Hit by the brick-and-mortar meltdown years ago, it attracted short sellers, which attracted meme stock traders, which blew up the short sellers, and then each other.
By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.
Bed Bath & Beyond has become another imploded meme stock. Meme stocks are a phenomenon that will go down in history as one of the grandest, most dazzling, most media-savvy pump-and-dump schemes that peaked in January and early February of 2021 – yes that infamous February 2021, when the stock market came unglued beneath the surface.
Today, Bed Bath & Beyond [BBBY] reported earnings and fired its CEO that had coddled up to the meme stock crowd. And its shares, after having already plunged in recent months, plunged by another 24% to $4.99 at the close.
In the two years through March 2020, the stock traded between $4 and $18. Then the meme stock traders ganged up on it and pushed the shares to an intraday high in January 2021 of $53.90. Over these 10 months, the stock gained about 1,000%. It sure was fun. While the meme stock crowd was jubilating in victory, the instigators dumped their shares, and the whole scheme collapsed, now by 91%, wiping out the entire 1,000% meme-stock gains, and thereby earning a spot in my Imploded Stocks column (data via YCharts):
Meme stocks are companies that had been struggling for years, often losing money for years, and they’d been going to heck in bits and pieces, such as GameStop and Blackberry and Bed Bath & Beyond, when suddenly after March 2020, they came to the attention of meme stock traders.
Flush with stimulus cash and PPP loans and extra unemployment money or whatever, and empowered by the Robinhood trading app and the idea that they were changing the world, folks ganged up in the social media on a few specific stocks, often those that had been heavily shorted for obvious reasons — they were going to heck for all to see.
And these meme-stock traders, accompanied by hedge funds that bet with them, whipped each other into frenzy on the social media, and whipped these shares to crazy highs often in hours, and then the instigators dumped their shares at huge profits, and those shares collapsed, and the rest of the folks ended up holding the bag.
These were classic pump-and-dump operations, carried out much more effectively on the modern venues of the social media, rather than in the boiler-rooms of yore.
Bed Bath & Beyond is a brick-and-mortar retailer that, starting in about 2014, got sucked down by the brick-and-mortar retail meltdown. Everything you could buy at Bed Bath & Beyond’s brick-and-mortar stores, you could also buy at a million online retailers and have it shipped to your home.
As Americans shifted their purchases to ecommerce over the years, countless brick-and-mortar chains filed for bankruptcy and were liquidated, even the biggest, Sears. Bed Bath & Beyond has a significant ecommerce presence, but it doesn’t need its brick and mortar stores for that – that’s just an albatross around its neck that it can never admit to.
In 2014, revenue growth slowed to 3.3%. In 2015, revenue growth was just 1.9%. And then it slowed further. In its fiscal year 2017 (through February 2018), revenues peaked at $12.4 billion. Then revenues began to fall each year. By the fiscal year 2021, revenues had plunged by 36% from the peak, to $7.87 billion.
The last time BBBY made an annual profit was in its fiscal year 2017. In each of the following four years, it lost money, totaling $1.5 billion.
And then came Q1 2022, which it reported today.
Today, Bed Bath & Beyond dished up another dose of reality. It reported that in its Q1, ended May 29, its revenues plunged by 25% year-over-year to $1.46 billion, down by 47% from Q1 2018. In other words, in four years, its Q1 revenues have collapsed by nearly half.
Its gross margin plunged by 8.5 percentage points year-over-year, to 23.9%. It booked a huge net loss of $348 million in Q1, bringing the total loss since 2018 to $1.8 billion.
Over the past 12 months, the company burned up $1 billion in cash. At the end of the quarter, cash was down to just $107 million.
And the CEO, Mark Tritton, in the job since 2019, and who’d played along with the meme stock crowd hoping for salvation, was fired by the board, all in one day.
The company has made a number of decisions over the years that back-fired, including – like many brick-and-mortar retailers – not shifting its undivided attention to the new thing, ecommerce, to fight off ecommerce competitors that then ate its lunch.
It screwed up the shift to store brands from well-known brands; it had become too dependent on the discount mailers; and the shift to private-label merchandise, which comes with longer lead times, exposed it even more to the supply chain chaos, etc. etc. The BBBY’s board is now weighing to sell its subsidiary BuyBuy Baby to raise cash. This is getting pretty desperate.
And making the situation even worse is an activist investor with a billionaire title, Ryan Cohen, founder of pet retailer Chewy, whose stock has imploded by 71% since the high in February 2021.
The shares, after a long climb, hit their all-time high in December 2013 of over $80. And then the brick-and-mortar meltdown set in, and now the shares are back where they had first been in in 1996.
Because this trajectory since 2017 was so obvious, it began attracting large amounts of short-interest – I mean, this was like the biggest no-brainer in the history of mankind – which by March 2020 attracted the meme traders, which were going after stocks with the most short interest, and so they first blew up the short sellers, and then each other.
For your amusement, here is the long-term trajectory.
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“Go woke, go broke” strikes again, apparently …..
I’m done with retailers that think their social activism should be a part of the business dynamic in selling me kitchen accessories, etc.
BB&B always sucked, IMO. I walked in once, and right out of there. The merchandising was cluttered, distracting, and overpriced junk. It was like a maze in there. I could are less about their politics, I care about a good business.
What are you talking about? They had bed clothes, bathroom accents and the like, and then there was the “beyond” department.
Bed, Bath and Beyond.
Agree with Dan. If you want to walk in a store and look at the kind of stuff they sell, whether you have an item in mind or are looking for something unexpected, BB&B is a good option.
This does not change that they are losing money. My flat is relatively complete. Not much domestic turnover here in “smalls” blankets and so on.
