The Dude: It's like what Lenin said…you look for the person who will benefit, and, uh, uh...
Donny: I am the walrus.
The Dude: You know what I'm trying to say...
Donny: I am the walrus.
Walter Sobchak: Shut the fuck up, Donny! V.I. Lenin! Vladimir Illanich Uleninov!
Donny:What the fuck is he talking about, Dude?
Hello again, GME Gang. What a fun day we had yesterday! Could it continue today? Only Melvin Capital (and maybe Ryan Cohen) knows!
And an extra special hello today to our newest WSB lookie-loo, Mr. Cramer (Can I call you Jim? I’m gonna call you Jim).
Now Jim, from what I’ve been able to gather, you and your Boomer stocks and your Hot Manic Takes don’t always get a lot of love around here. But that’s not all your fault, Jim. The Paste-Eating Rocket Kids are often good for a solid meme (FYI: it’s pronounced “Mee-Mee.” Feel free to use that on air without verifying). But the Rocket Kids can be a dense bunch and they’re also often one click away from Total Financial Ruin (Quick shout out to SPCE: Pleas fly again). So you have to dig a bit in here to separate the wheat from the chaff, as someone like you actually says in real life. What the fuck even is chaff, Jim? And why do all Boomers seem to think that folksy farm-based idioms are the perfect way to conclude a thought?
Anyway. Those of us who watched your teevee clips last week where you reference your interest in WSB know that you, Jim Cramer, might be one of the Olds, but that you also Think Young(TM). https://www.thestreet.com/jim-cramestock-market-advice-moderna-boeing-fed-ftc-dec-15. So we’re going to do our best to help your young-thinkin’ brain find the Needle In the Haystack here so you can get All Your Ducks In a Row on GME. Because we know that you’re a long way from being Put Out to Pasture, and though you may be an out-of-touch millionaire prone to facile yammering, we now like you here, Jim—simply because you mentioned us and that made us blush a bit since we’re needy Millennials who just want our Boomer mommies and daddies to Tell Us They’re Proud of Us. So even though the Paste-Eating Rocket Kids here are often Buying A Pig in a Poke (Christ, please do not ever say that or the kids’ Mee-Mees are gonna fuck you up), we appreciate you recognizing that, every now and then, there’s something worth paying attention to over in this weird little pocket of the Interwebs. And since you’re actually telling your loyal single-finger-typin’ viewers to check out this WSB shitshow, and “if they’re running GME, then do some work on GME,” we assume you might actually be checking this shit out too, since all true Young Thinkers know that What’s Good for the Goose is Good for the Gander.
Now, is the GME play as solid as your recent recommendation to buy Bed Bath and Beyond? Who knows? That seems pretty stupid, and I would look it up myself this weekend but my nice little Saturday is already pretty full so I don’t know—I don’t know if I’ll have enough time. But I’ll tell you one thing: the GME play is a lot more fucking fun. Life in a pandemic is boring, but here in this weird WSB place, these kids like fun. And for all your Boomer weirdness, you seem like you still like to have a little fun in this Mad, Mad world of ours. So consider joining us here more often. A word of warning, though: if you don’t like all the dern cuss words we use around here, Jim, well that’s just, like, your opinion man, and we’ll have you know that the Supreme Court has roundly rejected Prior Restraint.
First thing’s first: we have a bit of a bone to pick with you (now there I go). The stuff you said last week about GME as the next Blockbuster was D-U-M dumb, Jim. You were a bit out of your fucking element with that. You even made our largest shareholder and conqueror-in-waiting, Mr. Ryan Cohen, send an emoji-only tweet in response, which if you know the super nice-guy Ryan Cohen like all of us do (we actually know nothing), that is pretty much the equivalent of him bringing his dog over to micturate on your and George Sherman’s rug.
Now, I myself have never been into the whole brevity thing, but I wanted to take this opportunity to get you up to speed on the GME movie you’ve wandered into. And I know you’re down with this because you told all your viewers that if WSB is talking about GME, then “make sure you know GME.” So before you say something Absolutely Mad again and Cohen sends a tweet with an even less ambiguous emoji, it’s high time that you start Making the Sure here, Jim. Just consider this to be CPT Hubbard delivering you some Orange Sunshine and turning you on to some of that Sweet, Delicious Non-Chaff Wheat you love so goddamn much.
Part 1: GME’s Bonkers-Ass Short Interest
Now, I’m going to lead with the most crowd-pleasing part of the story here (Get ready, Rocket Kids!), and it’s the one that you did not even seem remotely familiar with in your “Stay out of GameStop, Deadbeat!” rant last week. Maybe that was by design or maybe not. We’ll return to that, Jim. But the point here is: the short interest here is batshit insane. And not just your garden variety Boomer in Rolled Up Sleeves Ranting About Buying Estee Lauder While Hitting Buttons On The Beep-Bop-Boop Machine kind of insanity. Really and truly fucking nuts.
So to TL/DR this shit for you, Jim (to use the parlance of our times): GME is the most shorted stock trading today—by far. https://financhill.com/most-heavily-shorted-stocks-today How shorted? Well, the value of shares short exceeds the market cap of the company; there are currently more shares short than the total number of shares outstanding. And when factoring in the institutional and insider ownership, the total short percentage of float is nearly 300%. https://www.gurufocus.com/term/FloatPercentageOfTSO/GME/Float-Percentage-Of-Total-Shares-Outstanding/GameStop-Corp Even higher, actually, now that Cohen’s interest is over 10%. Now, I’m not a numbers whiz like you, but that level of short interest and the small available float seems pretty fucked up to me. Like: “how is that even legal?” fucked up. And just for a frame of reference, the third most shorted security right now is your beloved Bed Bath and Beyond, with a short percentage of float at a nice and tidy 69%.
Are you starting to gather why some of us in this weird little pocket of the Interwebs are a little excited about GME? You see, as u/Jeffamazon and RodAlzmann u/Uberkikz11 and others have explained in these here corners and on the twitter machine with their top-notch DD, and as I will translate to you in lingo you can dig, the short sellers got way over their skiis on this one expecting a bankruptcy in Spring of 2020 that never came. And yet, amazingly, the short interest has only increased since then—there has effectively been no covering in the aggregate and, in fact, the short percentage has only gone up. And now, on the threshold of 2021, we all sit atop a massive powder keg wondering what is going to be the thing that finally lights this shit up. And at the end of this little missive, I’m going to tell you what I think that thing might be (Spoiler: It’s Ryan Cohen! Better start getting used to seeing his name, Jim, because this dude does not fuck around and he’s not going anywhere).
https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/k4csaa/the_real_greatest_short_burn_of_the_century_part/
https://twitter.com/RodAlzmann
https://thecollective.finance/2020/10/gamestop-gme-a-squeeze-to-44-from-14-can-be-justified-fundamentally-100-of-the-shares-are-short-watch-out/
Part 2: GameStop Isn’t Going Bankrupt and People Actually Want to Buy Shit There
So, you foul mouthed little prick, a bonkers-ass short interest is neat and all, but why is Jim Cramer wrong when Jim Cramer compares GME to Blockbuster you might be asking yourself in the third person. First, the most obvious answer, Jim, which you should fucking know already: Blockbuster was nearly $1 Billion in debt and missing debt payments left and right when it was delisted way back in 2010. That was also when there was a bit of a credit crunch, if you recall, right after that whole Housing Crash Unpleasantness that you saw coming from a mile away and from which you made hundreds of millions of dollars due to your contrarian foresight—I’m sorry, I’m clearly confusing you with Christian Bale starring as Dr. Michael Burry, weirdo head of Scion Asset Management, which also holds about 1.4M shares of GME (You really gotta start looking into this stuff, Jim. This story is made for TV, man—and you Boomers were raised by TV and you turned out TV!). Also, in 2010 when Netflix is ripping and when Blockbuster was about to be delisted and bankrupt, an analyst noted the obvious fact that Blockbuster had “nothing on the horizon that makes it look like Blockbuster is going to be more profitable.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-blockbusteblockbuster-wins-debt-reprieve-forced-to-delist-idUSTRE66052720100702
But Jim, if your Blockbuster comparison has any plausibility, GameStop must have a major debt problem then, right? And yet just last month GameStop repaid $125M in debt several months ahead of time. It’s also really weird that over the past year management bought back a ton of shares, taking the OS from 102M down to just under 70M (making a short squeeze even more likely, my Rocket Children). The weirdness continues with a soon-to-be-bankrupt company holding almost $500M in cash on hand. And according to George Sherman’s “Thine Omnichannel Shalt Be The Omni-est Channel of Them All” Conference Call following Q3, by March 2021 GME will have retired a total of $500M in debt and returned $200M to shareholders through stock buy backs. I’m no expert here, and I do not presently own a Beep-Bop-Boop Machine, but that’s all pretty weird shit to be doing if you’re about to go bankrupt.
No, no – I get it: who the fuck actually looks at balance sheets anyway before spouting off about what a stock is going to do? I sure as hell don’t. That’s why I follow my man u/Uberkikz11, since that dude is a GME DD Encyclopedia and was born to crunch numbers. No, when Really Smart People make the Blockbuster comparison, it’s usually just Mouth Sounds for: A B&M Store That Used to Be Popular But Now Is Not Because Technology, QED. But here even the Really Smart People might be missing something as well. They’re right in the sense that GME must use this new console cycle window and cash influx to quickly pivot to a tech-first gaming company (more on that and our boy RC shortly!), but they’re wrong on the timing and relevance of this Super Smart Insight.
So fine, they’re doing ok on debt and cash. But who even goes to that 90s-Ass-Looking Cluttered Mall Geekery anymore anyways? I confess: in my darkest moments, as the short sellers manipulate the fuck out of this stock and I curse the names Bell and Sherman, I too have wondered this. But it turns out that, just like I have no idea why anyone listens to Maroon 5 or eats at Applebee’s, apparently a lot of people in America do shit that I do not. Crazy huh? So here is some pretty neat data showing us how out of touch we might be here, Jim:
First, when a pretty large sample size of people were recently asked the question: which of the following stores or websites do you plan to buy holiday gifts from? The #5 response from United States Americans was none other than GameStop (Ticker, Jim: GME). Only Walmart, Amazon, Target, and Dollar Store (poor people buy gifts too, Jim) were ahead of little old GameStop. That’s higher than Nike, Macy’s, the Apple Store—and double the response of Bed Bath and Fucking Beyond in every category they surveyed. Check it: (h/t to my man u/snowk88)
https://stocktwits.com/snowk88/message/260983915
That’s kinda crazy huh? See Jim, when you Think Young(TM), you really can learn something new every day. And by following our man u/snowk88 (@snowk88 over at stocktwits), I learn lots of cool shit. But guess who already knew that? The guy that wrote this bad-ass letter that identifies GME’s brand and customer data as being one of the most valuable things GME has going for it. https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/RC_Ventures_Letter_to_GameStop.pdf
So now we know that Real Life People actually buy shit at GameStop here in the year of our lord 2020. But like that analyst from 2010 said about Blockbuster, there must not be anything on the horizon for GameStop to be more profitable in 2021, right?
