Build on something like the combined capabilities of Vlingo, Speaktoit, and Iris as it evolves, to approximate or better Siri's capabilities. I'd pay $5 for that app, probably. Maybe a bit more.
Give it the voice of GLADos, and I'd pay $20 for that app. :)

Update 2/4 - someone went ahead and spelled out the mechanics of the squeeze quite well and I would like to give their post attention https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/lc8vgo/slv_is_not_going_to_get_squeezedslv_is_the_trojan/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Update 2/2 - I am able to comment again. I messaged several mods on Reddit and the mod account on Twitter. None of them responded but it appears I am able to comment again so I assume one of them lifted my ban
Update 2/1 - I have been banned from posting on WSB. I guess they aren’t yet deleting my post here given the media attention. If this was a rogue mod I’d appreciate being restored the ability to post on WSB. I’m open to talking to any mods
Update 1/31 - there have been tons of 'what to buy' questions so I added a clarity post, hope it helps. It's also getting downvoted to hell because its not about GME so that's discouraging. The speed at which the downvotes flew in makes me think someone made bots to crush new posts related to SLV (or maybe anything not GME). It makes no sense for this post to have 93% upvotes and my new one to have 28%.
I have not sold my GME to buy SLV. I had a small pre-existing position in leaps I bought months ago.
Created an official Twitter handle not sure if I’ll use it, but didn’t want anyone to impersonate me on there
Here is the longer DD for the short squeeze case for SLV, a follow-up from my shorter post a few hours ago. Note that I talk in first person as this is something I’m going to do. Everyone is free to do as they individually please and copy my trade if they’d like to. I think it’s absurd that forces at be think this forum is manipulating by posting publicly but that’s where we are at right now.
First things first, I'm not doing this until the GME rise is done. I am long GME but am going long SLV immediately after.
Update 1/29: due to the manipulation and collusion of citadel, hedge funds, and brokers to change the rules and rig the game in their favor. Who likely knew ahead of time and bought puts right before and calls at the bottom, GME is too important to abandon still. SLV is still my next play but GME needs to go to $1000 and these people need to go to jail.
If you just want to know what to buy skip to the end
I present 2 investment DDs in this post, the short squeeze and the fundamentals. If you want to see what to buy
The short squeeze:
Buy SLV shares and SLV call options to force physical delivery of silver to the SLV vaults. Also buy physical silver bullion. The best possible thing would be to take physical delivery in the futures market if you have access to do so.
The silver futures market has oscillated between having roughly 100-1 and 500-1 ratio of paper traded silver to physical silver, but lets call it 250-1 for now. This means that for every 250 ounces in open interest in the futures market, only 1 actually gets delivered. Most traders would rather settle with cash rather than take delivery of thousands of ounces of silver and have to figure out to store and transport it in the future.
The people naked shorting silver via the futures markets are a couple of large banks and making them pay dearly for their over leveraged naked shorts would be incredible. It's not Melvin capital on the other side of this trade, its JP Morgan. Time to get some payback for the bailouts and manipulation they've done for decades (look up silver manipulation fines that JPM has paid over the years).
The way the squeeze could occur is by forcing a much higher percentage of the futures contracts to actually deliver physical silver. There is very little silver in the COMEX vaults or available to actually be use to deliver, and if they have to start buying en masse on the open market they will drive the price massively higher. There is no way to magically create more physical silver in the world that is ready to be delivered. With a stock you can eventually just issue more shares if the price rises too much, but this simply isn't the case here. The futures market is kind of the wild west of the financial world. Real commodities are being traded, and if you are short, you literally have to deliver thousands of ounces of silver per contract if the holder on the other side demands it. If you remember oil going negative back in May, that was possible because futures are allowed to trade to their true value. They aren't halted and that's what will make this so fun when the true squeeze happens.
Edit for more detail: let’s say there’s one futures seller who gets unlucky and gets the buyer who actually wants to take delivery. He doesn’t have the silver and realizes it’s all of a sudden damn difficult to find some physical silver. He throws up his hands and just goes long a matching number of futures contracts and will demand actual delivery on those. Problem solved because he has now matched the demanding buyer with a new seller. The issue is that the new seller has the same issue and does the exact same thing. This is how the cascade effect of a meltup occurs. All the naked shorts trying to offload their position to someone who actually has some silver. My goal is to ensure that I have the silver and won’t sell to them until silver is at a far higher price due to the desperation.
The silver market is much larger than GME in terms of notional value, but there is very little physical silver actually readily available (think about the difference between total shares and the shares in the active float for a stock), and the paper silver trading hands in the futures market is hundreds of times larger than what is available. Thus when they are forced to actually deliver physical silver it will create a massive short squeeze where an absurd amount of silver will be sought after (to fulfill their contractually obligated delivery) with very little available to actually buy. They are naked shorting silver and will have to cover all at once and the float as a percentage of the total silver stock globally is truly miniscule.
The fundamentals:
The current gold to silver ratio is 73-1. Meaning the price of gold per ounce is 73 times the price of silver. Naturally occurring silver is only 18.75 times as common as gold, so this ratio of 73-1 is quite high. Until the early 20th century, silver prices were pegged at a 15-1 ratio to gold in the US because this ratio was relatively known even then. In terms of current production, the ratio is even lower at 8-1. Meaning the world is only producing 8 ounces of silver for each newly produced ounce of gold.
Global industry has been able to get away with producing so little new silver for so long because governments have dumped silver on the market for 80 years, but now their silver vaults are empty. At the end of WW2 government vaults globally contained 10 billion ounces of silver, but as we moved to fiat currency and away from precious metal backed currencies, the amount held by governments has decreased to only 0.24 billion ounces as they dumped their supply into the market. But this dumping is done now as their remaining supply is basically nil.
This 0.24 billion ounces represents only 8% of the total supply of only 3 billion ounces stored as investment globally. This means that 92% of that gold is held privately by institutions and by millions of boomer gold and silver bugs who have been sitting on meager gains for decades. These boomers aren't going to sell no matter what because they see their silver cache as part of their doomsday prepper supplies. It's locked away in bunkers they built 500 miles from their house. Also, with silver at $23 an ounce currently, this means all of the worlds investment grade silver only has a total market cap of $70 billion. For comparison the investment grade gold in the world is worth roughly $6 trillion. This is because most of the silver produced each year actually gets used, as I have mentioned. $70 billion sounds like a lot, but we don’t have to buy all that much for the price to go up a lot.
**If the squeeze happens, it would be like 40 years worth of their gains in 4 months **
The reason that only 8 ounces of silver are produced for every 1 ounce of gold in today's world is because there aren't really any good naturally occurring silver deposits left in the world. Silver is more common than gold in the earth's crust, but it is spread very thin. Thus nearly every ounce of silver produces is actually a byproduct of mining for other metals such as gold or copper. This means that even as the silver price skyrockets, it wont be easy to increase the supply of silver being produced. Even if new mines were to be constructed, it could take years to come online.
Finally, most of this newly created silver supply each year is used for productive purposes rather than kept for investment. It is used in electronics, solar panels, and jewelry for the most part. This demand wont go away if the silver price rises, so the short sellers will be trying to get their hands on a very small slice of newly minted silver. The solar market is also growing quickly and political pressure to increase solar and electric vehicles could provide more industrial demand.
The other part of the story is the faster moving piece and that is the inflation and currency debasement fear portion. The government and the fed are printing money like crazy debasing the value of the dollar, so investors look for real assets like precious metals to hide out in, driving demand for silver. The $1.9 trillion stimulus passing in a month or two could be a good catalyst. All this money combined with the reopening of the economy could cause some solid inflation to occur, and once inflation starts it often feeds on itself.
​
What to buy:
Edit 2/24: I now advocate buying PSLV for shares, physical metal if the premiums come back down, and if you want options then SLV is still ok for that.
I will be putting 50% directly into SLV shares, and 50% into the $35 strike SLV calls expiring 4/16. This way the SLV purchase creates a groundswell into silver immediately that then rockets through a gamma squeeze as SLV approaches $35. Price target of $75 for SLV by end of April if the short squeeze happens.
Edit: for the part of your purchases going into shares, some people recommend PSLV because they think SLV might start lying about having the silver in their vault. Or that the custodian will be double counting, ie claiming that the same silver belongs to multiple people (banking on the fact that people wont all try to get their silver at once). So if you buy SLV shares and calls, that's great. But I think it could be prudent for us to buy options in SLV (no options on PSLV) and shares in PSLV. It all depends on how paranoid you want to be. There is a lot of paranoia in the precious metals world.
Alternate options:
- buying physical silver; this also works but you pay a premium to buy and sell so its less efficient and you take fewer silver ounces off of the market because of the premium you pay
- going long futures for February or March; if you are a rich bastard and can actually take physical delivery of 1000s of ounces of silver by all means do so. But if you simply settle for cash you are actually part of the problem. We need actual physical delivery, which is what SLV demands and is why SLV is the way to go unless you are going to take delivery
- miners; I don’t recommend buying miners as part of this trade. Miners will absolutely go up if SLV goes up, but buying them doesn't create the squeeze in the actual silver market. Furthermore, most silver miners only derive 30-50% of their revenue from silver anyways, so eventually SLV will outperform them as it gets high enough (and each marginal SLV dollar only increases miner profits by a smaller and smaller percentage)
Details on SLV physical settlement:
When SLV issues shares, the custodian is forced to true up their vaults with the proportional amount of silver daily. From the SLV prospectus:
"An investment in Shares is: Backed by silver held by the Custodian on behalf of the Trust. The Shares are backed by the assets of the Trust. The Trustee’s arrangements with the Custodian contemplate that at the end of each business day there can be in the Trust account maintained by the Custodian no more than 1,100 ounces of silver in an unallocated form. The bulk of the Trust’s silver holdings is represented by physical silver, identified on the Custodian’s or, if applicable, sub-custodian's, books in allocated and unallocated accounts on behalf of the Trust and is held by the Custodian in London, New York and other locations that may be authorized in the future."
Join me brothers. Lets take silver to the moon and take on the biggest and baddest manipulators in the world. Please post rocket emojis in the comments as desired.
Disclaimer: do your own research, make your own decisions, everything here is a guess and hypothetical and nothing is guaranteed, not a financial advisor, I have ADHD and maybe other things too.
Bear case: silver does tend to sell off if the broader market plunges so it’s not immune to broad market sell off. It’s also the most manipulated market in the world so we are facing some tough competition on the short side

