4.6 • 668 Ratings
🗓️ 4 February 2021
⏱️ 2 minutes
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0:00.0 | And even if, you know, some hedge funds have taken a hit, which they have, this kind of victory |
0:04.9 | for the little guy rendering of events is a little bit misleading. So can you explain why the David |
0:12.4 | and Goliath narrative, why things are not as kind of straightforward as all that? |
0:17.0 | Yeah, you know, it ends up being a lot more complicated on the one hand because if you look at GameStop or AMC, right, some of the largest holders of these companies that are being pumped by or, you know, being invested in by these communities and retail investors as part of a fight against short sellers are, you know, large institutional investors that have |
0:38.8 | massive slices or large slices of almost every single company, publicly listed company. |
0:44.9 | Black Rock, you know, which has is one of the five largest shareholders and 90% of the |
0:49.6 | S&P 500 is a huge game stop investor. It had a $174 million stake, about 13% of the company. And |
0:59.2 | at its peak, it was worth, at the peak of this explosion, it was worth $2.9 billion, right? |
1:04.1 | Of course, GameStop's shares are not going to be liquidated by BlackRock, right? But BlackRock |
1:08.6 | is also in the position to do something called securities lending, |
1:12.1 | where you can, you know, if you're a short seller and you are screwed on the fact that you don't |
1:16.4 | have the shares, you know, to get out of the position, right? You can come to me if I'm BlackRock, |
1:22.0 | and I can lend them to you and you just have to give me collateral equal to the value. |
1:25.4 | And the collateral and of itself is a deal, |
1:34.0 | or steal on this case, because the GameStop stock is worth nowhere near $400, right? It's not worth $4. It's worth more than $4, but it's not $400. And you're handing over collateral equivalent |
1:39.3 | to a massively inflated price just so you can get out of, you know, ridiculous short that you're trapped in. |
1:45.2 | These companies, Vanguard, Black Rock, Fidelity investments, have securities lending programs, |
1:50.3 | have massive stakes in companies like GameStop or AMCC or, you know, BlackBerry and so on. |
1:55.0 | And we're able to make, you know, relatively good amount of money, hundreds of millions of |
1:58.6 | dollars over the course of this entire spectacle, either lending out the securities, maybe liquidating some of their assets, that at the |
2:06.4 | same time should tell us, you know, hey, it is not simply that the little guy is waging more on the |
2:12.2 | hedge funds, right? They might have taken down one hedge fund or might take down other hedge funds. |
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