A business blatantly calculating to keep me from finding what I am looking for, meanwhile distracting me with noisy legions of impulse items (excuse me, landfill trash), in a terribly organized floor plan, deserves and gets zero respect (or money, or time) from me. Woke or otherwise. But I know there are those of you of other — persuasions.
phleep don’t want no scrubs
“Mostly Remainders” would be a better name. Good luck finding a pillowcase to match the overpriced sheets they sold. Their products were garbage, i.e. a broken toilet brush after the second use.
No replacement without the receipt. Then they politicized the good merchandise they sold by dropping the ever popular My Pillow. Screw them!
Most women I know or knew went googoo for BB&B. “Ohhh, they’re having a sale”. One girlfriend told me that if I can’t think of anything to get her, get her a BB&B gift card. So it’s not like they never had any business.
I suppose it all went the way of the malls. I haven’t been to the mall in 2 years so the BB&B may not be there now.
I went to Bed Bath & Beyond shopping for a bed. But they do not sell beds at Bed Bath & Beyond.
You can’t even buy beyond there either!
Andy,
Well in all fairness, if you invested heavily in the company, you would get/take a “bath”.
you are right, bbb ng
Any business that does not differentiate itself today is dead. The old way to make money was with distribution power. That means almost nothing today. It is about unique products, services and creating value for customers.
The stocks that will rise over the coming 5 years are the ones with some technical innovation, or ones innovating the value equation for customers. Everyone else dies or just loses money and market share.
Yeah, it is horrible. Who spends $75 for a plastic shower curtain you can get right next door for $12.50? Or $250 for a lux blanket you can get for $45?
I went in there 2ce, never bought anything and only saw a couple confused customers milling around. I don’t know if they bought anything either.
I always wondered if it was some elaborate front or something.
Tick Tock Tick Tock…looking at you Beyond Meat and your Q2 earnings..maybe good time to put in a short position assuming it will likely be a disaster.
Amen. The crypto-tulips are in an even worse position as “investments”– although they have become quasi-religious investments, so I hope I am not offending anyone’s crypto-religion. They have no inherent value or earning potential, except that their value can increase if you find a greater fool.
Their only value is that CCP-members can secretly set up computer farms to generate them with equipment purchased with yuan using yuan-paid, cheap labor and (in some locations in China close to dams) cheap electricity, and so get cheap cryptos that they can make into their US dollar their nest eggs outside of China by selling them to great fools that believe in crypto. (Reportedly, some powerful CCP “leaders” still do it despite China’s ban.)
Otherwise, the cryptos are just tulips: they are a little better value in that they are nonperishable as opposed to tulips, but tulips could not be hacked out of your crypto wallet. LOL
I forgot to add, the crypto-maniacs are engaging in a pump and dump many times, because many of them want to pump up the value of their tulip-cryptos, seek to shut out all criticism, and will sell the crypto-garbage at a profit once they can pump up the prices enough. The cryptos are like the stock pump and dump schemes of the early 1930s when organized criminals (called politely stock “investors”) would pump up the value of stocks with great news stories then, after the greater fools had bought into them, sell at huge profits off the backs of the greater fools.
Yup.
I have noticed that the “Impossible Burgers” are ALWAYS buy-one-get-one free at Publix. I don’t think they are popular (or profitable).
The chemicals aren’t too good long term either.
Bam,
Just try to get a wiener dog to eat one….
BBBY was of the first to ban MyPillow. Stockholders aren’t sleeping too well these days.
So you feel that is almost sacrilegious? Both sides are morons here, obviously, like who gives a rusty about a two bit infomercial hustler?
“first to ban MyPillow”
The Woke officers of the company will never make the connection between that and their financial demise.
Chinese made pillows can always be sourced from another supplier.
Yeah, because they lack any “Common Sense”.
“Common sense is a collection or prejudices, usually accumulated by about age 18”
-Albert Einstein
“The Woke officers of the company will never make the connection between that and their financial demise.”
It’s now “woke” to not support someone who supports overturning a US election/overthrowing the US government? I’m not convinced you know what woke means.
BBBY was being bankrupted intentionally by it’s own CEO and board members, working under a Bain Capital-esque vulture capital play. No “woke” excuses necessary. Ryan Cohen recently became BBBY’s largest single shareholder and is purging those poison pill CEO and board members in order to try to execute a transition to ecommerce and split off the very successful Buy Buy Baby brand.
There’s a whole lot more to the “meme stock” narrative (as told by the bought-and-paid-for financial media) than you realize. Qui bono? Amazon, of course.
What does politics have to do with bad business decisions? Wasn’t Jesus a social activist of his day or the Russian indoctrination camps skipped over that?
BBB had junk @ high prices with the coupons to get you in. Walmart ate their strategy and Target did the rest along with e-commerce sites. E-commerce is not ultimate destroyer it was worst service catering to a very niche customer set. Just like Sears Kmart and host of others with grouchy sakes and poor setup.
There are brick and mortars surviving and some even thriving so don’t beat the dead horse of politics.
Jesus did come up with a pretty good “New Deal”, so to speak. You gotta admit that.
Jesus was also into free medical care, what all that healing and bringing back from the dead.
Yeah, and no AMA back then to demand he be licensed per their rules or go to jail for “impersonating”.
There was talk when I was in at Pharmacy School Ore State that since we were far more trained in biochemistry/physiology Docs should diagnose and we should prescribe. Our profs just laughed like hell at us, and said the Rx power was their main one, and they would NEVER give it up.
“What does politics have to do with bad business decisions?” Everything to do with it and stupid as F for a business to alienate more than half its customer base. It’s like ignoring Hunters Laptop.
Really, Hunter’s laptop? You really had to struggle to fit that into this thread. nightdipper is a buzzkill. Please go away.
I don’t do well in retail stocks because I am not a shopper. Very close to the closest BB&B is an ULTA store. That stock has had a great run. Data I could find says 82% of sales are still brick and mortar.
I don’t do well in ANY stocks because I refuse to feed the beast.
