat nonsensical official slogans, and vent their impotent hatred and fear at the new “Untermenschen” or “counter-revolutionaries”), but that is obviously not the case here.

No, this is definitely not the German authorities staging a public “accountability” spectacle in order to memory-hole what happened during 2020-2023 and enshrine the official narrative in history. There’s going to be a formal “Inquiry Commission” — conducted by the same German authorities that managed the “crisis” — which will get to the bottom of all the regrettable but completely understandable “mistakes” that were made in the heat of the heroic battle against The Divisive Virus!

OK, calm down, all you “conspiracy theorists,” “Covid deniers,” and “anti-vaxxers.” This isn’t going to be like the Nuremberg Trials. No one is going to get taken out and hanged. It’s about identifying and acknowledging mistakes, and learning from them, so that the authorities can manage everything better during the next “pandemic,” or “climate emergency,” or “terrorist attack,” or “insurrection,” or whatever.

For example, the Inquiry Commission will want to look into how the government accidentally declared a Nationwide State of Pandemic Emergency and revised the Infection Protection Act, suspending the German constitution and granting the government the power to rule by decree, on account of a respiratory virus that clearly posed no threat to society at large, and then unleashed police goon squads on the thousands of people who gathered outside the Reichstag to protest the revocation of their constitutional rights.

Once they do, I’m sure they’ll find that that “mistake” bears absolutely no resemblance to the Enabling Act of 1933, which suspended the German constitution and granted the government the power to rule by decree, after the Nazis declared a nationwide “state of emergency.”

Another thing the Commission will probably want to look into is how the German authorities accidentally banned any further demonstrations against their arbitrary decrees, and ordered the police to brutalize anyone participating in such “illegal demonstrations.”

And, while the Commission is inquiring into the possibly slightly inappropriate behavior of their law enforcement officials, they might want to also take a look at the behavior of their unofficial goon squads, like Antifa, which they accidentally encouraged to attack the “anti-vaxxers,” the “Covid deniers,” and anyone brandishing a copy of the German constitution.

Come to think of it, the Inquiry Commission might also want to look into how the German authorities, and the overwhelming majority of the state and corporate media, accidentally systematically fomented mass hatred of anyone who dared to question the government’s arbitrary and nonsensical decrees or who refused to submit to “vaccination,” and publicly demonized us as “Corona deniers,” “conspiracy theorists,” “anti-vaxxers,” “far-right anti-Semites,” etc., to the point where mainstream German celebrities like Sarah Bosetti were literally describing us as the inessential “appendix” in the body of the nation, quoting an infamous Nazi almost verbatim.

And then there’s the whole “vaccination” business. The Commission will certainly want to inquire into that. They will probably want to start their inquiry with Karl Lauterbach, and determine exactly how he accidentally lied to the public, over and over, and over again …

And whipped people up into a mass hysteria over “KILLER VARIANTS” …

And “LONG COVID BRAIN ATTACKS” …

And how “THE UNVACCINATED ARE HOLDING THE WHOLE COUNTRY HOSTAGE, SO WE NEED TO FORCIBLY VACCINATE EVERYONE!”

And so on. I could go on with this all day, but it will be much easier to just refer you, and the Commission, to this documentary film by Aya Velázquez. Non-German readers may want to skip to the second half, unless they’re interested in the German “Corona Expert Council” …

Look, the point is, everybody makes “mistakes,” especially during a “state of emergency,” or a war, or some other type of global “crisis.” At least we can always count on the Germans to step up and take responsibility for theirs, and not claim that they didn’t know what was happening, or that they were “just following orders,” or that “the science changed.”

Plus, all this Covid stuff is ancient history, and, as Olaf, an editor at Der Spiegel, reminds us, it’s time to put the “The Divisive Pandemic” behind us …

… and click heels, and heil the New Normal Democracy!

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/16/2024 - 23:20

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