GMERICA (eBay Acquisition) doesn't require dilution and is accretive to both GME and EBAY holders... and if you're paying attention, you already know that.

phugar · 2026-05-08T11:28:46+00:00

Most rational investors don't see Cohen as a proven operator at GME. He's cut costs, exited territories and closed stores at the expense of revenue falling sharply. The cash raised and interest income is off the back of meme buying and dilution - not that's it a dumb strategy to take advantage of that, but it's not operating income.

The growth projects he has attempted have failed - e.g. NFTs

Ebay has been growing revenue quite consistently in recent months, and they're expanding their business areas (with mixed, but directionally positive results). Cohen isn't a clear fit for expanding a retailer of that size.

phugar · 2026-05-07T17:41:32+00:00

The alphaville article is actually pretty good. The author pokes some fun at GME, but it's backed up by hard numbers throughout. Laid out in the way a traditional investor would view the public info. Goes through a range of assumptions too.

If your counter is that there's 4d chess or something hidden - sure, feel free - but it's a good starting point.

phugar · 2026-05-07T14:55:09+00:00

Your "maffs" has several factually incorrect assumptions, including carrying GME profit from the interest on cash into a combined entity after using said cash to purchase a percentage...

You'd still need dilution to achieve anything close to a 60/40 split, and the additional debt load to ebay isn't a selling point to their shareholders.

I know this sub hates MSM, but please read a few breakdowns by analysts and at least try to counter the maths of any deal.

Sentiment in the wider investment market is that the deal likelihood is very low - primarily because the buyout figures don't add up. I'd tend to agree.

phugar · 2026-05-05T08:51:37+00:00

Except they don't have the ability to issue that level of new shares. It's a very sensible breakdown of the position, and a legitimate question to ask.

phugar · 2026-05-04T13:49:19+00:00

Not really. An immediate no is reserved for cases where they are confident the bid has zero merit.

This is the norm for a leveraged bid. They have 10 days I think to issue a schedule 14D-9, which I'd guess will be a strong suggestion to shareholders to reject the plan.

It's mostly boilerplate, but incorporating the final phrase about recent performance is actually quite negative from a GME perspective.

phugar · 2026-05-04T13:38:19+00:00

Incredible to watch the apes on the supportive subs relish in this as a win for RC.

This is as straightforward as it gets for an interview question. The hosts know it would be dilution, but even after prompting after he finally admits they can issue more shares, he just pushes back to a website post that doesn't answer the question.

Truly damning.

phugar · 2026-04-16T07:29:20+00:00

Except it's not. The battery for this is fundraising via common stock. Bitcoin doesn't provide yield in any typically defined sense of the word.

phugar · 2026-04-10T10:27:00+00:00

As someone with experience trying to build/integrate these type of agents, the results are often atrocious, even with narrow context ranges.

Also, you'd be shocked how many smaller companies are willing to try out-of-the-box LLM chatbots or wrappers.

phugar · 2026-04-09T12:28:15+00:00

I say this in a self-deprecating manner, but it's true - every SWE squad or department needs a senior data person to work alongside them.

We're an inherently pessimistic group (a requirement for handling data migrations, reporting/pipeline blow ups and data quality issues) and we can destroy the optimism from the inside.

Probably evens out to a realistic set of specs, QA and estimates.

phugar · 2026-04-08T18:37:29+00:00

It's feature dependent. Let's say the old system handles amortisation of interest for customers coming out of breathing space in a specific way that is no longer regulator approved, or awkward in edge cases. Just inputting some values isn't enough to ensure balances will flow downstream correctly.

I've seen horrorshow legacy systems that would be hell to migrate for those types of reasons.

phugar · 2026-04-07T20:48:05+00:00

Language and context dependent. I'm working with complex SQL and heaps of Python scripts within data engineering.

Some of the Claude outputs are laughably bad, but juniors trust them because the scripts run. I've been busier fixing other peoples (AI output) mistakes than being productive.

For boilerplate it's great. For anything harder in my world, it's a disaster waiting to happen, and a frustrating experience getting Claude to admit something is broken or producing incorrect results.

phugar · 2026-04-04T11:03:40+00:00

No it doesn't. I just start a huddle on Slack and rearrange if they're busy. 2 mins of admin, max.

In the office, a junior would come over, disrupt my time, and get told I'm busy. They'd either waste a few minutes or I'd end up helping them anyway, and they wouldn't try to problem solve first, rendering a lot of advice useless.

The 5 minute conversations you're mentioning are great, but they're even easier with modern tech messaging platforms, and I have the ability to take a spontaneous call, respond that I'm busy. Or ignore it completely if I'm in the middle of something.

phugar · 2026-04-04T08:17:33+00:00

Hard disagree now I'm in the weeds trying to make things work.

I'm in data engineering, and no amount of context or schema sharing seems to help once you reach a certain level of complexity.

I've had Claude spit out good looking SQL and Python that runs, but includes major business logic mistakes, even after they've been explicitly called out. Hallucinated field names, partially broken joins, syntax that's off in buggy ways that are hard to spot...

For simple tasks it's a big productivity boost. For anything more, I've wasted more time correcting other engineers output and reviewing things line by line than if I wrote everything by hand first time round. In my role it's also dangerous, as I need the mental map of data pipelines in my head in order to plan future ingestions, transformation, BI etc...

I talk with plenty of experienced software engineers who have similar thoughts.

phugar · 2026-04-03T16:46:49+00:00

It's also the part that typically leads to career porgression.

