Taste Success

20+ years in the markets. Investing, trading, income generation. My thoughts, not financial advice.

[Taste Success @taste]

$fisv Fiserv has 38,000 employees. This is expensive bloat. They never right sized the ship. The incoming CEO needs to start off with a cost reduction plan, cut 25% of the workforce. Other companies that are similar have a fraction of their headcount. Time to start changes.

[Taste Success @taste]

@hoarderresearch $sive @aleabitoreddit Why are they teasing a dual listing when asking people to accept dilution? I have not seen this as standard practice and unless it’s being noncommittal is a Swedish thing it would be a red flag to me.

[Taste Success @taste]

$pdd From mid-2023 to now the stock has bounced up from $96 four times. It has not fallen below. This is either a great opportunity to buy the dip, or if the trend breaks watch out below. Personally I’m buying the dip here.

[Taste Success @taste]

$gme Ryan Cohen appeared more lucid today, until in his interview we learned how the other $28B will work.
He failed at nfts, failed at crypto wallet, failed at store rebrands, failed at new product offerings (funko pop, really?), failed at increased distribution and now he’s asking for the chance to implement his ideas on a company 28X bigger (if we remove the dilution cash from the $gme balance sheet to adjust the mcap).
He stole Jim Carey’s briefcase and shoved a ton more of IOUs in it, doubt it works.

[Taste Success @taste]

What has Ryan’s $gme actions to date been? Failed business concepts (nfts, crypto wallet, in-store product shirts). The only one that brought cash in the door was dilution, which crushed any hope of a short squeeze. He’s not playing 4-D chess, he’s playing hide and seek and he can’t find one solid strategy.

[Taste Success @taste]

@TheLongInvest Cohen would need to dilute by more than that if the cash is being used. Market cap should drop by $9B, from $11B to $2B. Dilution would be 10X.

[Taste Success @taste]

$gme Sorry but what was that? This is not how you instill confidence. Cohen sounded dazed and unprepared. He certainly did not want to say or infer dilution but he ultimately had to acknowledge it. This is not who I’d want running a $56B highly dilutive and leveraged buyout. His “entrepreneurial spirit” has failed multiple times at GameStop. All he seems to know how to do is dilute.

[Wolf of My Street🏡 @Ryan__Rigg]

$GME GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen’s full interview with CNBC this morning and the $56B $EBAY deal — he takes a couple digs at CNBC regarding their past comments about #GME

[Taste Success @taste]

$gme The proposal that Cohen just released is 50% cash /50% GameStop stock. Between $9B on balance sheet and TD Bank providing $20B they can pull it off, but the dilution is massive and I’m not sure why anyone would want that. He also plans to cut $2B of costs do mass layoffs and severance packages. The only thing Cohrn seems to do is fire people because he has no clue how to grow revenue.

[Taste Success @taste]

@ryancohen $gme you’re going to turn around a $55B company when after years you haven’t turned around a $2B company? NFTs and funko pops, oh my.

[Taste Success @taste]

He’s going to need more than $2B for $gme to buy $ebay without a leveraged buyout. If they have to put $40B on the balance sheet as debt it’ll fail from Day 1.
I also don’t see what Evay is missing that Ryan brings. There’s no turnaround required here. Ryan hasn’t been able to right his own retail ship.

[Taste Success @taste]

@DOMOCAPITAL This is Cohen’s fifth major pivot in 5 years. Just wrote up a post about them all. He’s 0-4. Fair to say he got lucky with Chewy.

[Taste Success @taste]

$GME is preparing an offer to acquire $EBAY.
GameStop market cap: $12 billion.
eBay market cap: $46 billion.
GameStop cash: $9 billion.
GameStop long-term debt: $4 billion.
So a $12B company with $5B in net cash is going to buy a $46B company. Got it.
The math is going to be fascinating to watch.

Let’s talk about Ryan Cohen’s performance so far…

THE CLEAR FAILURES

THE NFT MARKETPLACE (July 2022 – February 2024)

• Launched July 2022. First 48 hours generated $3.5M in trading volume.
• Partnered with blockchain platform Immutable X. Digital Worlds NFTs committed up to $250M in IMX tokens to support the ecosystem.
• Built a dedicated blockchain engineering team around it.
• Sales collapsed: $77.4M in 2022 → $2.8M in 2023 (a 96% decline in one year).
• GameStop’s own SEC filing in March 2023 admitted NFT sales were not “material” to annual earnings.
• Officially shut down February 2, 2024, citing “continuing regulatory uncertainty.”

THE CRYPTO WALLET (May 2022 – November 2023)

• Launched May 2022 as a self-custody wallet for crypto and NFTs (Chrome browser + iOS app).
• Was supposed to be the on-ramp that made the NFT marketplace work.
• Shut down November 1, 2023, citing “regulatory uncertainty.”
• Lasted about 18 months total.
• The blockchain team was largely laid off.