Nothing against higher rate Treasurys, though, still debating if I’ll be able to spare my small local “just in case” CD money on them if rates go high enough, though. No use for brokers either, so it’s Treasury Direct (who no longer sells for you) or nothing for me. I’m an economic loser, I guess. So what?
Blatantly inject politics…
Lose half your customers.
Not a great business model.
That’s why I don’t tolerate politics in the comments :-]
+1… Let’s just talk Macro-economics… it’s beyond politics… well… sort of!
Thank you Wolf.
The fact is, it is the retailers who went down the politics road, and it is effecting their business. There was a reason in the past that business avoided third rail issues like politics and religion, because it is a no win situation.
It is a testament to how poorly managed most companies are today, that their officers would even consider risking offending large segments of their customer base. I imagine at some point there will be some legal actions taken by the shareholders for such recklessness.
I hear Disney is close to bankruptcy now.
Harrold wrote: I hear Disney is close to bankruptcy now.
So is the My Pillow guy. He even had to sell his private plane. Doesn’t your heart just break for the poor guy.
He must be WOKE too ? ?
You have alot of moderating comments in this post if you dont tolerate politics.
Yes, this one got away from me. The first comment hijacked the discussion, and I should have deleted it, but I didn’t see it right away, and by the time I saw it, it was too late, and lots of people had already replied. If I delete a comment, all replies and replies to replies, etc. go down with it, which I chose not to do.
“That’s why I don’t tolerate politics in the comments”
You forgot the ‘/s’ switch denoting sarcasm.
In more honest times, ‘economics’ was called ‘political economy’ because if you want to be honest about it the two are inseparable: politics is, in point of fact, one way or another, all about economics. It’s about who gets what. Or nothing at all.
unamused,
don’t be silly. You KNOW EXACTLY what I mean by “politics.” Discussion of “economic policies” in the comments is just fine. What is not fine is the Trump-hater and Biden-hater and Obama-hater BS, and the “woke” BS, and the partisan BS that is designed to rile people up. None of it has anything to do with economic policies.
‘You KNOW EXACTLY what I mean by “politics.”’
Of course I know. Partisan political bickering, activist issues, doomsayers like me. We’re here to talk economics and finance, and if you’re going to have the former you can’t have the latter. Tricky to manage though.
We also don’t do any deep dives into the underlying politics which enable financial and economic abuses, and those abuses, as we have seen, can be spectacular. The politics gets touched on here and there but it gets messy fast and it’s also out of scope.
So is lots of other stuff, if we’re going to focus here.
Oh well.
I too realize you are walking a very fine line, and isn’t it about time for another wealth distribution article due to “economic polices” (which are ok here)? It is not ALL the fault of the FED, although I truly appreciate the knowledge about it gained here.
I have heard too many Econ talking heads just say, “the FED is God” and let it go at that.
Yet, the Healthcare organization I work for is all about the culture you speak of. From the mouths of decision makers – behind the water cooler – it is about the ESG credit score. They do not believe in the hoopla they preach – they do it to get the credit rating or fear loosing their behind in the market.
So then one could say watching a company ESG score is like get woke or go broke? No political comments here my ass.
This country is divided by some really stupid and some really serious issues, and billionaires of any stripe are laughing their asses off. To me simple, unilateral class warfare is the major game being played, so bite off your favorite little bit of it to get outraged about.
What fun! What fools!
Depending on how things go, guillotine manufacturers could be about to make bank.
It’s hard to separate money and politics. Watched the big four central bankers today interviewed in Europe. ECB president Legarde blatantly said that converting the European economy over to Green energy is one of the banks top priorities.
Economics was originally called “political economy.” Certain aspects of politics like fiscal policy can’t really be excised from macroeconomics. Other aspects of politics can figure into demand for this or that.
That said, I appreciate the moderation of overtly partisan comments. They detract from the subject matter and are usually petty and annoying. The false binary of US politics is a choice limiting mechanism in any case.
The original Economists WERE Political; Marx, Ricardo, etc, etc.
Best to keep the political expressions to yourself. I read this for reality in economics.
In the real world, the POLITICS always triumphs over the Economics, as we have witnessed on the politics of XXXXX sanctions++
“….the corporations have become enthroned……….preying on the prejudices of the people until all the wealth winds up in the hands of a few and the Republic is destroyed.”
-Abe Lincoln
Where in the article does it mention BBBY going “woke”? Is there a connection to the “Bed” part of their business?
Exactly. It’s all just corporate money extraction, which is by far the best economic construct with which to pursue unilateral class warfare that was ever invented by man…..right up there with outright slavery which has been totally replaced by fossil fuel.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind”
-Adam Smith
“Don’t follow leaders, and watch the parking meters” was Bob Dylan’s advice to us kids. I took it.
Make that economic/legal construct….
And making the situation even worse is an activist investor with a billionaire title, Ryan Cohen, founder of pet retailer Chewy, whose stock has imploded by 71% since the high in February 2021.
That’s not very fair since he sold chewy years ago and everything is down from it’s 2021 highs. Also you literally never made a point about this statement about Ryan Cohen. Nice journalism. Sarc
Their merchandise will eventually show up at Ollies at 80% off.
Remember Coinbase, who banned political discussions on internal channels, celebrated on all the usual outlets as a triumph for corporate sanity? Funny, I don’t remember you talking about Coinbase’s politics on Wolf’s last article about them. “Get woke, go broke” is just reverse ESG investing.
But hey, keep on with your faith-based investment strategy.
“Woke Don’t Mean Broke”
By: Donny Arcade
I’m guessing the “Go woke, go broke” mockers here have no problem shopping at Hobby Lobby and eating at Chick Fil A since those company’s political statements match theirs. Just leave your politics out of this site, it’s the one sanctuary left. Sorry, right. I mean, oh crap.
My neighbors just now came by from being at one. They said they were the only shoppers there. They were looking for a rug and suggested the selection was poor if at all. So anecdata lines up in this small town.
