There seems to be a lot of interest in stocks from young investors. I imagine that many will make their way from WSB to this sub because WSB is a bunch of monkeys flinging poo. You may have lost some money and now you want to explore stocks from less of a Meme and emotional perspective. There is nothing wrong with Meme stocks. Meme stocks can be fun. I have had fun with it. I am also a 42-year-old man with rental properties, commercial properties, and a few small businesses. BB, NOK, AMC, and even GME are all fine. The DD is fine behind all of them. The issue is that if I lose $1,000 then I can write myself a check from one of my businesses for $10,000 to make myself feel better. That is not a brag...it is simply sharing that people come from different places in life. You are just starting off life and probably have far fewer resources and every dollar matters more. I challenge anyone to CMV but I am not a big proponent of stocks as a core investment strategy. Here are my reasons why.
Information has a time-decay of value. Meaning that information becomes less valuable over time. Data is what is mined to often produce new Information. You are at a disadvantage when it comes to both data and information. The information that you get on a retail level has already lost much of its value. This is where the saying "if you read it in the news you are already too late"
You have no power. You simply cannot compete with whales and whales don't become whales by letting people glean the crumbs that are leftover. They have the power to move markets, you don't.
You have no control over outcomes. You have no control over the success of a company. You have no control over other investors. You have no control over anything.
The odds on options are not that great. Even compared to blackjack our betting the outside of a roulette table they are just not that good.
Many people that are far more intelligent than you are, lose money at stock investing.
Your emotions and FOMO will be a hindrance and problematic.
Most stock investors are too young to understand the market cycles
I like stocks as a small part of an overall investment strategy for young people for the following reasons.
Time is valuable and you have the most time
Compound interest is the "force" behind all investing and compound interest compliments the stock market very well
Certain strategies can complement long-term wealth building
Building wealth through stocks is like trying to build a house one brick at a time...just you, and you are gathering the straw, digging the mud, and pressing each brick by hand. When it rains many of your bricks will wash away. If the sun shines for enough days then you will make good progress. The problem is that all markets cycle. The housing market cycles. Petroleum and natural gas cycles. The stock market cycles. I believe that a full market cycle is around 18 years with around 7-12 years in an up cycle and 6-11 in a down cycle. In the stock market, they call these bull and bear markets. We are currently in one of the longest bull markets on record due to interest rates and the feds printing money. No one has a crystal ball but sooner or later the market will peak. When this happens Boomers will be the first to pull money out and put it into bonds or CDs. Boomers are as big of a whale as retail can get. Anyone and I mean anyone could have made money in the current market. If ten years ago you had asked a five-year-old to pick five of their favorite things and invested in their choices you would have made money. That could be Barbies, YouTube, Pizza, Sprite, and their Dog. They would have made money on any stocks you picked around those five things. There will come a day sooner or later when Boomers and GenX will see trends in the market that they don't like. Boomers own multiple houses and are deep into retirement. GenX is a small but powerful generation that is now on the back Nine Holes of life. Gen X will largely inherit the wealth of the Boomers. There will come a shift towards mitigating losses and that shift is not far away. When they move their money from markets so goes the market. Is it fair to say that one of the longest bull cycles on record could transition to one of the longest bear cycles? Let's look at Millenials...a generation that is struggling to just buy a home. Boomers own a few. GenX may own a couple and Millenials that are now entering into their forties struggle with one. Millenials are a massively sized generation that I believe is now bigger than both GenX and Boomers combined because Boomers are dying at a rapid pace. Millenials are the generation that were adults starting life and careers in 2008 and full-blown families with Covid-19. Maybe one of the unluckiest generations. GenZ is this very talented and intelligent generation. Y'all are creating disruptions in culture, in politics, and in Wall Street. You are savvy and demanding. Giving billionaires the finger while pissing on the front door of their mansions. But you need to be careful. Stocks are not the key to your success. They are just a single tool in your toolbox. A better tool may be early homeownership or owning a small business. Life is about options...and I am not talking about the gambling options of Wall Street. I am talking about the options of having equity in a home to adapt to economic swings. I am, talking about the options of owning a small business where your day to day decisions make you smarter and more valuable. Where you own assets that make you money. Most importantly you have control over your own destiny. I am not telling you not to invest in stocks. I am just telling you that it should be a limited part of your overall strategy in life. Unless someone has been through two complete cycles of the stock markets then I would take their advice with a grain of salt. General advice:
Don't sell stocks that you have taken a loss on
Buy when everyone is selling and sell when everyone is buying
Invest in stocks with a strategy based on your knowledge and experience
Invest only what you can afford to lose
Stocks work best with time. Leave them alone
Be a value investor
Invest with a purpose
Number seven is important. For example, I like Robotics, AI, and Automation. I like these is two specific areas....transportation and mining. I operate in the Transportation industry. I know that very soon human drivers will be eliminated and self-driving trucks will take over. Trucks will be loaded, driven, and unloaded without a single human being doing any of that work. With that will come an entire supporting industry. Tow trucks will need to be automatically dispatched when trucks break down or in accidents. AI will need to be involved in decision making. I will see these changes before I am dead and I am 42. I like underwater mining. Our oceans are the next frontier and the next gold rush. We have areas of sea bottom that has very little life but is rich in gasses, minerals, and thermal energy. Automation, AI, and robotics will play a huge role in underwater mining. I will see this transition start in my lifetime and I am 42. Beyond that, once we have machines that are capable of underwater mining then we have the basics for machines that can mine inner-system planetary objects. From nearby asteroids to the moon, to thermal energy collection closer to the sun, to Mars and beyond. The wealthiest person in existence will be the person that is able to start the first off-planet mining operation. Where there is no EPA, no taxes on land, where we are not building sub-divisions next to mines. Where we don't have to worry about the ecosystem. Where gasses and pollutants are not pollutants because there is nothing of consequence to pollute. The largest land-owners in existence will be the owner of off-world mining operations. That may not happen in my lifetime...but it may in yours. I like investing in Meme stocks because they are fun. But I also invest in Robotics, AI, and automation with one-single question....is this company taking humanity one-step close to automated transportation or underwater mining? I invest with a purpose. Sure I will grab up some value stocks every now and then. People are going to be flying more than ever in a few years. People are going to be more social than ever in a few years. Shoot Condom manufacturers are a buy right now because people will be..........you get the idea. The whole reason that I wrote this excessively long post is to maybe get you into thinking about your strategy....what is it? And to caution you on being "all-in" on stocks. Stonks don't always go up.
Note: BlackBerry is NOT a cyber security company. They are a security company. Revenue does not care about your AI driven autonomous machine learning EV car with DDs. People are using these terms loosely. A quick lookup for interviews with John Chen would prove that he explicitly avoids these terms as they do not define nor matter to the products/revenue of BlackBerry. QNX revenue does not depend on any of these terms, it's on installation on any device. This includes the space station, of which there is 1 of with obviously non-recurring revenue. Buying based on these basis would be gambling. Bull:
Business transformation: BlackBerry is now a software company, starting the transformation in 2015. The focus is security, the general term.
5 Products:
QNX: Embedded system OS.
Multi-OS housing: It has the capability to allow for multiple OSs on a single chip.
Real-time availability/software prioritization: Not all pieces of software operate on the same priority. Steering/braking would be higher priority than media, and QNX allows for that. Even if the thread/core is shared with other applications, when high priority software is requesting a resource it will be prioritized to ensure reliability.
Resource sharing: CPU, RAM, and GPU resource sharing between different applications capability. Two applications can share the same CPU core and bump each other based on prioritization.
Why not Linux? QNX has the highest certification for security available. Linux does not. CEOs would want to avoid liability and this certification allows for that.
Device agnostic: It can be installed on any device, not just cars. Any IoT and offline device can use QNX.
QNX Hypervisor: Consolidate multiple OSs on a single SoC using virtualization
SoC: System on a chip. Instead of using multiple ECUs, which is what car manufacturers currently do, they can use one single chip to run multiple high priority applications and multiple OSs. This is what Tesla does now.
Virtualization: Running an OS in a virtual environment. Think Linux environment inside of Windows. This helps with debugging for developers without having to have the actual hardware.
IVY: Scalable cloud-connected software platform for vehicles.
What is it a solution for? When a vehicle manufacturer wants a way to transmit the QNX/OS data safely, normalize it, and visualize it/interact with it. It also allows car manufacturers to own the data, unlike other OSs.
Scalable: AWS servers are capable of handling the load from many endpoints.
Software platform: There is currently no centralized software ecosystem for vehicles. IVY is providing that.
Non-BB developers would be able to use an SDK to develop applications on IVY for infotainment/general apps/others. IVY will also use ML to gain insight on unrecognized patterns by developers. An example of this is detecting if a car slipped, without having the developer connect multiple sensors to figure out if that event happened.
50/50 joint effort on revenue and effort to develop the ecosystem. Using AWS's knowledge in AI/ML for calculated sensors (slip, driver on seat, etc)
Usage by other vendors: A city can connect to the data from vehicles and detect when ice/slipping is happening. If brakes are getting overheated coming from a high elevation area. If a car had an accident, etc. An insurance company can provide an app to give discounts similar to the currently implemented OBD-2 readers. A maintenance provider can also connect to this data and check if an error is specific to maintenance, malpractice, or general misuse.
Spark: Endpoint management. Basically API security. Did not delve far into this, basic info.
Unified Endpoint Security: This is the endpoint where a laptop/phone/IoT device hits. It provides encryption and security around that. Continuous authentication is a part of it, where a device is learning the user behavior using ML and continuously checking if the behavior matches the original owner; if not, lock the device.
Unified Endpoint Management: Basically managing your API for devices.
Zero trust: I think this is specifically talking about continuous authentication. Basically, it's not an authenticate once and forget it. It's constantly tracking behavior to verify the user is the authenticated user.
AtHoc: Non-enterprise communication system.
Target customers: Government, healthcare, education, etc.
Solution: A communication system targeting non-enterprise businesses; specifically for Event management, cross organizational communication/collaboration, mass notifications.
Who does this benefit? You've seen the hacks in healthcare/educational/governmental sector. This is specifically for them.
SecuSUITE: Phone application to allow employees to use work related data in personal devices without cross communication (between personal and work data).
End to end encryption.
Separation of concerns between personal and work data. Employers CANNOT access your personal data.
Used by NATO; doesn't carry much value in my book but maybe in yours.
Customer oriented solutions: As you've seen in the products above, some products overlap and are just names to target specific customers. It allows customers to easily understand what product could solve their issue. Continuous authentication is a great example of this: Their customer complained that they kept re-authenticating, so they designed a solution allowing them to authenticate once and using ML they learned their behavior and can continuously check if the user is the owneauthenticated user. This kind of passion in leadership is good for business.
Liability: QNX has the highest security rating available. Most CEOs want to avoid liability when it comes to security, using QNX would help them avoid that in a similar way cloud services help them avoid being blamed for hacking.
Leadership: BBs leadership isn't one to play on famous words to drive the stock up. John Chen explicitly states this in his interviews and says they are a security company. Not cyber, doesn't mention AI or whatever. He explicitly avoids meme words and understands what the point of BBs business is.
Where I think growth can be made:
QNX in more cars. They can capitalize on the idea of less ECUs = less cost for OEMs + security.
IVY usage by OEMs along with QNX.
IVY ecosystem. Maybe application billing?
Professional services (support) for the products listed.
AtHoc increased market share in more governmental/healthcare/educational entities.
SecuSUITE for more enterprise customers with the idea being saving employers money from purchasing work phones for employees, and worrying about securing them.