Abbreviation Index:

BB -- Blackberry
AWS -- Amazon Web Services
IVY -- Intelligent Vehicles Yo. I don't actually know if this stands for anything
QNX -- Quick-Unix perhaps? It's a Unix-like embedded microkernel RTOS (real-time operating system)
EOY -- end of year
PT -- price target
SP -- stock price
EV -- electric vehicle
SoC -- System on a Chip
IoT -- Internet of Things
TL;DR: Blackberry ($BB) is almost daily announcing new partnerships and new clients for their software, including new deals with companies that are just now or just this year launching autonomous vehicles that run on QNX software. The big kahuna of all these deals is BB's recent partnership with Amazon to go 50/50 into BB's software IVY, a scalable cloud-connected software platform designed for intelligent vehicle data gathering and data sharing. With Amazon's Jeff Bezos stepping down, and Andy Jassy filling his shoes, who was the CEO of AWS, BB will have some very firm support behind Amazon's new CEO. BB and Amazon are having a webinar Feb. 23rd about their partnership and IVY, which should be a strong catalyst moving forward. IVY beta earnings are projected to begin impacting BB's Q3 or Q4 earnings beginning in November this year, with IVY fully being integrated around the 2023 timeframe. Through a lot of reading and analysis, I believe BB has a four-tiered business model dating back as far as 2013 when BB's CEO John Chen was hired to begin the massive BB turnaround process. Tier 1 was development of QNX and IVY, lasting from 2013 to today and onward, however, Tier 2 overlaps Tier 1. Tier 2 was customer acquisition, primarily distributing their secure software in QNX, SecuSuite, Spark, and AtHoc. They secured 37 automakers during this time, including 9 of the top 10 automakers, over 106 governments from around the world, including all of G7 governments and 18 of G20 governments, as well as 77% of Fortune 100 companies, including partnerships with Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Sony, XPENG, XPEV, NVIDIA, Intel, Qualcomm, Baidu, IBM, LG, Samsung, and others. Well if they have such an incredible market share, why are they so undervalued? The answer is that QNX was not the end-all-be-all product. It was the base that the rest would be built on. Particularly IVY, which is the real money-maker. Tier 3 is IVY beta, and Tier 4 is IVY distribution and subscription revenue streams. So why is IVY the big deal and not QNX? They are both big deals, but QNX was never designed to be the money-maker. They are charging a one-time fee per vehicle use. There is a bigger goal here, to secure their clients as their customers for the bigger product in IVY. They also need QNX is to be a secure system in order for IVY to be trustworthy and reliable. And it certainly is secure. QNX has ISO26262 certification, as well as US government clearance, NSA clearance, and CIA clearance. The US government uses QNX and Blackberry products. Just let that sink in. That should tell you something about its security. Anyways, IVY will be used in autonomous vehicle level 4 and level 5 communication (note that QNX is level 5 certified... it has a business moat just in its security level and clearance), as well as EV and gas vehicle data collecting and AI-powered data synthesis. See below for more details on IVY. Wrapping up this TL;DR, BB is going to do well this year as IVY unfolds, but will do even better in the next 2-5 years. I have a PT of 25 by EOY and a PT of 80 by 2023 EOY, and a PT of 160+ by 2025 EOY
TL;DR: TL;DR: BB go up, but go slow for now because IVY revenue not here yet, but big fast later. Make big monies, BB is the future tech that Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc will be building upon in the EV and IoT market

FAQs:

1) Why is Blackberry stock price going down?
A: A few possible reasons. One, as of today the whole market is down. BB is connected to overall market swings as most companies are. Two, there may be some market manipulation by bearish financial institutions as there are a lot of calls expiring on 2/19. I would expect that BB SP to be volatile between $11 and $14 between now and then, and to move upwards after 2/19 and especially after 2/23 (Amazon + BB webinar). Three, there are bearish investors who still think BB is a phone company and don't understand the underworkings of BB's business strategy, their software, their patents, or their partners. Their revenue has been affected by coronavirus and has not been particularly phenomenal so far this year.
2) Should I invest now or later?
A: First off, I'm not a financial advisor, these are just my opinions. Invest at your own risk. In my opinion, BB will see a large SP growth by EOY, anywhere from 50% to 150% growth by EOY. While revenue will likely not increase much this year, the partnership with Amazon and news regarding IVY will likely create new floors for their SP much higher than the current SP right now, at around the $12 SP
3) What's stopping competitors from building a similar product and hurting BB's business?
A: There's a lot of reasons why BB has a huge moat right now. One, notice the partners that BB has with QNX. They've got all the big boys working them, aside from Apple and Tesla. Seeing as SpaceX runs on QNX, and seeing that Apple was trying to make a deal with Hyundai that did not go through, I think it is still possible that either Tesla or Apple or both companies could also make a deal with BB to use QNX as their OS system. BB worked to develop their QNX embedded microkernel OS for the last eight years or so. Anyone trying to step into the game now is far too late. Apple has the best chance of all companies, as it has its own OS and Apple knows security very well, but this still requires an entirely new system in order to work in the EV sector. Also, Apple announced recently that they would be developing their own EV, although they did not give much details beyond that statement. The likelihood that they are both working on the hardware and software side of this thing is slim given the large number of difficulties that come with certification as it relates to the cybersecurity software space. Regardless, I would suspect that either Apple or Tesla is the most likely to be competitors in this space, but neither company has successfully completed a certified OS system, particularly for the emerging sector of autonomous EVs. Tesla is currently building a Linux-based system that is having a lot of difficulty in passing certifications such as ISO26262, a struggle that has been ongoing for years now. They may achieve a product that passes these safety regulations and certifications, but the question remains whether this will be in time as the EV and autonomous market picks up speed, and whether competing companies would even be interested in using their product. In fact, any car company is unlikely to develop their own OS software because none of their competitors would be likely to use it. BB is the perfect business to license since it is not competing in the hardware sector for the EV market. This argument can also be used for Apple if they are also building an EV.
4) Why is BB's revenue so low if they have so many customers and partners?
A: QNX has been licensed so far as a one-time purchase, per vehicle or IoT using their software. IVY will be a subscription-based software that also includes a one-time purchase. Thus, BB's revenue streams are somewhat unimpressive currently, but they are playing the long game. If my hypothesis is correct, it is John Chen's goal to lay low as software is developed and customer relationships are built. It's the same with the book market. It's the sequel that makes all the money, not the first book. QNX is just the first book of a series looking to hook in its customers with low costs before hitting 'em with the strong follow up in IVY. Additionally, in order to build a competitive business moat, it was to their advantage to not forewarn any competitors of their involvement and plans. Consider John Chen's work as a CEO in his last business Sybase. Chen worked as the CEO of Sybase for 10 years. For the first 7 years, the SP remained at around $10 a share. Three years later, the SP was at $100 a share. I suspect he is implementing a similar model with Blackberry. Chen joined Blackberry in 2013. BB stock actually dropped for most of the last 7 years, resting at a stock price of around $5. Now BB is at $12 a share. I would not be surprised if BB reaches $50 two years from now.

Now for the details.