I was there recently for something cheap I needed right away. I was the only customer there.
Since it was next door, I strolled through Kohl’s. Couldn’t go in the doors on the right (men’s side). “Use other door”. Inside, I realized the registers were also closed on the men’s side. Only one register was open for the whole store with no wait.
I didn’t buy anything.
They’re both doomed.
They just have a little merchandise gender dysphoria (MGD). It’s normal.
Their best ad was when Will Ferrell mentions something about them in The Other Guys. That alone probably kept them afloat longer than without.
The meme stock thing is classic adolescent behavior: the coolest kids manipulated abused the wannabees. Again. How is it some “cool trick” was going to enrich the suckers? Now, though, it is real money spirited away (or vaporized), and the cannibalism is getting intense. So glad not to be in that little drain-swirl!
You sound like you are in a real bad mood today. Everything going OK?
Hardly. But that’s just my opinion.
Do you think everything is going OK?
Why, either way?
Not speaking for phleep, just myself. BTW, I honestly can’t see the “real bad mood” in the comment, it’s actually a pretty good analogy and very much on topic…..again, just my opinion.
I played the meme stock game a bit while it was happening. I just don’t understand how anybody couldn’t see the obvious end result of all this. It was all so clearly pump and dump.
Bought doge when it was funny, for instance, then it took off, and then I rode it back down a bit and sold. My mortgage lender at the time told me not to sell because, in his opinion, fiat currency was all but done for and crypto was the safest place to store your money. Coocoo for cocoa puffs!! I’m sure he’s still holding. Also we bailed on the condo.
Also did not get remotely rich on doge. I had way too few coins (because, again, I bought them as a kind of funny anecdote… If people talked about crypto, I could boast about my home dogecoin), and waited too long on the come down. But it was fun to see it skyrocket. To the moon! The good ol’ days. Hopefully I’ll still have a job come Q4.
Crypto exists at the whim of the Treasury Dept and their police force. If it was such a big threat to fiat it would have been attacked and the exchanges shut down. Crypto fulfills a different purpose for those it supposedly threatens beyond its utility for skirting capital controls and its pseudo anonymity.
It’s arguable the whole shenanigan of cryptocurrency was de facto sanctioned by the Treasury as evidenced by their inaction. In the past they even went after barter.
Whether meme of internet bubble it’s all just pump and dump, regardless of how the momentum starts. BBB was never a great store to shop going back at least 10 years. Probably more. I used to go in with my wife and leave feeling fleeced. So Amazon sealed their fate. Stimulus money and reddit pumped it up. I bet real money that the reddit blogger is a hedge fund manager and not a gen z person with a smart phone.
In the 1710s and 1720s, the catalyst for mania was “cheap” money and promises of new riches from a new offshore land: (1) paper money and supposed fortunes from Louisiana (John Law, France) in place of gold, and (2) weird financial engineering with the public debt, and projected South seas riches (England). People traded good money for being risk-equity holders in back of the line for things that didn’t exist. Those ingredients are right here. Very little of human risk management is inborn, so, each new generation comes along to learn P.T. Barnum’s maxim ….
only difference is that for the last several years, if you traded in dollars, you weren’t trading good money. You were trading a depreciating asset being decimated by interest rate suppression.
it will be interesting to see what the future holds. I hope Mr. Wolf is right about the outlook.
I was thinking one way to look at the examples presented here is like corporations are now sorta doing their own corporate raiding, but from the inside.
And it’s just as lucrative as the old style, and the results are the same.
But it still falls under unilateral class warfare, fewer winners, many more losers.
Give me a roulette wheel any day (not that I like gambling….I mean investing at all), at least it’s all totally obvious…..unless there is one of those buttons…..
“corporations are now sorta doing their own corporate raiding, but from the inside”
That’s not new. Leveraged buyouts by private equity are the serial killers of brick and mortar retail with their auto cannabilistic parasitic asset stripping modus operandi.
The executives all leave before the whole thing comes undone after feasting for a few years.
Very true. Look what Private Equity did to ToysRUs.
Oh.
Eddie Lambert was on Cramer’s CEO “hall of fame” when he ran Sears, for what it’s worth……but I still stand proudly and thoroughly verbally destroyed……
I learned the hard way that shorting stocks of companies that you know are going to go down the drain is a risky business when you have a Fed that backstops (or is there to backstop) the market. I bought put options on Carvana a few years ago and lost every dime of that position. Once the Fed removed that backstop Carvana is now almost worthless. It totally sucks when you have a company like BBB that is way overvalued yet you can’t short it with the threat of the Fed put in play. It used to be that short sellers were vital to an efficient market and bubble prevention.
It’s no different for the stock market as a whole. Absurdly inflated valuations sustained for most of the last 25 years due to manic psychology.
As for “meme” traders, they are the ultimate dumb crowd. It’s either them or the future bag holders of the 20,000 cryptos which are destined to become worthless.
Except for Ethereum… and maybe ChainLink… they have some potential in the long run IMHO. Smart contracts with validated data does provide value… and value is what people pay for!
What’s your estimation regarding the present value of Ethereum’s earnings for the next 10 years?
Ethereum will be worth exactly zero in 10,years.
The ether serial number is just that. If someone want to buy your number it has value. So does my cabbage patch doll I guess. Then we hear it’s the blockchain that is valuable. Since I don’t understand the blockchain, I think maybe it is valuable. Just beyond my ability to understand. Then I think of the saying that a sucker is born every minute. This is a game, same as snake oil, carnival games and gambling. There is no value in a long serial number. Sorry for rambling
Nothing you described has anything to do with any crypto. You’re describing code or a computer program. There is no requirement to pay for smart contracts with crypto.
Even if you were correct, it doesn’t mean Ether should sell for a lot more than its current ridiculous price. It’s still nothing, literally.