Now, I will admit that being a bit bearish on GME in December of 2020 would make more sense if, say, GameStop were the nation’s largest purveyor of limp and half-lit pumpkin spice-scented candles and we were exiting the apogee of Shitty Candle Season. But as it turns out, GameStop is currently selling basically the most sought-after items that exist in the marketplace right now—where demand for the Xbox and Ps5 is far outpacing supply and is projected to continue well into 2021. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-11-17-microsoft-expects-xbox-series-x-s-shortages-until-q2-2021 I don’t really need to get into the details on that here, because it’s pretty goddamn obvious, but I think 2020 GameStop at the precipice of a new console cycle might be in a bit of a better position than, say, 2010 Blockbuster relying on the latest Adam Sandler release to lift its sagging rental numbers. But I don’t know. Millions of people don’t watch my show looking for Candid Analysis from me and my folksy man-of-the-people-lookin’ rolled-up sleeves.
Part 3: Ryan Cohen is the Sword of Damocles Hanging Over the Short Sellers’ Dumbass Heads
And now we’ve gotten to the best part. It’s my favorite part of all of this, Jim, and if you give this a little time, I think it will be yours too. You see, all that corporate bla bla bla about balance sheets and console cycles and early debt repayment and overleveraged short sellers and brand recognition is neat and all—and definitely worth a second look by itself. Maybe even a little Beep-Bop-Boop on the ol’ sound machine—I don’t know your methods. But the real thing that’s about to rip all our faces off here is the business and investment decisions of a mild-mannered wunderkind named Ryan Cohen.
Now you can revisit my prior epistle if you want to know a bit more about the involvement of Mr. Ryan Cohen in Le Affair GameStop. https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/kakxrm/gme_tribe_a_story_about_how_ryan_cohen_is_about/. My fly-by-night theory of his lawyer’s possible use of the consent solicitation could have probably marinated for another day, but the thrust of my argument there was that Cohen and his attorney have been laying the groundwork to come after GameStop for a while now. And that Cohen was likely emboldened by the humiliating, lame-ass CC performance by some dude with a mid-century comic-strip sounding name that we’ll all soon know only as: The Guy With the Punchable Face Who Used to Be CEO of GameStop.
But here is where things get really interesting. This is a story in the making, Jim, for fucks sake - take notes! This Monday, on December 21, Mr. Ryan Cohen filed a revised 13D showing that last week he started buying a shit-ton of shares—starting on Tuesday December 15th—which is the day after the stock price inexplicably plunged on Monday the 14th and the very same day you were yammering on the teevee about GME being Blockbuster! Instead of listening to you, however, Cohen started buying more GME shares (super-sleuth dark pool watchers u/rgrAi and u/snowk88 noticed in real-time that there was some very large accumulation taking place), which culminated in the big reveal that Cohen purchased a total of 2,501,000 additional shares last week—500,000 of which were purchased on Friday December 18, 2020 at the price of $16.02 a share. Ryan Cohen is still the single largest shareholder of GME with 9,001,000 shares in total, taking his ownership of GME above the 10% threshold from 9.98% to 12.9%. And so he apparently thinks that the floor for his investment is $16.02 per share. Is he still buying? We’ll know soon. But yesterday seemed like a little taste of what it might look like if a large buyer steps in to prevent short sellers from manipulating all of my nervous little Rocket Children here and their delicate little paper hands.
There was another thing we learned from this 13D filing: Ryan Cohen has apparently hired a new attorney and law firm. Instead of the great Christopher Davis of Kline Kaplan, now Ryan Cohen is represented by Ryan P. Nebel, a partner with Olshan Frome Wolosky, LLP. Now, if you’re familiar with my prior ramblings, you might wonder if I was a bit confused, and maybe even a little sad, at this sudden change from my man C. Davis. And you might be a little right. But then the wonder of the internet allowed me to learn a bit about these new lawyers. And holy shit, things are about to get fun.
Now, I liked what I knew about Chris Davis and he seems like a genuine bad ass activist attorney. But the folks at Olshan Frome and Wolosky, LLP are Next Level Players and really seem tailor-made for this exact situation. First off, Olshan is ranked as the top global lawfirm for Activist Attorneys. https://www.olshanlaw.com/assets/htmldocuments/Bloomberg%20Activism%20League%20Tables%20H12020.pdf (H/t @flummoxed at stocktwits). They seem to be the go-to law firm for major proxy battles initiated by activist investors. But possibly even more important is that Olshan is the same firm that represented Hestia and Permit in their successful proxy battle earlier this year to appoint two new directors to the GME Board. I’m not going into the fine details of that, because this is already a bit of a long-form Idiot’s New Yorker article, but GameStop just went through a proxy fight last year with Activist Investors Hestia Capital and Permit Capital, which resulted in two Board seats for our shareholder buds from Hestia and Permit. So, it’s reasonable to assume that the attorneys at Olshan might know their way around GameStop at this point and where the pressure points are here.
http://www.globallegalchronicle.com/hestia-capital-and-permit-capitals-two-new-directors-to-the-gamestop-board/
https://www.olshanlaw.com/resources-mentions-HestiaCapital-PermitCapital-GameStop-BoardofDirectors-ShareholderActivism.html
And if you follow u/snowk88 over at stocktwits (@snowk88)— you’d also find a wealth of DD on how Olshan rolls when entering these activist-investor-replaces-dumbass-boards-and-CEOs type disputes. To bottom line it: they get it fucking done.
https://stocktwits.com/snowk88/message/266158534
https://stocktwits.com/snowk88/message/266155112
https://stocktwits.com/snowk88/message/266153175
But what else did we learn from the 13D? We learned that Ryan Cohen is definitely not going anywhere any time soon. Specifically, the filing notes that RC Ventures intends to continue to engage in discussions with GameStop’s board “regarding means to drive stockholder value, including through changes to the composition of the board and other corporate governance enhancements." And while RC Ventures “desires to come to an amicable resolution with [GameStop, it] will not hesitate to take any actions that it believes are necessary to protect the best interests of all stockholders.”
I really like that last part, don’t you? And although I thought his November 16th letter was pretty goddamn clear, this 13D just ratcheted up the transparency level here. In sum, Ryan Cohen has all of our backs and he’s going to replace this Board and Sherman with people that are on the level and that will help implement his vision.
And now seems like a good time to return to those “Ryan Cohen: Boy Genius” articles that were definitely NOT part of a well-coordinated pre-hostile takeover media campaign initiated earlier this year. I think there might be a few things in those articles that Mr. Cohen wanted all of us shareholders (as well as the short sellers and the Board he’s about to replace) to really and truly understand. Recall also that Cohen is not one for diversification or for playing it safe. So here’s a few choice nuggets for you to ponder:
***
Bloomberg, June 2020: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-05/chewy-founder-cashes-out-bets-on-apple-wells-fargo
· "It's too hard to find, at least for me, what I consider great ideas," he says. "When I find things I have a lot of conviction in, I go all-in."
· Cohen uses the word “conviction” a lot. He says it’s something he learned from his father, who ran a glassware importing business in Montreal where Cohen grew up. “He taught me how to block the noise from the masses,” says Cohen. “To have a point of view and have conviction and not waver.”
· He wouldn’t, however, recommend his [non-diversified] investment approach to everyone. “You need to have the temperament to block the noise,” he says. “Sometimes it feels like a roller coaster.”
· He likens his obsessive focus on building Chewy to his approach to stock picking. "I don't want to swing for a single," he says.
***
You hear that, Jim? Our man Cohen likes idioms too! But fuck those farm idioms, Jim – we’re upgrading to the Sportsball kind now. So what’s the takeaway here? I’d say that Cohen has his Eye On The Ball and that it’s time for all short sellers and the Board to Throw in The Towel because Ryan Goddamn Cohen likes to Take the Bull By The Horns and will ensure that he Hits a Homerun for shareholders that believe in his vision.
Here’s a few more things Mr. Cohen wants all of us to know:
***
Forbes, August 2020: https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2020/08/16/entrepreneur-chewy-founder-ryan-cohen-shares-his-best-advice/?sh=41e1370e5840
· “For me, each no sounded like they just didn’t understand my vision. It was frustrating at times, but never discouraging. Those ‘no’s never made me doubt my strategy – it was the opposite. I was motivated by all the rejections and they just got me fired up.”
· “I understood that thinking big was likely going to be misunderstood along the way. I’m contrarian by nature, so being misunderstood often validates what I’m doing. It wasn’t until Chewy boxes were on doorsteps across the country that the bulk of investors started to recognize our formula.”
· “[M]y biggest risk would have been not taking risk. The risk of going head-to-head against Amazon. The risk of insourcing fulfillment. The risk of building a company in Florida rather than a popular tech hub. The risk of spending $3 million a month on TV ads, more than Home Depot HD -0.1%'s budget. The risk of hiring expensive executives even though we weren’t profitable. These decisions were some of the most controversial and required me being comfortable betting against conventional wisdom, and were often contrary to the advice of my board. Suffice it to say, I was not the most popular board member.”
· “Dad never swayed when he believed in something. I never compromised my vision, regardless how many investors turned me down I was not going to give up on building Chewy into the world’s biggest online pet retailer. I love to be challenged, and I’m flexible on details, but I’m never willing to give up.”
***
Goddamn it, Ryan. I was done having children but now you’ve forced me into getting back on that train just so I can name this future child Ryan Fucking Cohen. Thanks a lot, asshole.
But to return to my point: are those the statements of a man that seems likely to walk away at this point? Or is Cohen trying to tell us all to get ready because he is going All In on this shit?