THE CEO PICK — MATT FURLONG (June 2021 – June 2023)

• Cohen personally recruited Furlong from Amazon Australia to lead GameStop’s tech-forward transformation.
• Furlong was the public face of the NFT/crypto pivot.
• Fired without explanation in June 2023. No replacement announced at the time.
• Cohen took over as Executive Chairman, then CEO in September 2023.
• Cohen’s hand-picked CEO lasted exactly two years.

THE HARDWARE / ACCESSORIES PUSH (2022 – 2024)

• Cohen pushed the company into gaming chairs, TVs, and gamer-branded peripherals to diversify beyond games.
• Most analysts now describe this as a “short-lived push.”
• Revenue continued declining every year through the period the strategy was supposed to be working.

STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS THAT HAVEN’T BEEN FIXED

REVENUE KEEPS FALLING

• Q1 2025: $732M, down from $881.8M YoY (-17%)
• Q3 2025: missed estimates
• Q4 2025: $1.1B, down from $1.28B YoY
• The retail business is in secular decline.

MASS STORE CLOSURES

• 590 stores closed in fiscal 2024.
• 295–410 more closed in early 2026.
• Store count: 2,915 (Feb 2024) → ~1,598 today.
• Roughly 45% of all stores closed in 2 years.

THE $35B COMPENSATION BACKLASH

• January 2026: Cohen granted performance-based stock options worth up to $35B if market cap reaches $100B.
• Drew significant public criticism given simultaneous store closures and layoffs.

THE PATTERN

Cohen has had one repeating playbook for 5 years: identify a hot trend (e-commerce/tech in 2021, NFTs in 2022, crypto wallets in 2022, Bitcoin in 2025, transformational M&A in 2026), announce GameStop’s pivot into it, raise capital on the announcement, then quietly shut it down or move on to the next narrative when it doesn’t generate operating returns.

The eBay rumor is the 5th major pivot announcement in 5 years.

[Taste Success @taste]

@stockplaymaker1 20% in a week is 10X annualized (noncompounded). Worse ways to spend one’s time.

[Taste Success @taste]

$BYND just wrapped its best month in 2 years.
Stock hit $1.14 this morning before pulling back to $0.96.
Short interest: 31.7% of float.
108,000+ watchers on Stocktwits.
52-week range: $0.50 to $7.69.
Earnings drop next Wednesday after the bell.
The setup hasn’t looked like this since 2024. I’m in for a small play here with 30,000 shares. Can drop back to $0.60, but if history can repeat it is a 10X potential. I’ll roll the dice with the R/R on 30% SI and retail chatter.

[Taste Success @taste]

The capital return news on $QCOM is what should matter most:
• $5.4B in share repurchases in H1 of fiscal 2026
• New $20B buyback authorization just approved
• Dividend increase
A semiconductor company guiding flat-to-down revenue just authorized a buyback program equal to 13% of its market cap.

[Taste Success @taste]

$QCOM closed Wednesday at $156, up 4% on the day.
But that’s not the story. The real story is what happened on the earnings call between 4:30 and 5:30 PM.
The stock dropped 7% in five minutes, then ripped 16% higher over the next hour — all because of a single sentence from the CEO 👇

[Taste Success @taste]

Beneath the headline drama, $QCOM Q2 looked like this:
• Adjusted EPS: $2.65 (beat $2.56)
• Revenue: $10.6B (in line)
• Automotive revenue: $1.3B, +38% YoY (record)
• Auto annualized run rate: just crossed $5B for the first time
• IoT: +9% YoY
The diversification away from handsets is finally showing up.

[Taste Success @taste]

$V is up 6% today on Q2 revenue growth of 17% — the largest top-line increase the company has posted since 2022.
Adjusted EPS: $3.31 vs. $3.10 expected.
Revenue: $11.23B vs. $10.74B expected.
Visa’s read on the consumer in their statement: “Spending remained resilient.”
This should benefit $fisv which I called out yesterday as my now largest position.

[Taste Success @taste]

The $HOOD playbook now:
Build prediction markets into the next pillar of the business. Less dependent on crypto prices. More dependent on event activity (sports, elections, earnings, whatever).
They added $100M to their 2026 expense plan to support Trump Accounts.
The crypto story is over. The next chapter just started.

[Taste Success @taste]

$HOOD is down 10% today after missing Q1 estimates.
Crypto trading revenue fell 47% YoY to $134M.
But buried in the same report is a number nobody is talking about: a single product line at Robinhood grew 320% YoY this quarter.
The pivot they’re making is below 👇

[Taste Success @taste]

The fundamentals on $HOOD are stronger than the headline miss suggests.
• Total revenue: $1.07B (+15% YoY)
• Funded accounts: 27.4M (an all-time record)
• Equities volume: $638B (+54% YoY)
• Options contracts: 586M (+17% YoY)
The miss was on crypto. Everything else is growing — fast.