What’s the value of your plastic Visa card? It’s intrinsic! The value is in the flexibility it gives you to buy and settle transactions. I’m not a fanboi of ‘crypto’ & NFT’s… that is a fools errand!
But securing a transactional record with an immutable source of record and then marrying it to a data source of truth is powerful and IMHO does present value.
Do a little research on ChainLink and understand what an Oracle is and you’ll see why smart contracts have become of interest… it’s about automating reaction to events and in effect insurance. Insurance drives a lot of things!
To get another sense of this, go to It was built on ChainLink and is an Oracle Data Feed on what is REAL Inflation. I told Wolf that it will be interesting to see how this tracks to the FED’s CPI/PPI releases.
My 2 cents…. for what it is worth!
And Augustus, you are correct a ‘crypto’ does not factor into a ‘smart contract’ but a ‘token’ most assuredly does, and tokens are what get traded.
Augustus Frost said: “Absurdly inflated valuations sustained for most of the last 25 years due to manic psychology.”
—————————————————
due to the FED
The PPT has been disbanded. It’s all going down now.
Where are the retail investors’ yachts? PPT has probably found some bargains in confiscated slightly used oligarch models. and is headed over the horizon.
Meanwhile in cryprto, the new, cooler PPT is furiously burning cash to hold BTC at $20k and is about join the circling toilet cyclone. Maybe Bed Bath & Beyond has an overpriced gimmick product for that, like a rhinestone plunger or something.
“ and empowered by the Robinhood trading app and the idea that they were changing the world”
Yawn….. OK, will you tell me when you’re done please….
BBBY… hmmmm…. Buh-bye?
Next on tap is AirBnB.
Uber?
Couple of decades ago a young friend told me he was doing the pump and dump thing with a couple of his friends once or twice a week – and making good money doing it.
I suggested he stop immediately, as it was clearly illegal. He did stop.
Week or so later I saw a story about a totally unrelated young guy being put in jail for a long time by the SEC for doing exactly the same thing.
Why aren’t these current pump and dump folks going to jail???
What about The Main Cause of Inflation ? Powell and Trump does this equate to Pump and Dump?
In any event Its about Law Enforcement is it not .
Without Law Enforcement You can do anything you want because then
the question is does that make it Legal ?
Do you remember during the dotcom bubble around 1999, a guy operating under “Tokyo Joe” was famously doing pump and dump via the internet. Had a big following too. The SEC charged him with fraud in 2000 as it was all collapsing, not before.
Pump and Dump is not illegal. Buy low, encourage others to do so as well, then sell. SOP for equities.
Beardawg
Pump and Dump is not illegal
It is, if one encourages ‘actively’ recruiting victims for his scheme of any fraud!
Made off is the exception where investors were falling over and pressing him to take their money for him to invest!
Most people don’t realize it, but the SEC can only bring civil enforcement actions. The Department of Justice brings criminal charges if warranted. The DOJ does use any relevant evidence garnered during an SEC investigation if it brings criminal charges.
The SEC is allegedly looking into the practice of buying order flow .
These “high speed traders” who buy the order flow nick every trade and calling it “trading”.
I will venture that the SEC will drop their plan to stop this thieving .
Too much money being made from the practice and too many friends in high places.
“The SEC is allegedly looking into the practice of buying order flow .” Oh, please: the biggest, long standing discount brokerage firms completely eliminated commissions on stock trading- I was incredulous- how were they going to make any money? They themselves stated it was thanks to buying order flow, which to me meant knowing their customers’ positions and trading against them. (and to me, that is one of the biggest challenges in short selling. We are not allowed to engage in naked short selling- have to borrow shares from someone else who has hypothecated his- but “market makers” are allowed by law to do it. Think about that.
Any idea what percentage of new (COVID) investors intentionally burned their free government money, simply to burn wealthy investors?
I’m assuming based on the little I have read, not every one was looking to make money.
I gave a good chunk of the free stimi money away, and could just as easily burned it.
So, I’m confused now. Are you a Saint or a braggart?
Buying meme stocks or selling short stocks can lose money, even if you are on the right side of the fundamentals. If you can afford to stay short, and add to your short position others are covering, and have a diversified portfolio of shorts, that might work; another option is to cover shorts that go against you, in case info about the fundamentals turns out to be wrong, however as pointed out, macro conditions and interest rates, might squeeze you out of most of your positions. Maybe best to just avoid this lane. It does make you wonder about total market index funds that buy everything, even companies that have businesses that are unlikely sustainable.
Every investment can lose money. Boeing looked like a slam dunk just before their planes started crashing.
The point is, in every stock transaction, one person buys the stock believing it will go up, but, he is buying that stock from someone who is equally convinced it is going down.
Who is right is most often decided by heard mentality, and not actual fundamentals.
The pendulum swings back and forth between illogical boom markets, and fearful bust markets, with the reversion to the mean being the law of all markets.
In addition to online competition, they face baby BUST as people are having less babies. Nothing political here, just it’s too DAMN expensive to have kids!
1) For entertainment only, SPX daily. Yesterday big red was followed by do nothing candle today (trading range on 15 min). Tomorrow June 30, possibly a big white. A morning star, with coffee.
2) If so, SPX monthly will close > Apr low, leaving behind a large buying
tail, indicating that buyers are moving in. Options :
3) Option #1 : in the next few months to a lower high, followed by correction to Apr 2020 islands.
4) Option #2 : to 5,600, to a new all time high, followed by…
5) Option #3 : cont the downtrend.
6) Technical recessions are one to ignore, the real one might come later on.
7) In a real recession, whenever it comes, consumers and gov debt might be cut by half, rejuvenating our nation for the next 30 – 50 years.
*For entertainment purposes only*
In plain English, what should I buy?
How much should I pay?
When do I take action?
Then, when do I sell and at what price?
Otherwise, quit wasting our time ME. We have meme stonks to discuss!