So where does this leave us? After a huge week where Cohen buys 2.5M more shares and then the SP skyrockets to $20 yesterday on that news? Well, this is where I want to tip my cap to my man Justin Dopierala over at Seeking Alpha and allow him to conclude this section. He, along with his pal Dmitriy Kozin have been pretty clear-eyed on all this shit for a while now and they both deserve some credit. And I know I gave my main man Justin a bit of a hard time in my last novella, but the dude is sharp as hell and helped a lot of us see the forest through the trees here. And you should also definitely invite him to join your poker nights (seriously: check out the dude’s tweet in response to our own Rod Alzmann’s introduction of the #WeWantCohen hashtag right after the Q3 call debacle). https://twitter.com/DOMOCAPITAL/status/1336446055685230592. You have no comment on a potential takeover involving Ryan Cohen, Justin after your hour-long googly-eyed call together? Can’t believe you’re just preemptively leaving the WSJ and Bloomberg hanging like that. Justin, I love you dude, but if I’m holding pocket Kings I’m folding after that tweet because that twinkle in your eye lets me know you’re about to drop two Aces on my ass.
Anyway. Here is what our man Dopierala thinks might happen here soon (and he called this way back on November 17th- and sorry - no links here, per the mods, as apparently no Alpha must ever be Sought from these parts):
I think a very likely outcome at this point is a majority slate next shareholder meeting where Cohen takes over BOD and then makes himself CEO. A majority slate proxy battle would require all institutions to call in shares and would force a squeeze.
We’re intrigued, Justin. Please continue:
If Ryan Cohen successfully negotiates a purchase price with the Board then the shareholders will have to vote on it. Unlike the proxy battle where Hestia and Permit were running a minority slate of directors, an offer to purchase GameStop would force institutions like Vanguard and Blackrock to call in their shares. By doing so, the shorts would be forced to close out their positions and GameStop would finally have the greatest short squeeze of all-time. Ironically, Cohen could use this opportunity to sell all of his shares and use the proceeds to entirely fund the acquisition of GameStop going down as the first person in history to acquire a billion dollar company... for absolutely nothing. In fact, his acquisition price would be less than zero.
And now is when I get to speculate on what I think is going to happen here. But I do not necessarily think Cohen is going to put an offer to buy GME to take private. That would definitely trigger a MOASS, but I’m not sure I see it given the attorneys he’s hired and his recent buys up to $16 and the amount of cash that would take. Like Dopierala’s first comment, though, I think Cohen is going to nominate directors to replace nearly the entire Board of Directors with a vote happening at the annual meeting and once that Board is in place, they’ll appoint Cohen as CEO. And as Justin notes, if he nominates a majority slate of directors, shares will have to be called in to vote. And this vote and proxy battle will make the prior minority slate Hesita/Permit battle, and the tiny short squeeze that took place when that happened, look tame by comparison.
Now everyone: get your calendars out. Because the date to nominate directors here is in Mid-March, and my super-smart corporate lawyer buds inform me that it’s standard practice to file about 7-10 days prior. So, if this actually happening, we should be seeing something on this by early March.
But even though early March is now the mark on the wall, today’s insane price action caused me to think about all of this a bit harder and speculate a bit more. And a major h/t to my buds on the stocktwits board, especially u/rgrAi (@amarbar) for all the sharp analysis on this. But if you were Ryan Cohen and you knew this company was hugely undervalued and you had a high level of CONVICTION here and also knew you needed shareholder votes to sweep out these dumbasses and implement your vision—then how would you play this with the short interest here as crazy as it is? I’d keep buying. Why? Well, lots of reasons, you smart alecks.
First, so I have more guaranteed votes (duh?). Second, so that when the building starts burning and short hedge funds run for the exits they find that a mild-mannered Millennial with super-good ideas has sealed off all the doors and windows. That’s gruesomely delicious, isn’t it? Why else, CPT? Well, finally, and maybe most importantly, because I would want to excite and delight all my fellow shareholders by triggering a slow-burn short squeeze, raising the SP significantly, so that I can once again make the point (as he did in the Nov 16 letter) that the incompetent management that caused a HUGE drop in SP following that utterly incompetent Q3 call and the shelf registration, had nothing to do with the SP increase that again happened once Cohen announced his intent and started buying. Not the console cycle, not the cost containment measures, not the buybacks and not the early debt reduction. Nope: rightly or wrongly, shareholders will see Ryan Cohen buying shares and the corresponding SP increase and everyone—especially all new buyers who are delighted at their good fortune and swept up by Ryan Cohen Fever 2021—will start getting #WeWantCohen tattoos on their ass they’ll be so happy. And all of us, newly enriched by Ryan Cohen’s Big Canadian Balls and tactical brilliance, will crawl over glass to vote for him over The Boomer Artist Formally Known As GameStop’s CEO. I could be very wrong on this last point in particular, but if we start seeing 13Ds drop here shortly, things should get very fun very quickly.
Part 4: A Return to Our Short-Squeeze-to-Da-Moon Discussion: Who’s Side Are You Fucking On, Jim?
Now, Jim, given the fast friendship we’re creating here, and all we’ve been through over the past 5000 words, I hesitate in bringing this up. But we’ve all seen the video, Jim. You know the one I’m talking about. Yes, the one where you actually tell the truth about how short selling hedge funds manipulate the market to knock down the price of perfectly good securities that many hard-working people invest in—many normal-ass people all assuming they wont ever have to Point Where On The Dolly The Invisible Hand of the Economy Touched Them. But that’s not life now is it Jim? And fuck those poor-ass rubes for not knowing how to play the game with you sophisticated Masters of the Universe, amirite?
https://www.reddit.com/dashpay/comments/93evx4/jim_cramer_reveals_dirty_tricks_short_sellers_use/
https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/cramer-market-manipulato
So where are you in this whole GME/Cohen story, Jim? You candidly (gleefully?) acknowledge that a prime strategy that shorts deploy is to spread negative rumors that are then amplified by Big Smart Trustworthy Financial Media Titans like yourself to shake out unsophisticated retail players like my Rocket Kids here—who because of their tiny paper hands and you mean short selling brutes often subsist on paste and paste alone.
So for this particular security, are you the one helping with the manipulation and actively creating the “new truth” or are you just one of the Useful Idiots that these short sellers use to manipulate with an anodyne, TV media-ready comparison like: GameStop Is The Next Blockbuster? And how in the fuck does this fit into your Think Young(TM) project, Jim? Because if there is one thing that we over at WSB fucking hate, it’s a bunch of Manipulative Short Selling Boomer Fuckwads. Why on earth would a hip Young Thinker like you want to be included in that crew, Jim?
And I know we’re all friends here now, Jim, but I need to push back a bit on some of what you said in that video in such a cavalier whatareyagonnado manner. So if I understand you, short and distort and fomenting negative reactions from retail players based on deliberately false narratives is illegal, but still easy as fuck to do "because the SEC doesn't understand it." But you fucking do understand it, Jim! So why are you helping those short and distorters break the law here? Why are you being such an obtuse dumbshit? Just check out what happens to the borrow rate and short selling every time there is any good news for GME:
https://stocktwits.com/Slantedangles/message/264519950 (h/t @slantedangles). This manipulation isn't just happening with GME; it is happening everywhere. It’s baked into the cake. And that is pretty fucked up that we all just accept it because whatareyagonnado.
I think that one thing that those of us who truly do Think Young(TM) have a hard time understanding is at what point in your lives do you Boomers all finally come to realize that it’s maybe time to stop playing the game like you have been? What point do you finally have enough where doing the right thing matters more than getting paid? Maybe start by telling the truth more often—and maybe don’t go out of your way to help those corrupt-ass hedge fund managers who continually fuck over average people merely because they were stupid enough to believe you all. What contempt you Masters of the Universe have for all of them—for all of us. There is a bigger story here on GME and this out-of-control short interest (naked shorting, counterfeit shares) http://counterfeitingstock.com/CS2.0/CounterfeitingStock.html than even Ryan Cohen and the inevitable short squeeze we’re about to witness here. And it begins and ends with people like you and Melvin Capital and Bank of America not giving a fuck about the rules while thinking you’re smarter than the rest of us who do—but who lack power to do anything about it. And you know what? Maybe you are smarter than us. You certainly know how to play this game pretty well, as that video shows. But if I know my old school 1980s movies like I think I do, this is usually the part of the story where the rag-tag kids from across the tracks come over to show you hubristic rich fuckheads what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass.
Now I myself have never dabbled in pacifism, Jim, so this isn’t too much of a stretch for me, but seeing that video of yours and seeing the insane short interest and all the manipulation here makes me want to burn the whole corrupt system to the ground—while barricading the doors to trap in those arrogant-ass short sellers who lie and cheat and distort to profit off average people. And though I’m certain that this larger battle is not driving him, maybe that result is one that Ryan Cohen wouldn’t mind too. Though he’s a polite Canadian and would probably just let everyone know that he’s not really mad, just disappointed. But me? I’m an Angry American and I say: Block the fucking doors and windows and light that shit up.
So maybe this epistle will be useful for your Think Young(TM) project and cause you to reflect a bit more on what’s really going on out there with this whole GME thing and the likely illegal shorting that has driven the short percentage of float to these insane levels, drawing in new retail shorts too stupid to know what’s even happening. Or maybe it wont cause you to reflect in the slightest (count me as one of those cynical types that see your overtures to WSB as a transparent play for greater market share from the Young Crowd since your old-ass audience is dying and/or switching to bonds). But in a few months when all the Billy Ray Valentines and Louis Winthorpes assembled here are toasting each other in stupid shirts on a white-sand beach somewhere, we do not want you to look back on your knee-jerk boomer-ass dismissal of GME and your Useful Idiot blathering with that same tinge of regret and longing you feel when you look at a pre-Client 9 picture of you and your old roomie: warm-toes-and-hosiery-enthusiast E. Spitzer, Esq.
In conclusion: GME = Blockbuster comparisons are for Simps and Corrupt Short-and-Distorters. Don’t be like them, Jim. And to my Rocket Children: the only weapon we wield in this stupid game is Diamond Hands with a float like this. Toughen the fuck up.
And Happy Holidays everyone.
--CPT Hubbard
TL/DR: Jim Cramer likes farm-based idioms and apparently being a useful idiot to scummy short selling hedge funds. DD on the GME turnaround is solid and overleveraged short sellers should be shitting themselves. Ryan Cohen, our polite, hard-working Canadian benefactor is about to rip all our fucking faces off and trigger a MOASS. Probably even by early March, if that time is good for you (he’ll text before he comes). And fuck infinite regress: It’s rockets all the way down here. 🚀🚀🚀 Now: diamond hands, motherfuckers.
**This is a shitpost and is only to be used as investment and life advice for Mr. Jim Cramer, Esq.

(Note the connections)
CargoMetrics Cracks the Code on Shipping Data
Scott Borgerson and his team of quants at hedge fund firm CargoMetrics are using satellite intel on ships to identify mispriced securities.