Bear:
Revenue: It is not yet based on a subscription/usage basis. You can only produce so many cars, and they don't give an insight on how much do they charge per car for QNX. Anywhere from $2 - $20 is what was mentioned in transcripts. This is a growth area, but not at a trajectory that's excellent. IVY does work on a subscription/usage basis, but IVY can be used WITHOUT QNX. I'm worried about this, but still see it as an area that will generate revenue in the range of $400 MM - $600 MM at the price of $20 per 30M cars. The 30M per year is based on the listing of their customers and their yearly production rates. Keep in mind I stated any device, this does not include trucks or other IoT devices.
Market share: These are relatively new products. J.P. Morgan pointed this out as a priority for growth. This could end up not working out and growth never happens. This is a relatively low risk due to QNX and IVY providing SO MUCH value for car manufacturers Vs. other products in the market.
Patent revenue: They sold a chunk of their no longer relevant patents to Huawei. This makes up a small (<= 32%) of their revenue and is a one time sale. The coming quarter could be equal or less to the last quarter revenue due to either other sales making up the lost revenue from patents, or coming up short. It could come higher if they sold more services, but due to COVID and knowing that many car manufacturers have lowered their production due to chip shortage, the next quarter will most likely be lower.
VW.os: VW is making their own OS. VW.os is what they're calling it. They're currently using QNX, but that revenue could potentially stop. Personally I don't believe VW is capable of doing that. It's a marketing hype. Their companies are not capable of good collaboration or good implementation based on what I've read and researched (can't find article right now), but it's something to be concerned about.
QNX success: While IVY could be using QNX, it does NOT depend on it. There is potential for OEMs to use IVY without QNX. I think this is a low risk, but still risk. 19 OEMs are already using QNX.
Lack of Answers: I can't get much out of their earnings call. They don't delve into pricing for QNX, how they plan to grow it besides getting more car manufacturers and more cars post Corona. How they plan to do recurring revenue. A breakdown of each revenue segment would be helpful, but I don't see that either and there is hesitancy to delve into it.
Prediction: I think QNX can become a $1B revenue per year alone. $2B revenue per year as a company is not far fetched. Without a subscription/usage based model, it is difficult to see how growth can go beyond that. BB is good in 2-5 years, not this year. I can see their revenue growing to potentially $2B - $4B revenue per year. They did mention trying to figure out a subscription/usage based billing, if done then the revenue would be much higher. I think $18 is a fair price on the high end. It could grow further than that, but expectations would be HIGH. Resources:
Position: 1,500. Disclaimer: I don't know everything, I may be incorrect about some things. This is based on what I've researched and to the best of my ability. Do your own DD. Obligatory this is not an investment advice. Edit: This is the only sub with a lot of discussion. I appreciate y'all. 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 Edit 2: One day later, marked closed $18.03. Crazy.
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.
Greeting Theta Gang boys and girls, I hope you're well and not bankrupt after last week. I'm just now recovering mentally myself. I saw a few WSB converts and some newbies asking for tips, so here you go. V2 of my Options guide. I hope it helps. I spent a huge amount of time learning about options and tried to distill my knowledge down into a helpful guide. This should especially be useful for newbies and growing options traders. While I feel I’m a successful trader, I'm not a guru and my advice is not meant to be gospel, but this will hopefully be a good starting point, teach you a lot, and make you a better trader. I plan to keep typing up more info from my notebook, expanding this guide, and posting it every couple months. Any feedback or additions are appreciated Per requests, I added details of good and bad trades I made. Some painful lessons learned are now included. I also tried to organize this better as it got longer. Here's what I tell options beginners: I would strongly recommend buying a beginner's options book and read it cover to cover. That helped me a lot. I like this beginner book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GWSXX8U/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_OxNDFb2GK9YW7 Helpful websites:
Tasty Trade (TT) and Ally Invest have helpful articles and videos.
ITM: In the money; strike is below stock value. Signif
ATM: At the money; strike is just at or above the stock value, often very highly traded. Can be very effective with moderate - long term expiry.
NTM: Near the money; strike is above the stock value, but fairly close. Slightly unofficial term.
OTM: Out of the money; price is at least a few strikes from the current stock price. I would say 10-30% over stock price.
Very OTM: Not a real definition, this is essentially a lottery ticket. Cheap, but almost certain to expire worthless unless there is explosive movement.
Understand delta in general and how delta changes with ITM and OTM options.
IV, IV crush, and how IV affects pricing. In general, you want to sell when IV is high and buy when the IV is low. Increasing IV is good for held calls/puts. IV drop or crush is generally good for sellers.
Selling options can be quite beneficial. Once you have a good general understanding, lookup thetagang . Kamikaze Cash has good youtube videos on most theta strategies (linked above). I personally believe selling options (especially cash secured) is much safer and can consistently make you profits. Θ Gang 4 life.
FOMO and how to avoid chasing a dangerous trend. DO NOT CHASE FROM FOMO!
What intrinsic and extrinsic value are. Know how they are affected by being exercised/assigned and how theta affects them.
Understand that some of WSB recommendations are straight up high-risk gambling and factor in the information accordingly. Be careful with Meme stocks and the survivorship bias on YOLO plays. However, I love the sub and think it’s hilarious. It has a lot of valuable information / DD if you are comfortable with the “colorful” language. It’s also great if you like rocket ship emojis.
Basics / Mechanics
Understand the 4 "main" option types. Buying or selling a call and buying or selling a put. Spreads and more complex multi-legged option strategies are based off these in some way (see below)
You can sell calls with 100 shares of stock or if you own an underlying longer term option; see LEAPS and PMCCs later. Selling calls naked is incredibly risky and often requires Level 4 (very advanced) permissions and usually a lot of capital. I will literally never sell calls naked since I don't want to ruin my life and end up living in a dumpster eating saltine crackers.
Puts can be sold/written cash covered (cash secured), which means you have the cash in your account to buy 100 shares. Your broker will put this money on hold until the trade is closed. Puts can be sold "naked" using Margin and Level 3 (with most brokers). Your broker will hold a percentage of cost of 100 shares (often 30-40%, 100% on meme stocks) allowing you to sell more puts. This increases your available capital/power as well as increasing risk.
General Tips and Ideas:
Don't EVER leave (short) spreads open on expiration day, close them. (more details below)
Start off trading very small. Slowly build up over weeks / months. You need to get accustomed to a fifty dollar swing a day, then a few hundred, then a few thousand. You need to ensure you don't get emotional (see below). I started trading options with 5k, then 25k, 50k, and later over 100k. I added my own funds over time and used my gains to build my account. Don’t go all in immediately, that’s dangerous and unwise.
Especially as you build up the amount of money you have invested, keep it diversified among several stocks.
Don't go all in on one thing, ever. Be able to take a hit from one stock and not mortally wound your portfolio.
A company may be doing great, then there's a major product issue out of nowhere. If you are overexposed in one stock this can really hurt you.
I had to roll options I sold that were about to expire completely worthless because FDX's CEO changed and the stock took a hard dip.
Don't trade emotionally. If you realize you are emotionally trading for vengeance, you should probably exit the trade and cool off for several days with that stock. Same if you get caught up in a wave of hysteria.
Have a plan for every trade, ideally with entries / exits that are specific values, ranges, or a set condition. This helps remove emotions. This is super important for strong movements and high volatility (see later).
Use an options profit calculator from your broker or an online one before entering a "new" trade, especially a complex multi legged trade: https://www.optionsprofitcalculator.com/
“Rolling” an option: Closing your existing option and opening a similar one at different strike and/or expiration.
Rolling a call “Up” would be selling a call you own and buying a cheaper call at a higher strike.
Rolling a put “Down and out” closes your original one and buying or selling one at a lower strike at a longer expiry.
Better broker interfaces have a literal “Roll” button. I know E-trade does. You can manually do it by selecting relevant contract legs.
If you have a losing trade, re-evaluate it. If your initial assumption is definitely incorrect, close it. Don't stay in losing trades forever and lose the entire value of the option over stubbornness. If you re-evaluate and you think your assumption was right, hold, potentially consider adding another cheaper option (or buy another call / put). Rolling out sold options can help here.
Don't try to day trade, especially with options. It's statistically unlikely to be profitable. Day-trading with options introduces extra liquidity risks and is dangerous, especially with spreads.
Try not to over-trade, you'll likely mis-time the market over time. When I get emotional I over trade, then lose additional money on wash sales. If you scale your entries into positions it should help alleviate your desire to exit positions when they turn badly against you. Whenever I buy calls I do it at larger increments after W almost made me loss my hair; luckily it eventually came back.
NEVER enter a position on a stock you have no idea about, especially when you read about it online or heard about it from some rando.
At market open options contracts are often volatile and inflated. Buying during this time can be more expensive. Options are usually cheaper mid-day, I read somewhere 2-3PM is cheapest. I’ve had success around 12-1PM EST after prices settle.
Try wheeling on cheaper stocks once you get all fundamentals down.
When selling puts if you are very bullish consider "doubling down"; note this is higher risk. Use the credit from your put sale to buy shares or a cheap call. This can be roughly inversed with puts, except I wouldn't ever recommend shorting shares.
Learn from your mistakes. You can’t go back in time and beating yourself up (to a point) is useless. Make a physical &/or mental note of it so you don’t do it again. If you don’t learn from it, then beat yourself up so you won’t do it again.
If you have friends that like to trade, I find it helpful to discuss strategies and planned plays. I talk openly with my close friends about my current holdings and planned trades, it helps keep me accountable. If I get a wide-eyed look, I might be doing something excessively risky or stupid. I’ve over-leveraged myself in calls twice and I knew I shouldn’t have done it both times. When I tell my friends what I did and I’m embarrassed, it exemplifies the face that I shouldn’t have done it in the first place. You will also get ideas for new strategies or plays from them. It’s good to stay versatile and use multiple strategies when appropriate. Beware of group think/echo chambers.
I recommend NEVER telling someone what to buy/sell and when. I’ll tell people MY plays or what I like and why, but I will not encourage them to emulate what I do. Depending on the audience, I’ll tell them my exact positions along with my exit and entrance strategy. With closer friends I’ll offer my thoughts on their trades (if asked). If my friend is doing something really risky (one of my friends does some scary stuff) I may ask them if they want my advice, and provide it, especially if they overlooked a risk/event. I will not encourage someone to execute/enter a trade since it has a high potential for hurt feelings or animosity all around.
Don’t fall in love with a stock. Just because something made you money before and you have high confidence in it doesn’t mean it will keep performing. I joke that FDX betrayed me when it started dipping and losing me money. I was over-confident of its bounce-back and sold too many puts too quickly. I’m in several losing trades because of it. However, I will keep good stocks in my rostetracking list or try different strategies or re-enter trades when they change their behavior.
As you start to both buy and sell options and get more experience in general, you'll start seeing the two sides to every trade. You will likely start adjusting your strategies or trying new trades out because of this. Things will likely click one day. Most/all the greeks and options concepts will become almost second nature. For me this was when I could build an Iron Condor from scratch, which was a watershed moment involving a good understanding of many strategies.
Understand Liquidity and volume.
Trading in low volume, low open interest contracts results in wide bid/ask spreads and difficulty having your contracts filled. Look at all the data for a contract, not just the strike and price.
Monthly Expiration dates typically have better liquidity.
Multi-legged trades (Common examples are 2-legged vertical spreads or 4-legged iron condors) have more difficulty being filled, especially on bad brokers like Robin Hood. Having very liquid options for all legs is extremely helpful in obtaining timely and well-priced fills, which maximize your potential profits.
