THE ALL-IN INTERVIEW IS BACK! 🚨
@friedberg sits down with @ryancohen to discuss running $GME and his $56B offer to take over $EBAY
-- Building and selling $CHWY for $3.35B
-- How to compete with $AMZN in e-commerce
-- Activist investing and his road to GameStop CEO
-- What he sees in eBay: Massive potential, poor execution
-- Ryan lays out his three-part vision for eBay
++ more!
(0:00) David Friedberg intros GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen!
(1:56) Building and selling Chewy for $3.35B, how to compete with Amazon in e-commerce
(11:58) Post-Chewy life, activist investing, the road to GameStop CEO, expanding into collectibles
(26:39) Why he wants to buy eBay for $56B: Massive potential, poor execution (slow growth, rising expenses, seller relationship failure)
(43:58) Ryan's three-part vision for eBay: Cut costs, expand live commerce, create digital in-game collectible marketplace
(49:33) Why eBay has rejected the offer, media bias against GameStop
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Four purchases alone will make up ~75% of your entire life. That's where luxury spending should go, rest ends up being a rounding error
https://t.co/pgKbtbVhPd
You little rascals wanna get bearish right before the lows on $MSTR?
Bet against a company that holds ~850K BTC?
The move in purple is clearly a 3 wave move, that means the top is not in and it means the entire yellow box is a flat correction, 3 down (a) 3 up (b) 5 down(c).
Today was the most difficult day in the history of Digital Credit.
$STRC traded as low as $82.50 before recovering sharply. $SATA traded from par down to the low 90s before also rebounding. It was a difficult day for many investors.
What happened today was a leverage liquidation event, not a deterioration in underlying credit quality.
There is an old saying in income markets that the road to hell is paved with carry.
When investors discover an asset that offers attractive yields, relatively low volatility, and strong underlying credit characteristics, many eventually decide that owning it is not enough. They borrow against it. They lever it. They attempt to enhance the carry.
That works until it doesn't.
When markets move against leveraged holders, forced selling can create a cascade. Prices fall, margin calls increase, more selling occurs, and the cycle feeds on itself. The selling becomes disconnected from fundamentals and becomes driven by balance sheet constraints.
We have seen this many times before in traditional finance. Some of the largest hedge fund failures in history involved highly leveraged positions in U.S. Treasuries. Not because Treasuries suddenly became poor credits, but because investors became overextended while trying to earn additional yield on assets that appeared safe and stable.
That is the dynamic that played out today in Digital Credit.
Importantly, the creditworthiness of the issuers remains strong.
At @Strive, our dividend reserves remain intact. Our company is not under stress. We remain well positioned to meet our obligations and continue executing our strategy. The underlying credit profile remains substantially unchanged from where it was before today's volatility.
One of the lessons markets teach repeatedly is that leverage flushes are not necessarily evidence of weak collateral. In many cases, they occur precisely because the underlying collateral is viewed as stable enough to encourage excessive leverage in the first place.
In that sense, today's events were difficult for some investors, but they were also instructive.
Digital Credit is still in its infancy. It is better for the market to experience and learn from these dynamics now, while the market remains relatively small, than years from now when the market is many times larger. Investors, issuers, and market participants all benefit from understanding the risks associated with leverage and liquidity before the asset class reaches full scale.
No one knows with certainty whether today's lows will ultimately prove to be the bottom.
What is clear is that there was substantial demand at those prices. Both $STRC and $SATA experienced significant buying interest off their intraday lows, resulting in sharp recoveries. That price action reflects meaningful demand entering the market at lower levels and is an encouraging sign for the health of the asset class.
A liquidation event and a credit event are not the same thing.
The price action today did not change my conviction in the long-term opportunity for Digital Credit. If anything, it reinforced my belief that we are building an entirely new category of financial instrument that will experience many of the same growing pains that other large fixed income markets experienced before reaching maturity.
The volatility was uncomfortable for many participants.
The lesson will prove valuable.
Stay calm. Focus on fundamentals. Markets have a way of working through excesses, and when they do, stronger foundations are often left behind.