Read this for DD on BB's achievements, certifications, markets, QNX products, EV growth, Spark software and clients, BB Radar, software pricing, and BB challenges:
Comprehensive Guide about BB and how it shall take off in coming years

Full List of Clients and Partners:

Blackberry Clients and Partners
Automakers: Honda, Audi, Jeep, Mitsubishi, Ford, Hyundai, Volkswagen, Bentley, Lamboghini, Byton, Mini (cooper), Toyota, Subaru, Fiat Chrysler, Mazda, Nio, BMW, Porsche, Lexus, Kia, Land-Rover, Mercedes-Benz, Buick, Jaguar, Visteon, Skoda, Chevrolet, Nissan, Acura, Continental, General Motors, Baidu, Motional
Other: Denso, Aptiv, Bosch, Panasonic, Harman, Bugatti, LG, Vodafone, Bell, Carahsoft, CACI, Telus, iSec, KPMG, Tableau, Qlik
Major: Amazon, Google, Sony, XPENG, XPEV, Li Auto, NVIDIA, Canoo, Microsoft, Intel, Verizon, Qualcomm, IBM, LG, Samsung
Major Investors: PRIMECAP, Hamblin Watsa, Ontario Teachers’ Pension, Vanguard, Harris Associates, ETF Managers Group, Wells Capital, Arrowstreet Capital, Kahn Brothers Advisors, Norges Bank Investment
Governments: Albania, Andorra, Angola, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Belarus, Belgium, Benin, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Canada, Congo, Croatia, Czech Republic, DR Congo, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, France, Gabon, Germany, Ghana, Gibraltar, Greece, Guadeloupe, Hong Kong, Hungary, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Kuwait, Latvia, Lesotho, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macau, Macedonia, Malawi, Malaysia, Mali, Malta, Marthinique, Mauritania, Mauritus, Mayotte, Mexico, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Netherlands, Netherlands Antilles, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Réunion, Saint Barthélemy, Saint Martin, San Marino, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Turkey, USA, Uganda, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Uruguay, Vatican City, Western Sahara, Zambia, Zimbabwe

Blackberry Current Revenues:

BlackBerry Revenues: How Does BlackBerry Make Money? -- Trefis
This display the biggest bearish argument to BB. Until IVY begins producing new revenue streams, BB is likely to not exponentially increase revenue streams, but only sustain moderate YoY growth

Blackberry Analysis Regarding Infotainment and Google and Ford Deal:

see "Blackberry (BB) Stock News Analysis | What I need to say..." by Financial Live by LEYA on the forbidden video website
The media recently picked out a story that left out a lot of pertinent information, making it seems that BB lost Ford as a client. This is not true. QNX is designed to be a SoC. This means that other operating systems, such as Linux or Android, can be easily added to QNX. It is in fact encouraged. The Ford and Google deal was simply announcing the Ford would be using Android as their infotainment system. I believe that BB was never intended to try and be the predominant entity for all software systems in EVs or IoTs, but the backbone that connects all together, and to protect all components in a secure system. Autonomous EVs and even regular EVs in general would not be possible without a secure system protecting the product, as is true with IoTs. This is also why things like US Fighter Jets run on... you guess it, QNX. Ford is still using QNX. It is simply also now using Android that is running on top of QNX more commentary on this: Analyzing Blackberry Bear Argument - Case No. 1: Ford Deal

Pretty Charts

The New BlackBerry Everyone is Talking About $BB

Facebook Settlement with BB

Image
This is an interesting one to be sure. Facebook was being evil, like the do, and were caught using a number of BB patents. They settled in February, and the day that the settlement was finalized, John Chen (BB CEO) tweeted reminding everyone that BB is used on the ISS
https://twitter.com/JohnChen/status/1358853064153784321?s=20
Well, the connection and speculation here is that Blackberry is going to the moon, and that the settlement is rather significant. Someone else also dug out some information in Facebook's most recent 10-K, specifically a portion for a 'non-cancelable contractual commitment' of an amount of $7500 million dollars. That's 7.5 billion btw. We don't know how big the settlement is, but it is worth noting that BB's entire market cap is 7.5B. I highly doubt that a settlement would reach such lofty numbers, but it could be possible that FB settled for some initial amount of $1B or so, as well as $1B in reoccurring payments over several years. We won't know until March 15th actually, so stay tuned.

Blackberry New Partnerships

Within the last few weeks, Blackberry has announced a stronger partnership with Baidu (China's Google), as well as their involvement with Baidu choosing to use QNX for their autonomous vehicles that will be hitting the road, as early as this year and next. BB has also announced their involvement with Motional, a joint venture between Hyundai and Aptiv, which will use QNX for their autonomous vehicles. Motional will be partnering with Lyft to use autonomous vehicles to begin serving customers and will be deploying their vehicles in 2023. It was also announced that QNX will be working with AOSP (Android Open Source Project), as well as announcing yesterday that QNX Hypervisor 2.2 is now released, which is what allows Android and Linux to run on top of QNX.
A sum-up of all the recent news on $BB

BB's Technical Page on QNX Security

Link
Very technical. But cool stuff.

Rumor: Blackberry Buyout? Here's why that's not happening:

Just read this post. It's quite revealing:
Great Day for BB despite stick dipping.
TL;DR: Amazon could have easily bought BB. Why didn't they? Well, all the big players are interested in this EV and IoT emerging sector. This is the new wave of technology that will dominate the market. First we had the dot.com boom, then the cell-phone and smart-phone market, and now we have the autonomous EV and IoT market. If Amazon were to buy BB, they would have to submit a tender offer. This would be a red flag to all the big players that Amazon were trying to buy up the best security out there. It would be a bidding war that could result in a double-digit multi-billion dollar buyout. It was much more to their advantage to create a secret alliance with BB and establish a 50/50 partnership, whose contract includes exclusivity for their use of IVY. Ouch! That's gotta hurt. This is where the importance of QNX lies. BB will be able to pull the rug out from any company that chooses to use something other than IVY. No IVY, no QNX, no EV. It will be a package deal where IVY is the big money maker. All other companies will have to build from the ground up or be forced to license QNX and make their money off of other sectors, such as the infotainment sector, as Google has already begun to do with the Ford deal. When this deal happened, the other big boys wet their pants realizing they needed to get into this space, and fast. Microsoft partnered with Cruise/GM. Apple tried to partner with Hyundai, who was so flattered, they may have initially said yes or indicated so, before realizing that they were already partnered with BB, so it was a no-go. Not sure if that is fact or fiction, but it is an interesting proposal.

Blackberry IVY + AWS Partnership:

Alright, so what's the deal with IVY? Why is it going to be so profitable? Why is IVY the real money-maker, while QNX has been used as the customer-acquisition software tool? Check out this picture:
Image
For one, IVY is designed for real-time communication between EVs or other IoTs. Autonomous driving level 5 requires vehicles to communicate with one another. This is where IVY comes in. IVY connects the different software components of an EV (which presumably are running on QNX), as well as harvesting data on those systems. The data used can be distributed for a wide-variety of uses, including, but not limited to, automakers and suppliers, app developers, consumer services, smart cities, EV charging providers, insurance companies, and vehicle maintenance providers. All of these different sectors will be willing to pay subscriptions for these data services, as well as the automakers and IoT makers who will also be willing to pay subscriptions for IVY. For instance, IVY can help share information between vehicles that will allow for a car detecting ice roads in one area so that other cars using IVY can take a different route. This results in less crashes, which helps the automakers. Insurance companies can use data from all these different data points as well, allowing them an inside-view of their clients. The list of what is possible here is inexhaustible.
As for price points, the subscription models for multiple outside companies wanting to use the data will be create huge revenue streams for BB. With Amazon as a 50/50 partner, and with their resources and strategic management, BB will be poised to be the foundation in security and data sharing for the entire EV, and somewhat of the IoT market (the IoT market has more competitors for sure)
see "Is BlackBerry Stock Undervalued?" by Wealthy Mindset on the forbidden video website
see "Roadmap to $180 a share (BlackBerry Stock)" by Wealthy Mindset on the forbidden video website

Revenue, revenue, revenue...

Blackberry is poised to be an industry leader in EV, government, and IoT security and data sharing with products such as QNX, IVY, Spark, and their other software products. Stock price will likely stay somewhat stunted until IVY revenue begins picking up. It is possible that more announcements and marketing related to IVY will make this growth more rapid. In my opinion, either way BB over the next 5 years will 10x. The question is whether you want to get in now at $12 / share or two years from now at $40 a share or something similar, assuming that either way this stock is going to push for that 100B market cap (it's currently at 7B). There will be bearish analysts that will continue to say that Blackberry is a worthless company until those IVY revenue streams begin to come in. It is also possible that a realistic competitor may emerge within the next three years, such as Tesla or Apple. But if Apple is seeking to create its own EV product, then both companies will have a hard time finding any way to license their software to any other company. It remains possible that Apple and/or Tesla may strikes deals with BB as well in order to be able to produce autonomous vehicles and get a bite of that market share

Really, no competitors?

Well it's called a business moat for a reason. As we have recently seen, QNX is working with AOSP, and so clearly, they are not to be worried about. Tesla is not a true competitor as their OS product is not certified yet, and has demonstrated difficulty in doing so, and additionally, other automakers will not want to benefit their competitors by using their product. A third-party non-auto-maker will be much more desirable. Other companies such as VxWorks, have a lot of to prove both in security and certifications, as well as producing an OS product that is compatible with an emerging autonomous level 5 EV market. QNX's embedded microkernel RTOS is very much unique in this regard. This type of system allows for real-time processing and power distribution, while protecting the system from attacks. In an embedded microkernel system, if one part of the system is attacked, the whole system will not shut down, in layman's terms. This is essential for the security of any high-risk product that is built upon an underlying software that controls that different components of the system.

