Oh goodie, here come the ‘people laughed at the internet’ survivorship-bias defenses, citing exceptions like their thing’s gotta be one.

Steve Jobs fell ass-backwards into a billion dollars, several times over. He thought the Apple II would be an appliance and PHP would replace Flash. There is no such reality-distorting messianic figure for Gamestop. It’s a brick-and-mortar video game store, in an era where consoles may not even support physical media, and the PC market is almost entirely digital. They were never special. They were already the merger of several other generic consumer-electronics chains, and the ones that weren’t absorbed have all died off.

Y’all managed to throw them an obscene amount of money, for deeply questionable reasons, and they still hit this death spiral. You already did the most you could possibly do, to help them, and it did not work. It is not going to get better. Their entire business model is kinda fucked. Several obvious directions they could go are similarly fucked. Best Buy’s not even selling movies, any more.

Honestly, at the height of their relevance, Gamestop’s reputation was a sleazy pawn shop for used titles. They got rich buying bare-disc games for $3, total, and selling them for $3 less than a new copy. As digital distribution made that irrelevant slash impossible, they got into toys and collectables, putting them in direct competition with music stores and novelty shops.

Apple survived because Microsoft needed a competitor to avoid getting shattered as a monopoly. Apple took off because Jobs was a marketing-centric bastard who could sell the worst mouse ever designed by making it translucent. Apple exploded because they were the first company stubborn enough to strongarm AT&T into supporting a smartphone without carrier-dictated software. And oh yeah, because their fancy new smartphone didn’t fucking do anything, for an entire year, until they announced a proudly-censored monopoly software store that demanded 30% of all money spent on or in any iPhone application.

Gamestop survived because of whatever the hell you’d like to say happened in 2020. They have not taken off. They’ve cratered. Their prospects are miserable. I cannot even guess what you expect they’ll do. I genuinely hope you have a more substantial expectation than ‘they’ll turn around! :)’ because by itself that means literally nothing. But I’m not optimistic about that hope panning out. Concrete predictions would mean the possibility of being dead wrong, at some point in the near future, and it seems evident nobody got here through realistic expectations and reassuring milestones.

If the belief persists despite all evidence, to maintain ingroup cohesion, yes.

This is not about individuals. This is about your “community.” This whole place seems to exist to aggressively reject the possibility that one specific stock going up for a while was a fluke.

Politely stated nonsense.

“My life” does not involve stocks.

Greed and lying are not the same problem as delusion.

Normal stock-market greed works, unfortunately. However many asterisks you want to put on stocks being traded: real people make real money.

That’s not what’s happening here. This stock is going down, has gone done, and will continue to go down, to the surprise of absolutely nobody looking in from the outside. But you’re all convinced that’s not the case. You have staked some part of your psyche and your identity on denying a very explicable downward slope. There was a hot minute where things went sideways for some jerkoff millionaires - two entire years ago - and then, it stopped. What’s happened since then is mostly a precipitous decline with no bottom in sight.

The actual business you proudly own a tiny sliver of is not doing much actual business. Their industry is kind of fucked. Like, the general concept of buying video games at a physical location, might end. I don’t want that to happen - but what I want doesn’t decide what’s real. Not even if I poured umpteen hojillion dollars into a store that desperately relies on a particular outcome. Y’all did that for this company, and with all your money and attention, they’re still going to wind up bankrupt and delisted in the foreseeable future. At which point your genuine notarized fraction of a real company will be worth literally nothing, instead of what it’s worth right now, which is damn near nothing.

There is no reason to expect the next rise will be higher than the last. There is no reason to expect the next dip will be temporary. None of you have even tried to argue otherwise. You insist on your conviction - but the accusation is, you are acting in blind faith. Conviction is not a counterargument.

Honestly, I can’t even get excited about them, negatively. They were always sort of mediocre. I preferred Electronics Boutique. But they weren’t doing great, they’re not getting better, and OP’s straight-up eager to throw in good money after bad.

This is what successful scams look like… except there’d be someone taking the money. Instead, it’s a craze that refuses to end. Most crazes peter out as it becomes clear the initial high price was irrational, the peak was caused entirely by runaway speculation, and everything’s returning to the mean. People with a pile of tulip bulbs or comic books or commemorative plates just have to sigh and figure out where to put 'em. But our modern hellscape lets people make the Earth being flat their entire personality and social group, so surprise surprise, cargo cults emerge over wiggly lines.

One time they saw a guy in a tower talk into a box, and a whole goddamn airplane appeared out of the sky, so they’re up in a tree talking to boxes all day every day. Your face is gonna be so red when their airplane comes.

For me the continued approach to profitability is a huge sign the investment will be a success. The company can exceed estimates by a landslide and the price dips, so I just ignore the price and look at what’s happening. Ryan taking over tells me things weren’t going in a direction he approves of long term. The NFT marketplace is, as of now, an obvious flop (don’t know if it was/is profitable but it certainly is not panning out as planned) and I think it was a key disagreement between Ryan and Matt which lead to Matt being replaced by Ryan as CEO.

And apparently I struck a nerve because now you aren’t bragging about all the good you are doing but getting defensive and just using insults. So, whatever. It doesn’t matter. And I hate that I care even at all what happens to other people.

If someone else is reading this and haven’t yet fully committed to this cult please understand that the system is a mess, and likely there is no simple way out of it, least of all buying a retailer store stock. It’s ok to be aware and it’s hard to optimistic after you are. But hiding away from reality and only accepting what is confirming to your idea of reality is not be brave and not going to be beneficial to anyone other than people that can take advantage of you.