A lot has been made of recent events involving a US company, Gamestop and how their meteoric share price rise was a battle between David and Goliath, Goliath in this case being big hedge funds who short sold Gamestop in the expectation of large profits on the share price continuing to fall. David on the other hand, an army of small investors / speculators, buying Gamestop to stop the price falling and force the short sellers to buy stock at ever-increasing prices.
I don’t agree.
For sure, the way the share price yo-yoed around will mean a lot of people will have made a lot of money, just as another lot of people will have lost a lot of money and a lot more people will be somewhere in-between, with small losses and small profits. Who those people are, I don’t claim to know.
Initially, I was sucked in by the story too, until I took a step back to think about why it was getting so much publicity and being presented like this in the first place. as someone once said, “the revolution won’t be televised” and so it is here. If the small investor really was getting one over on the big guys, we probably wouldn’t even get to hear about it and rules would be quietly changed to stop it happening again.
Apparently WallStreetBets, the Reddit group supposedly behind all this, has several million members and it’d be hard not to believe at least some of those made a lot of money pumping and dumping a business whose days are probably numbered, physical shop locations in dying malls and city centres, selling games in boxes at a time that it’s all migrating to online, even the downloading of the products themselves.
What has this all got to do with Silver anyway?
Well, some posters claimed Silver was going to be the next target, with an attempt to attack JP Morgan, who short silver way in excess of the physical silver market, to suppress the price. Again, I have no doubt machinations take place to make the price whatever it needs to be at a given time, but I wouldn’t recommend that you try to actively participate on this base and furthermore, I wouldn’t recommend that you imagine yourself to be one of Robin Hood’s merry men, ambushing the bad guys and taking the loot to redistribute to your favoured needy causes. The game is often rigged, probably more so than any of us realises, but just occasionally, the riggers get found out. I just don’t believe this is one of those times. Admittedly, JP Morgan did have to pay a large settlement for active involvement in the silver market, but whether anyone has the resources to take the big boys on is another question.
Meanwhile, I can’t help but feel that this story will be used to bring in some laws, under the guise of investor protections. Perhaps that was the real intention of it all along.
If you invest in silver or gold, it’s a long term story, where some day people will realise prices of essential goods and services are rising dramatically in their local fiat currency and begin to wonder why. We aren’t there yet, but if precious metals start to rise priced in that same fiat currency, I believe that will be the major reason, that the game is up and it’s every man and woman for themselves. Much likelier than feeling yourself aligned to an online group of renegades who you’ve never met and who you don’t know the true motives for wanting you to get involved and spend your money on their cause, isn’t it?