Conclusion:

All eyes are turned towards Blackberry right now. People want to know what this deal with Amazon will look like, how it will work, what they will focus on, (will Amazon also use this system for a fleet of delivery drones? hmmm), what the revenue streams will look like, what are their projections, what markets and sectors are they targeting, what are their future goals, what will Amazon be doing on their end, etc, etc. The Amazon + BB webinar may answer some of those questions, or maybe they won't. Time will tell (Feb. 23rd, specifically -- here's a link to sign up and watch: Next-Gen Vehicle Architectures Unlock Unprecedented Opportunities for Automakers). Also look out for that FB settlement numbers on March 15th, and Q4 earnings March 31st. I don't expect Q4 earnings to be particularly interesting unless they include the FB settlement numbers. Could those numbers instead be put into Q1 earnings for 2021? Possibly.
Initially IVY beta is expected to begin being released late this year. I will also be looking forward to see how Apple and Tesla respond in the coming months. Ultimately, BB is a long-term play, but is poised to dominate this emerging industry with the partnerships and security focused software they have secretly been building. Now if only the could do something about their logo, some rebranding would be nice...
This is not financial advice, just my own opinions. I am not a financial advisor nor a professional. I own 14k shares in Blackberry, as well as options (10x 8/17/21 20c BB). Do your own DD and fact check me as well

I know a lot of folks are getting frustrated in their learning process, and in their life, so I wanted to talk a bit about what your life will be like once you've landed your career.
edit: This is a pretty American-centric viewpoint and experience, and one born out of having experienced a decade of struggling financially in stressful jobs working 50-60 hours per week.
For reference, I'm self-taught, and before programming I was a line cook for 6 years, and IT help desk for 4. I went to school for English, History, and Music. I got my first actual programming job at 29 and have been writing web apps for the state government in America for just under 5 years, but am now moving to Norway in two weeks to start a programming gig there.
My Entry-Level Pay and Situation
I started off in a very, very low-end pay structure. About 43k USD per year. But I did get full health benefits and some retirement contributions, which was great. I was able to afford my own apartment at 1350 USD per month.
The Big Shockers
First, I didn't have to budget food anymore. Somebody else mentioned this, but woah, this was amazing. I went from strict meal planning around the cheapest meals I knew to basically having whatever I felt like. Granted it's not steaks and lobster for every meal, but I could make whatever meals I wanted without worrying about how much they'd be. I could also eat out at restaurants way more often too. The amount of stress that was removed from not having to worry about how much food costs was enormous.
Second, I didn't have to worry about where I was at work at all times. Or hardly ever, for that matter. No more "hey can you cover the phones while I go to the bathroom?" Saying "hey can I get the Monday two weeks from now off for a doctor's appointment" instead became "oh I've got an appointment tomorrow at 2 so I'll be out for the rest of the day after that." Oh yeah, I got health insurance, finally. More on that later. I mean I could literally just say "hey I'm going for a walk around the block" and nobody would bat an eye. We would gather groups of folks up for a walk to the coffee shop just to take a breather. Multiple times a day. Your work becomes project-based and you become the person who decides if you've done contributed a good enough amount of work at any moment in order to take a break. And lunch is whenever the hell you want it to be. Meetings throw a wrench in the gears of your break plans but that's about it.
Third, and pretty closely related to the one above, paid time off is no longer something you have to fight others over. I didn't have to worry about if I was the first one to request Christmas week off or not, because it doesn't fucking matter. Everyone takes it off. I also often took a week or two off in the middle of Spring just 'cause. Same with sick days. For one boss I kinda had to worry 'cause she would set ridiculous deadlines, but once she moved on my guilt over taking a sick day was gone.
With all of these things combined, life became just fucking easy. I really didn't realize how goddamn caught up I was in survival mode until I was able to leave that lifestyle behind. When I stepped outside of the building after a work day work just totally left my mind, and it was replaced with total excitement for the rest of my day. Removing so much of that stress and end-of-day exhaustion left room for actual, real-life peace and excitement. Holy fuck this was so, so, SO fucking amazing.
Unexpected Side-effects
One of the biggest side effects that I didn't really foresee was how much healthier I got. Both physically and mentally. Having struggled with anxiety my whole life, I had always been grossly underweight. 125lbs at 6 feet tall. Couple that with worrying about how much it would cost to feed myself, and suddenly there's a recipe for awful health. But now I could feed myself, which gave me more energy, which meant I could spend that energy on getting healthier.
Regarding my mental health, when I started my programming job I was 2 months fresh out of a divorce, so needless to say I wasn't doing super great mentally. Luckily, I could now afford therapy! Holy fucking shitballs, therapy was awesome, but I guarantee it would've sucked if I didn't have the extra mental energy I had from having a 40 hour week job that didn't beat my ass with tons of stress. My free mental energy allowed me to confront all kinds of shit from my childhood that I realized had been contributing to making me miserable. And since I was living alone I could work through the crazy physical and mental rollercoaster that comes with dealing with your shit. I didn't have to worry about not crying in front of anybody, because it was just me. I didn't have to worry about rage-punching pillows and screaming into them, 'cause it was just me. My apartment became healing grounds for family shit that had been passed down to me from my parents by their parents and their parents' parents.
So, my life started to become amazing. I gained 40 pounds, finally settling into a healthy weight. I started making better friends. I started getting back into the dating world. Life became pretty goddamn good.
And the OPPORTUNITIES. I mentioned I'm moving to Norway. After you've got a good 3-5 years of programming experience under your belt, you can go pretty much wherever you want. Literally wherever. And your new job will be super grateful to have you. And with the options you have, you really get to decide what you want in life. I thought maybe I wanted lots of money so I applied for a job at 140k USD per year, but I ended up turning it down, showing the offer to my boss, who then raised my salary up to around 80k per year. I took the 80k per year. When I was struggling, I would've slapped future-me in the face for turning away 60k per year, but once you're out of the struggle, you get to choose the lifestyle you want. I like a slow-paced gig, not tons of pressure, and I would've had to give up a couple of work-from-home days, which I didn't wanna do. It's really hard to explain this decision to somebody struggling, but I hope that everyone here gets the opportunity to choose between the two.
The Only Problem
Soap box time.
After living the good life for 3 or 4 years I started to reflect on my life beforehand. I had a lot, a LOT of gratitude for my situation having come from shit, shit jobs and a shit, shit life. I became my own superhero for getting myself out of all of that. I had these awesome connections with co-workers who had done the same. People who got their families out of dangerous neighborhoods. People who moved from secretary work at 45 and into programming, finally being able to exercise their creative, problem-solving minds.
The problem comes from realizing how goddamn hard we all had to work to get here. Like, these are all people who were dealt a shit hand, and the only hope they had was to spend 1-4 years ruining their relationships and friendships and shirking all other aspects of their lives in order to get out of it? How the fuck is that fair? These brilliant, amazing people had to forgo meals so their kids could have a babysitter for 2 hours a day while they studied programming.
You realize after a little while that these were just the people who made it. Who were luckily enough to find the time, the money, or the mental effort. We are all so grateful for where we are at, far more than anybody else could be, and you do have that to look forward to. But we look around at our close friends and family members who will never escape the rut they're in, and it's pretty soul-crushing.
A job should not be the thing you need to escape the Catch-22 of I-can't-get-better-because-my-life-sucks-because-I-can't-get-better. But, if you're like me and it's the only option you have, for the love of GOD do it. Put your own airbag on before you help the others around you.