Time in market vs timing the market:
It is extremely difficult to time the market perfectly. If you wait for the perfect opportunity forever, history has proven you will miss out on gains. Keeping all your money out of the market has proven to be ineffective. Now if there is something serious happening with a stock/the market (like say a new pandemic), don’t go all in. I recommend entering incrementally at dips. If the stock has huge upside potential it may never go down, so it might make sense to partially enter at the current price.
IMIO selling puts is a great strategy to get into a stock you like, or at least make money off it. I think buying stock in lots of 100 is usually for suckers. Selling an ATM or ITM put (assuming the math works out) on a stock you were going to buy and hold is ALMOST free money.
I recommend keeping some cash available regardless. If you have a very large account or expect a downturn, hedging with indexes like QQQ, SPY, or VIX or calls/puts may be wise.
Every trade can't be a winner. You will take some losses, you must get used to it. I don’t like having a realized loss of 1K or more on any trade. However, this will happen, especially with larger accounts.
As long as you win more often and beat the S&P that year I consider it okay. I’m kind of aggressive, so I consider 20%+ annually good. 30%+ annually is great. 40%+ and I’m dancing. After trading options I am almost baffled by my old belief that 5% annual returns (mostly from dividend ETFs) was “good”. That’s nothing to me now since I’m willing to take risks. Note: While lots of people danced in 2020, realize that’s an insane Bull Run year and is atypical.
Adhere to your own risk tolerance and never over-extend yourself, especially with margin use. Don’t make huge gambles leaving you uncomfortable. Only gamble with money you are willing to lose.
My personal strategy is to make safer gains for the year and then enter slightly riskier strategies using those gains. I can be slightly-moderately more aggressive and compound my gains. For me I often sell puts to make money, then when I see a big opportunity I’ll sell a put and buy an OTM or moderately ITM call.
Understand it’s not safe to try and get rich overnight. However, once you hit big “steps” things may start to snowball. You can enter more positions and take more risks if you choose to.
For me this when I hit 50k, then 100k. I was able to balance low and moderate risk positions to more significantly grow my account. I’ll even do a high risk thing now and again because my gains can absorb it (assuming I have them).
I can’t wait to get to 250K, then 500K. I know it’ll take quite a long time, but I am confident I’ll eventually be able to have 500K and (hopefully) 1M in my non-401k trading account with gains and additions from my job. I can only imagine how “dangerous” I will be with that kind of capital.
If you missed "the next big thing" like AAPL, TSLA, or the time machine I’m building in my basement. Don't get upset, learn from it. Adapt and become a better trader for next time.
Figure out why a company was so promising, before they mooned. Determine how you would have traded differently in hindsight. Apply those lessons to the next company you believe has long term growth prospects.
For me that's putting in 1-2.5k towards shares and/or buying LEAPS on it. Depending on my bullishness I may buy “cheap”, fairly far OTM calls. The far OTM options are sort of lottery tickets. If I'm right the (relatively) low cost will have explosive profits; if I'm wrong, they didn't cost that much so it's a calculated loss I’m willing to accept. For more serious bets I’ll buy ITM LEAPS to run PMCCs on. I also like to buy 1-2K in my 401k for very long-term plays.
The stock market hates uncertainty, it seems to crave the status quo. A shakeup can potential tank a stock, even if it's nothing. With shares you can wait it out, but this can be problematic for options. If you see volatile/uncertain times ahead (politics, disease, manufacturing, earnings, etc.), you might want to reduce your overall portfolio risks or hedge.
Profit Retention / Loss Mitigation
If selling options, it is a viable strategy to close early after a large gain with many DTE left until expiry. See TT videos / strategies on this.
Don't hold options through earnings unless you literally want to gamble. I like playing on earnings run ups, but that can be risky.
If you hold options through earnings, IV crush will happen immediately afterwards, devaluing the option. However, if the option is profitable enough, IV crush won’t matter, which will still make money for a call buyer. A sold put sufficiently far OTM will benefit from IV crush, even if the stock dips after slightly bad or lukewarm earnings.
Don't throw good money after bad. Don't gamble on a recovery if your assumption appears to be wrong or the market is flat out tanking. If you are wrong and still believe in the company, wait twice as long as your original plan (wait for your 2nd entry point vs 1st) before adding to your position.
Consider using stop losses to lock-in profits on rides up or sometimes use them to prevent losses. Note, stops can be easily triggered in volatile options. Now when I'm up a lot on calls (especially around earnings or large momentum run-ups) I always set stop losses. I have been burned too many times. In December 2020 I didn't set a SL on several thousand dollars of FDX calls I was already up on and I "lost" ~$5K of unrealized gains. If you're up big, don't get too greedy.
A possible strategy if a stock is on a tear and you have multiple options open: Close some positions (I prefer to do this incrementally if the stock has momentum), but leave 1+ open in case the stock goes into outer space/the floor. Next, set a stop loss with a little buffer below its current movement / range so it doesn't get hit unless the stock falls hard. Finally, watch the stock closely and if it keeps rising, keep moving the stop loss up in little bits incrementally. This will let you keep more profits on a hot streak, but give some protection and secure more gains. It will also help eliminate FOMO if a stock exceeds your expectations.
Have rules when to roll out, down & out, or up & out. I like TT’s roll at break even or at 1x loss and to always roll for a credit (or for me a very minor cost). Obviously these rules need some monitoring. Know your stocks, the news, and technicals so you don’t jump the gun.
If you roll early for a credit and you’re right, it’s not the end of the world. You’ll just need to hold longer, which will obviously tie up capital. Sometimes it’s better to tie up some money (especially if you aren’t paying interest) than eating a huge loss.
Rolling too late can be worse though. I currently have a very underwater FDX put I sold that is over 2x loss, rolling it does almost nothing unless you want to pay a debit or extend it extremely far out.
On huge options gains, I strongly you recommend taking profits by rolling up/down or incrementally sell your contracts at several different prices (this is why having multiple contracts is nice).
Rolling up involves selling your initial call, then using a fraction of your proceeds to buy a cheaper, further OTM call with the same expiry; puts are inverse this. When rolling up I like to ensure the new option’s cost is 15-40% of my realized gains. I’ll buy a more or less expensive new optoin based on my convication to the stock and predicted movements. You can also roll up and out to get a further expiry and strike.
This is monumentally important if you are playing with incredibly high rising stocks or during a short squeeze.
Sad story time: I completely screwed up when I forgot to roll up, twice, during the GME gamma/short squeeze. I didn’t take my own advice; I didn’t have a real exit or transition plan and I got emotional. It all happened so fast and I was at work; the insanity of the run up and subsequent gamma squeeze caught me off guard. I should’ve clocked out and thought through the situation for 15-30 minutes to form an impromptu plan, then executed trade(s). My moderate risk tolerance coupled with my desire to take profits took over. When the stock partially cratered after a run up, I sold to retain gains. In the heat of the moment I thought the squeeze was squoze and it was going to plummet into the ground and I wasn’t being rational.
On 1x 4K call I would’ve made an additional 15-25K if I rolled up to a cheaper contract with some of my profits.
I know I missed out on significantly more with a 2nd call I had. Depending when I rolled it, it would likely have been an additional 25-50k in profits.
I talked about learning from your mistakes above. This mistake is branded into my brain due to the massive gains I missed out onby not rolling up. I’m furious with myself as I write this 1 week after the GME gamma squeeze, I’m a planner and I didn’t plan. If anything I own is significantly up ever again, I’m rolling up (or at least setting a stop loss). If necessary, I’ll roll up a trade multiple times to keep extracting profits.
Learn from my mistake so you don’t miss out on gains too. I strongly recommend rolling up when you are up big on a call / roll down when you are up big on a put. This enables you to take profits, stay in the game, and keep extracting more gains.
If you trade a lot of options, talk to your broker about a discount. I was getting the standard $.50/contract with E-Trade, but I traded over 300 contracts a quarter and was able to get the fee reduced by over $.10 by just asking. I am now doing more spreads and condors, so once my volume gets very high, I’ll ask again.
If you have a broker that isn’t great and you want to switch, leverage your current trading fees to the new broker. Tell them you’ll move over $### thousand if they beat your current options trading fee per contract.
Trade Planning & Position Management Tips
As you gain experience, start monitoring what kind of Delta, OTM, DTE, etc. you are most profitable with. Use it in your future trades. You'll often see the tasty trade 30-45DTE .3 Delta strategy for selling.
Before entering a trade, look at rough technicals like resistances and supports to consider your relevant strikes as well as entry/exit points. Look at upcoming earnings & dividend dates as well as stock/market news.
Consider staggering strikes and expirations for safety and diversity; it’s nice to avoid assignment on 3 puts at once because you used the same strike for all 3.
Incrementally enter positions on large rises/falls. One of my favor strategies is to buy dips after over reactions. By doing this slowly in large price "steps" it helps combat FOMO and helps you avoid getting slaughtered.
This will also help you avoid "chasing a falling knife". It also ties into having a plan.
I set alerts at several predetermined prices and I REALLY try not to enter new trades unless I hit my preset points. It makes me less emotional and usually more effective.
Don't buy far expiration options with poor liquidity for shorter term plays. I bought 1x GME 1-year+ LEAPS call before the 2021 short squeeze. That was stupid, I should've bought 2-3x 60-120 day calls to have better liquidity. I also paper-handed it and missed out on my lambo.
If selling options, consider rolling (for a credit) to avoid assignment when it makes sense / meets your plan. Rolling closer to expiration can be a valid strategy to get theta on your side. On the flip side, if the stock moons or plummets it could've been better to roll before it got crazy deep ITM. See rolling “rules” above.
Covered Calls:
If a stock has a large movement range, I think it can be worthwhile to wait to open a CC after the last one is closed/expires. I have been more successful waiting for another opportunity vs. opening one immediately on the Monday after the second the last one expires.
Consider selling covered calls at all time highs/peaks. If you sell a CC and the stock dips significantly, and you think it’s temporary, you can buy to close your CC for a quick profit, then reopen it later.
If you own Meme stocks, selling covered calls runs the risk of missing out on large gains. On these stocks I typically only sell them further OTM than I normally would or not at all. If I do sell CC on a Meme stock I try to ensure I have 25-100 other shares that won’t be called away.
-Advanced Beginner- Spreads
Spreads (with 2 legs) are neat because they manipulate how delta and theta act. It caps your gains and losses, but you can profit with less stock movement. Try several spreads on a P/L calculator to see for yourself.
Spreads usually require margin trading.
Spreads allow you to define max losses (assuming you close before expiration day) and use less capital.
Experienced traders will open many spreads at identical/similar strikes to heavily profit off movement. Spreads can make you/lose you a lot of money if you are right.
For example. I could make a $200 premium off a $500 risk trade, max loss would be $300. This is much more effective capital utilization than a naked or cash secured put, however it does not have the same downside protection or “wheel” potential as a sold put. Higher risk, higher reward.
Vertical Debit spreads: I think of these like mini calls/puts. I personally don’t use them unless calls are outrageously expensive or the break even is absurdly high, but there’s nothing wrong with them. A call debit spread will lower your breakeven and overall cost vs just a call. You can do clever things like making a positive theta call spread if you’re creative. I like doing this since I hate losing money to theta.
Vertical Credit spreads:
Very good theta strategy to define downside/upside risks.
A put credit spread is bullish and allows you to bet on upward movement with less capital and defined losses.
A call credit spread is a bearish strategy that allows you to bet on downward movement. These are very cool since they allow you to sell calls without selling naked calls, which can ruin you financially. I see selling these as better than buying puts since it’s so much easier to be profitable; to be redundant, Θ rocks.