By Fred R. Bleakley February 04, 2016
Link to article
One late afternoon last November, as a ping-pong game echoed through the floor at CargoMetrics Technologies’ Boston office, CEO Scott Borgerson was watching over the shoulder of Arturo Ramos, who’s responsible for developing investment strategies with astrophysicist Ronnie Hoogerwerf. At Ramos’s feet sat Helios, his brindle pit-bull-and-­greyhound mix. All three men were staring at a computer screen, tracking satellite signals from oil tankers sailing through the Strait of Malacca, the choke point between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea where 40 percent of the world’s cargo trade moves by ship.
CargoMetrics, a start-up investment firm, is not your typical money manager or hedge fund. It was originally set up to supply information on cargo shipping to commodities traders, among others. Now it links satellite signals, historical shipping data and proprietary analytics for its own trading in commodities, currencies and equity index futures. There was an air of excitement in the office that day because the signals were continuing to show a slowdown in shipping that had earlier triggered the firm’s automated trading system to short West Texas Intermediate (WTI) oil futures. Two days later the U.S. Department of Energy’s official report came out, confirming the firm’s hunch, and the oil futures market reacted accordingly.
“We nailed it for our biggest return of the year,” says Borgerson, who had reason to breathe more easily. His backers were watching closely. They include Blackstone Alternative Asset Management (BAAM), the world’s largest hedge fund allocator, and seven wealthy tech and business leaders. Among them: former Lotus Development Corp. CEO Jim Manzi, who also had a long career at IBM Corp.
Compelling these investors and Borgerson to pursue the shipping slice of the economy is the simple fact that in this era of globalization 50,000 ships carry 90 percent of the $18.5 trillion in annual world trade.
That’s no secret, of course, but Borgerson and CargoMetrics’ backers maintain that the firm is well ahead of any other investment manager in harnessing such information for a potential big advantage. It’s why Borgerson has kept the firm in stealth mode for years. In its earlier iteration, from 2011 to 2014, CargoMetrics was hidden in a back alley, above a restaurant. Now that he’s running an investment firm, Borgerson declines to name his investors unless, like Manzi and BAAM, they are willing to be identified.
“My vision is to map historically and in real time what’s really going on in economic supply and demand across the planet,” says the U.S. Coast Guard veteran, who prides himself and the CargoMetrics team on not being prototypical Wall Streeters. “The problem is enormous, but the potential reward is huge.”
According to Borgerson, CargoMetrics is building a “learning machine” that will be able to automatically profit from spotting any publicly traded security that is mispriced, using what he refers to as systematic fundamental macro strategies. He calls the firm a new breed of quantitative investment manager. In unguarded moments he sees himself as the Steve Jobs or Elon Musk of portfolio management.
Though his ambitions may sound audacious, one thing is certain: Borgerson doesn’t lack in self-confidence. Over the past six years, he has secretly and painstakingly built a firm heavy in Ph.D.s that can manage a database of hundreds of billions of historical shipping records, conduct trillions of calculations on hundreds of computer servers and systematically execute trades in 28 different commodities and currencies.
For his part, Borgerson seems an unlikely architect of such a serious, ambitious endeavor. Easygoing and fond of joking with his colleagues, he is a hands-off manager who credits CargoMetrics’ investment prowess to his team. His brand of humor comes through even when he’s detailing the series of challenges he had starting the firm. After using the phrase “It was hard” several times, he pauses and adds, “Did I mention it was hard?” Although Borgerson declines to provide any specifics about Cargo­Metrics’ portfolio, citing the advice of his lawyers, performance during the three years of live trading apparently has been strong enough to keep his backers confident and his team of physicists, software engineers and mathematicians in place. “Hopefully, it won’t be too long before we can make a more significant investment,” says BAAM CEO J. Tomilson Hill. Former Lotus CEO Manzi is optimistic about the firm’s prospects: “It has an unbelievable edge with its historical data.”
CargoMetrics was one of the first maritime data analytics companies to seize the potential of the global Automatic Identification System. Ships transmit AIS signals via very high frequency (VHF) radio to receiver devices on other ships or land. Since 2004, large vessels with gross tonnage of 300 or more are required to flash AIS positioning signals every few seconds to avoid collisions. That allows Cargo­Metrics to pay satellite companies for access to the signals gleaned from 500 miles above the water. The firm uses historical data to identify cargo and aggregation of cargo flow, and then applies sophisticated analysis of financial market correlations to identify buying and selling opportunities.
“We’re big-data junkies who could not have founded CargoMetrics without the radical breakthroughs of this golden age of technology,” Borgerson says. The revolution in cloud computing has been instrumental. CargoMetrics leverages the Amazon Web Services platform to run its analytics and algorithms on hundreds of computer servers at a fraction of the cost of owning and maintaining the hardware itself.
At his firm’s headquarters — where the lobby displays a series of colored semaphore signal flags that spell out the mathematical equation for the surface area of the earth —Borgerson leads the way to his server room. It’s the size of a closet; inside, a thick pipe carries all the data traffic and analytic formulas CargoMetrics needs. That computing power alone would have cost $30 million to $40 million, Manzi says.
CargoMetrics is pursuing a modern version of an age-old quest. Think of the Rothschild family’s use in the 19th century of carrier pigeons and couriers on horseback to bring news from the Napoleonic Wars to their traders in London, or, in the 1980s, oil trader Marc Rich’s use of satellite phones and binoculars for relaying oil tanker flow.
Other quant-focused Wall Street firms are latching onto the satellite ship-tracking data. But, Borgerson says, “I would bet my life on a stack of Bibles that no one in the world has the shipping database and analytics we have.” The reason he’s so convinced is that from late 2008 he was an early client of the satellite companies that had begun collecting data received from space and on land to build a large database of all the world’s vessel movements in one place.
That’s what caught Hill’s eye at Blackstone when he learned of Cargo­Metrics a few years ago. BAAM now has a managed account with the firm. “If anyone else tries to replicate what CargoMetrics has, they will be years behind [Borgerson] on data analytics,” Hill says. “We know that a number of hedge fund data scientists want his data.”
But too much reliance on big data can go wrong, say many academicians. “There is a huge amount of hype around big data,” observes Willy Shih, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School. “Many people are saying, ‘Let the data speak; we don’t need theory or modeling.’ I argue that even with using new, massively parallel computing systems for modeling and simulation, some forces in nature and the economy are still too big and complex for computers to handle.”
Shih’s skepticism doesn’t go as far as to say the data challenge on global trade is too big a puzzle to solve. When informed of the Cargo­Metrics approach, he called it “very valid and creative. They just have to be careful not to throw away efforts to understand causality.”
Another big-data scholar, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of electrical engineering and computer science Samuel Madden, also urges caution. “What worries me is that models become trusted but then fail,” he explains. “You have to validate and revalidate.”
Borgerson grew up in Southeast Missouri, in a home on Rural Route 5 between Festus and Hematite. His father was a former Marine infantry officer and police official, and his mother a high school French and Spanish teacher. The family traveled 15 miles to Crystal City to attend Grace Presbyterian Church, which was central to young Borgerson’s upbringing: There he was a youth elder, became an Eagle Scout and received a God and Country Award. The church was across the street from the former home of NBA all-star and U.S. senator Bill Bradley, whose backboard Borgerson used for basketball practice.
When it came to choosing what to do after high school, Borgerson was torn between becoming a Presbyterian minister and accepting an appointment to the U.S. Coast Guard Academy or West Point. He went with the Coast Guard because, he says, “the humanitarian mission really appealed to me, and I had never been on a boat before.”
At the academy, in New London, Connecticut, Borgerson played NCAA tennis and was also a cutup, racking up demerits for such antics as placing a sailboat on the commandant of cadets’ front lawn and leading bar patrons in a rendition of “Semper Paratus,” the school’s theme song. Still, he graduated with honors and spent the next four years piloting a 367-foot cutter — which seized five tons of cocaine in the Caribbean — then captaining a patrol boat that saved 30 lives on search-and-rescue missions. From 2001 to 2003 the Coast Guard sent Borgerson to the Fletcher School at Tufts University to earn his master’s of arts in law and diplomacy. While at Tufts he volunteered at a Boston homeless shelter for military veterans and founded a Pet Pals therapy program for senior citizens.
Following graduation, from 2003 to 2006, Borgerson taught U.S. history, foreign policy, political geography and maritime studies at the Coast Guard Academy, and co-founded its Institute for Leadership. While there he would get up at 4:00 each morning to work on his Ph.D. thesis exploring U.S. port cities’ approaches to foreign policy. He would also travel to Boston to complete his course work at Tufts and meet with his adviser, John Curtis Perry.
Borgerson’s military allegiance runs deep. One weekend last fall he played football in a service academy alumni game. On another he attended the Army-Navy game. Still militarily fit at age 40, the 6-foot-5 Borgerson works out regularly at an inner-city gym aimed at helping youths find an alternative to gang violence; a few weeks ago he was there boxing with ex-convicts and lifting weights.
Leaving the Coast Guard was a hard decision for Borgerson, resulting in part from his frustration with the military bureaucracy’s stymieing of his bid to get back to sea for security missions. With his degrees in hand, he applied for a fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations. During the application process he met Edward Morse, now global head of commodities research at Citigroup. Morse was on the CFR selection committee in 2007 and recommended Borgerson as a fellow.
Morse introduced Borgerson to commodities, and to trading terms like “contango” and “backwardation.” Morse himself had, earlier in career, gotten the jump on official oil supply data by hiring planes to take photos of the lid heights of oil tanks in Oklahoma’s Cushing field.
Working for the CFR in New York reconnected Borgerson with his Missouri roots. Bill Bradley’s aunt called the former senator to say: “The son of a family who went to our church in Crystal City is in New York. Would you welcome him?” Bradley did — and would later play a part in Borgerson’s career development.
While at the CFR, Borgerson became an expert on the melting of the North Pole ice cap, writing numerous published articles on its implications; this led him to co-found, with the president of Iceland, the Arctic Circle, a nonprofit designed to encourage discussion of the future of that region. Borgerson recently spoke to 50 international generals and admirals about the Arctic and is co-drafting a proposal for a treaty between the U.S. and Canada that would help resolve the differences the two countries have in allowing international ship and aircraft travel through the Northwest Passage.
His Arctic research led to an aha moment early in 2008, while he was still with the CFR, on a visit to Singapore and the Strait of Malacca with his Fletcher School classmate Rockford Weitz and their former Ph.D. adviser, Perry. Seeing the mass of ships sailing through the strait, Borgerson and Weitz decided to build a data analytics firm using satellite tracking of ships.