What’s good newcomers, OG’s, Millennials, Boomers, boys, girls, 🦍, 🍉 and former 🥭 tweet enjoyers.
OBLIGATORY - $GME🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 (YES THAT IS 7 ROCKET EMOJIS SO YOU KNOW IM DAMN SERIOUS).
It’s ya boy here, ElJefe and boyyyyyy do I have something to share with you!
Hold onto your seats, because what I’m about to share IS a doozy and it might help make a lot of connections with what the fuck is going on related to this whole GME fiasco, that is now turning into some chance opportunity for $SLV to return to the main stage as another “squeeze opportunity”.
Listen we all should know by now that the news we are shown is mostly used to control a narrative for a certain group and this is NO DIFFERENT OF A TIME. The thing that is so unique with this situation is how intertwined things are more than you are lead to believe.
Does anyone find it amazing that 1 company Robinhood) was able capture the attention of millions upon millions of NEW retail investors by simply creating an app that is understandable and is easy to use? Think of it, Robinhood opened the door to change people’s lives by guiding them through the transaction process for stocks and people started to open their eyes and realize that making money to sustain your life doesn’t need to take a whole bunch of your time away from you.
So here is where the story begins.
Robinhood as many of you know was heavily funded by a Market Maker that is known as Citadel (previously Wellington management, which was founded in 1933 by Walter L. Morgan(weird coincidence, but maybe popular name in the day 🙃) as the first balanced mutual fund).
Citadel not only is a market maker, but they also are the providers of a certain component of the transaction process known as immediate or cancel interface. Check out “Citadel Connect” - which essentially is known for the immediate or cancel interface that is baked directly into the transaction process for Brokerages. So they have their hand in a lot of cookie jars across brokerages, to say the least. They also provide a system of algorithmic trading that helps automatic trading for their clients and more! Check out their website, it is eye opening the power this single company really has over the exchange.
Now keep in mind from before, Citadel gave Robinhood a SIGNIFICANT AMOUNT OF MONEY to get them going because they saw a huge opportunity with having MORE retail traders joining the party and that opportunity was DATA. Citadel has instant and live trading data access to every single trade you make (hence why you usually notice an immediate opposing force from the stock you are buying - buy call and stock goes down right away, buy put and stock goes up right away), this is not something you are imagining, Citadels algorithm is literally taking this data in real time, and placing the most favorable trade for Citadel, which usually starts mind fucking you with your position right off the bat. Remember emotional trading will always lose, and they fuck with your emotions IMMEDIATELY (usually).
So Robinhood —> Citadel.
Next is JP Morgan. The banker. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait up. A Morgan started the original Citadel (Wellington), remember? Seems like a killer coincidence! Is Walter somehow related to John Pierpont? Even if indirectly, they bare the same family name... hmmm weird, but I can’t seem to find any relation on good old Google! So we’ll leave this just as a coincidence.
Back to JP Morgan - they would be the next in line to pay up or default and they are fully aware of the immensity of an infinite squeeze and now are in a position where they would be ones losing huge amounts of money. They have a lot of smart people working for them that quickly caught onto this and starting creating a contingency plan of some kind of to recoup some of the losses they are about to experience.
This is where $SLV/Silver comes into play and WHY YOU ARE SEEING IT POP UP MORE FREQUENTLY.
For those who unaware, $SLV is the ishares Silver Trust (which is blackrock’s silver etf). The silver squeeze IS something to have happened before and guess who was able to benefit SIGNIFICANTLY off of the sell off of the last $SLV rally... JP Morgan. How’d they do this? They shorted the fuck out of it. Check out JP Morgan’s history with the precious metals market - https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/09/29/jp-morgan-settles-spoofing-lawsuit-alleging-fraud-in-metals-trades.html. They paid, but still made out like bandits with profits.
Weird how when JP Morgan is about to lose a metric fuck ton of money, $SLV all of a sudden becomes “viral” and we start seeing it popping up everywhere as the “next squeeze”, but maybe just a coincidence, right?
Recap Robinhood —> Citadel —> JP Morgan would be the defaulted order. JP Morgan will need to recoup losses somehow, and what better way then A short on Silver whilst writing options during the run up?
Hence why $SLV has became viral.
So in essence. Stay the fuck away from Silver stocks unless you really know what you’re doing. Our mission is to focus on 💎🤲🏻ing GME. EVERYTHING ELSE THAT IS BEING SHILLED IS A DISTRACTION.
Also, Citadel should be another entity we are burning at the stake, not just Robinhood. Citadel is pulling off the greatest heist in history and the rest of the hedgies are just benefiting from this fiasco.
🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🌚🌚🌚🌚🌚🌚🌚🌚🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🦍🦍🦍🦍🦍🦍🦍🦍💎💎💎💎💎💎🤲🏻🤲🏻🤲🏻🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🥭🥭🥭🥭🥭🥭🥭🥭🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥵🥵🥵🥵🥵🥵
$SLV CREW 🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡
GME & AMC CREW 👑👑👑👑👑👑🤴🤴🤴🤴🤴🤴🤴🤴🤴👑👑👑👑👑👑
TLDR: HOLD GME IT IS A REALLY GREAT STOCK , SLV IS DISTRACTION (at least during this), BUY TANGIBLE SILVER. IT IS IN JPM’S BEST INTEREST AT THIS POINT FOR GME TO FALL AND THEY ARE DOING DAMAGE CONTROL TO RECOUP LOSSES BY SHILLING SLV AND THEN SHORTING BECAUSE BLACKROCK HAS A MASSIVE POSITION IN GME.

Guys, it's happening. They know they are screwed.
Yellen is having an emergency meeting tomorrow OR the day after with the SEC heads, Federal Reserve, Federal Bank, Bank of New York and the CFTC and the meeting is about Gamestop Volatility!!!
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-treasurys-yellen-call-regulator-014419687.html
https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/lbdpbtreasury_secretary_janet_yellen_to_call_regulato
​
"What volatility?" I'm sure you're asking.
THE ONE COMING FROM THE SQUEEZE. They are mega fucked. Today only around 1.5% of float GME remains. There is sufficient real research on this sub that shows that we are ACTUALLY diamond handing.
THAT 1.5% WILL GET GOBBLED UP IN NO TIME WITH OUR RETARDED GME BUYING.https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/lb9s3f/bloomberg_terminal_looks_mostly_green/ (SEE LOCKED IN SHARES TOP LEFT RETARDS)
​
On another note, some people's sell limit at 3.2k and 5k got filled today for 1 single GME share on this sub.
https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/l7h8jv/gme_getting_filled_at_above_1000/
https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/l6z9d0/gme_filled_at_51k_a_share_this_morning_for_me/
​
Thesis:
Goldman Sachs and the big boys have deleveraged their stake in GME and said they are reducing risk while also calling what already happened as the squeeze and that other hedges deleveraged as well. I can't tell if this is FUD or if they truly believe this. This info is in their daily customer subscription mailers, only actual GS customers get these mailers afaik. I don't know what is the truth anymore.
If Yellen wants to meet for volatility on a fizzling stock that is 98.4% ish locked in by buyers, this screams all kinds of alarms in my head. They are either going to try and stop the party or they are looking for money to pay us and not crash everything at the same time.
Tomorrow is the final fight. Yellen and all the bigwigs are the bosses.
Also i think it makes sense for the squeeze to happen this week before Friday due to the naked short puts the HFTs have been selling that are likely 2/05 of expiry. They DO NOT want this squeeze to happen next week when all those shorts are gone and the price is back way up. They also don't want the squeeze to happen on Friday due to the extreme volatility due to their naked 2/05 puts.
If all that makes sense, this means that the squeeze is coming tomorrow or the day after and NOT next week or this Friday.
​
If none of this happens, Cohen still has this smoking gun to trigger it.https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/lbc6aa/cohen_still_has_the_opportunity_to_buy_another_7/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
​
Final words.

• -Set your sell limits.
• -SET YOUR SELL LIMITS.
• -YES YOU.
• -FOR THE NEXT 2 DAYS STRAIGHT.
• -There's SOME consensus on the sub that realistically it should be ~800. Add a few lottos at 5k and 10k too as some people were lucky to get filled on 3.2k and 5k today. Don't get too greedy or you might not fill. https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/lagd2m/millions_in_gme_calls_bought_today_at_800_hold/

Good luck retards.

Note: I am mostly summarizing the aggregate of explanations currently floating around about the 1/29/21 option expiry date. I don't claim any knowledge. This is not investment advice. Do your own research, don't invest what you can't afford to lose, and if something feels wrong it probably is.
TL;DR: This isn't about options (yet), it's about shares, and Institutional Investors are playing a dangerous game by convincing us (some of y'all have bought in without realizing it) that a magical short squeeze has some 3-day time limit, that Friday is somehow the end game, and are hoping that when investors don't see a $5,000 short squeeze by next week they will fold and take their gains at a "reasonable" double-digit stock price. Don't believe them. They can survive through mid-late February before the true short squeeze smashes upward. And I'll be ready. I like this stock and believe in it's long term potential, and I think it's undervalued.
THESIS: If institutional investors can (1) convince retail investors to sell stock at low prices and (2) convince their lenders to wait, then the 0.01% get richer.
JUSTIFICATION: There is so much public sentiment (passion, enthusiasm, excitement, anger, whatever) surrounding short (~1 day) price movements*, and Friday's expiring options (these are also end of month contracts), that it seems like big clever money may be trying to artificially create a sort of bear trap for shareholders.
Whatever happens in the next week or so (crest to $700? crash to $60?) almost means nothing in the long term, but could fool investors into giving these guys CHEAP ways out of their 140% float short interest positions. Remember, these are people who have been dumping tons of money for a long time, shorting the stock when it was in the single digits. They've been hoping for a GameStop bankruptcy, and manufacturing one as best they can.
IT'S DIFFERENT THIS TIME: Remember the VW infinite squeeze, where we saw weeks of crazy price movement before the actual peak. And that is a mild case, as most of the shares were held by an entity with legal, competitive, and strategic reasons and obligations forcing them to hold shares and artificially reducing the float, or available shares for trading. This reduced supply caused the short squeeze.
However, this time around we've got a huge short interest, much much larger by comparison than that from VW's 2008 peak, to the tune of 140% of shares available for trading (float). They've massively overreached, and are going to pay the price for that. But they haven't yet.
SO YOU'RE SAYING THERE'S A CHANCE: This time, however, if the big dogs can shake shareholders hard enough, weak links break and paper hands fold and a fantastic long term play starts to seem out of reach. The market manipulation wins.
DARE TO BELIEVE: Unfortunately for the shorts, GME has real long term prospects to revolutionize the gaming industry for consumers, and now has the attention and potential equity momentum (if they play it smart, which I think the new leadership will) to make this a reality.
From that link above:

In GME's case the rise in the stock price itself will likely result in fundamental improvements to the underlying economic metrics of the company.