Beck, buy a bond fund now, and sell when the Fed cuts back to zero. You are welcome.
Even better, buy slightly out of money longer term puts in Microsoft and Apple. Don’t thank me.
I like ME’s comments. But then my time has very very little value, as compared to yours, I guess….
In order to get a response phrase the question like you are addressing a zoom meeting of Yoda, The Count from Sesame St, a Skeksi, Alex Trebek and the oracle of Tom Jones.
Charting is a lot like Tensor math, well beyond simple spreadsheets. Obviously well over your head, judging from your above attempt at it.
Michael,
What about bitcoin? What do the charts say?
As Bitcoin drops, more miners are forced to sell bitcoins to pay their bills, which causes Bitcoin to drop, and more miners are forced to sell Bitcoins to pay their bills…
If I understand bitcoin correctly, when it drops to negative $60,000 the miners will be forced to process it back into electricity.
To Andy
Yes it will be wonderful to watch the second law of thermodynamics being violated for the first time….. ;>)
If Bitcoin goes to zero, where did the money go? Who won?
Q: “Where is my money?”
A: “Where does a flame go when you blow out the candle?”
Mostly unoxidized creosote like compounds. You can smell them easily.
Bye Bye Baby. Bed Bath and Beyond was kind of an interesting store until online retail showed up and ate their lunch. I haven’t been in one of their stores for a few years. It seems OK to pay a tiny bit more to be able to walk into a place and get a look at the product range in-person before making a choice, purchasing it, and bypassing the wait time for shipping. But the large markup at BBBY has just been a tough sell for a long time. Why pay 20-50% more for the same product I can get online?
CEOs that have fed into their meme stock status were only gaining some barrowed time at best. As the meme stock frenzy collapses, so too will their companies. I’m looking at you Adam Aron of AMC Entertainment.
I’ve always hated shopping. Before the internet, I purchased via mail order everything I could, from furniture to my dress shirts. I’ve always considered going into a store a torturous waste of time, especially, as is often the case, if you cannot find what you want, and you end up either buying something you don’t want, or going to another store, and wasting more time there. Ecommerce has brought an immense improvement to the quality of my life. I’d pay MORE to not have to go into a store.
And I’m not the only one. There’s a whole generation out there now that doesn’t even know what the inside of a store like Bed Bath & Beyond looks like. They have no reason to waste their time in there.
That’s why there is a brick-and-mortar meltdown. It’s not price, it’s waste of time.
It seems like brick & mortar retail inventories were much more diverse pre-internet back when malls, department stores, and specialty stores were still really alive. But I totally agree that nowadays your chances of finding what you want are low and wasted shopping time is a terribly drag.
There are still some holdouts though. Hardware and tools are something I still prefer to see in-person to hold and compare. Same for musical instruments. I can’t imagine buying a guitar without playing it, or an amp without hearing it first. Clothes are unbelievably frustrating to shop for online without trying on. Shopping for food with the ability to pick out my own items and expiration dates, especially for meat and produce, still renders online food delivery vastly inferior. Cars are another thing I can’t buy without a test drive, especially used… Carvana appears to be headed straight for the scrap heap of history readily beaten by Carmax’s in-person big box model, so other consumers clearly agree. But for many consumer items, I have to admit that online shopping has become just plain superior. BBBY and the like are doomed.
A few weeks ago I went into Staples looking for paper of a certain color. Kind of a last minute thing. They didn’t have any in stock and I was told by an associate to order it online.
I did, but from another online retailer.
I normally buy everything online (even groceries, which I pick up in the parking lot), but sometimes I need to remind myself WHY I do that, and Staples helped. The only time I go store shopping these days is for wine (I know a discount outlet with a great selection).
That said, some of my fondest memories of a young age are of shopping malls. This was when they had classy department stores, decent book and music stores and did things up for Christmas. That is a lost era.
Now I’m tearing up. Can’t see well enough to post anymore.
I actually like shopping. Not that I do it too much. But I never understood BB&Y. Exactly what was I supposed to be buying there that I couldn’t get at Walmart or Target?
“I’ve always hated shopping.”
For me it’s the congestion and traffic. I live right next door to a large outdoor shopping center. If I had to park there, it’s not unusual to have almost no open spaces and a long line to exit at the one traffic light.
I almost never go shopping where I have to drive (other than Walmart and Kroger) due to the traffic and wasted time commuting.
There is little I need to buy that I cannot buy online.
Many of us in America believe that there is NOTHING MORE FUN AND INTERESTING THAN SHOPPING and that just about anything else is a totally boring and a waste of time, especially anti-social activities such as hiking, fishing, biking, and other such stupid nonsense such as wandering around pointlessly and aimlessly in nature.
Showrooming occured. That’s when people would test products in a store then buy them cheaper online. Nearly killed best buy. Bankrupted Circuit City. Showrooming was a huge contributor to the demise of brick and mortar.
otis-double check. (would add that a lot of ‘product testing’ was brain-picking of knowledgeable store staff. Often followed by the erstwhile customer not only reappearing later with said item, but boasting about finding it cheaper online, THEN proceeding to brain-pick about some other item (i would suddenly lose all of my product knowledge at that point and wish them a good day)).
may we all find a better day.
8) Today we celebrate with two more nods out of 32. In the next recession we will learn to mind our own f..ing business.
Having spent a few years in Chicago I saw “brick and mortar” Marshall Fields go belly up, Macy’s, Younkers (Iowa), Nordstrom and a plethora of others. Retail is bleeding at most malls and diverse combinations of tenants to non-profit and medical business is moving into malls. BBB is usually attached to malls as is outer building pads like Walgreens. First thing to go is Fast Food operations.
Amazon took advantage of the old Sears model early and now since most items made in China not so much?
Jesse Livermore is looking up from Heck and nodding his head in recognition and approval.
What kind of shenanigans will they think up next?
“Reminiscences of a Stock Operator”…… J Livermore
required reading for anyone in the business.