Like many successful entrepreneurs, the two struggled to find financing before reaching out to a network of friends and their contacts. One was Randy Beardsworth, who had sat with Borgerson at a 2007 Coast Guard Academy dinner, where Beards­worth, then the Coast Guard’s chief of law enforcement in Miami, was the guest speaker. Borgerson “made references to history and literature, and I thought, ‘Here is a sharp guy,’” recalls Beards­worth. “We have been friends ever since.”
But Borgerson didn’t turn to his new friend in his initial fund-raising. “He came to me in 2009, after he had been turned down by 17 VCs, was maxed out on his credit card, was married and had a newborn son,” says Beardsworth, who was reviewing the Department of Homeland Security as part of the Obama administration’s transition team. Beardsworth came to the rescue, not only committing to invest a small amount but introducing his friend to Doug Doan. A West Point graduate and Washington-­based angel investor, Doan took to Borgerson right away. “To be honest, it wasn’t his idea, it was Scott I invested in,” says Doan, who provided $100,000 in capital and introduced Borgerson to a few friends, who added $75,000. Manzi came on board as an investor in 2009, having been asked by Bradley to check out Borgerson’s plan for a data metrics firm. (Manzi knew Bradley from the late 1990s, when the latter was considering a run for U.S. president.)
With Doan, Doan’s friends and Manzi as investors, CargoMetrics was finally able to garner its first venture capital commitment in early 2010, from Boston-based Ascent Venture Partners. That gave the start-up the capital it needed to hire a bevy of data scientists to build an analytics platform that it could sell to commodity-trading houses and other commercial users. In 2011, CargoMetrics added Summerhill Venture Partners, a Toronto-based firm with a Boston office, to its investor roster, raising roughly $18 million from venture capital and angels for its data business.
By then Borgerson had already begun to contemplate converting CargoMetrics from an information provider into a money manager; he saw the potential to extract powerful trade signals from its technology rather than share it with other market participants for a fee. Among those he consulted was serial entrepreneur Peter Platzer, a friend of one of CargoMetrics’ original investors. Platzer, a physicist by training, had spent eight years as a quantitative hedge fund manager at Rohatyn Group and Deutsche Bank before co-founding Spire Global, a San Francisco–­based company that uses its own fleet of low-orbit satellites to track shipping, in 2012. “We had lengthy conversations on how to set up quant trading systems and how [commodities giant] Cargill had made a similar decision to set up its own in-house hedge fund to trade on the information it was gathering,” recalls Platzer. So Borgerson reset his course. Doan describes the decision as a “transformative moment” for the CargoMetrics co-founder. “The military trains you to be a strategic thinker,” Doan explains. “Scott had been tactical until then, making small pivots, and like a general who sees the theater of war, he moved into strategic mode.”
Borgerson’s ambition to succeed was in no small part fueled by the early turndowns by many venture capital firms and a fierce determination to best the Wall Street bunch at their own game. “There’s a lot that motivates me, including — if I’m honest — I have a big chip on my shoulder to beat the prep school, Ivy League, MBA crowd,” he says. “They’re bred to make money, but they’re not smarter than everyone else; they just have more patina and connections.” (Bred differently, he spent last Thanksgiving visiting his parents in rural Missouri. After breakfast he and his father were in the woods, shooting assault guns at posters of terrorists, with Gunny, his father’s Anatolian shepherd dog.)
Borgerson’s plan was not met with enthusiasm from the company’s then co-CEO, Weitz. CargoMetrics had been gaining clients and meeting its goals, and was on its way to becoming a successful data service provider. Weitz, who now is president of the Gloucester, Massachusetts–based Institute for Global Maritime Studies and an entrepreneur coach at Tufts’ Fletcher School, did not return e-mails or phone calls asking for comment. For his part, Borgerson says: “A ship cannot have two captains. The company simply matured and evolved into a streamlined management structure with one CEO instead of two.”
Eventually, Doan went along with Borgerson’s plan. “We believe in Scott and that shipping holds the no-shit, honest truth of what the economy is doing,” he says. But buying out the venture capital firms several years ahead of the usual exit time would require a hefty premium over what they had invested.
Once again Borgerson’s early supporters played a key role. Manzi, a fellow Fletcher School grad who had mentored Borgerson since the company’s early days, put up more money (making CargoMetrics one of his single largest investments) and introduced him to a powerful group of wealthy investors. Separately, the CFR’s Morse suggested that Borgerson meet with Daniel Freifeld, founder of Washington-based Callaway Capital Management and a former senior adviser on Eurasian energy at the U.S. Department of State. Impressed by Borgerson’s “intellectual honesty, vigor and more than four years of historical data,” Freifeld brought the idea to a billionaire third-party investor, who took his advice and became one of CargoMetrics’ largest backers. “I would not have suggested the investment if CargoMetrics had not done the hard part first,” adds Freifeld, declining to name the investor.
A chance encounter in the fall of 2012 gave the CargoMetrics team its first taste of real Wall Street trading. Attending an Arctic Imperative conference in Alaska, Borgerson met the CIO of a large investment firm, whom he declines to name. When Borgerson confided his ambition and that CargoMetrics had developed algorithms to trade on its shipping data once it was legally structured to do so, the CIO suggested CargoMetrics provide the analytical models for a separate portfolio the money manager would trade. Live trading using CargoMetrics’ models began in December 2012. Manzi brought in longtime banker Gerald Rosenfeld in 2013 to craft and negotiate the move to make CargoMetrics a limited liability investment firm. Rosenfeld acted in a personal role rather than in his position as vice chairman of Lazard and full-time professor and trustee of the New York University School of Law. The whole process took a year and a half. During that time Blackstone checked in as an investor.
Bradley, now an investment banker, has yet to invest in CargoMetrics, explaining that he is unfamiliar with quantitative investing. But he may eventually invest in Borgerson’s firm, he says, because “we are homeboys. I believe in him and that things are going to work out ” — pausing to add with a smile, “based on my vast quant experience, of course.”
Borgerson has been in stealth mode since CargoMetrics’ early days, when he moved the firm from an innovation lab near MIT because the shared space was too open. He is much more forthcoming when boasting of the firm’s “world-class talent.” The team includes astrophysicists, mathematicians, former hedge fund quants, electrical engineers, a trade lawyer and software developers. Hoogerwerf, who has a Ph.D. in astrophysics from the Netherlands’ Leiden University, built distributed technical environments for scientists and engineers at Microsoft Corp. Solomon Todesse, who works on quant investment strategies, was head of asset allocation at State Street Global Advisors. Aquil Abdullah, a team leader in the engineering group, was a software engineer in the high-performance-computing group at Microsoft. And senior investment strategist Charles Freifeld (Daniel’s father) has 40 years’ experience in futures and commodities markets, including nine with Boston-based commodity trading adviser firm AlphaMetrics Capital Management.
“All were self-made people; none were born with a silver spoon,” Borgerson notes. One of his blue-collar-­background hires was James (Jess) Scully, who joined as chief operating officer in 2011, after his employer Interactive Supercomputing was acquired by Microsoft.
“The team we built treasures team success, which is Scott’s motto,” Scully says. “We want shared resources, one P&L, not ‘How much money did my unit make?’” Both Scully and Borgerson say Cargo­Metrics is like the Golden State Warriors, a leading NBA basketball team known for putting aside personal glory and playing as a band of brothers having fun.
Borgerson says he fosters a no-ego policy with “lots of play because investment teams are built on trust, and playing together builds trust.” Team building at CargoMetrics includes pub crawls, picnics at Borgerson’s house, poker nights, volunteer work in a soup kitchen for the homeless, Red Sox games and visits to museums.
Trips to the Boston docks or Coast Guard base are intended to remind the CargoMetrics team of the real economy. There are also occasional “touch a tanker” days. On one visit to a tanker, everyone was amazed that the ship was the size of a city building, Borgerson says. “They could smell the salt on the deck,” he recalls. “Wall Street can lose sight of the real fundamentals in the world. I don’t want that to happen here.”
Unlike the Rothschilds 200 years ago, only a small percentage of the trades that CargoMetrics makes relate to beating official government data. Most simply are aimed at identifying mispricings in the market, using the firm’s real-time shipping data and proprietary algorithms.
At a whiteboard in his conference room, Borgerson sketches out CargoMetrics’ general formula. He draws a “maritime matrix” of three dynamic data sets: geography (Malacca, Brazil, Australia, China, Europe and the U.S.), metrics (ship counts, cargo mass and volume, ship speed and port congestion) and tradable factors (Brent crude versus WTI, as well as mining equities, commodity macro and Asian economic activity). Using satellite data with hundreds of millions of ship positions, CargoMetrics makes trillions of calculations to determine individual cargoes onboard the ships and then to aggregate the cargo flows and compare them with historical shipping data. All that leads to the final comparisons with historical financial market data to find mispricings. If CargoMetrics observes an appreciable decline in export shipping activity in South Africa, for example, its trading models will determine whether that is a significant early-warning sign by considering that information alongside other factors, such as interest rates. If Cargo­Metrics believes a decline in the rand is forthcoming, it might short it against a basket of other currencies. “This is like a heat map showing opportunity,” Borgerson says, noting that CargoMetrics is not trading physical commodities. “We are agnostic on whether to be long or short, and let the computers spot where there is a mispricing and liquidity in the markets.” He sums up his simple, but still less than revealing, process by writing on the whiteboard “Collect, Compute, Trade.”
Borgerson says CargoMetrics is building a systematic approach that will work even when cargo cannot be identified — on containerships, for instance. It already knows a large percentage of the daily imports and exports into and out of China and island economies such as Japan and Australia. And although the firm cannot glean from its calculations on satellite AIS data the type of cargo, such as iPhones from China, it can measure total flow, which shows present economic activity. Cargo­Metrics’ data scientists are working on linking such activity to the firm’s data set of the past seven years to measure the evolving global economy. That will lead, Borgerson maintains, to more trades on currencies and equity index futures and, eventually, trades on individual equities. “Uncorrelated” is a mantra of Borgerson and his team. Well aware that correlated assets sent the performance of most asset managers, including hedge funds, plunging in the financial crisis, CargoMetrics is determined to come up with an antidote. Careful not to say too much, Borgerson lays out the simple principle that the process starts with placing many bets among uncorrelated strategies in different asset classes, like commodities, currencies and equities.
