Photo: jonsibal/facebook
In case you haven't been on one of the increasingly-popular overlanding trips in an area with no signal, you're probably aware of how investors like that early adopter friend of yours, along with a few big names such as Elon Musk, have tuned GameStop, an ailing game retail chain, into one of the hottest stocks on the market, taking on multiple hedge funds in the process. And the rendering we have here is a prominent digital artist's take on the matter.
Before zooming in on the pixel portrait, though, let's take a bit of time to zoom in on the waves the stock market has been experiencing, shall we?
Many professional investors were shorting GameStop stock, being convinced that the health crisis restrictions would be the final nail in the coffin of a brick-and-mortar chain that has already been struck by the shift to online sales.
Shorting, a classic Wall St. strategy, sees an investor predicting a stock price's downfall borrowing the respective company's shares from another investor only to sell it asap. The expectation is that, once the price actually goes down, the investor can buy back the shares, return them to the source and keep the "change".
But the risks associated with this practice are considerable. For instance, short-sellers have been betting on a Tesla dive for years, with company founder and CEO Elon Musk constantly fighting the trend via his social media influence. Nevertheless, with the Palo Alto company's stock skyrocketing, traders who bet against it last year lost $38 billion, as Bloomberg writes.
Returning to the GameStop movement, the hedge funds that were shorting the chain's stock have been registering hefty losses as amateur traders gathered to buy GameStop shares - following a boost of over 1,000% this year alone, the chain's shares registered a 68% jump on Friday, pushing the company's theoretical value to over $22 billion according to the Los Angeles Times.
The motives people had for grabbing GameStop stocks? They vary from attempts to make money in these troubled times and perhaps have a bit of fun to the opportunity of sending Wall Street a message about market dominance. Note that their efforts were coordinated via social media, with Reddit's WallStreetBets, which has a strange language, being the main instrument for the movement. And here's Musk tweeting about this exploding community on Tuesday:
The video game retailer's stocks are just the headliner of the movement, with the similar actions taken in the case of other names, such as BlackBerry, being a clue towards the fact that we might be looking at a trend here.
For now, the people have won the fight against the financial elites, albeit with the Dow Jones Industrial average registering its worst week since last October as a result of the turmoil. As for where this movement will lead and whether it will come to a stop or not, this is a bet in itself, with opinions obviously depending on the side of the trading business they come from.
The artistic community hasn't failed to capture the movement, with the rendering we have here being one of the sharpest digital examples of this.
The work comes from Jon Sibal, a Southern California-based car design artist whose work ranges from renderings like this one and comic books (e.g. DC's Batman Earth One) to real-world designs, some of which have been stars of the SEMA show in Las Vegas, involving collaborations with brands such as Toyota.
In his latest pixel painting, Sibal imagines a GameStop parking lot that has become the scene of what might be described as a... company investor supercar meet.
From the Wolf of Wall Street reference that is the white Lamborghini Countach, to reigning hypercars such as the LaFerrari and icons like the McLaren F1 LM, this is a poster car lineup. And the personality of these virtual counterculture success stories can be seen in details such as that Countach being lowered on custom wheels.
Taking this imagination exercise further, we've thought of a way to use the newly acquired funds. How about the people getting together to buy (more or less modern) classics and then selling them for cheap as a way of taking on the speculators who keep the prices high in the sky and the cars down in their basements?
On a more serious note, the car flipping issue mentioned above is real and it doesn't just concern classics - perhaps the most famous recent case involves the Porsche 911 R. Released back in 2016, this was a limited edition celebrating the 50th anniversary of the nameplate, which was first used for a homologated competition special.
The new-age R came in an era that that saw the German automaker removing manual transmissions from its GT Division Neunelfers (think 991.1-gen GT3 and GT3 RS) and while the less focused Carrera models could be had with three pedals, the seven-speed gearbox wasn't as sharp as the six-speed that landed on the R.
For obvious reasons, Zuffenhausen only built 991 units of the rear-engined special and while getting hold of one wasn't as easy as walking into a showroom with a solid financial situation, speculators soon started stashing these in their garages. And it didn't take long before the cars started showing up on the "used vehicle" market, with the only aspect more ridiculous than their close-to-zero mileage being the prices, which had been pushed towards the $1M mark.
The German automaker stepped in a year later, with the 991.2 mid-cycle of the 991 generation seeing the stick shift returning to the GT3 alone as an option, while a Touring Package deleting the fixed rear wing, a treat that had been reserved for the R, was made available.