I believe.
However, if the shorts can fight, sneak, manipulate, and otherwise adjust the share price down this week then they start to see light at the end of the tunnel. They make 2-3 week plans for doing the same thing. For them, prices don't have to bottom back out, they just have to convince enough people to sell that they buy thrmselves a few weeks before a short squeeze really takes them all under.
*Some of this price movement is shorts covering, but much is actual legitimate investment between retail investors and other institutional investors who have seen the light. Remember, TSLA didn't get to where it is because one company made some bad short positions. But if GME shorts can convince everyone that a 3-day squeeze is all they get until GME crashes to some "normal" level, then they win.
Everyone getting hyped about Friday is playing into their hands. Yeah maybe some will need to take gains after a Friday pop, but a smart long-term hold position on GME is what they're really afraid of. And I want to be a shareholder in GME's future, as many wanted to be with TSLA. And sure, maybe if everyone else thinks that way too, there may be an incidental short squeeze that wrecks the uber wealthy in mid-late February along the way.
Again, I am not claiming to be knowledgeable or insightful, just commenting my best guesses. Nobody knows the future. This is not investing advice.
🚀

You guys did it. By concentrating enough WSB autism in one point in the form of $60 call options, you created a previously unproven distortion of the fabric of vol/price/time known as a Degenerity, where vol became price, green became red (for dealers) red became green (for option holders), bears like me get excited for bulls, and the market broke, spawning a wormhole to a new universe where GME is somehow above it's ATH, and spraying out a massive field distortion via degenerons, which are now being detected on CNBC. It's like a black hole, but with options. I look forward to those with PhDs in physics and finance expanding upon this theory. Expect additional unforseen repercussions such as investing advocating a 10% allocation to "YOLO" in their now 4 fund portfolio (domestic stocks, global stocks, bonds, YOLO).
TLDR: I think Market Makers got completely screwed today by this sub's unprecedented call buying yesterday. Expect some people to get fired. They normally can hedge their calls they sold you buying stock as price moves, but there wasn't supply for them to buy the 15m shares they needed in the 3 hour period this AM, and realy, a good 8-10m of that need happened in a few minute period which was when the market broke. I suspect MM's are going to be in the hole $100-200 million today. And yeah, some people are getting fired. You guys did it - you made the Degenerity! GME hit an all time high price (but not all time high market cap)
​
Not a short squeeze:
I don't think this is a short squeeze primarily. I think we are actually seeing a gamma squeeze in which dealers could not hedge as quickly as their short calls lost value, and citadel and other market makers are losing hundreds of millions today as a group, which almost never happens, especially at this scale.
Shorts don't HAVE to cover until there are 0 shares to borrow and they get bought in. They may get margin called before, but institutions diversify. And there are shares to borrow to an extent, rate still 22% on IB. I'm sure some of this happened, but you can't really force this until the many hundreds on a typical hedge fund book.
On the other hand, looking at options, OI went up a lot overnight - I sadly did not check this AM. You now have 80K calls expiring today at 55 to 60 bucks, then another 70k next week, and another maybe 50k at longer dates. That is what we call... 🚀 ⛽
That's 200k, or 20m shares!!! To hedge that at 63+ you need... about 20m shares. Of course, some are thetagang short options, so call it 15m shares. Keep in mind, dealers had 25-30m shares before this going into today, so they now want to hold 40-45m shares (on 110m sythethic float of loaned shares + real shares) 🚀 ⛽ 🚀 ⛽ 🚀 ⛽
When the ramp started around 55, dealers had to rush to buy shares, but could not get 15m shares between $50 and $60. When it hit $60, there was a HUGE amount of options all at once, and market liquidity was insufficient ("The Degenerity"). At the writing of this post in the morning during the halt, it means they are losing $10m per dollar move in the price, and will pay any price to stop the bleeding. I'm sure some guys in their risk mgmt department are getting fired over this, as the writing was on the wall, and they still sold you guys calls - they should've been charging $10 a call yesterday to protect themselves, or offering much higher strikes to tempt money into that and away from over-concentrating at $60. I suspect when the dust settles, we will find out that the better market makers BOUGHT calls from other market makers, and would not be surprised if there's an 8-k from a market maker tonight about exceptional losses. You may actually bankrupt a small one. Because the mass of calls at $60 got so heavy, it became impossible to hedge in real time.
In terms of gamma conditions from here, there's no remaining real ramp once you are at around 63.
Edit #3: Previously said we would see stagnation right under $60 because dealers have an interest in a $60 close and probably own 40m+ shares at this point offsetting the huge short calls - and had to unload 6m shares in ITM calls ending today. But it looks like they either don't care or are losing control with this hot close at $64.75. Going to be a lot of share delivery into Monday, maybe as much as 10m. That'll be interesting to sort out.
I'm a bear, but seriously, congrats bulls, you did break the market, but maybe not in the way you think you did. I really think the guys you screwed today were MMs, probably on the order of $100-200m... I have profound respect for what you did. Yes, my puts sucked, I'm down $35k all together on trying to play this one. You are welcome, you deserve it. 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀
And I'm really dumb for not checking open interest this morning. Writing was on the wall due to all the calls you guys bought yesterday. It's infuriating when you know you could've seen it in plain sight and were too busy doing something else to check.
I do think MMs will be more careful on this moving forward and make this less likely to repeat. This epic failure on their part is going to attract CIO level oversight. Unlike the meltup last Wednesday where they got to hedge smoothly, they were not able to hedge here.
Also, wanted to link you guys Martin Shkreli's comments on the GME situation from YESTERDAY via people who have access to him I guess by phone (since he still has about a year of federal prison left)? Very interesting. Looking forward to his read as someone who's squeezed someone before:
https://www.reddit.com/MartinShkreli/comments/l2b850/gme/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Be nice... he's the original best trader mod and all that.
​

I don't get what you guys are worried about with PLTR.
Here's my personal DD on PLTR, you're welcome to read and do whatever you want. Other helpful info or pointing out mistakes in my DD is very welcome.
Fears preventing you from buying PLTR

1. Targeted ads on your phone from Yahoo Finance or Zacks telling you PLTR = BAD!!!1!eleven
2. Shills spamming "pLtR tO tHe MoOn" and :rocket: on PLTR thread comments.
3. Last quarter's seemingly bad financials/earnings.
4. Financials Moving Forwards
5. Soros who owns 21 million shares "threatening" to sell his shares upon DPO expiry.
6. DPO expiry 3 days after February's earnings and possible insiders and DPO holders sale and dip.
7. What does PLTR tldr.
8. Other Information

​
#1 Targeted Ads
Ads and articles are both paid for by someone.The fact that in the past 3 weeks i've been getting multiple multiple targeted ads on my phone related to PLTR since i love PLTR so much.
Ads are telling me that PLTR is bad, doesn't provide a dividend, they're telling me PLTR's fair price is 20 instead of 25 based on some financial model and have gone as far as to provide a list of alternative stocks to buy.
To me, this all screams: SCARE TACTICS
Additionally, the last few weeks of ups and downs in PLTR's stock price is another indication of the attempts to short the stock to sh!t and drive investors out. (For what reason? I don't know.)
​
#2 Shilling PLTR
I myself love to shill PLTR to people whenever i can. I do this because i legitimately think this company will do great. I work as a product manager in a software development house and understand what PLTR does. PLTR is not cryptic.Regardless, i think when people shill PLTR to you, they are right to do so as you're probably missing out on a great opportunity to make money in the long run. If you're looking for big gains short term, maybe try something else.
Shillery is OK, but at least give the facts.
​
#3 Last Quarter's Bad Financials
If you'd done your DD not by searching reddit posts but by checking PLTR's actual quarterly report, you'd know that PLTR's "bad" last financial quarteearnings were due to the costs of listing themselves on the New York Stock Exchange.~855million were spent on listing and stock related compensations and this is the big reason.
Direct quote by PLTR here: https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2020/Palantir-Reports-Revenue-Growth-of-52-in-the-Third-Quarter-Raises-Full-Year-2020-Guidance/default.aspx

We incurred a loss from operations of $847.8 million, which includes $847.0 million in stock-based compensation following our recent direct listing.

I would like to remind everyone that this is a 1 TIME THING. Put simply, this means that PLTR won't have as excessive losses next quarter as they did this last quarter.
Additionally, let me go into further detail on this and not just leave it to that.

• PLTR's quarterly operating expenses for the past 3 quarters were at around ~260 million.
• PLTR's operating expenses this quarter were ~987 million.