Classic. I’d have been better off skipping business school and just reading that.
My wife and I have planned a pretty nice little Saturday. We’re going to go to Home Depot to buy some wallpaper, maybe get some flooring, stuff like that. Then maybe to Bed, Bath, & Beyond, I don’t know, I don’t know if we’ll have enough time.
That sounds absolutely dreadful for a Saturday.
I was just going to say. I mean, isn’t there a place you can go hiking, do something fun, or go sailing, or meet with friends or whatever?
If you had two X chromosomes, you might think differently.
@Harry Houndstooth
Put the double X chromosomes in your family front of the award winning documentary “Why do I hike” by Nikola Horvat-Tesla. It’s available on Youtube.
I will be moving bulls. Might want to trade places, we will see how it goes. Right in the middle of breeding season.
Depends. Projects can be fun and offer a huge amount of satisfaction. Maybe some folks prefer not to live in boring boxes with nothing about the place that makes it their own, which sounds like a dreadful way to live. I wouldn’t want to hang out at Home Depot every weekend, but sometimes it’s good. What’s wrong with a couple that is motivated to put some work into their home together to make it truly their own? Lighten up DP. Maybe on some weekends people enjoy home projects, and on other weekends they go for a nice hike, or visit a lake, or enjoy dinner with friends, or go play golf, or whatever. I’m sure there are things you like to do on some Saturdays that others would find dreadful too. To each their own.
The nesting instinct is strong.
I would put a moratorium on shopping at the Home Depot with hubby any day of the week! It always leads to cursing about work and stuff not made correctly. I will threaten it with a trip to IKEA! That usually works. :-))
I believe you have my stapler. I will burn IKEA down…
Frank the Tank……..Frank the Tank
Lol!!!
Mr. Falcon is quoting a line from the movie “Old School”.
Falcon…
no craft stores?
Sounds like some form of torture that likely violates the Geneva Convention.
LOL I am really enjoying this little thread w/in a thread!
Good catch Harvey and Steve.
Their prices are the problem. A low quality fitted sheet from China is $75.
Shouldn’t it be called: Bet, Bath & Beyond?
Bedlam, Broke and Beyond.
Need to get a celebrity tie-in: Bed Bath and Beyonce
How about Bed, Bath and Beyond Meat? They could merge and reinvigorate the pumping mill for another round. Still a few suckers left….
Bedlam, Broke, and Begone.
Anyone remember Coldwater Creek? They were a very successful mail-order, then online, retailer of women’s clothing. Very successful. Then for some unfathomable reason they went full blitz brick-and-mortar.
Sunk like a rock. All gone.
The coupons flooded the mailbox, but they had a long list of products and brands excluded. I prefer dental work to shopping and never did go there. Just heard on a national talk show that bb&b are turning off the air conditioning in their stores to save money. That would be desperate and ill-advised if it’s true.
I hated their coupon strategy because it always made me feel I was paying too much if I didn’t have a coupon. I avoided shopping there because I hate a place that makes me feel ripped off.
I also don’t go where I feel ripped off. Any Apple outlet or Switzerland for starters.
Bed Bath and Beyond worried more about the stock picture then the business at hand in their outlets. The stocks will follow your success. Essentially, if you want to do well in this world, offer a unique product (a “moat” Warren Buffett calls it) and sink that moat as deep as you can.
As I was reading this, all I could think about is in a year or two Wolf can pull out this article, replace BBBY with DKS, and change a few sentences.
“Slumping sales at Bed Bath & Beyond have cost CEO Mark Tritton his job. Shares are down sharply in early trading after the retailer missed revenue and earnings estimates. Sue Gove, an independent director on the board, steps in as interim CEO. She’s tasked with cleaning up the balance sheet and fixing inventory and supply chain problems that have plagued Bed Bath & Beyond.”
I believe much of the bad rap companies are getting now is due to the crazy money printing by the Fed in the last two years. They pumped up the stock market to insane levels due to stimulus and PPP payments, and now the bloom is off the rose so to speak since none of that was sustainable (even for companies like Apple and Amazon).
Well, I know the FED is now really serious about the “inflations”.
In a statement he said the inflation of workers wages is troublesome and needs correcting.
Said in other words……Untold billions in corporate welfare and Wall St handouts…..meh. Workers wages rise….Gentlemen, we have a serious problem here!!
Wage increases is the only type of so-called ‘inflation’ of any real concern at all and the Federal Reserve should have paid attention to that all along as their single biggest concern. Firing ‘workers’ and cutting their hours and decreasing wages are the key to prosperity and solid asset prices.
“Firing ‘workers’ and cutting their hours and decreasing wages are the key to prosperity and solid asset prices.”
It’s a factor supporting a ridiculously inflated stock market but absolutely not in economic prosperity.
A prosperous economy can (and normally would) support rising wages, with corresponding increasing efficiency (productivity). It’s only an oligopolistic economy where international corporations substantially or mostly use financial engineering, artificially cheap money, and labor arbitrage to
generate unprecedented profits.
The reason rising wages are (supposedly) inflationary is that too many people are either getting paid too much for what they produce (from the top of the income scale down to the bottom) or subsidized for not producing at all.
If wages are paid from artificial demand and fake “growth” due to loose monetary policy and government spending, that will be inflationary. That’s what’s been happening especially since March 2020.
BB&B is just one of the last of the brick and mortar retailers that cannot compete with e-commerce. Nor only is online selection better and cheaper, but I, like most people anymore, don’t shop. The days of spending the day at the mall are long dead. The younger generation knows almost nothing about malls or stores, it is only the older people keeping it afloat. I do everything online because I know what I want and want to use my time for other things. I also see that with eating out. The vast majority of young people where I live go fast casual and usually order ahead on apps so they just come in and pick up. Traditional sit down places, at least where I live, are taking a beating. People don’t want to spend a lot of time shopping or eating, especially younger ones. Lastly, a consignment store owner, who handle higher quality stuff, told me that the younger generation are huge thrift store shoppers, so will shop if they can get a bargain.