Sure, the GT3 Touring Package had a four-figure production number, but its arrival was enough to reverse the ascending trend of 911 R prices. In fact, one could argue that, these days, some of these uber-limited 911s even land in the hands of the people, as this rebuild story comes to show.
Many professional investors were shorting GameStop stock, being convinced that the health crisis restrictions would be the final nail in the coffin of a brick-and-mortar chain that has already been struck by the shift to online sales.
Shorting, a classic Wall St. strategy, sees an investor predicting a stock price's downfall borrowing the respective company's shares from another investor only to sell it asap. The expectation is that, once the price actually goes down, the investor can buy back the shares, return them to the source and keep the "change".
But the risks associated with this practice are considerable. For instance, short-sellers have been betting on a Tesla dive for years, with company founder and CEO Elon Musk constantly fighting the trend via his social media influence. Nevertheless, with the Palo Alto company's stock skyrocketing, traders who bet against it last year lost $38 billion, as Bloomberg writes.
Returning to the GameStop movement, the hedge funds that were shorting the chain's stock have been registering hefty losses as amateur traders gathered to buy GameStop shares - following a boost of over 1,000% this year alone, the chain's shares registered a 68% jump on Friday, pushing the company's theoretical value to over $22 billion according to the Los Angeles Times.
The motives people had for grabbing GameStop stocks? They vary from attempts to make money in these troubled times and perhaps have a bit of fun to the opportunity of sending Wall Street a message about market dominance. Note that their efforts were coordinated via social media, with Reddit's WallStreetBets, which has a strange language, being the main instrument for the movement. And here's Musk tweeting about this exploding community on Tuesday:
Gamestonk!! https://t.co/RZtkDzAewJ
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 26, 2021
The video game retailer's stocks are just the headliner of the movement, with the similar actions taken in the case of other names, such as BlackBerry, being a clue towards the fact that we might be looking at a trend here.
For now, the people have won the fight against the financial elites, albeit with the Dow Jones Industrial average registering its worst week since last October as a result of the turmoil. As for where this movement will lead and whether it will come to a stop or not, this is a bet in itself, with opinions obviously depending on the side of the trading business they come from.
The artistic community hasn't failed to capture the movement, with the rendering we have here being one of the sharpest digital examples of this.
The work comes from Jon Sibal, a Southern California-based car design artist whose work ranges from renderings like this one and comic books (e.g. DC's Batman Earth One) to real-world designs, some of which have been stars of the SEMA show in Las Vegas, involving collaborations with brands such as Toyota.
In his latest pixel painting, Sibal imagines a GameStop parking lot that has become the scene of what might be described as a... company investor supercar meet.
From the Wolf of Wall Street reference that is the white Lamborghini Countach, to reigning hypercars such as the LaFerrari and icons like the McLaren F1 LM, this is a poster car lineup. And the personality of these virtual counterculture success stories can be seen in details such as that Countach being lowered on custom wheels.
Taking this imagination exercise further, we've thought of a way to use the newly acquired funds. How about the people getting together to buy (more or less modern) classics and then selling them for cheap as a way of taking on the speculators who keep the prices high in the sky and the cars down in their basements?
On a more serious note, the car flipping issue mentioned above is real and it doesn't just concern classics - perhaps the most famous recent case involves the Porsche 911 R. Released back in 2016, this was a limited edition celebrating the 50th anniversary of the nameplate, which was first used for a homologated competition special.
The new-age R came in an era that that saw the German automaker removing manual transmissions from its GT Division Neunelfers (think 991.1-gen GT3 and GT3 RS) and while the less focused Carrera models could be had with three pedals, the seven-speed gearbox wasn't as sharp as the six-speed that landed on the R.
For obvious reasons, Zuffenhausen only built 991 units of the rear-engined special and while getting hold of one wasn't as easy as walking into a showroom with a solid financial situation, speculators soon started stashing these in their garages. And it didn't take long before the cars started showing up on the "used vehicle" market, with the only aspect more ridiculous than their close-to-zero mileage being the prices, which had been pushed towards the $1M mark.
The German automaker stepped in a year later, with the 991.2 mid-cycle of the 991 generation seeing the stick shift returning to the GT3 alone as an option, while a Touring Package deleting the fixed rear wing, a treat that had been reserved for the R, was made available.
Sure, the GT3 Touring Package had a four-figure production number, but its arrival was enough to reverse the ascending trend of 911 R prices. In fact, one could argue that, these days, some of these uber-limited 911s even land in the hands of the people, as this rebuild story comes to show.
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