Linked List: January 27, 2021

Wednesday, 27 January 2021

Apple Q1 2021 Results: Record-Breaking Revenue and Profit 

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2021 first quarter ended December 26, 2020. The Company posted all-time record revenue of $111.4 billion, up 21 percent year over year, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $1.68, up 35 percent. International sales accounted for 64 percent of the quarter’s revenue. [...]

“Our December quarter business performance was fueled by double-digit growth in each product category, which drove all-time revenue records in each of our geographic segments and an all-time high for our installed base of active devices,” said Luca Maestri, Apple’s CFO.

Double-digit growth in every category. That’s the story. Apple’s no GameStop, but they have a nice little business selling phones, computers, and services.

‘GameStop Nihilism’ 

Jim Ray:

There is, suffice to say, a lot to unpack here. Once again, the real and virtual worlds are blurred beyond recognition. “Jokerfied”, pandemic-bored redditors moving markets for the lulz, or because they hate bankers and other “globalists”, possibly making millions of dollars on a joke. GameStop’s stock halted several times over the past few days given its “bitcoin-like volatility”. On the one hand, that’s mildly horrifying, on the other, it’s a more democratic, for lack of a better word, form of what the hated bankers do to the world every single day.

And there’s a through line that runs from r/wallstreetbets to r/thedonald to Gamergate and 4chan. There’s a shared aesthetic happening here but also a common worldview, the nihilism that Levine talks about that comes from some combination of boredom, lack of purpose (shared or individual), and a disintermediated, hyperconnected network that brings together enough individual sociopaths to create something that resembles a community.

I don’t see how anyone could prove it, or even try to prove it, but my gut feeling is that the timing of this WallStreetBets/GameStop escapade coming on the heels of the dissipation of QAnon/StopTheSteal collective madness is not coincidental. There’s a certain Fight Club-esque feel to it, too: just wanting to fuck with The Man. And, also, gambling is maddeningly good fun when it works in your favor.

WTF Is Up With GameStop’s Stock? 

Jason Koebler, writing for Vice, has another good high-level explanation of just what the hell is going on:

What is going on is that GameStop, a company that sells physical copies of video games next to Auntie Anne’s pretzel shops in dying malls, is the most highly traded asset in the United States, a “meme stock,” and currently the primary front in a micro class war. GameStop’s stock price jumped from $4 last summer to $20 at the end of 2020, to $40 two weeks ago. It was worth $100-ish at times on Monday and Tuesday, and as I write this it is worth close to $300. Essentially, many normal-ish people have made a huge bet against gigantic financial institutions and are currently winning. In practice this means we are seeing one of the largest wealth transfers from the financial ruling class to the middle and middle-upper classes in recent memory, so it is, understandably, the only thing anyone is talking about.

‘The GameStop Game Never Stops’ 

Matt Levine, writing two long days ago in his Money Stuff column for Bloomberg:

Here is a YOLO story, a story of utter nihilism. You know this story. This story is perhaps best told with a series of rocket emojis, but let’s try words instead. The people on the WallStreetBets subreddit sometimes all get into a stock at once. This is fun, a nice social outing in an age of social distancing, a risky but potentially lucrative collective entertainment. Recently they decided to do GameStop. Because, I don’t know, they’re gamers, or because it’s a little comical to pump the stock of a chain of mall video-game stores during a pandemic, or because a lot of professional investors are short GameStop and they thought it’d be funny to mess with them. Or, especially, because their friends on Reddit were buying GameStop and they figured they’d join in the fun. Or all of those things in different combinations. Take one person who’s long for fundamental reasons, add 100 people who are long for personal-amusement reasons like “lol gaming” or “let’s mess with the shorts,” and then add thousands more who are long because they see everyone else long, and the stock moves.

As good an explanation of what the hell is going on with GameStop’s stock as you’ll find, I think.