The goal is diversification, staying as market neutral as possible and remaining sensitive to tail risk in different scenarios. CargoMetrics’ analytic models help find asset classes that are outliers. Those may include a publicly traded instrument such as oil, another commodity or an equity for which shipping information was a leading indicator during times when other asset classes marched in lockstep. The historical ship data is then blended with this new information to seek opportunities. Identifying mispriced spreads among different trades within an asset class is another way of avoiding the calamity of correlation. Borgerson says the firm’s models will find instances where one type of oil should be a short trade and another a long one. The same goes for whole asset classes — shorting one that will benefit if virtually all asset prices plunge and buying another that will rise when oil prices gain. “We’re counting cards with the goal of being right maybe 3 percent more than we are wrong, as a way of making profits during good times and staying afloat during times of sudden, unpredictable but far-reaching events,” Borgerson says. The key, he adds, “is to know your edge and spread your risk.” CargoMetrics’ uncorrelated approach worked during the dismal first three weeks of this year, says Borgerson. Dialing down risk as volatility in the markets soared, the firm was on track in January to have its best month since it began trading.
To improve the firm’s models, eight of its data scientists hold a weekly strategy meeting, nicknamed “the Shackleton Group” after the band of sailors shipwrecked in the Antarctic from 1914 to 1917. Hoogerwerf and Ramos co-lead the group. At one recent meeting they were deciding how much risk, including how much liquidity, there was in a possible strategy; reviewing whether to keep previous strategies; and assigning who would research new ones.
The Shackleton Group’s meetings are free-form, with a lot of “I’ve got an idea” interjections that disregard official roles. “We hit the restart button a lot,” says Ramos, a former director of business intelligence and a quantitative economist at law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf who joined CargoMetrics in late 2010. “That’s why our motto is ‘Never lose hope.’” A bet on oil, related to Russia’s production, was stopped at the last minute in 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine. Some currency-trading strategies have been abandoned in theory or after failing. Strategies the Shackleton Group likes are passed on to the firm’s investment committee of Borgerson, Scully and Ramos for a final decision. CargoMetrics has a unique set of big-data challenges. Historical shipping patterns may not be as useful in the new global economy now that shipping freight prices are plunging, a sign that trade growth rates may be changing. And analysts point out how hard identifying oil cargo can be in certain locations and instances, even in more-­predictable economic times. “While it may be easy to say that ships leaving the Middle East Gulf are typically carrying crude oil, knowing the type of crude is sometimes quite difficult,” says Paulo Nery, senior director of Europe, Middle East and Asia oil for Genscape, a Louisville, Kentucky–based company that analyzes satellite tracking of ships. Borgerson maintains his team is well aware of the dangers of data mining and getting swamped by noise. “If you run computers hard enough, you can convince yourself of anything,” he says. To make sure CargoMetrics’ algorithms for identifying cargo are valid, the firm spot-checks manifest data filed at ports and imposes statistical confidence checks to guard against spurious correlations.
Getting the jump on official government statistics is likely to become tougher too thanks to the recently formed High-Level Group for the Modernization of Official Statistics. Although the U.S. is not a member, Canada is a key player helping to lead the mostly European nation group (including South Korea) in coming up with a global blueprint for measuring and reporting economic activity.
Reflecting on his journey to Wall Street — raising money, hiring employees with different skill sets, making changes to Cargo­Metrics’ culture, overcoming legal and regulatory hurdles — almost gives Borgerson second thoughts about whether he would do it again. “I’ve sailed ships through tropical storms, captured cocaine smugglers and testified before Congress [on his Arctic research],” he says, “but this was the hardest.”

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There are still many people who would rather play in a casino than playing a poker game over the internet. Although you cannot see any significant difference between a poker game and an online slot game, you might want to still enjoy the excitement that these kinds of games bring. To do this, you can try to increase the amount of chips that you put into your bet by choosing the best payouts.
As a matter of fact, you can increase your chances of winning by choosing randomly when playing slot machines. Since there is no specific pattern that can be followed in slot machine games, it will really be impossible for you to tell whether you are going to win or not. However, if you do have this information at hand, then you can maximize your earning potentials. Playing online casinos with agen idn slot machines is a good way for you to earn additional income.
agen idn slot machine online | slot machine | slot machines | machine | machines} All in all, you need to carefully study each of your options when choosing where to place your bets. It would also help a lot if you are able to determine the best slot machines that you can try playing. Do not rush things out and make hasty decisions. If you want to maximize your earning potentials, then it would be better if you are going to read as much as you can about the different slot machines that offer different payout percentages. This way, you can have a much better idea on what type of online casino you will join and which slot machines you will choose to place your bets.

the cosmopolitan six thousand five hundred dollar bank the bonus live play tonight last night you guys wanted some mighty cash i found you a mighty cash double up look at those numbers that we're working with same format last night we do 500 tickets however some of my tickets are a thousand bucks they're just easier that way so i'll have to do some uh thinking and uh math but i get kerry here to help me out and i got all my lovely and fans so ticket starts at a thousand dollars so we're not gonna go below 500 guys so this one should be pretty easy max volume bank the bonus live play 13.50 a spin [Music] mighty cash double up let's see this haywire five or more for the bonus [Music] mr classic tv says punky power thank you mr classic tv oh yeah mr classic tv i think you won one of those blenders or um mixers but i need to get your address so send me an email or message me on facebook so i know jimmy d won the other mixer but i'm pretty sure you are the other winner so i want to get that sent out to you yes haywire we got something big oh 45 bucks good ones big one oh i couldn't drop like the maxi because it doubles up [Music] wait there we go [Music] and carrie we trust so we're gonna have him hit the button all right gary [Music] wow that's huge let's keep getting these red ones yes this is not bad red [Music] that wasn't a good spin but if your first two are pretty solid so i forgive you [Music] yolanda rory love you bry mighty cash is the best i love you too yolanda hopefully it will come to new york here soon yeah this is a decent oh yolanda which one do i pick yolanda's picking guys left right middle if yolanda's in here we'll give her a first chance to pick one two or three your left middle right yolanda i'm gonna wait for her i am i'm in plenty of time [Music] i'm a no hurry this is a nice little bonus yolanda gets to pick [Music] leland assistant too all right here it is shoot that's fine all right let's do it anything filled up down there okay extra 13.50 [Music] yes too bad we couldn't fill that up this is not a bad little hit i'll do some ticket math later on because uh i had a thousand dollar ticket but a good start yesterday we started off great and then it went south and if smaller bets work we'll do smaller bets but i am getting some revenge on that 25 cash code it's a jackpot to start the night what do you know [Music] yolanda has no reason to be sorry how's the picture quality everybody we have one person keep saying bad picture but everybody else says [Music] [Music] nothing [Music] all right let me see if i can uh [Music] all right [Music] all right is that good now how does that look perfect all right couple backup spins come on please please please [Music] backup spins galore i saw it go by too all right two thousand dollars will be the ending point [Music] all right first game get a win nice start all right so this ticket guys oh cougar girls 9.99 super justice happy new year all right i reset it i don't know what else to do so i did reset the wi-fi i mean the picture i am at mercy of the casino and romeo evan welcome to the bod rubber ducky club all right guys since um the same ticket so five hundred dollars again i've got these thousand dollar tickets i have to use them twice so the floor is going to be 1500 all right all right 17 16 a spin [Music] that's huge 300 that's good [Music] [Applause] yep i i work with what i have so [Music] maybe it'll get better but i did reset it twice after that i can't do much i apologize but i'm working with what they have but thank you to 800 people watching one more [Music] open this pot 24. [Music] 40 bucks [Music] yes scott i just re-logged into wi-fi for the third time i did reset it and i reset it again so [Applause] [Music] all right before the bonus i'll see if i can fix the wi-fi whoops 73. if you're winning with that well i find it just keep it that way give me one second guys this is my best four games [Music] which one do you guys look all right which one should i pick i've never done this thank you raja what do you guys want [Music] miss mary brian thank you for the live play i really activity oh thank you miss mary [Music] coins [Music] all right coins all coins come on yes oh we're going to do something on the left [Music] chris had patches behind me for me hey one more time i logged out i forgot the network and i logged back in [Music] guys not much i can do guys so the i'm doing the best i can but tell me it's blurry and tell me it's unwatchable and you're gonna unsubscribe above and beyond because i don't control the wi-fi you're gonna unsubscribe from my channel uh i'm not trying to be negative here but don't say crap like that that's just not cool all right guys i'm doing the best i can to give you guys some bonus live play and kyle sell data does not work at all in vegas anyways we got a bonus 776 dollars all right there's some backup spans the floor we'll get 2800 2750 2800 we'll see how it goes and we'll do the top up if we hit it [Music] all right so 27.50 is gonna be the floor so the first thousand in we're gonna have at least 27.50 so that's a great start tonight the pot is a little over 6500 but that's what the tickets i had available was they're gonna make that work but thank you all for tuning in thank you for you know the watching the earlier live play and we got a super chat herbert d brian you're doing fine ignore the complaint all right one more spin and we're gonna cash out so far it's a good little start [Music] all right let's move what do you guys want to see next is my lucky players card [Music] so [Music] those are not multi-dino [Music] yep how you doing yeah i hope so i reset it again it's still really bad i i re-logged in crushing it you hit reconnect i hit reconnect yeah it's still brilliant now all right we're back live all right thank you all right guys garager just help me out it's great usually for a little bit and then it kind of sputters out all right guys how about some konami konami time [Music] [Music] it can go to a hotel you go to hotel next all right and play konami games radiant witch 15 to spin so the floor on this game is gonna be 500. because it's a thousand dollar ticket let's do it guys but thank you all for tuning in hey brian i got a super chat for you one dollar lucky super chat from jose all right usually the usually for a super chat has to be at least 1.99 or higher to say anything doesn't want it we'll try one this is going in the community pot there we go so now you're in action you have a point one tenth of a percentage all right taxi 10 000. yeah we need to go to the other one all right we're gonna try the hotel one all right we're gonna try one more wi-fi guys i apologize all right all right last try guys after this we're just gonna wing it but waffs 73 in bod we trust thank you wasps genomes just keep crushing it all right guys if i missed a super chat then i did do my best doing my best all right here we go it's an iphone 12 pro mac so it should the phone's not the issue here oh i think it was one away from that symbol nice you love silver lucky 25 super super chat flip phone it's a motorola gopro i have no idea come on three or more bonus symbols may trigger the money galaxy feature oh you're not like that okay [Music] we switched the wi-fi network so hopefully guys hopefully