I repeat this on purpose: Don't EVER leave short spreads open on expiration day, close them. If you don't close, they better be VERY far from the strike on a non-volatile stock. In after hours a stock can jump/dip below your strike and be exercised without the other leg to protect you. This can lead to massive, life ruining losses. This is not an exaggeration, google this and be scared. It happened to a fair number of people with TSLA. Video explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtVFj9nRRDo&t=315s
Short Straddle:
Trading Mechanics, Taxes, Market Manipulation
Learn about wash sale rules. They suck and are very easy to activate with options. This will eliminate your ability to write off losses. Over trading can easily cause wash sales. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/washsalerule.asp
Short attacks:
Learn to recognize these sketchy attacks by hedges/firms. They manipulate the market, it’s been documented countless times. A common one is rapid short selling, which pushes the price down.
Some people say short ladder attacks don't exist. I've seen some very strange stock nosedives off low volume, so I tend to think they do.
If you plan well enough and the market doesn’t give up on the stock you may be able to use it as a great opportunity to buy the dip.
Cramer explains how he intentionally manipulated the market when he ran a hedge fund years ago. Multiple links to the video are below since this video gets pulled often, Cramer / The street never wanted this to go public.
Due to this video I don’t fully trust Cramer. His show can give you stock ideas to buy (or inverse), but you never know where his true loyalties lie.
Plan for taxes if you are up big. You may need to over withhold or contribute to taxes quarterly depending on your situation. https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc306
-Intermediate / Advanced Strategies (work in progress)- You’ll notice many of these strategies inverse one another. Options Strategy Finder This website is great for learning about new strategies, you’ll see many links to it below. https://www.theoptionsguide.com/option-trading-strategies.aspx Short Strangle / Straddle
Both of these strategies profit from little price movement. I recommend using a P/L calculator to determine BE, profit, etc.
A straddle sells (or buys) two options at the same expiry and strike.
A strangle sells (or buys) two options at same expiry with different strikes.
Both these strategies involved selling a Call and a Put for a credit. Straddle uses ATM legs, strangle uses OTM legs.
Limited max profits and unlimited risk. Due to the unlimited risk, I am not a fan. However, many people like these a lot.
These strategies profit from neutral or mostly neutral stock movement. They receive a credit to open and benefit from theta decay. If your stock is range bound, these may be a good choice.
These are both 4 "legged" trades, so you will have 4 trading fees to enter or exit the trade. A lower cost or zero cost broker shines here. However, “bad” free brokers will give you poor fills, which may not be worth the discount.
Condors and butterflies have "wings" which are your purchased puts and calls. The wider the wing the higher the max profit/risk. The condor body can be riskier and skinny with a narrow high profit range or wider for a much greater chance of success with lower payout.
An iron condor is built by combining a put credit spread and a call credit spread with the same expiry.
An iron condor can be thought of as a modified short strangle with limited risk, and therefore a bit less profit. I prefer defined limited risk.
The butterfly is similar except instead of a plateau it has a sharp peak. My personal mental note is that a condor looks more like a strangle with wings, while a butterfly looks like a straddle with wings.
Pay attention to earnings dates when you open these, I have forgotten to check before and it led to bad trades.
The debit version of an Iron Condor. You expect the price to stay inside your defined range. This strategy profits from neutral or mostly neutral stock movement. I’ve never tried this, Iron Condors make more sense to me.
Inverse of an Iron Condor. You expect the price to go OUTSIDE your defined range. These are useful when you expect significant price movement. Credit to open.
Limited risk / limited reward.
Can be harder to set up. I want to try these, haven’t yet.
Inverse of an Iron Condor. You expect the price to go OUTSIDE your defined range. These are useful when you expect significant price movement. Debit to open.
LEAP Options are options that are long term with many DTE, often over a year until expiration. LEAP calls are great for long term growth plays (downtrends with LEAP puts) or simply when you really like a company and can't afford 100 shares. LEAPs (or any "longer term" option) enables you to sell a PMCC or PMCP (below)
PMCC / PMCP
PMCC or PMCP are poor man's covered call (or poor man's covered puts). They are diagonal options often used with purchased LEAPs. You sell a shorter DTE call/put with a further OTM strike than your purchased call/put. For PMCC/PMCPs it is often recommended to recoup your extrinsic value as soon as possible, some recommend with your first call CC or put sale, to ensure you are positive if the option is assigned early. These have a lot of moving parts and strategies. If you buy a barely ITM call/put and sell a nearby strike call/put you run the risk of the purchased option getting "blown by" on large stock movement and ending up with a very negative losing trade. Keeping your purchased LEAP deeper ITM should protect you. Check your initial PMCC using an options calculation to make sure you don't screw up.
I'm currently tinkering with these myself. So far I like .7-.9 delta call LEAPS with 30-45 DTE calls on my CC. The goal is to hold the LEAP long term, potentially until expiration, and constantly sell calls/puts on it that expire worthless. Typically the call/put is rolled up and out or down and out if it's going to be assigned, unless you don't want your LEAP anymore.
Some people look at these many sold CC or puts as profits, I look at them as lowering my cost basis until it's zero (or even negative). I have a page in my notebook I write each CC on my NIO LEAP (I Meme stock sometimes). I find it satisfying to slowly see the cost of the original option disappear. When I originally wrote this I had ~2 years left on it and it's 9-10% paid for; that doesn't even count the actual gains the LEAP has.
TT states this is considered an IV play, which I partially agree with. You want to buy these during low IV times since an IV drop will hurt your LEAP value. I look at them more as a way to sell calls/puts on a high IV company with a lot of price movement and potential upside/downside.
Good brokers will allow you to set these up, some will require a desktop to do it. This lets you link one action to another. In programming think of it like an if-then. You’ll tie a buy/sell to another buy/sell
Setting trailing stops on options is very chaotic since their price movement can be drastic due to volatility. I prefer to set my trailing stop to a stock.
What I like to do is set a trailing stop on a stock (or just link it to a stock price drop) and have it sell 1 share I own. Then it immediately executes a market order to sell my call. I’ve had good luck doing this with incredibly volatile plays were stop losses aren’t effective. I’ll often have an order saved and ready saved for when a strong run up starts. When my price alerts start blowing up my phone, I’ll immediately hit execute to turn it on.
Disclaimer: I’m not a financial adviser, I'm actually an engineer. I’m not telling you to invest in a specific stock/option or even use a specific strategy. I’ve outlined and more extensively elaborated on what I personally like. You should test several strategies and find what works best for you. I'm just a guy who trades (mainly options) part-time for financial gain and fun. I don't claim to be some investing savant.
Listen you fucking retards. Take your adderall i want an opinion. My sense is that GME was being massively shorted despite it being relatively healthy on the books because it's obviously doomed. They've had years to move into a new field and constantly failed. Look at Kongregate, they bought that and for years idled with it. Look at Miniclip vs Kongregate. And what I wanted to ask you clowns is what would actually fix GME? My thoughts: My drug induced best guess is Gamestop will become Redbox. In dummy words: Gamestop will shut down physical large stores and sell games from vending machines due to increased digital sales. Gamestop used to be the place dad would go to have some smart nerd tell him which game to buy the kid so dad can see his mistress Yulia more often. Now it's literally just a smelly box with games. So why don't they buy Redbox or another company that has logistics and tech to distribute games everywhere. There's only a handful of MUST HAVE games in any given quarter. This is a no brainer. Where is my mistake? Not enough coke? Other opportunities:
something related with real money & gambling
become a nerd-community center (esports, more merch)
not sure how they can ever compete in Mobile Games ?
Note: BlackBerry is NOT a cyber security company. They are a security company. Revenue does not care about your AI driven autonomous machine learning EV car with DDs. People are using these terms loosely. A quick lookup for interviews with John Chen would prove that he explicitly avoids these terms as they do not define nor matter to the products/revenue of BlackBerry. QNX revenue does not depend on any of these terms, it's on installation on any device. This includes the space station, of which there is 1 of with obviously non-recurring revenue. Buying based on these basis would be gambling. Bull:
Business transformation: BlackBerry is now a software company, starting the transformation in 2015. The focus is security, the general term.
5 Products:
QNX: Embedded system OS.
Multi-OS housing: It has the capability to allow for multiple OSs on a single chip.
Real-time availability/software prioritization: Not all pieces of software operate on the same priority. Steering/braking would be higher priority than media, and QNX allows for that. Even if the thread/core is shared with other applications, when high priority software is requesting a resource it will be prioritized to ensure reliability.
Resource sharing: CPU, RAM, and GPU resource sharing between different applications capability. Two applications can share the same CPU core and bump each other based on prioritization.
Why not Linux? QNX has the highest certification for security available. Linux does not. CEOs would want to avoid liability and this certification allows for that.
Device agnostic: It can be installed on any device, not just cars. Any IoT and offline device can use QNX.
QNX Hypervisor: Consolidate multiple OSs on a single SoC using virtualization
SoC: System on a chip. Instead of using multiple ECUs, which is what car manufacturers currently do, they can use one single chip to run multiple high priority applications and multiple OSs. This is what Tesla does now.
Virtualization: Running an OS in a virtual environment. Think Linux environment inside of Windows. This helps with debugging for developers without having to have the actual hardware.
IVY: Scalable cloud-connected software platform for vehicles.
What is it a solution for? When a vehicle manufacturer wants a way to transmit the QNX/OS data safely, normalize it, and visualize it/interact with it. It also allows car manufacturers to own the data, unlike other OSs.
Scalable: AWS servers are capable of handling the load from many endpoints.
Software platform: There is currently no centralized software ecosystem for vehicles. IVY is providing that.
Non-BB developers would be able to use an SDK to develop applications on IVY for infotainment/general apps/others. IVY will also use ML to gain insight on unrecognized patterns by developers. An example of this is detecting if a car slipped, without having the developer connect multiple sensors to figure out if that event happened.
50/50 joint effort on revenue and effort to develop the ecosystem. Using AWS's knowledge in AI/ML for calculated sensors (slip, driver on seat, etc)
Usage by other vendors: A city can connect to the data from vehicles and detect when ice/slipping is happening. If brakes are getting overheated coming from a high elevation area. If a car had an accident, etc. An insurance company can provide an app to give discounts similar to the currently implemented OBD-2 readers. A maintenance provider can also connect to this data and check if an error is specific to maintenance, malpractice, or general misuse.
Spark: Endpoint management. Basically API security. Did not delve far into this, basic info.
Unified Endpoint Security: This is the endpoint where a laptop/phone/IoT device hits. It provides encryption and security around that. Continuous authentication is a part of it, where a device is learning the user behavior using ML and continuously checking if the behavior matches the original owner; if not, lock the device.
Unified Endpoint Management: Basically managing your API for devices.
Zero trust: I think this is specifically talking about continuous authentication. Basically, it's not an authenticate once and forget it. It's constantly tracking behavior to verify the user is the authenticated user.
AtHoc: Non-enterprise communication system.
Target customers: Government, healthcare, education, etc.
Solution: A communication system targeting non-enterprise businesses; specifically for Event management, cross organizational communication/collaboration, mass notifications.
Who does this benefit? You've seen the hacks in healthcare/educational/governmental sector. This is specifically for them.
SecuSUITE: Phone application to allow employees to use work related data in personal devices without cross communication (between personal and work data).
End to end encryption.
Separation of concerns between personal and work data. Employers CANNOT access your personal data.
Used by NATO; doesn't carry much value in my book but maybe in yours.
Customer oriented solutions: As you've seen in the products above, some products overlap and are just names to target specific customers. It allows customers to easily understand what product could solve their issue. Continuous authentication is a great example of this: Their customer complained that they kept re-authenticating, so they designed a solution allowing them to authenticate once and using ML they learned their behavior and can continuously check if the user is the owneauthenticated user. This kind of passion in leadership is good for business.