A great summary of current atmosphere. I too no longer shop. Time will tell if online shopping continues as fuel (think UPS/FEDEX) gets more expensive. Trends see $6-8 a gallon by September.
Restaurants above “fast casual” are more likely to run into trouble due to the inability of their current customer base to afford it.
Restaurants are ridiculously expensive and the culture of the last few decades of a mass market for these restaurants is only possible due to the credit mania and fake “growth”.
It’s going to be an unaffordable luxury for most people as artificial affluence declines.
Thank you for this post on BBB and B. The one at the local mall closed its doors Jan. 2020.
In addition to buying products online, Target and Wal-Mart carried much of BBB’s towels, linens, kitchen ware, etc.
1) For entertainment only, SPX weekly : SPX tank, consumer confidence sank. Why, we don’t care.
2) SPX retraced 0.435 of the move from Mar 2020 low. Even if SPX drop
to 3,500 area, to ma200, a 0.50 retracement, – and even if we are
in technical recession, – there is a good chance, it’s only an option, that SPX will easily exceed 5,600.
3) [4,800 top – 2,200 bottom] x 0.80 + 3,500 current low = 5,600.
4) If correct, in 2023/ 2024 the SHARKS might bite SPX.
5) We don’t know how far below it will go.
6)
MW: Bed Bath & Beyond stock price target cut to $2.40 from $3.00 at BofA Securities
What was this article realllllly about? I got lost in the comments 🤪🤪🤪
I still like shopping in person. It is a nice day out.
I usually buy tools that I rarely use .They are paid for
using store points accumulated by using their credit card.
One side effect of this is when I shop at said store I
resent having to spend cash there because I am so used
to paying from their points. So. Brick and mortar owners
Get those credit cards going. Forget coupons.
There’s more to this BBBY collapse. They had a solid footprint and good selection—but were consistently overpriced (even if you remembered to bring your kite-sized 20%-off mailer). They should have been able to adapt to the e-commerce wave (like Macy’s). They even brought in a hot shot from Target for a retail make-over. I suspect there’s something wrong culturally. And the “overpaid management” comments hint at that.
Isn’t most all ‘management’ over paid? At least that’s been my experience during over 45 years of working for the man. Management is easy… Leadership is when it gets hard!
I kind of like the outlet mall REIT sector because the math is easy. Last I looked they could make good money renting out space to retailers for about 40 / sq ft per year. Retailers tended to do pretty well if they could sell about 10X the rent or $400 / sq. ft. per year.
Hot brands come and go, but you try to keep the place filled with brands people want. Last 12 months were the best for the REIT I follow with sales of $450 sales per SQ ft. higher than per pandemic.
You can see how Fed threw companies a bone as they were able to lock in financing for 5 years at 3% during pandemic. If you are in real estate business and you can borrow at 3% you don’t need too good of s business to cash flow a lot of money.
Words of Wisdom Emanate From Esteemed Federal Reserve Chairman…
Powell: “We understand better how little we understand.”
My last visit to a BBB (gee, almost a 666 build back better, but I digress) was for a closing sale. It was awesome really. Stuff for near free. Loaded up on stuff I didn’t need of course (besides electric toothbrush, noise sound machine, sheets, scale etc….) and used those as gifts.
I just love the chase of bargains that cost less than to make them.
My favorite is real estate. To buy for less than build cost is orgasmic.
Those graphs…OMG.
They do remind me of Sears where the crook CEO and his bankers was selling the top real estate just to support the negative cash flow. He was selling it to himself of course, while loading up the company with debt. Unsurmontable debt. Wiped everybody out and became billionaire.
I wonder if…..Nah…conspiracies of course. We don’t do conspiracies.
I agree, this is social pump and dump. Instead of shady guys being paid by shadier guys to tout crap stocks to the gullible, these are a bunch of suckers thinking that they are in on the con, led by a few real con artists with social media clout.
Diamond hands, indeed.
Like Wolf I always considered going into a brick store a waste of time but about 10 years ago my daughter got a part time job a BBY, a store I always considered overpriced. She would alert me to sales of some quality items that were cheaper than what I could buy online after shipping. But they were a small percentage of the items in the store and limited quantity. I didn’t think the business could last long. Recently I saw the stock price going up and found out it was caused by the “meme” crowd. I wasn’t even sure who they were so I researched. As it turns out the “meme” crowd is just a low rent version of Goldman Sachs, Citi and others who have been pumping and dumping for decades. No one who outside of a lottery player hoping to get rich would listen to any of them, assuming one can read a financial statement. If one cannot do that its best to invest in Series I bonds at 9%. Sure there’s a 10k limit but you can buy for your offspring and so can your wife, partner or whoever you trust. 10k is likely more than the average meme investor has to gamble with anyway.
I haven’t been to one of those stores for years before COVID. I’d save the 20% off coupons and when I wanted to go there, I’d find the coupons expired. I hated their business model. Why couldn’t they just reduce prices by 20% and foot traffic would significantly increase, exposing the mailers as a dumb idea. I’m sure millions of people felt similarly and just stopped shopping there.
That’s too bad about Bed Bath and Beyond. I liked their towels and toilet cleaning accessories.
A few people I know registered there for their weddings. I thought that was very practical.
However, I never thought their stock price reflected their superior toilet cleaning accessories.
Smells like the demise of Pier One. Over priced land fill fodder.
Is REV(lon) the next crazy meme stock? Been wild lately. I’m too sane to go there.
It’s sad. Some 20+ years ago I would shop at BBY, but I have not been there in a very long time. It’s a strategic misstep not to have embraced their ecommerce business model and sticking to brick and mortar, which is slow death. Oh well, we live in a brave new world, now.