ADDITIONALLY...
PLTR also had a higher R&D cost this quarter that just passed. Normally they'd pay 80 million on R&D, but somehow ended up paying ~300 million this quarter. No one knows why, but this is another thing that influenced PLTR's earnings.
https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2020/Palantir-Reports-Revenue-Growth-of-52-in-the-Third-Quarter-Raises-Full-Year-2020-Guidance/default.aspx

On September 30, 2020, in connection with the Direct Listing, we incurred $769.5 million and $8.4 million of stock-based compensation using the accelerated attribution method related to the satisfaction of the performance-based vesting condition for RSUs and growth units, respectively, that had satisfied the service-based vesting condition as of such date.

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#4 PLTR financials moving forwards
PLTR is deep in bed with the government and the Biden regime although may look like it would be against using PLTR is in fact secretly very pro-surveillance e.g pro Palantir.
Here's some of the known organizations in the US Govt that use PLTR:

1. CDC
2. Office of the Secretary
3. Food and Drug Administration
4. Immigration and Customs Enforcements / ICE
5. Internal Revenue Service / IRS
6. National Institute on Drug Abuse
7. DOD/ARMY - ACC Aberdeen Proving Ground
8. Coast Guard / DHS
9. DOD/NAVY - Naval Information Warfare Systems Command
10. US Attorney's Offices / DOJ
11. US Special Operations Command / SPEC OPS

Boys. The big institutional people know these things. You just found this out. See how deep PLTR is already in bed with the Government?????? Palantir IS the next Raytheon/Lockheed of DATA aggregation and visualization.
UPCOMING EARNINGS
I've done some quick maths and it looks like PLTR is more likely to be in positive earnings this quarter and with a 0.02 cent EPS target, we can easily assume that they'll destroy this with maybe 0.04 or 0.08 EPS. In the worst case scenario, PLTR's EPS this quarter could be somewhere around MINUS -0.05 ish due to interview costs and ad/campaigning costs that were not there before the company was listed.
WHAT CAN DESTROY PALANTIR
Now, there's big possible downsides and Palantir can fail IF contracts that expire are not renewed. That's biggest REAL reason for Palantir's balance sheet getting screwed.
I've seen a disturbing pattern with PLTR's financials and that's that every year, it's R&D cost is rising by between 150 and 350 million dollars. This is quite a bit of negative revenue and if new contracts are not constantly coming in, PLTR's balance can start going into the negative.
WHAT WILL NOT DESTROY PALANTIR
Some people may have concerns over the new left leaning government dumping PLTR. An article was posted that is behind a paywall EVERYWHERE that goes something like this:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/cdc-officials-urge-biden-team-to-dump-palantirs-covid-tracker
In my opinion, i believe this is inconsequential and that a few people crying to daddy Biden to kill a multimillion contract with PLTR is a stretch. Also we know the current new Biden team has his hands full and will have them full for at least the next 1 year with what's going on.
There is no time to deal with a few crybabies and even if he did deal with it and did decide to kill the PLTR Tiberius Covid tracker contract with the CDC which he WONT, these things take months and years to deal with, and by then the contract/s will have already brought PLTR tons of money and revenue in.
HOW MUCH DOES KARP AND HIS GOONS GET PAID
Short answer is... A LOT. The amounts below are PER YEAR. That's a lot of money in the hole and contributes to annoying amount to why PLTR is always just at the edge of just barely being profitable.
https://preview.redd.it/ba58nqcurob61.png?width=2615&format=png&auto=webp&s=55d45833faad4d60ea8dc142a9601c44b4cc7395
Palantir's prospectus 311 page document's 130 last pages are almost all exclusively talking about extremely complicated options trading schemes that are made by Cohen and others to make sure they can squeeze out a LOT of money out of PLTR.
Mithril Investments has existed from before and is not a new company. Owned by Thiel/Cohen/Karp as a way to launder and exchange options for more options and more money for all 3 of them. Also Shyam Sankar to me feels corrupt which scares me a bit, he's had some very shady dealings and has brought his wife in PLTR that gets paid 200k per year.
Prospectus Document: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1321655/000119312520230013/d904406ds1.htm
I suggest you skim through it, it contains EVERYTHING about Palantir.
Palantir is going to need to have to be getting AT LEAST 500 million in NEW contracts per year to REMAIN BARELY profitable. It's doable in my opinion, but just barely and it's why they made the company public to try and get more people's attention and increase the inflow of contracts.
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#5 Soros and his 21 million shares
First of all, i think we can all agree that Soros can suck it.
If you've read a few articles here and there, you'll know that Soros owns/owned 1% of Class A PLTR shares. No one knows whether he's sold them yet or if he's an DPO holder who'll sell 3 days after February's earnings.
Whether he sells them or buys more will be mostly inconsequential in my opinion. We see dips and pumps every day. He legally cannot sell his shares all at once, he'll have to sell certain amounts daily and over time. This will create annoying sideways motion as shares exchange hands and consolidation starts for 2-3 weeks until his and insider shares exchange hands.
Nothing special to see here, move along just a little draw down resulting in some consolidation.
PLTR is exposed to OIL more than anything, so fluctuations in the general market and general market crashes affect PLTR much less than other stocks. Also PLTR does not track ANY benchmarks. NONE.
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#6 DPO expiry 3 days after earnings in February
To my limited knowledge, this is how BIG plays who are holding DPO shares usually work:

• If a stock has performed well up to earnings and investors are more than happy with the returns, they're more likely to not sell their stock or just sell less than they normally would.
• If a stock hasn't performed as well as investors thought, these investors are more likely to sell stock or reduce their positions more than normal.

There's a total of 1.16Billion Class A PLTR shares currently (Give or take don't flog me). We are currently trading with ~250 million shares while the rest are locked away in the DPO.
When those shares are "unlocked" in February, the price of the stock won't be diluted. These shares already exist and are accounted for. They are simply locked. Also when they are unlocked, the share price won't simply multiply because all shares are now tradeable.

According to Palantir’s after-hours filing with the SEC this afternoon, the company has 1.16 billion Class A shares, 484 million Class B shares and 1 million Class F shares on its cap table outstanding today, or a total of roughly 1.64 billion. Only Class A shares will trade, and Class B and F shares are convertible to Class A shares on a one-to-one basis. On a fully diluted basis, which Palantir says represents 2.2 billion shares total according to its most recent S-1 filing, the company is valued at $16 billion. The difference between those two aggregate numbers comes from outstanding stock performance grants, warrants and other financial instruments.

What WILL affect stock price:

• Employees exercising their non class A options into Class A shares. This IS dilution.
• The bigwigs e.g Alex Karp, Peter Thiel and a few other bigshots exercising their options and then selling them for a profit.

To note, regular employees will barely affect the price of the stock with their miniscule share holdings. Alex Karp, Peter Thiel and a handful of other high ranked executives in PLTR are the ones that will create a tiny but manageable ripple in the stock price.
What COULD affect the stock price a lot:

• Massive sell off by the big institutional holders.
• Not shorters. (Citron and Citi can suck it, we're in control here)
• People with weak spaghetti wet paper hands.
• Everyone fomoing the same weeklies e.g like when everyone bought Jan 15 calls on everything.
• Big but silent scare campaign (that's already going on) to scare off normies like us.

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#7 What does PLTR do, tldr.
Imagine Facebook's database of everything about everyone & Youtube's Database of everything & Geolocation data in a database made by the US Army for known terrorist cells.
Palantir allows you to select and match varied data TYPES from several different database, combine it in any way you want and visualize it so that it's human readable by even the dumbest person in the room so that even they can see patterns and come to conclusion on a subject matter.
It's kind of like filling an excel sheet with data and then visualizing it with a bar chart, except the date you filled the sheet with can be anything and not just numbers or dates or countries and you can make various combinations using all the different rows of data to maybe come up with a pattern to something like how to best distribute the Covid vaccines in the counties in a very specific state in the US.
Literally what you see in SciFi movies where people combine random data by smashing keys on a keyboard and somehow find the murderer, the location of a terrorist or the percentage that someone will commit a murder in the future based on a lot of random data about that person or the area, country, family, history... anything.
While this all might sound super cool and amazing, it is. Maybe in 10 years time there will be a few more companies doing this, but for now, it's only Palantir, Circles, Alteryx and a few other private entities that do this type of thing. Many of them work with governments and are hush hush due to the kinds of things they use this type of software for (terrorist cells, warzones, etc) and the public backlash this could cause.
tldr: Glorified data aggregator and visualization platform/software with different access levels for different people.
PLTR is superbly positioned to offer their software to SLOW and Boomer like organizations like Governments.
Governments are stupid and don't have neither the time, nor technical knowledge to develop this software themselves for internal use. This is what PLTR capitalizes on and why Governments use them so much.
Governments could have spent the a fraction of the money they spend on PLTR contracts to make the software themselves but only for their own internal systems and use, but they can't and if they tried, they'd fail because technocracy in governments is not a thing. By the time they'd even complete a project like this, it'd likely be out of spec, unusable and would require further development and money and we know how slow and bad governments are at doing even the basics. Again PLTR wins because of this.
PLTR is likely NOT to be adopted by giants like Google or FB or other modern tech organizations of any size because they are not stupid. They have their own purpose built internal systems that they use to do everything related to data aggregation and visualization because they have the technical knowledge and resources. Buying PLTR for their use is a joke.
PLTR capitalizes on being general a general purpose tool and is set up manually by an engineer over the course of 4-10 days for each customer. The engineer customizes and configures the system for each company's custom use since the software allows you to do so. Regular aggregation and visualization software CAN do the same, but typically lacks data input types and features that PLTR has because PLTR has cultivated a special set of features over many years that were suggested by their existing clientele in battlefields and other places.
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#8 Other Information
\*Big known PLTR Holders*\**
https://preview.redd.it/a404oalxrob61.png?width=1631&format=png&auto=webp&s=8c2dbcfac5a7ca207127771ec4e3133f8d943359
\*PLTR's Price List (2019)*\**
https://www.esi.mil/Download.aspx?id=7186
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\*Personal TA and Crayon Mania*\**
https://www.tradingview.com/chart/PLTnrjqL4dw-PLTR-Risky-April-100-200-possibility/
https://www.tradingview.com/chart/PLT5YcdCye0-PLTR-Schizzo-Technical-Analysis/
https://www.tradingview.com/chart/PLTCkCTvtqM-PLTR-PLTR-train-leaving-the-station-get-ready/
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\*PLTR stock pumping events*\**