Liability: QNX has the highest security rating available. Most CEOs want to avoid liability when it comes to security, using QNX would help them avoid that in a similar way cloud services help them avoid being blamed for hacking.
Leadership: BBs leadership isn't one to play on famous words to drive the stock up. John Chen explicitly states this in his interviews and says they are a security company. Not cyber, doesn't mention AI or whatever. He explicitly avoids meme words and understands what the point of BBs business is.
Where I think growth can be made:
QNX in more cars. They can capitalize on the idea of less ECUs = less cost for OEMs + security.
IVY usage by OEMs along with QNX.
IVY ecosystem. Maybe application billing?
Professional services (support) for the products listed.
AtHoc increased market share in more governmental/healthcare/educational entities.
SecuSUITE for more enterprise customers with the idea being saving employers money from purchasing work phones for employees, and worrying about securing them.
Bear:
Revenue: It is not yet based on a subscription/usage basis. You can only produce so many cars, and they don't give an insight on how much do they charge per car for QNX. Anywhere from $2 - $20 is what was mentioned in transcripts. This is a growth area, but not at a trajectory that's excellent. IVY does work on a subscription/usage basis, but IVY can be used WITHOUT QNX. I'm worried about this, but still see it as an area that will generate revenue in the range of $400 MM - $600 MM at the price of $20 per 30M cars. The 30M per year is based on the listing of their customers and their yearly production rates. Keep in mind I stated any device, this does not include trucks or other IoT devices.
Market share: These are relatively new products. J.P. Morgan pointed this out as a priority for growth. This could end up not working out and growth never happens. This is a relatively low risk due to QNX and IVY providing SO MUCH value for car manufacturers Vs. other products in the market.
Patent revenue: They sold a chunk of their no longer relevant patents to Huawei. This makes up a small (<= 32%) of their revenue and is a one time sale. The coming quarter could be equal or less to the last quarter revenue due to either other sales making up the lost revenue from patents, or coming up short. It could come higher if they sold more services, but due to COVID and knowing that many car manufacturers have lowered their production due to chip shortage, the next quarter will most likely be lower.
VW.os: VW is making their own OS. VW.os is what they're calling it. They're currently using QNX, but that revenue could potentially stop. Personally I don't believe VW is capable of doing that. It's a marketing hype. Their companies are not capable of good collaboration or good implementation based on what I've read and researched (can't find article right now), but it's something to be concerned about.
QNX success: While IVY could be using QNX, it does NOT depend on it. There is potential for OEMs to use IVY without QNX. I think this is a low risk, but still risk. 19 OEMs are already using QNX.
Lack of Answers: I can't get much out of their earnings call. They don't delve into pricing for QNX, how they plan to grow it besides getting more car manufacturers and more cars post Corona. How they plan to do recurring revenue. A breakdown of each revenue segment would be helpful, but I don't see that either and there is hesitancy to delve into it.
Prediction: I think QNX can become a $1B revenue per year alone. $2B revenue per year as a company is not far fetched. Without a subscription/usage based model, it is difficult to see how growth can go beyond that. BB is good in 2-5 years, not this year. I can see their revenue growing to potentially $2B - $4B revenue per year. They did mention trying to figure out a subscription/usage based billing, if done then the revenue would be much higher. I think $18 is a fair price on the high end. It could grow further than that, but expectations would be HIGH. Resources:
Position: 1,500. Disclaimer: I don't know everything, I may be incorrect about some things. This is based on what I've researched and to the best of my ability. Do your own DD. Obligatory this is not an investment advice.
Note: BlackBerry is NOT a cyber security company. They are a security company. Revenue does not care about your AI driven autonomous machine learning EV car with DDs. People are using these terms loosely. A quick lookup for interviews with John Chen would prove that he explicitly avoids these terms as they do not define nor matter to the products/revenue of BlackBerry. QNX revenue does not depend on any of these terms, it's on installation on any device. This includes the space station, of which there is 1 of with obviously non-recurring revenue. Buying based on these basis would be gambling. Bull:
Business transformation: BlackBerry is now a software company, starting the transformation in 2015. The focus is security, the general term.
5 Products:
QNX: Embedded system OS.
Multi-OS housing: It has the capability to allow for multiple OSs on a single chip.
Real-time availability/software prioritization: Not all pieces of software operate on the same priority. Steering/braking would be higher priority than media, and QNX allows for that. Even if the thread/core is shared with other applications, when high priority software is requesting a resource it will be prioritized to ensure reliability.
Resource sharing: CPU, RAM, and GPU resource sharing between different applications capability. Two applications can share the same CPU core and bump each other based on prioritization.
Why not Linux? QNX has the highest certification for security available. Linux does not. CEOs would want to avoid liability and this certification allows for that.
Device agnostic: It can be installed on any device, not just cars. Any IoT and offline device can use QNX.
QNX Hypervisor: Consolidate multiple OSs on a single SoC using virtualization
SoC: System on a chip. Instead of using multiple ECUs, which is what car manufacturers currently do, they can use one single chip to run multiple high priority applications and multiple OSs. This is what Tesla does now.
Virtualization: Running an OS in a virtual environment. Think Linux environment inside of Windows. This helps with debugging for developers without having to have the actual hardware.
IVY: Scalable cloud-connected software platform for vehicles.
What is it a solution for? When a vehicle manufacturer wants a way to transmit the QNX/OS data safely, normalize it, and visualize it/interact with it. It also allows car manufacturers to own the data, unlike other OSs.
Scalable: AWS servers are capable of handling the load from many endpoints.
Software platform: There is currently no centralized software ecosystem for vehicles. IVY is providing that.
Non-BB developers would be able to use an SDK to develop applications on IVY for infotainment/general apps/others. IVY will also use ML to gain insight on unrecognized patterns by developers. An example of this is detecting if a car slipped, without having the developer connect multiple sensors to figure out if that event happened.
50/50 joint effort on revenue and effort to develop the ecosystem. Using AWS's knowledge in AI/ML for calculated sensors (slip, driver on seat, etc)
Usage by other vendors: A city can connect to the data from vehicles and detect when ice/slipping is happening. If brakes are getting overheated coming from a high elevation area. If a car had an accident, etc. An insurance company can provide an app to give discounts similar to the currently implemented OBD-2 readers. A maintenance provider can also connect to this data and check if an error is specific to maintenance, malpractice, or general misuse.
Spark: Endpoint management. Basically API security. Did not delve far into this, basic info.
Unified Endpoint Security: This is the endpoint where a laptop/phone/IoT device hits. It provides encryption and security around that. Continuous authentication is a part of it, where a device is learning the user behavior using ML and continuously checking if the behavior matches the original owner; if not, lock the device.
Unified Endpoint Management: Basically managing your API for devices.
Zero trust: I think this is specifically talking about continuous authentication. Basically, it's not an authenticate once and forget it. It's constantly tracking behavior to verify the user is the authenticated user.
AtHoc: Non-enterprise communication system.
Target customers: Government, healthcare, education, etc.
Solution: A communication system targeting non-enterprise businesses; specifically for Event management, cross organizational communication/collaboration, mass notifications.
Who does this benefit? You've seen the hacks in healthcare/educational/governmental sector. This is specifically for them.
SecuSUITE: Phone application to allow employees to use work related data in personal devices without cross communication (between personal and work data).
End to end encryption.
Separation of concerns between personal and work data. Employers CANNOT access your personal data.
Used by NATO; doesn't carry much value in my book but maybe in yours.
Customer oriented solutions: As you've seen in the products above, some products overlap and are just names to target specific customers. It allows customers to easily understand what product could solve their issue. Continuous authentication is a great example of this: Their customer complained that they kept re-authenticating, so they designed a solution allowing them to authenticate once and using ML they learned their behavior and can continuously check if the user is the owneauthenticated user. This kind of passion in leadership is good for business.
Liability: QNX has the highest security rating available. Most CEOs want to avoid liability when it comes to security, using QNX would help them avoid that in a similar way cloud services help them avoid being blamed for hacking.
Leadership: BBs leadership isn't one to play on famous words to drive the stock up. John Chen explicitly states this in his interviews and says they are a security company. Not cyber, doesn't mention AI or whatever. He explicitly avoids meme words and understands what the point of BBs business is.
Where I think growth can be made:
QNX in more cars. They can capitalize on the idea of less ECUs = less cost for OEMs + security.
IVY usage by OEMs along with QNX.
IVY ecosystem. Maybe application billing?
Professional services (support) for the products listed.
AtHoc increased market share in more governmental/healthcare/educational entities.
SecuSUITE for more enterprise customers with the idea being saving employers money from purchasing work phones for employees, and worrying about securing them.
Bear:
Revenue: It is not yet based on a subscription/usage basis. You can only produce so many cars, and they don't give an insight on how much do they charge per car for QNX. Anywhere from $2 - $20 is what was mentioned in transcripts. This is a growth area, but not at a trajectory that's excellent. IVY does work on a subscription/usage basis, but IVY can be used WITHOUT QNX. I'm worried about this, but still see it as an area that will generate revenue in the range of $400 MM - $600 MM at the price of $20 per 30M cars. The 30M per year is based on the listing of their customers and their yearly production rates. Keep in mind I stated any device, this does not include trucks or other IoT devices.
Market share: These are relatively new products. J.P. Morgan pointed this out as a priority for growth. This could end up not working out and growth never happens. This is a relatively low risk due to QNX and IVY providing SO MUCH value for car manufacturers Vs. other products in the market.
Patent revenue: They sold a chunk of their no longer relevant patents to Huawei. This makes up a small (<= 32%) of their revenue and is a one time sale. The coming quarter could be equal or less to the last quarter revenue due to either other sales making up the lost revenue from patents, or coming up short. It could come higher if they sold more services, but due to COVID and knowing that many car manufacturers have lowered their production due to chip shortage, the next quarter will most likely be lower.
VW.os: VW is making their own OS. VW.os is what they're calling it. They're currently using QNX, but that revenue could potentially stop. Personally I don't believe VW is capable of doing that. It's a marketing hype. Their companies are not capable of good collaboration or good implementation based on what I've read and researched (can't find article right now), but it's something to be concerned about.
QNX success: While IVY could be using QNX, it does NOT depend on it. There is potential for OEMs to use IVY without QNX. I think this is a low risk, but still risk. 19 OEMs are already using QNX.
Lack of Answers: I can't get much out of their earnings call. They don't delve into pricing for QNX, how they plan to grow it besides getting more car manufacturers and more cars post Corona. How they plan to do recurring revenue. A breakdown of each revenue segment would be helpful, but I don't see that either and there is hesitancy to delve into it.
Prediction: I think QNX can become a $1B revenue per year alone. $2B revenue per year as a company is not far fetched. Without a subscription/usage based model, it is difficult to see how growth can go beyond that. BB is good in 2-5 years, not this year. I can see their revenue growing to potentially $2B - $4B revenue per year. They did mention trying to figure out a subscription/usage based billing, if done then the revenue would be much higher. I think $18 is a fair price on the high end. It could grow further than that, but expectations would be HIGH. Resources:
Position: 1,500. Disclaimer: I don't know everything, I may be incorrect about some things. This is based on what I've researched and to the best of my ability. Do your own DD. Obligatory this is not an investment advice.
