The same message as the day before rolled up on all the computer screens this time, not just the creator accounts, stating that GameShack had ceased all streaming operations as of the following Friday.
Colleen and Tristan stood in his darkened computer office on his yacht, the floor rocking gently under their feet, watching the GameShack site on their monitors as each one of them snapped to black, and then their words appeared.
The GameShack streaming service has ceased operation.
Due to mounting operational costs and recent financial losses, GameShack is discontinuing its streaming service as of today at this time.
No data downloads will be available.
Thank you for being a valuable contributor to the GameShack streaming service.
Colleen nudged Tristan with her elbow. “See? I told you they wouldn’t take the servers off-line to run the antivirus.”
Tristan chuckled and shrugged. “I never cease to be amazed and disappointed by my fellow human beings, especially those with too much money.”
She pointed at a different monitor off to the side. “Oh, look! CNBC has a live shot of it.”
“Okay, we’re starting phase two. Get Anjali.”
Twenty minutes later, just before the opening bell, CNBC announced that the meme stock GameShack was dead and probably heading to zero.
The talking heads unleashed invective that GameShack was a cautionary tale about why investors shouldn’t invest in meme stocks or else they could lose everything. The anger from Suit-Wearing White Guy #3 at the desk suggested that he’d lost a lot of money and hadn’t managed to divest himself of his position yet. “The shorts are smelling blood in the water, and the contrarians won’t be enough to save it.”
GameShack’s stock price fell like an ice-coated dead leaf in a blizzard, with flutters in the howling wind but its weight driving it inexorably to earth.
The price of GameShack’s cryptocurrency, the CurieCoin, did not fall. It rose and kept drifting upward.
When an artist dies, the price of their paintings goes up because that artist will produce no more art to dilute the pool of art already made.
If GameShack went to zero and dissolved in bankruptcy, the CurieCoin blockchain mint would cease operations, which meant no new CurieCoins would be minted.
CurieCoins had taken on an identity of their own that was no longer tied to GameShack, as they were traded on the international crypto exchanges, not merely on the GameShack streaming platform.
Huh.
Tristan turned to Colleen and Anjali, working on their computers at the end of his desk. “Time to crush the stock.”
53
Sherwood Forest
Colleen
Colleen and Anjali fired up their laptops and went to work convincing the minnows and other small fishies of the Sherwood Forest stock market forum that it wasn’t time to buy GameShack yet.
Let the price fall all day, they told the minnows. Drops like this don’t stage recoveries during the middle trading hours.
The Killer Whales were gleeful, encouraging people to buy the dip even though they’d already divested themselves of their positions, just because it amused them to see little people who couldn’t afford it lose their money. Colleen had seen the celebrations in the Killer Whales’ Pequod chat room after one of the small investors wrote a tearful post admitting they’d lost their life savings gambling on day-trading.
A quick search showed that the user account TwistyTrader was conspicuously absent from those posts, except for the occasional, “Knock it off, assholes,” comment.
Okay. Good.
So QueenMod and PikachuMod fought the good fight on the boards for hours, telling people how risky it was to catch a falling knife to keep them from buying the stock until it was lower.
They told the minnows that they should wait and see what the stock price would do in a few hours because it might go to zero, and then no buying price was a good deal.
When GameShack’s stock price fell below a dollar per share, the stock exchange declared that it would be removed from the NYSE the following day, a death knell for the stock.
Perfect.
Finally, with an hour left to go of trading and GameShack’s stock price at less than twenty-five cents, Colleen admitted TwistyTrader to the Small Pond room, a special meeting place for the small fish of the forum and the diametrical opposite of the Pequod room, where he made his offer to the minnows and sea bass of Sherwood Forest.
Fellow Merry People:
I don’t want to be seen buying GameShack stock, but with the approval of and in conjunction with Sherwood Forest’s moderators, at the close of trading today, I will buy GameShack stock for thirty-five cents US per share from anyone on this forum, no matter what you bought it at.
Happy Trading,
TwistyTrader
QueenMod and PikachuMod threw their support behind him, affirming that TwistyTrader had agreed to buy any and all shares of GameShack for thirty-five cents at the close of the stock exchanges, Eastern Time, and they trusted him to make good on his promise.
The mods would make sure that TwistyTrader wasn’t conning them. It was safe to do it.
The scavenging began.
The Sherwood Forest forum was an excellent place to learn the more occult areas of the financial markets, such as where to buy penny stocks that were not listed on the major exchanges. Because those stocks are considered trash, they are neither regulated nor arbitraged as regularly as blue chips and the other major stocks on the NYSE or Chicago.
As soon as GameShack had fallen below a buck a share, it had landed on the mean streets of the penny stock exchanges.
Colleen watched it all and did the math in her head. She was also running around the penny stock exchanges and picking up the stock with the money she’d made over the years by doing the opposite of what the Killer Whales had told the small fish to do.
While there was a bit of hand-wringing in the Sherwood Forest forum about whether TwistyTrader would make good on his promise, many hundreds of people zoomed around back alleys of the internet and bought up the stock for anything less than thirty-five cents. That number formed a hard ceiling, so their buying didn’t bump the stock up any higher than that.
The shares were vacuumed up so fast that the minnows and sea bass of Sherwood Forest purchased approximately seventy percent of GameShack’s stock in just the last hour of trading.
Their plan had worked astonishingly well, far better than they’d expected. They’d hoped for forty percent, quite honestly, and Tristan would’ve had to buy the rest of what he needed on the other exchanges in after-hours trading.
Colleen and Anjali were whooping with excitement and giggling over their laptops.
“Oh, yar, we own GameShack,” Anjali said, laughing.
Colleen took another look at just how much stock the Sherwood Forest collective had bought and how much was still outstanding.
Yeah, they had.
They’d bought GameShack.
By buying over fifty percent of the stock, the collective traders of Sherwood owned the GameShack company.
Even with thirty-ish percent of the stock still floating around, with an agreement among the Sherwood Forest investors, they could do anything they wanted to with the company. They could take it private. They could fire the board of directors and the CEO and hire anyone they wanted to take their places.