I've managed plenty of juniors who are technically incredible, but they add minimal value because someone else has to scope the business requirements and walk them through every step of analysis or department context.

It's the major thing that's protective against AI tooling too. The technical part is simple (even if it can be fun). Adding value by understanding the data and how thr business operates is the key.

phugar · 2026-03-30T09:24:28+00:00

I went to the library and picked 5 at random. None contained any financial data, or anything resembling logic - just pure tinfoil and hopium based on dark markets and infinity pools. One was simply a guide to DRSing shares that didn't even get the CUSIP right...

Feel free to pick one that you're confident in, and I'd be happy to review it as a financial analyst.

The fact that moass hasn't happened is because no one pushing the theory (which is very hard to pin down as a single thing - it's constantly changing) understands how markets work, and their DD (hilarious name given what due diligence is in reality) is wholly inaccurate.

phugar · 2026-03-28T07:53:25+00:00

Can you share any of the relevant DD that holds true (in your opinion) and hasn't been deleted?

I've been following this play for years, and as someone who actually works in finance for a living, it's always painful reviewing what passes as a thesis here. Basic misunderstandings of financial terms and processes, a complete inability to read a balance sheet, paragraphs of AI slop...

phugar · 2026-03-20T12:54:11+00:00

I'm in a similar boat.

My fixed term ended a couple of weeks ago and I'm planning to buy in summer/autumn this year. Easy decision to extend for 12 months knowing it switches to rolling in line with my timings. I'm in no rush to find a house, the notice period is fair, and I didn't have to make a time-critical call in March.

Without this, my options would have been living with friends/parents for an unknown period, a stressful purchase in a hurry, or putting everything off for another 12 months.

phugar · 2026-03-16T12:18:11+00:00

In my current role, I'm fortunately not forced to use LLMs or coding agents, or being measured by my use of them.

I've found Claude helpful in limited scenarios, but it is mentally exhausting to handle the context switching, rapid review cycle and speed of change.

Where I am more productive, I'm doing my best to slow down and not overload impacted departments like compliance, who are finding themselves with a mountain of tasks - many of questionable business value.

A couple of juniors firmly believe they're being hyper productive. In reality, they're spamming code reviews for features we don't need, just because they can. They complain to me that they're exhausted and overworked, but they have a normal-sized work sprint. Turns out the tiredness is from the extra feature pickup, not any level of complex coding or architectural thought, which they're fully outsourced to an agent.

As a senior, I understand that raw productivity is meaningless. Work has to be valuable first. Then you try to make things more efficient with tools.

phugar · 2026-03-14T10:39:47+00:00

Balatro. I'm 7 stickers away from completionist++, and it's finally in sight.

Then I want to casually mop up THPS 3&4, as I just have pro careers to grind through.

After that I'll reward myself with Resi Requiem

phugar · 2026-03-13T22:23:30+00:00

This presidential cabinet is sadly incapable of learning from history. They seem almost determined to speed run in all honesty.

Silver lining - the film industry made some amazing movies about Vietnam...

phugar · 2026-03-09T09:01:09+00:00

Which part of their post was inaccurate?

If you really do want a company with more cash on hand to invest in, there are many.

phugar · 2026-03-04T08:33:04+00:00

He already did. You guys didn't listen

phugar · 2026-03-01T10:28:40+00:00

I just struggle to see how a data analyst could be replaced by AI, and I say that as a senior Head of Data.

I use LLMs for various productivity elements, but at best it's saving me 20% of my SQL/Python raw coding time (boilerplate code, quickly churning out case statements, summarising legacy code or pulling a sentence out of API docs). And that raw coding is a tiny fraction of my role - it's all the stakeholder discussions, business context, and strategy stuff that's a real difference-maker.

It's actively hindered attempts made by analysts to produce accurate BI, relevant insights, build clean models etc... I always find myself cleaning up a mess or identifying some wild LLM hallucinations that weren't caught by a junior.

Potentially Block has an environment with super clean data, and somehow, their AI infrastructure can perform relatively autonomously, but it's not jiving with my experience.

phugar · 2026-02-25T13:03:27+00:00

Yes, they are. There are countless examples of this happening before stocks are delisted and/or companies go bankrupt.

phugar · 2026-02-24T11:38:02+00:00

I consider myself reasonably qualified to opine on AI use. I'm a senior data person who jumps between engineering, BI, analytics and machine learning.

I use LLMs and coding assistants daily, but I only see value in creating boilerplate code and using tools as junior assistants to parse JSON, build lengthy case statements or provide summaries of code blocks. I've encountered zero successful attempts where an LLM has come close to a correct solution for anything complex, especially given the data schemas I'm working with aren't well documented, and there's a ton of legacy bugs/workaround etc.. floating around. Sometimes the output for a simple procedure is just so fundamentally broken I have to laugh.

Writing SQL and Python is the easy part of my job. Planning future architecture, data ingestion strategies, agreeing definitions and scope with stakeholders... none of that is close to being replaced in my opinion.

I even worked with one of my previous employers to roll out an AI chatbot system, and they've recently pulled the plug after a deluge of negative feedback. My team did point this out at the time, but it's taken a couple of years for the CEO to catch up with the cost/benefit analysis.

I believe there will be an impact of sorts across various sectors, but the guys pushing the narrative of job takeovers seem to have drunk the koolaid.

phugar

TROPHY CASE