Old Austin Tales: Forgotten Video Arcades of The 1970s & 80s
In the late 1980s and early 1990s when I was a young teen growing up in far North Austin, it was a popular custom for many boys in the neighborhood to assemble at the local Stop-N-Go after school on a regular basis for some Grand Champion level tournaments in Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat. The collective insistence of our mothers and fathers to get out of the house, get some exercise, and refrain from playing NES or Sega on the television only led us to seek out more video games at the convenience store down the road. Much allowance and lunch money was spent as well as hours that should have been devoted to homework among the 8 or 9 regular boys in attendance, often challenging each other to 'Best of 5' matches. I myself played Dhalsim and SubZero, and not very well, so I rarely ever made it to the 5th match. The store workers frequently kicked us out for the day only to have us return when they weren't working the counter anymore if not the next day. There is something about that which has been lost in the present day. While people can today download the latest games on Steam or PSN or in the app store on your smartphone, you can't just find arcade games in stores and restaurants like you used to be able to. And so the fun of a spontaneous 8 or 10 person multiplayer video game tournament has been confined to places like bars, pool halls, Pinballz or Dave&Busters. But in truth it was that ubiquity of arcade video games, how you could find them in any old 7-11 or Laundromat, which is what killed the original arcades of the early 1980s before the Great Crash of 1983 when home video game consoles started to catch up to what you saw in the arcade. I was born in the mid 1970s so I missed out on Pong. I was kindergarten age when the Golden Age of Arcade Games took place in the early 1980s. There used to be a place called Skateworld on Anderson Mill Road that was primarily for roller skating but had a respectable arcade in its own right. It was there that I honed my skills on the original Tron, Pac Man, Galaga, Pole Position, Defender, and so many others. In the 1980s I remember visiting all the same mall arcades as others in my age group. There was Aladdin's Castle in Barton Creek Mall, The Gold Mine in Highland, and another Gold Mine in Northcross which was eventually renamed Tilt. Westgate Mall also had an arcade but being a north austin kid I never went there until later in the mid 1990s. There were also places like Malibu Grand Prix and Showbiz Pizza and Chuck-E-Cheeze, all of which had fairly large arcades for kids which were the secondary attraction. If you're of a certain age you will remember Einsteins and LeFun on the Drag. They were there for a few decades going back way before the Slacker era. Lesser known is that the UT Student Union basement used to have an arcade that was comparable to either or both of those places. Back in the pre-9/11 days it was much easier to sneak in if you even vaguely looked like you could be a UT student. But there was another place I was too young to have experienced called Smitty's up further north on 183 at Lake Creek in the early 1980s. I never got to go there but I always heard about it from older kids at the time. It was supposed to have been two stories of wall to wall games with a small snack bar. I guess at the time it served a mostly older teen crowd from Westwood High School and for that reason younger kids my age weren't having birthday parties there. It wasn't around very long, just a few years during the Golden Age of Arcades. It is with almost-forgotten early arcades like that in mind that I wanted to share with y'all some examples of places from The Golden Age of the Video Arcade in Austin using some old Statesman articles I've found. Maybe someone of a certain age on here will remember them. I was curious what they were like, having missed out by being slightly too young to have experienced most of them first hand. I also wanted to see the original reaction to them in the press. I had a feeling there was some pushback from school/parent/civic groups on these facilities showing up in neighborhood strip malls or next to schools, and I was right to suspect. But I'm getting ahead of myself. First let's list off some places of interest. Be sure to speak up if you remember going to any of these, even if it was just for some other kid's birthday party. Unfortunately some of the only mentions about a place are reports of a crime being committed there, such as our first few examples. Forgotten Arcade #1 Fun House/Play Time Arcade - 2820 Guadalupe June 15, 1975
ARCADE ENTHUSIASM A gang fight involving 20 30 people erupted early Saturday morning in front of an arcade on Guadalupe Street. The owner of the Fun House Arcade at 282J Guadalupe told police pool cues, lug wrenches, fists and a shotgun were displayed during the flurry. Police are unsure what started the fisticuffs, but one witness at the scene said it pitted Chicanos against Anglos. During the fight the owner of the arcade said a green car stopped at the side of the arcade and witnesses reported the barrel of a shotgun sticking out. The crowd wisely scattered and only a 23-year-old man was left lying on the ground. He told police he doesn't know what happened.
ARCADE ROBBED A former employee of Play Time Arcade, 2820 Guadalupe, was charged Tuesday in connection with the Tuesday afternoon robbery of his former business. Police have issued a warrant for the arrest of Ronnie Magee, 22, of 1009 Aggie Lane, Apt. 306. Arcade attendant Sam Garner said he had played pool with the suspect an hour before the robbery. He told police the man had been fired from the business two weeks earlier. Police said a man walked in the arcade about 2:45 p m. with a blue steel pistol and took $180. Magee is charged with first degree aggravated robbery. Bond was set on the charge at $15,000.
First it was called Fun House and then renamed Play Time a year later. I'm not sure what kind of arcade games beyond Pong and maybe Asteroids they could have had at this place. The peak of the Pinball craze was supposed to be around 1979, so they might have had a few pinball machines as well. A quick search of youtube will show you a few examples of 1976 video games like Death Race. The location is next to Ken's Donuts where PokeBowl is today where the old Baskin Robbins location was for many years. Forgotten Arcade #2 Green Goth - 1121 Springdale Road May 15, 1984
A 23-year-old man pleaded guilty Monday to a January 1983 murder in East Austin and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Jim Crowell Jr. of Austin admitted shooting 17-year-old Anthony Rodriguez in the chest with a shotgun after the two argued outside the Green Goth, a games arcade at 1121 Springdale Road, on Jan. 23, 1983. Crowell had argued with Rodriguez and a friend of Rodriguez at the arcade, police said. Crowell then went to his house, got a shotgun and returned to the arcade, witnesses said. When the two friends left the arcade, Rodriguez was shot Several weeks ago Crowell had reached a plea bargain with prosecutors for an eight-year prison term, but District Judge Bob Perkins would not accept the sentence, saying it was shorter than sentences in similar cases. After further plea bargaining, Crowell accepted the 15-year prison sentence.
I can't find anything else on Green Goth except reports about this incident with a murder there. There is at least one other report from 1983 around the time of Crowell's arrest that also refer to it as an arcade but reports the manager said the argument started over a game of pool. It's possible this place might have been more known for pool. Forgotten Arcades #3 & #4 Games, Etc. - 1302 S. First St Muther's Arcade - 2532 Guadalupe St August 23, 1983
Losing the magic touch - Video Arcades have trouble winning the money game It was going to be so easy for Lawrence Villegas, a video game junkie who thought he could make a fast buck by opening up an arcade where kids could plunk down an endless supply of quarters to play Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Asteroids. Villegas got together with a few friends, purchased about 30 video games and opened Games, Etc. at 1302 S. First St in 1980. .,--.... For a while, things, went great Kids waited in line to spend their money to drive race cars, slay dragons and save the universe. AT THE BEGINNING of 1982, however, the bottom fell out, and Villegas' revenues fell from $400 a week to $25. Today, Games, Etc. is vacant Villegas, 30, who is now working for his parents at Tony's Tortilla Factory, hasn't decided what he'll do with the building. "I was hooked on Asteroids, and I opened the business to get other people hooked, too," Villegas said. "But people started getting bored, and it wasn't worth keeping the place open. In the end, I sold some machines for so little it made me sick." VILLEGAS ISNT the only video game operator to experience hard times, video game manufacturers and distributors 'It used to be fairly common to get $300 a week from a machine. Now we rarely get more than $100 . Pac-Man's a lost cause. Six months ago, you could resell a Pac-Man machine for $1,600. Now, you're lucky to get $950 if you can find a buyer." Ronnie Roark says. In the past year, business has dropped 25 percent to 65 percent throughout the country, they say. Most predict business will get even worse before the market stabilizes. Video game manufacturers and operators say there are several reasons for the sharp and rapid decline: Many video games can now be played at home on television, so there's no reason to go to an arcade. The novelty of video games has worn off. It has been more than a decade since the first ones hit the market The decline can be traced directly to oversaturation or the market arcade owners say. The number of games in Austin has quadrupled since 1981, and it's not uncommon to see them in coin-operated laundries, convenience stores and restaurants. WITH SO MANY games to choose from, local operators say, Austinites be came bored. Arcades still take in thousands of dollars each week, but managers and owners say most of the money is going to a select group of newer games, while dozens of others sit idle. "After awhile, they all seem the same," said Dan Moyed, 22, as he relaxed at Muther's Arcade at 2532 Guadalupe St "You get to know what the game is going to do before it does. You can play without even thinking about it" Arcade owners say that that, in a nutshell, is why the market is stagnating. IN THE PAST 18 months, Ronnie Roark, owner of the Back Room at 2015 E. Riverside Drive, said his video business has dropped 65 to 75 percent Roark, . who supplied about 160 video games to several Austin bars and arcades, said the instant success of the games is what led to their demise. "The technology is not keeping up with people's demand for change," said Roark, who bought his first video game in 1972. "The average game is popular for two or three months. We're sending back games that are less than five months old." Roark said the market began dropping in March 1982 and has been declining steadily ever since. "The drop started before University of Texas students left for the summer in 1982," Roark said. "We expected a 25 percent drop in business, and we got that, and more. It's never really picked up since then. - "It used to be fairly common to get $300 a week from a machine. Now we rarely get more than $100. 1 was shocked when I looked over my books and saw how much things had dropped." TO COMBAT THE slump, Roark said, he and some arcade owners last year cut the price of playing. Even that didn't help, he said. Old favorites, such as Pac-Man, which once took in hundreds of dollars each week, he said, now make less than $3 each. "Pac-Man's a lost cause," he said. "Six months ago, you could resell a Pac-Man machine for $1,600. Now, you're lucky to get $950 if you can find a buyer." Hardest hit by the slump are the owners of the machines, who pay $3,500 to $5,000 for new products and split the proceeds with the businesses that house them. SALEM JOSEPH, owner of Austin Amusement and Vending Co., said his business is off 40 percent in the past year. Worse yet, some of his customers began returning their machines, and he's having a hard time putting them back in service. "Two years ago, a machine would generate enough money to pay for itself in six months,' said Joseph, who supplies about 250 games to arcades. "Now that same machine takes 18 months to pay for itself." As a result, Joseph said, he'll buy fewer than 15 new machines this year, down from the 30 to 50 he used to buy. And about 50 machines are sitting idle in his warehouse. "I get calls every day from people who want to sell me their machines," Joseph said. "But I can't buy them. The manufacturers won't buy them from me." ARCADE OWNERS and game manufacturers hope the advent of laser disc video games will buoy the market Don Osborne, vice president of marketing for Atari, one of the largest manufacturers of video games, said he expects laser disc games to bring a 25 percent increase in revenues next year. The new games are programmed to give players choices that may affect the outcome of the game, Os borne said. "Like the record and movie industries, the video game industry is dependent on products that stimulate the imagination," Osborne said "One of the reasons we're in a valley is that we weren't coming up with those kinds of products." THE FIRST of the laser dis games, Dragonslayer and Star Wan hit the market about two months ago. Noel Kerns, assistant manager of The Gold Mine Arcade in Northcross Mall, says the new games are responsible for a $l,000-a-week increase in revenues. Still, Kerns said, the Gold Mine' total sales are down 20 percent iron last summer. However, he remain optimistic about the future of the video game industry. "Where else can you come out of the rain and drive a Formula One race car or save the universe?" hi asked. Others aren't so optimistic. Roark predicted the slump will force half of all operators out of business and will last two more years. "Right now, we've got a great sup ply and almost no demand," Roark said. "That's going to have to change before things get- significantly better."