this helps it's holding up so we'll take it at this point jose ah i tried [Music] guys it has nothing to do with the camera on the phone it's the wifi [Music] chris pat you're doing great brian of data oh that's my new name brian of data 9150 so i heard you made a killing in the stock market today had a good day you guys haven't checked out raja makes money the mods have been actually posting the link so thank you mod for doing that come on kanami give me some heck yeah [Music] gosh you guys i might have to cancel live play early tonight if i have to keep modding for myself [Music] come on it's due [Music] uh now i get that radiant witch symbol when i don't need it yep once again [Music] well i would go play it and that's that's it that's the 500 mark so [Music] all right let's keep moving on guys [Music] now um somebody specifically told me i should go play high stakes [Music] you know what maybe he'll do some video poker since carrie's here tonight how would you guys want to see some ultimate at the video poker i think that could be fun 1250 spin max that volume out yay or nay on video poker oops stephen hall he requested this game tonight so he got it apple alert for guys tonight 5 30 ah so close 5 30 pacific time you know what i did really good on last night was uh one more that uh i hit those two nice jackpots on uh also environment really i haven't if we went at one more and open up the taco that is like another four i never have like an ultimate fire like played it again last night but the last couple ever since i started playing that another one ultra hot megalink i didn't go to those now they've done these whole shows okay i never liked it because i never got the bonus but now we've got all these great bonuses they're gonna take 5 30 guys the big jackpot will be live on the main facebook page with youtube live play to follow at six o'clock pacific time [Music] yes we got a bonus see what happens when i push the button all right big one here we go carrie go ahead and hit the button carrie terry first lucky raja high rollers i had to mix it up it didn't work for me yesterday all right raja your turn your turn nah all right jose hit the button [Music] okay there we go that's 125 for jose tracy says i feel bbb coming for b.o.d well we believe in b.o.d everybody hit the thumbs up jose you're on the roll ready another 125. you're fired i'm fired i'll come in and save the day all right come on all right you're in all right here we go there you go that's all you guys are worth 25. oh this is 50 cents it's 12 minutes all right carrie you're back in it come on 62.50 jose tagging you back in you're hired again come on that's this is a brd spin oh okay there it is all right same as the raja come on nature just drop it oh really i carry you're back in [Music] all right jose we'll worry about the price of the grand if we come to that all right it comes down to body [Applause] that's something 362. [Music] it is but yours is a lot tighter mine's maybe the spring's gone or something [Applause] [Music] all right backup spins we'll play it down to what 500. how does that sound that sounds great thank you one more sorry he's live right now [Music] ma'am it's 45 dollars i'm sorry that's my gunnery jose my agent told me that all right big congratulations to the quick father he's not going to be with us tonight and right when we got done playing about one o'clock last night went to the room get a good night's sleep at three o'clock he sent me a message he had to get an uber for a five-hour drive back to california he missed his baby being born that's why we picked this date early in the month because baby was due on the 18th so we're like okay two weeks plenty of time you know get home and yeah out of nowhere last night all right guys what do you think we should play next all right autumn moon let's do it ah guys i do not really charge 45 dollars a photo you guys can believe whatever you want this one's due i'm into this game for at least a thousand bucks i get this one two oh the better match yeah no no but this one yesterday all right here we go twenty dollars to spend fifty four hundred dollar major hundred and three thousand dollar grand this is slower than like that first [Music] so the floor is 500 on this game unless we decide to play a second round on it so thousand dollar ticket in the floor come on what whoa no oh i thought you had it oh wow how did you screw that up very easily oh i thought i had it thousands left what happened to that 20 orb what happened to that 20 dollar orb tracy if jose twerks upside down like naomi there will be mega booms wow you've been requesting the twerk upside down [Music] diane mccall says whatever rajo says about you after i fell for the malaria hoax [Laughter] so diane mccall says she doesn't believe anything you say about me after she fell for the malaria hoax when you told everybody i had malaria b.o.d uh brandon true b.o.d ah what what grand did you hit the other day when the raja was live it's probably the same as me having malaria whatever that's worth [Music] it's no minor finally [Music] the good news is i don't have malaria currently but the question is are you going to fall asleep 2 000. i knew this game was due ah yeah come on keeping it alive [Music] now i pumped well over a thousand bucks in this game last night [Music] plus in the group paul we didn't do too well either [Music] [Applause] thousand right [Music] oh here it comes 103 000 live let me at least see it i did not see it i got my glasses on and i don't see it again the drama it's left-handed does it work nope i need to mix it up is that what you do in the bedroom people got jokes today come on [Music] hopefully we keep playing well i can pay off my markers it'll be nice [Music] that's something is that tick-tock tick-tock well i only have one phone unlike some people wow you guys both have one phone wait we got so many girls and tracy d if you don't mind sending me a photos later on of all the jackpots thank you all right so the floor is gonna be three thousand bucks one more moon there's still good line hit john johnson boom boom boom in bod's room that's right [Music] yeah this machine was definitely due after i mean carrie watched me struggle on this game last night i mean struggle one more i knew this game had to do a comeback hi there how you doing today good how are you i'm doing well you can't do recording what did this gentleman tell you i'm spitting fake news again i'm gonna have to call security on you that wouldn't be the first time yeah they called him last time when he had those prostitutes you grabbed his hands on his feet caesar's palace was not a good day remember caesar's palace and that lady i was tracy says i'm waiting jose you got this bee all right cash it out so this yeah so yeah this was a new this was a fresh ticket jimmy beauty on ajita keep it up i got your hoodie in my room during his live play i'll get it for you all right cash cove 25 a spin so the floor is just under 2 500. purple and gold saw it's nice wind keep it up i'm going to purple gold and i got jimmy d there you go all right all right so the floor is like 2 400 and change what doesn't want my ticket i did this yesterday too gaming machine unable to redeem at this time that was weird and it took it cash go 25 to spend cash cove just under 2 400 sorry just under 2 500. come on make up make up for you so 24 in change [Music] 100 dollars get it oh but thank you to all the mods help out thank you to kerry all aboard or luxury line tiffany j beauty great live stream can you play some cats all right we'll do cats after this [Music] no thank you nope i'm doing well not drinking anything so i'm gonna hold off as long as we keep winning i will not have a sip of water the entire livestream i am very superstitious [Music] what did he get nice jose is on ajita as tracy d would say this ticket will be put in the bank after this machine is over that's a great observation [Music] [Music] doesn't want me to quit this game i guess no okay there you go all right couple more spins not gonna go below 2400 come on come on all right final spin on this game cash an hour all right all right so that i think it's done all right we're gonna put another thousand dollar ticket in so once again the floor is gonna be um 500 bucks i didn't have to didn't have time to break down the tickets cats here it is somebody wanted cats to send a super chat and i haven't done cats in a while so [Music] 15 to spin [Music] yes that's it i thought it looked it looked a lot better in my mind sometimes the lower bets work better that's a pay line on 15. oh fine don't have to convince me it looks like if i'm a game manufacturer i'm making 15 lines that's not one of mine [Music] yeah of all the games being different heights different angles it's not always the easiest sometimes to uh that's it fifteen all right 30 that's fine 30 bucks on cats ah 200 nice [Music] come on bank the bonus that's good huh 400. nice [Music] that's right johnny milwaukee loves all the games that have cats in it kitty glitter miss kitty [Music] bonus [Music] [Music] what do you think should i play 45 a spin on catch or keep it here at 30. 500 is the floor we're going for that bonus oh yeah 250. i'll tell you what we'll do actually choose the max you can only play 30 bucks so by default oh bonus nope no nope gina anyway can you play black widow uh maybe you'll do some black widow i'll tell you what since we're doing well in the game we'll i don't want to lose any money on this game so we'll set the floor in a thousand bucks so we guarantee we don't lose any money playing cats [Music] i hate to do well in the machine and go broke trying to hit the bonus so [Music] come on okay 200 just for that [Music] and if we break the two 2000 mark maybe he'll set a floor above that come on full screen say meow i likey [Music] so if the raja ever tells you something about me 95 of the time it's not true he said you were an awesome individual b.o.d yep see told you now he knows better than joke about my dogs so oh yeah that's like the one thing he knows so if he says something about my dogs that may be true but besides that i never had malaria [Music] what's not a pay line but this jagged thing is that's bs hey ben hello [Music] don't get called on me kitty cats [Music] all right um is black widow on here all right this game's getting cold i'm going to use this extra 186 dollars for black widow so the forum black widow's still going to be 500. i so whatever that's worth executive vod decision [Music] forty dollars to spend on black widow [Music] the floor is at 500 on the game he's taking some of that extra money [Music] all right a black widow floor is five hundred dollars oh there's yep i that's a lot of people say i look like the purple guy in black widow they're the pink guy does that look like b.o.d what do you guys think i think it is they modeled it after me maybe that's right the raja this is his favorite game because he gets to see me all the time [Music] wow cheryl clark blackwidow be nice to b.o.d thank you we don't think we had a single playback of anything on black widow yet [Music] not a single does black widow hate b.o.d looks like ben affleck oh there we go on the last spin it pays 160 says don't quit on me [Music] ah mark wahlberg all right final spin and we're putting this ticket in the bank for cats and black widow so cats and black widow is done now i did play some um dancing drums earlier today and i got killed 2 000 down on dancing drums so based on that it's dancing drums revenge [Music] time [Music] yeah i saw my afternoon live play we did play some dancing drums so what do i got left 500 500 500 000 so 6500 in tickets i have 2500 left let's just make it easy to put a 500 ticket here so once again guys i had to get some thousand dollar tickets i couldn't get the 500 so that's why we used some tickets twice 1760 a bet and we're going for three if we get it we're going for three the last three games we haven't done anything so we're due for another bonus here jimbo come on drums let's see a bonus i agree timbo so the mini's at 178 miners 626 that seems awfully high you son of a yeah majors at 9 000 yeah we're going for three because that's what i said all right here we go all right big money there we go that's it [Music] yes oh one more dragon that helped 120 yeah 360. [Music] all right 660 dollar bonus [Music] all right we're gonna play some more uh like 750 floor on this game we need some backup spins let's get another bonus [Music] you know screw it we'll do the mystery if we get it again that sounds fine with me mystery if we get another bonus i just hit five drums [Music] all right final spin unless we hit something um [Music] all right whoops says uh [Music] top dollar let's do it [Music] a lot of people like the double top dollar [Music] yeah 210 dollars to spend sorry 10 dollars a credit 20 [Music] we've been doing better on the lower d knobs right now so [Music] she says always double she's an expert so yeah 10's on there i'm putting a thousand dollar ticket in so the floor will be 500. [Music] so it's 20 dollars yes we did some higher spins earlier going backwards still good slide play [Music] carla howard says good luck tonight hashtag bonus time hope you're staying warm up there [Music] carla [Music] oh [Music] [Music] is my card working all right let's see this top dollar logo [Music] so close there we go [Music] almost 2 000 people watching thank you guys for tuning in tonight make the bonus live play from the cosmopolitan las vegas hit that subscribe button keep notifications on because sometimes i do surprise live play like this morning last spin [Music] and i did some like hundred dollar huffing puff this morning all right let's move on to some pinball [Music] two credit pinball we'll do 20 to spin on this too yes we'll do the video poker [Music] let's set pinball yeah uh these old school pinballs you can't see them anymore you don't find them much all the casinos that have them do not get rid of them looks like the new pinball they have it's a little different format 20 to spin so with a three credit pinball you get five shots with two credit pinball you get four [Music] that was 250 okay give this some more ammo to hit this pinball come on come on [Music] ah so close we have 1500 left after this the big jackpot will be live at 5 30 pacific time so [Music] and maybe i'll do some surprise late night live play tonight you never know that's why you have to subscribe and click those notifications on if i do like it yeah yeah it's something i was waiting for like yeah eight grand i'm like my like time just kind of stopped okay for me i'm like is it gonna happen [Music] it is what time what time is it carrie right now i think about five o'clock or so so it's 4 45 yes there we go uh i think i'm gonna keep the ten dollar genome it's working i hate to blow through everything on the twenty five dollar d numb we ain't broke i rather win a little bit of money on a smaller bet than lose more money on a larger bet [Music] yeah maybe some we'll see late no promises i did a surprise live play this afternoon [Music] and it's not a surprise if i tell you happy new year b.o.d and good luck well thank you sonny happy new year to you come on pinball get a couple decent line hips golden nugget that's a casino we're at the cosmopolitan is there a game called golden nugget oh yeah [Music] what was your biggest hit um nice on 15 bets yeah can't beat that [Music] i know where a wild wild nugget is but um some guy last night kept saying wild wild nugget the whole time and it really gave me bad juju and we lost so no wild wild nugget tonight i'm not a fan of that game anyways but we got a come on bonus 80. okay 250 it's a good start come on 80 80 no 500 bucks come on 80 80. [Music] [Applause] all right we're at 8 40. like 7 60 something like that get it five back upstairs legit whoops taught me so my final spin okay cash now [Music] 1500 left [Music] carrie and i gonna play some video poker for five thirty dollars to spin ultimate x video poker scary carry and body now beauty is gonna make the best choices oh thank you for that i'll do the best i can i got carrie here so we'll [Music] oh i didn't sorry i was um live when you texted me oh you're fine [Music] thank you thank you do you want a cosmopolitan no no no hold nothing or yeah all right oh so i was playing this earlier i got dealt four to the royal correct carry yeah i got dealt four to the royal i had a four-time multiplier up top or something and of course i did not hit it we'll be back to slots after this open ender all right seven queens [Music] maybe i should have held the aces michael alphonse in the house check out live stream casino shenanigans on facebook featuring michael halphon nothing all right the no holds barred anything goes facebook gambling drinking debauchery group sanders lodge shared the length thank you okay in order here we go oh come on give us something here come on [Music] all right here we go four to the flush let's hit this yeah look at the next all right come on four of a kind wherever oh come on oh come on top here okay guys all right come on could be eight thousand dollars it could be all right here we go a little dramatic pause come on twenty thousand dollars here it comes [Music] oh man yep yeah i got del four to the royal with the multiplier i had a couple good deals today [Music] here we go [Music] all right here we go come on four of a kind four of a kind king queen [Music] hey quads there we go oh cheers that's why i got somebody else here [Music] maybe if i do a late night it'd be all video poker live stream it's a possibility if anybody wants to do a video poker with me tonight maybe i'm going for it oh you just look at it [Music] okay so it's open ender too yeah so you need a two or seven eclipse [Music] there we go [Applause] 2500 [Music] all right [Music] nice all right so we're at 28 10. i'll probably play down 2 500 or so yeah um come on here it comes guys let's play for a miracle carry i'm good right yeah ah tyler smith the b.o.d for president carrie lee for vp i like it okay let's do it again come on four of a kind [Music] [Music] [Music] yes sir oh come on four aces come on [Music] [Music] okay that's right it's lacey from the slot ladies the one and only will she go live tonight i don't know if you guys want to send her money on only fans i think she may go live again tonight but hopefully is that how you send people money oh yeah so if you check out lacey's instagram and tracyd or whoever has it share it in the chat and on instagram they have your cash app in there so if somebody wants to send lacey 100 bucks or she gets up to 500 tonight i think she may go live again [Music] oh somebody sent you 100 you just need 400 more all right that sounds fair and whoever sends the most money can pick the game [Music] it'd probably be after the big jackpot tonight probably directly after before the group poll [Music] it actually was good she told me my left arm was sore because my right arm was tight [Music] yeah i had the hundred minute in the end well worth it eight times there we go anything i have a mask on my braces oh there we go can we get the flush can we get a flush ah yeah that's a good way to end it positive money and tracy d thank you mod tracy just shared lacey's instagram so just to confirm her cash app is linked in the buy over instagram right yeah all right so if she gets 500 tonight 400 more she will be going live [Music] am i down only 500 left yeah i guess i'm only at 500 left tonight wow i thought it had more oh yeah we had the thousand between those two machines right so what do we want to do for the last so let me think about schmidt i put 500 in there 500 here okay we all know what's going to happen last guys 25 spins huff and puff [Music] that's right guys huff and puff to end the night and wild wild nugget is being played i was going to end it tonight in a wild wild nugget but some gentleman is playing it so i can't do that yep 25 spins we're doing well we're gonna do 25 spins we did it yesterday for a thousand bucks we couldn't hit so maybe it's due that that logic worked on the uh what game did the logic were gone oh autumn moon we lost yesterday all right here we go 25 spins huff and puff let's do it um yeah maybe some late night live play i'll talk to some people and figure out a game plan there's no promises [Music] well i got some money to throw in the pot it could be video poker who knows two more yeah yeah there we go by the way we're gonna end it we got backup spins all right i'm excited yesterday was terrible today is much much better one more oops man i didn't mean to do that [Music] oh come on don't be like that it is going to be like that we got backup spin so there's one point we just want a coin [Music] ouch and the actual three games only played seven dollars and fifty cents it was bad [Music] 500 bucks will be the floor [Music] thank you that was not a good bonus nope nope nope [Music] come on the volume is maxed out that is not the issue what are you gonna do one more spin to end the night on bank the bonus live play i don't i would like to play it through but i don't know if that's fair because everybody has to agree on it so based on that um i'm okay thank you though so but guys thank you so much on behalf of b.o.d scary carrie and lacey we will see you soon remember check her out on instagram camera's on you just let you know oh hi taking my these are not i can't walk in them so i'm switching all right so check her out on instagram if she gets 500 today she's going live and you pick the game if you're the highest donor and also check her out on only fans so all right guys thanks to glot and i will see you guys later on maybe late night tonight bye

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Another element that we check is the security of said casino, that is, that they carry out protocols at all times that ensure the protection of user data. That is why all the casinos that we recommend from GuiaCasino have an SSL encryption system, which guarantees both the privacy of your account, the protection of 100% of your banking and personal data.
All these casinos, apart from their security, also demonstrate their transparency through the use of the RGN system, generation of random numbers, which ensures the transparency and randomness of the games that they make available to the user. In addition to having an admitted percentage of RTP, return to the player, that is, it has an indicator that shows that the return to the player is regularized.
They also promote a form of responsible gambling, offering all the necessary help to users who experience gambling problems. In addition, all of them have a seal of "Responsible Gambling", " Safe Gambling " or another of the accreditations that prove this.
Payment methods
One of the most important elements, and of course we cannot forget to check, is the variety of payment methods they offer. Here depending on the country and the real money online casino you want to play in, the payment methods will vary a lot. Of course, there are some payment methods that most online casinos have from experience, these are:
- Credit and charge cards : Visa , Mastercard and Maestro
- Electronic wallets: PayPal , Payoneer, Neteller and Skrill .
- Bank moves , among some others.
Apart from the various forms of payment, another element that we also take into account is the time of both deposit and withdrawal of money. Where it must be said that they are 100% linked both to the selected form of payment, and to the real money online casino in which we are playing.
Real money online casino bonuses
In addition, we cannot forget the games or casino bonuses offered by online casinos with money, with the aim of attracting and retaining users. Here in particular we have to highlight bonuses such as the welcome, the no deposit bonus, the one you receive for bringing a friend, the loyalty bonus, among a great list more. All the real money casinos that we recommend from GuiaCasino, have a wide variety of them.
Do you actually need to know more advantages?
Online casino games for real money
Another of the most important elements is the variety of casino games that they make available to the user to play. As a general rule, these usually have a wide variety of games, among which we highlight:
Traditional card games like online blackjack, online poker, and baccarat.
Other traditional casino games such as online roulette , bingo or keno.
The new range of online slots .
The modalities of live games.
To the latter, it must be emphasized that live games in this type of casino is one of the modalities that is currently being received the most. Since it has all the advantages of face-to-face casinos, plus those of online casinos.
Customer Service
This is one of the basic elements of review, because when a user has problems, what they value the most is good customer service. So this is one of the key items on our checklist and we need to know the information about. Most of the online casinos with money that we recommend from GuiaCasino, have a customer service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year, via chat, telephone and mail.
Real money online casino software and graphics
Another element to take into account in this type of online casino is its software providers, since these are responsible for the range of online games that each casino has. Some of the most popular are casinos like Microgaming , Merkur Gaming, Playtech, Pragmatic Play and NetEnt.
And we cannot forget the design and graphics of dischos casinos, since they have to be 100% oriented to offer a pleasant user experience. That is to say, make the navigation of these simple and intuitive, always ensuring that they enjoy the experience to the fullest and do not encounter any kind of difficulty.
Advantages of playing in a real money casino
Next, we are going to show you all the advantages of this game mode:
The experience and excitement you experience when betting real money.
The economic benefits you get from playing
The comfort of being able to play wherever and whenever you want
The multiple modalities of payment methods that they offer.
Enjoy its wide gallery of games, both traditional and the latest modalities on the market.
But how can I play for real money?
The procedure is very simple, below, we are going to show you all the steps you must follow to play in these online casinos:
The first and most important thing is to choose the online casino where you want to play
Later you will have to register and create your casino account
Make your first deposit through the selected payment method
Choose the game (s) you want to play at the online casino
And, start playing and enjoy the experience!