GameStop: ‘The Berkshire for Suckers’

How the stock's plunge may be signaling the end of the ‘Age of Illusion’

I never think anything that is an obvious setup is really a setup. It’s too easy. It’s like the comedian Albert Brooks told Rob Reiner in Reiner’s fantastic documentary on Brooks, “Defending My Life.”...

I had a very famous agent and he said to me, ‘I don’t know why you always take the hard road.’ And my answer was, ‘You think I see two roads.’

And as my friend Jeff Macke puts it, it’s a “kind of Berkshire for suckers.”

Exactly!

For some of us, nothing is that easy.

What’s the Catch?

So, when I see these seemingly obvious bell ringers of a market top, I just know there’s a catch...

Such as the seemingly obvious bell-ringer with last week’s Bloomberg story, headlined...

Short Sellers in Danger of Extinction After Crushing Stock Gains.

Or this chart from the Financial Times on the growing interest in penny stocks...

Or perhaps the most obvious of all: the circus surrounding GameStop and the hoopla over the live webcast Friday by a guy named Keith Gill, who goes by the meme Roaring Kitty. (You can read his FINRA report, from when he was a stockbroker, here.)

It’s a Trick!

But rather than the sign of a market top, maybe it’s something else, even bigger…

With GameStop tumbling 40% on the nonsensical performance, my friend Peter Atwater – author of “The Confidence Map” and “Moods and Markets – took a different twist in his Financial Insyghts newsletter…

Roaring Kitty's noontime video performance cautions that the end of the "Age of Illusion" is finally at hand.

He added...

Today, the crowd saw through the bright lights and heavy makeup and saw the true grotesqueness of the act.

Concluding...

Time will of course tell, but this afternoon felt too significant not to comment on it.

The king had no clothes. And behind Roaring Kitty there is a very long line of jesters equivalently dressed.

All thinking this time is different, though it really isn’t. Because it rarely is.

Head’s up: I’ll be traveling for several weeks, supposedly on vacation, during which time I may or may not publish. I’m assuming “not,” but I wouldn’t take the under.

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DISCLAIMER: This is solely my opinion based on my observations and interpretations of events, based on published facts and filings, and should not be construed as personal investment advice. (Because it isn’t!) I do not have a position in any stocks mentioned here.

I can be reached at herb@herbgreenberg.com.