Well there is a lot to take from that long article, among other things, that the author confused "Dragonslayer" with "Dragon's Lair". I lol'd. Anyone who has been to Emo's East, formerly known as The Back Room, knows they have arcade games and pool, but it's mostly closed when there isn't a show. That shouldn't count as an arcade, even though the former owner Ronnie Roark was apparently one of the top suppliers of cabinet games to the area during the Golden Era. Any pool hall probably had a few arcade games at the time, too, but that's not the same as being an arcade. We also learn from the same article of two forgotten arcades: Muthers at 2522 Guadalupe where today there is a Mediterranean food restaurant, and another called Games, Etc. at 1302 S.First that today is the site of an El Mercado restaurant. But the article is mostly about showing us how bad the effects were from the crash at the end of the Golden Era. It was very hard for the early arcades to survive with increasing competition from home game consoles and personal computers, and the proliferation of the games into stores and restaurants. Forgotten Arcades #5 #6 & #7 Computer Madness - 2414 S. Lamar Blvd. Electronic Encounters - 1701 W Ben White Blvd (Southwood Mall) The Outer Limits Amusements Center - 1409 W. Oltorf March 4, 1982
'Quartermania' stalks South Austin School officials, parents worried about effects of video games A fear Is haunting the video game business. "We call it 'quartermania.' That's fear of running out of quarters," said Steve Stackable, co-owner of Computer Madness, a video game and foosball arcade at 2414 S. Lamar Blvd. The "quartermania" fear extends to South Austin households and schools, as well. There it's a fear of students running out of lunch money and classes to play the games. Local school officials and Austin police are monitoring the craze. They're concerned that computer hotspots could become undesirable "hangouts" for students, or that truancy could increase because students (high-school age and younger) will skip school to defend their galaxies against The Tempest. So far police fears have not been substantiated. Department spokesmen say that although more than half the burglaries in the city are committed by juveniles during the daytime, they know of no connection between the break-ins and kids trying to feed their video habit But school and parental worries about misspent time and money continue. The public outcry in September 1980 against proposals to put electronic game arcades near two South Austin schools helped persuade city officials to reject the applications. One proposed location was near Barton Hills Elementary School. The other was South Ridge Plaza at William Cannon Drive and South First Street across from Bedlchek Junior High School. Bedichek principal B.G. Henry said he spoke against the arcade because "of the potential attraction it had for our kids. I personally feel kids are so drawn to these things, that It might encourage them to leave the school building and play hookey. Those things have so much compulsion, kids are drawn to them like a magnet Kids can get addicted to them and throw away money, maybe their lunch money. I'm not against the video games. They may be beneficial with eye-hand coordination or even with mathematics, but when you mix the video games during school hours and near school buildings, you might be asking for problems you don't need." A contingent from nearby Pleasant Hill Elementary School joined Bedichek in the fight back in 1980, although principal Kay Beyer said she received her first formal call about the games last Week from a mother complaining that her child was spending lunch money on them. Beyer added that no truancy problems have been related to video game-playing at a nearby 7-11 store. Allen Poehl, amusement game coordinator for Austin's 7-11 stores, said company policy rules out any game-playing by school-age youth during school hours. Fulmore Junior High principal Bill Armentrout said he is working closely with operators of a nearby 7-1 1 store to make sure their policy is enforced. The convenience store itself, and not necessarily the video games, is a drawing card for older students and drop-outs, Armentrout said. Porter Junior High principal Marjorie Ball said that while video games aren't a big cause of truancy, "the money (spent on the games) is a big factor." Ball said she has made arrangements with nearby businesses to call the school it students are playing the games during school hours. "My concern is that kids are basically unsupervised, especially at the 24-hour grocery stores. That's a late hour for kids to be out. I would like to see them (games) unplugged at 10 p.m.," adds Joslin Elementary principal Wayne Rider. Several proprietors of video game hot-spots say they sympathize with the concerns of parents and school officials. No one under 18 is admitted without a parent to Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre at 4211 S. Lamar. That rule, says night manager David Dunagan, "keeps it from being a high school hangout. This is a family place." Jerry Zollar, owner of J.J. Subs in West Wood Shopping Center on Bee Cave Road, rewards the A's on the report cards of Eanes school district students with free video games. "It's kind of a community thing we do in a different way. I've heard from both teachers and parents . . . they thought this was a good idea," said Zollar. Electronic Encounters in Southwood Mall last year was renovated into a brightly lit arcade. "We're trying to get away from the dark, barroom-type place. We want this to be a place for family entertainment We won't let kids stay here during school hours without a written note from their parents, and we're pretty strict about that," said manager Kelly Roberts. Joyce Houston, who manages The Outer Limits amusements center at 1409 W. Oltorf St. along with her husband, said, "I wouldn't let my children go into some of the arcades I've visited. I'm a concerned parent, too. We wanted a place where the whole family could come and enjoy themselves."
Well you can see which way the tone of all these articles is going. There were some crimes committed at some arcades but all of them tended to have a negative reputation for various reasons. Parents and teachers were very skeptical of the arcades being in the neighborhoods to the point of petitioning the City Government to restrict them. Three arcades are mentioned besides Chuck-E-Cheese. Electronic Encounters in Southwood Mall, The Outer Limits amusements center at 1409 W. Oltorf, and Computer Madness, a "video game and foosball arcade" at 2414 S. Lamar Blvd. Forgotten Arcade #8 Smitty's Galaxy of Games - Lake Creek Parkway February 25, 1982
Arcades fighting negative image Video games have swept across America, and Williamson and Travis counties have not been immune. In a two-part series, Neighbor examines the effects the coin-operated machines have had on suburban and small-town life. Cities have outlawed them, religious leaders have denounced them and distraught mothers have lost countless children to their voracious appetites. And still they march on, stronger and more numerous than before. A new disease? Maybe. A wave of invading aliens from outer space? On occasion. A new type of addiction? Certainly. The culprit? Video games. Although the electronic game explosion has been mushrooming throughout the nation's urban areas for the past few years, its rippling effects have just recently been felt in the suburban fringes of North Austin and Williamson County. In the past year, at least seven arcades armed with dozens of neon quarter-snatchers have sprung up to lure teens with thundering noises and thousands of flashing seek-and-destroy commands. Critics say arcades are dens of iniquity where children fall prey to the evils of gambling. But arcade owners say something entirely different. "Everybody fights them (arcades), they think they are a haven for drug addicts. It's just not true," said Larry Grant of Austin, who opened Eagle's Nest Fun and Games on North Austin Avenue in Georgetown last September. "These kids are great" Grant said the gameroom "gives teenagers a place to come. Some only play the games and some only talk. In Georgetown, if you're from the high school, this is it." He said he's had very few disturbances, and asks "undesirables" to leave. "We've had a couple of rowdies. That's why I don't have any pool tables they tend to attract that type of crowd," Grant said. Providing a place for teens to congregate was also the reason behind Ron and Carol Smith's decision to open Smitty's Galaxy of Games on Lake Creek Parkway at the entrance to Anderson Mill. "We have three teenage sons, and as soon as the oldest could drive, it became immediately apparent that there was no place to go around here," said Ron, an IBM employee who lives in Spicewood at Balcones. "This prompted us to want to open something." The business, which opened in August, has been a huge success with both parents and youngsters. "Hundreds of parents have come to check out our establishment before allowing their children to come, and what they see is a clean, safe environment managed by adults and parents," Ron said. "We've developed an outstanding rapport with the community." Video arcades "have a reputation that we have to fight," said Carol. Kathy McCoy of Georgetown, who last October opened Krazy Korner on Willis Street in Leander, agrees. "We've got a real good group of kids," she said. "There's no violence, no nothing. Parents can always find their kids at Krazy Korner." While all the arcade owners contacted reported that business is healthy, if not necessarily lucrative, it's not as easy for video entrepreneurs to turn a profit as one might imagine. A sizeable investment is required. Ron Smith paid between $2,800 and $5,000 for each of the 30 electronic diversions at his gameroom. Grant said his average video game grosses about $50 a week, and his "absolute worst" game, Armor Attack, only $20 a week. The top machines (Defender and Pac-Man) can suck in an easy $125 a week. That's a lot of quarters, 500 to be exact but the Eagle's Nest and Krazy Korner pass half of them on to Neelley Vending Company of Austin which rents them their machines. "At 25 cents a shot, it takes an awful lot of people to pay the bills," said Tom Hatfield, district manager for Neelley. He added that an owner's personality and the arcade's location can make or break the venture. The game parlor must be run "by an understanding person, someone with patience," Hatfield said. "They cannot be too demanding on the kids, yet they can't let them run all over them." And they must be located in a spot "with lots of foot traffic," such as a shopping center or near a good restaurant, he said. "And being close to a school really helps." "Video games are going to be here permanently, but we're going to see some operations not going because of the competition," which includes machines in virtually every convenience store and supermarket, Hatfield said.
This article talks about three arcades. One in Georgetown called Eagles Nest, another in Leander called Krazy Korner, and a third called Smitty's Galaxy of Games on Lake Creek Parkway "on the fringes of North Austin". This is the one I remember the older kids talking about when I was a little kid. There was once a movie theater across the street from the Westwood High School football stadium and behind that was Smitty's. Today I think the building was bulldozed long ago and the space is part of the expanded onramp to 183 today. Eventually another unrelated arcade was built next to the theater that became Alamo Lakeline. It was another site of some unrecorded epic Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat tournaments in the 90s. But the article written before the end of the Golden Era tell us much about the pushback I was talking about earlier. Early arcades were seen as "dirty" places in some circles, and the owners of the arcades in Williamson County had to stress how "clean" their establishments were. This other article from a couple of weeks later tells of how area school officials weren't worried about video games and tells us more arcades in Round Rock and Cedar Park. Apparently the end of the golden age lasted a bit longer than usual in this area. At some point in the next few years the bubble burst, and places like Smitty's were gone by the late 80s. But the distributors quoted earlier were right that arcade games weren't going completely away. In the mid 1980s LeFun opened up next in the Scientology building at 2200 Guadalupe on the drag. Down a few doors past what used be a coffee shop and a CVS was Einsteins Arcade. Both of those survived into the 21st century. I remember the last time I was at Einsteins I got my ass beat in Tekken by a kid half my age. heheh That's all for today. There were no Bonus Pics in the UT archive of arcades (other than the classical architectural definition). I wanted to pass on some Bonus newspaper articles (remember to click and zoom in with the buttons on the right to read) about Austin arcades anyway but first a small story. I mentioned earlier the secret of the UT Student Union. I have no idea what it looks like now but in the 90s there was a sizable arcade in with the bowling alley in the basement. Back in 1994 when I used to sneak in, they featured this bizarre early attempt at virtual reality games. I found an old Michael Barnes Statesman article about it dated February 11, 1994. Some highlights:
Hundreds of students and curiosity-seekers lined up at the University of Texas Union to play three to five minutes of Dactyl Nightmare, Flying Aces or V-Tol, three-dimensional games from Kramer Entertainment. Nasty weather delayed the unloading of four huge trunks containing the machines, which resemble low pulpits. Still, players waited intently for a chance to shoot down a fighter jet, operate a tilt-wing Harrier or tangle with a pterodactyl. Today, tickets will go on sale in the Texas Union lobby at 11:30 a.m. for playing slots between noon and 6 p.m. Players, fitted with full helmets, throttles and power packs, stood on shiny gray and yellow platforms surrounded by a circular guard rail. Seen behind the helmet's goggles were computer simulated landscapes, not unlike the most sophisticated video games, with controls and enemies viewed in deep space. "You're on a platform waiting to fight a human figure," said Jeff Vaughn, 19, of Dactyl Nightmare. "A pterodactyl swoops down and tries to pick you up. You have to fight it off. You are in the space and can see your own body and all around you. But if you try to walk, you have to use that joy stick to get around." "I let the pterodactyl carry me away so I could look down and scan the board," said Tom Bowen of the same game. "That was the way I found out where the other player was." "Yeah, it's cool just to stand there and not do anything," Vaughn said. The mostly young, mostly male crowd included the usual gaming fanatics, looking haggard and tense behind glasses and beards. A smattering of women and children also pressed forward in a line that snaked past the lobby and into the Union's retail shops. "I don't know why more women don't play. Maybe because the games are so violent," said Jennifer Webb, 24, a psychology major whose poor eyesight kept her from becoming a fighter pilot in real life. "If the Air Force won't take me, virtual reality will." "They use stereo optics moving at something like 60 frames a second," said computer science major Alex Aquila, 19. "The images are still pretty blocky. But once you play it, you'll want to play it again and again." With such demand for virtual reality, some gamesters wondered why an Austin video arcade has not invested in at least one machine.
The gameplay looked like this. Bonus Article #1 - "Video fans play for own reasons" (Malibu Grand Prix) - March 11, 1982 Bonus Article #2 - "Pac-Man Cartridge Piques Interest" - April 13, 1982 Bonus Article #3 - "Video Games Fail Consumer" - January 29, 1984 Bonus Article #4 - "Nintendoholics/Modems Unite" - January 25, 1989 Bonus Article #5 and pt 2 "Two girls missing for a night found at arcade" (truly dedicated young gamers) - August 7, 2003
I LOVE Enderal, but... oof, that ending though (Rant)
So, I finished Enderal over a week ago or so, and normally with stories I read/play/etc., that's it and I move on. Especially if they're upsetting or bothersome somehow (f.e. a book with dumb characters), most of the time I actually finish them, instead of setting them aside, because that helps me "close that chapter in my mind" so to speak or something. For some reason though, with Enderal that doesn't apply. I love the game, I love most of it's writing, characters, performances and so on, but the ending and where it left the story frustrates me more than it probably should, and it continues to do so for the past week. So maybe ranting about it will get it out of my system, and maybe you guys can enjoy, or agree, or disagree :D **HEAVY SPOILER WARNING!!*\*
High-tech Mural Documentation
Remember Skyrim, where a traditionalist, medieval warrior clan decided to record history in a way that wouldn't get lost to time and language, so they made a giant mural? Neat, right? Now imagine you're an ancient race with unparalleled technology, advancement, magic, and a freakin Laputa soaring through the skies, and in order to record history for no-one but yourself... you made a giant mural. I burst out laughing at that point. Still all fun and games though, I figured constraints in the development might've lead to a suboptimal solution there, just like the explanation for being home alone in Star City, instead of the ingame non-explanation we got, is probably that it would've been too much effort for the devs. The trouble started right afterwards however, when what's-her-name pulled the theory out of her ass that the high ones are creating a new high one. Source:Dude, trust me. I was bewildered. Would it have been so hard to have the floaters in the final mural coalesce into a high one at the top? Could there have been some other basis for that conclusion instead? I dunno, but what was that? At that point I hoped someone would at least reinforce that later on, but it is literally never explained, or substantiated, and the characters literally go "WELL, we got no better idea, so let's go with this wild conjecture, it's fine!" (love you Arantheal)
The High One's deal
So there I was, hoping for the ending to clean some stuff up. Not EVERYTHING, I like a little mystery, theorycrafting, etc., but y'know, some consistency tying things together. First and foremost, why are the High Ones doing this shit? And what answer does the game ultimately shove down your throat? IT'S INEFFABLE! Not not an answer, an anti-answer. Urgh! Doesn't stop one from wondering of course. Seems reasonable that the "first" civilisation built the first beacon intentionally to become the first High One intentionally, but literally none of the motivations for "reproducing" I could think of are in any way consistent with their behaviour in the game. Especially their seething contempt for the prophet and humanity in general. Some aspects of the story, or the cycle in particular, don't have to be explained. Like f.e. the Red Madness can be seen as a possible "necessity" to drive humanity into action in the first place. Or how the Black Stones corrupting their owners can be seen as a "necessity" to produce stories around them so that humanity can eventually know where to find them. But when you can literally plant people like Coarek whereever you like, why bother with this game of the double-double-double-double-double-double-double-cross-cross-something-someting at all? If the High Ones just left the Coarek-kinda-character out of their narrative entirely, we would've gathered the stones, lit the beacon, presto. And before you can say "But we would've needed the nUmiNOs!!", the first beacon obviously didn't have one, so humanity's glorious idea of slotting the "essence" (URHGH!!) of a High One in there must have come from the High Ones in the first place. In PRINCIPLE, the concept of key points of fateful history repeating is cool, but why the repetition of things that aren't needed for the Cleansing? Why the catastrophy? Why false Gods? Why religion? For that matter, how does life even keep popping up in the same way over and over?
The whole Numinos-Word-of-the-dead-BS
"LISTEN UP people, this is the plan: Based on this baseless theory from this lady that just got introduced and immediately killed off, we're gonna go to aspecial place, to trigger avisionofanother time, that, as far as we know this far, is only happening/perceivable for asingleperson,bankingon there being a High One, although we haveno proof, nor argument, that High Ones are actually necessarily presentATthe BeaconAT the timeof the Cleansing, where we'll use this McGuffin, that has previously been established to haveno powerto transport things in and out of minds (scroll), to enter the (surely harmless)mindof animmaterialbeingin that past, in thebaseless hopeto find something resembling that beings "essence", which hopefully is, in turn,materialfor some reason, and thenpick upthat essence thing, and take it with usout of this mind,OUT OF THE PAST,into the present with us, where we'll slot it into that machine and all will be well." "I led them to the light, I alone" my ass
YUSLAN, C'mon man.
Ok, so a man who is sooo driven by revenge that he'd not only sacrifice his own life, not only the life of other people, but literally the lives of everyone everywhere, and to his knowledge, probably the lives of a few Cycles to come, including all the other happy wifes, and little girls and whatnot he can sympathize with to achieve it... is already a BIT of a stretch. Ok, but so far my suspension of disbelief is only teetering on the window sill, so to speak. But you expect me to believe that THIS man, this YUSLAN is the same who just hours before was content to die in another reality?? To abbandon his brooding master plan years in the making just to get a whiff of a happiness that could've been, so much so that the prophet had to (literally had to) talk him out of it? Suspension of disbelief far over the ledge, crashing down. AND THEN, to top it off you want me to buy that THIS MAN notices the prophet's Dreamflowers in full knowledge of what they can do, got them to do with as he pleases, and doesn't use them?? Fuck off. (No offense SureAI, I love you) Slam Dunk that S.o.D. into the concrete. If he was ready to give up everything for personal gratification 5 mintues ago, he sure as shit would be ready to do the same now. Not soooo driven after all.
Make up your damn mind, (veiled) woman!
Nothing about the veiled womans actions in THIS story is explained, ever. Just more mystery without substance. The Esme quest just fleshes out (ha!) who/what she is, it doesn't pertain to her motivations or actions at all. Why does she kill you and Sirius? Probably to set you up as the prime target to become the prophet of this cycle, but why you specifically? Why wouldn't the High Ones notice and refuse to play on her terms? Why does she play it off like reviving Jespar is a favor to the prophet, when in reality it's the only reason she's there in the first place? Why does she want the Cleansings to happen, but interferes regardless? Why does she save Calia, and tell her "You have no idea how special you are!", when in 50% of cases demongirl just dies in the Cleansing? She has no crucial role up to that point! Why would she come to your rescue in the end and set up your meeting with the Black Guardian, with you of all the prophets in particular, and with this cycle in particular? There are only 3 possible consequences, either an end to the Cycle via Beacon/Numinos v2.0, end to the Cycle via reeducation of next humanity, or a continuation of the Cycle, ALL OF WHICH SHE COULD DAMN WELL DO HERSELF, AND ALL OF THEM MORE EASILY. What's so damn special? \crickets** Go play checkers with Gajus for all I care!
Black Blah Blah
When I was "hoping for the ending to clean some stuff up" a 30 minute exposition dump wasn't what I had in mind, but at least some stuff would've been cleaned up. Instead there are just more questions, more plotholes, no interesting questions to ask (like how all the Black Guardian's propositions conveniently fullfill the prophet's innate desire), and more non-answers. Why let the prophet ask about the ancient starlings, if the answer you're gonna get is "no idea" anyway? The only real answer coming out of this is the mechanism by which the High Ones exert power over mankind, feeding of their character flaws, ego, and so on. But honestly that seems to have very little explanatory power to the previous gaps, and largely just serves as an avenue for the "reformation of mankind" strategy to become an option. Seemingly. If the High One's didn't have the power to amplify those negatives, but rather to "instill" them, what would really change story-wise except for one possible ending? Ah, and there was this other thing that was finally "explained"...
fLEshLeSs
Ah, so the prophet is fleshless. Except they have flesh, and they can be cut, and bleed, and die, and be in need of revival by some funky Norn on DMT... Oh, and they have this really strong desire that they pursue single-mindedly... Well, aside from days of sidequesting at the peril of existence, or romancing various red-flag-collectors, or gambling. And of course, they have this neat ability to access the memories of their previous incarnations for rapid gro-... oh wait, that was unique to being the prophet, not being fleshless. Hmmm... No wait, fleshless are special because they are merely projections by the high ones, that's why they simply cease to exist once they fulfilled their role in the... Fuck. (Looking at you, Gajus) AH, I GOT IT, they're immortal, yes, that's it. Why you ask? No idea. Just in case a prophet has to dig through 15 km of granit to get to a black stone or something I guess... Seriously though, I was hyped by all the allusions building up to this, but being "dead" is of literally no consequence to the prophet whatsoever. No dilemma where destroying the High Ones would also destroy the emissaries (Fire Emblem Awakening, anyone?), no implanted memories responsible for their drive, no aspects of reality visible/invisible to them because they're dead, no threat of madness, or eternal solitude, or lack of "rest", or loss of some kind of afterlife. Just "spoooky aura", ooooooooh. The High Ones could just as well have revived you like the veiled woman did, or just amplified the desires of a living person, like they already do. Like so many other things, it ultimately feels like somehthing "that would be cool" thought of in the beginning, stayed in during the process, but ultimately didn't find it's raison d'être in the final product.
"Echo" my ass
As a final, small nitpick: Literally the first time we experience the prophet's Echo, it undermines it's own logic. It happens in the Esme quest to a small extent, where for some reason the prophet can see the current timeline and the game pretty much alludes "yeah, we're not gonna bother explaining that one". But there at least we're seeing past events. With the apothecarii at the start you literally see the future, unless you want me to believe 2 dudes in a previous cycle were miraculously also named Finn and Carbos and got blown up with identical dialogue... Just kinda irks me when the first time around your looking for answers and it goes: "Hm, I sometimes can see the future, what's that about?" "It's actually not the future, you can see the past!" "But it wasn-""IT'S THE PAST!" Let me just finally make it clear that as a whole, I love Enderal. I don't fault the devs and writers for this, I don't want to hate on the game, not even parts on it. I reckognize Enderal is an amazing, completely free experience, with probably thousands of voluntary workhours in it. I just needed to vent a little so I can stop mulling this stuff over in my head, and my best guess as to why it bothers me in the first place, is that I compare the conclusion to this epic ride to the EXCELLENT standard set by the rest of the game itself, it's writing, and it's characters (Black Stone Quests omg) Maybe you guys can get something out of this as well. Let me know if you have any thoughts, or can patch up some things after all :)
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