• 7'th Jan - Interview
• 26'th Jan - Demonstration
• 11'th Feb - Earnings
• ~15'th Feb - DPO expiration - Havoc

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\*Similar Companies*\**

• PLTR - Palantir - Stock Price ~$25 - Market Cap 48bln
• AYX - Alteryx - Stock Price ~$125 - Market Cap 8bln
• Semantic Research - Private

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\*Known Contract Info*\**

• 240 million Palantir Air Force contract expiring soon in 3 months. If it's re-signed, it'll be a big catalyst for a PLTR pump. If not, it'll be a sad dump day.
• Mithril, investment/financial company owned by Karp and Thiel buys a 3.15million share stake in Palantir. Somehow this makes them major stakeholders.
• Sompo holdings has 5% of all PLTR shares.

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\*Past and new US KNOWN gov contracts. Source* govtribe.com\\**
https://preview.redd.it/kbim7afrrob61.png?width=1392&format=png&auto=webp&s=9abc99d9995c4972919e275f407e1bba6382dfdd
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\*Quotes from Won and LOST contracts from Federal Agencies*\**
National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIH) - WON

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) intends to award a contract without providing for full and open competition to Palantir Technologies, Inc., 100 Hamilton Ave., Suite 300, Palo Alto, CA 94301.

Veteran Health Association - WON

The pandemic-related data management and operational decision-support requirements have led the program office to determine that the Palantir data management and analytics platform is the only viable solution that would maintain the current operational capability, without a degradation in VHA COVID-19 decision-support.

AFLCMC Wright Patterson AFB (DOD - USAF - AFMC - AFLCMC) - LOST

Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) held meetings in January/February 2020 timeframe with potential vendors to determine their capabilities and their abilities to meet this mission requirement. They met with Palantir, Recorded Future, Altyrex, In-Q-tel and Semantic AI. From the information they gathered in those meetings it was determined that Semantic AI would be the only company that could fully meet the requirements of this effort without further delaying the project and incurring additional costs

​

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Now friends, here's my position on PLTR. I'll be holding onto it for the next year. If it's not at least 300% by then, i'm selling it and moving on to the next stock. App i'm using is Revolut.
Also yes, i'm ALL-IN only on Palantir because i know my money will multiply itself in the short term. I'm not holding this till 2025 as others are supposedly doing. I'm selling in 2022 with 300% or more profit. PLTR is severely undervalued, underpriced because it's a DPO. Give it till EOY and we're going to be rich. If it was an IPO it'd be trading at 180+ already imho.
I've spent the last month and a half holding PLTR. I've gone full schizzo mode when it comes to PLTR. I lose sleep daily and i love it. I hadn't slept for 37 hours a few days ago because i spent so much time researching PLTR and scraping the internet for all possible information.
I come from an IT/Development background, so i understand what PLTR does completely.
My PT's for PLTR are:

• 48-89 by March or April.
• 75 - 125 by EOY.
• 200+ 2022 IF they solve their income and constantly increasing R&D cost issues.

https://preview.redd.it/4t0k1ujprob61.png?width=407&format=png&auto=webp&s=0b3a16265edafa290432e6b79f9009e3df99f495

This is my first DD post on any company, be gentle.
Disclaimer: I am long RKT. This is not financial advice, and I am not receiving any compensation whatsoever from anyone for this post. I’m not a professional, I’m not even an amateur, this is a Wendy’s.
Sources used: RKT investor relations website and company website, RKT earnings transcripts, SEC fillings, the SEC EDGAR database, sea king al pha, whalewisdom, finbox, yahoo finance, stockcharts, openinsider, Zacks, google sheets.
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Summary
Rocket Companies (RKT) is a fintech company that operates several brands including the flagship Rocket Mortgage. I think RKT presents an opportunity to buy serious value at a cheap price, because the market has not priced in the underlying fact that RKT is a tech company akin to Square, Paypal, etc.

• RKT has disrupted the lending industry and has embraced a fully digital ecosystem, which will continue to drive customer acquisition and retention in the future
• RKT spends considerable money and resources on UX/UI development, client experience, and marketing. This will also help drive their continued expansion into the lending market.
• The RKT “ecosystem” provides a “full cycle” solution for everything related to real estate transactions and insurance. They serve real estate professionals looking to generate leads, develop those leads, better serve their clients, and make every stage of real estate transactions smoother. From the client side, they similarly just make everything easier - it’s an app, it’s online, it’s doable from home and it’s not complicated. There’s an inherent advantage in what they’re doing here because closing on real estate transactions has always been something that’s complex, unpleasant, expensive, and not well understood. You need lawyers, you need agents, there’s a ton of paperwork, it sucks. RKT is changing all of that.
• RKTs balance sheet, income, and liabilities support a stock price several times higher than the current one in my opinion.
• RKT is currently stagnant in price, and the market appears to be pricing it like a traditional mortgage company, not a rapidly growing tech company (which they are).
• RKT has been around for decades (skips the startup costs that will provide barrier to entry for newer companies looking to do what they’re doing), but somehow seems to still be leading the tech charge in the industry. That’s a unique and potent combination in my opinion.
• RKT needs a catalyst to get the market to value it as a tech company instead of a lending company. Once that happens, and I expect it to sometime within the next year, RKT should approach an appropriate valuation such as 20x earnings. That’s an estimate I pulled out of nowhere, but is commensurate with the low end of P/E ratios for companies I see as similar to RKT.

Key Point - RKT is Priced Like a Legacy Mortgage Company
The average estimate for 2020 year end revenue is $15 billion, and the yearly earnings estimate average is $3.85 per share.
This estimate gives a ttm P/E ratio of just over 5.5. The sector median is something like 8-12, which makes RKT cheaply valued relative to the earnings it produces, even compared to the financial/mortgage sector. What’s key here is, I don’t think that’s really an appropriate comparison. I would place them more in line with companies like Square (ttm P/E ratio of 325x lol), PayPal (ttm P/E ratio of 69x, nice), or Fiserv (ttm P/E ratio of 24x). I used Zacks for all of these P/E ratio lookups.
Let’s assume RKT is conservatively worth 15x earnings, and that it hits the estimate of $3.85 eps. That would put its fair value right now at $57.75 per share. I think it’s worth more than that but, we all should do well to remember that it’s really only worth whatever the market will pay for it.
Key Point - Catalysts
This thing needs a catalyst. Right now I am loading up. I’m buying shares, I’m selling SHORT TERM covered calls to reduce basis on those shares, but I will be stopping the sale of those covered calls within a couple weeks most likely. The Q4 earnings announcement will be on 2/25. I am not sure that the actual earnings numbers will be enough to wake this thing up, although I expect them to be good. But if that announcement comes with discussion of their focus for 2021 and beyond, and gets the market thinking about them as a tech company first and mortgage lending company second, things will start to heat up. I don’t know when the real catalyst will hit that triggers the run-up, but I think it could start with the Q4 earnings call. I am looking at $21 as the floor for this stock, and I expect the price to double within a year. I will be acquiring OTM LEAPs, expiring next spring.
Supporting information and background follows.
The Business
RKT is in the business of providing solutions to financial transactions, including mortgage origination and refinancing, auto lending, and more. Specific subsidiaries and my simplistic view of how they interact:
Home Financing

• Rocket Mortgage - The mortgage company. This is a prominent “public facing” part of the Rocket ecosystem.
• Amrock - Amrock provides title insurance, property valuations, and other solutions. I see this as “supporting infrastructure” to keep clients within the rocket ecosystem where they would otherwise need to go elsewhere and is part of what makes RKT a one-stop-shop.
• Amrock Title Insurance (ATI) Company - basically does underwriting for Amrock. The “business end” in my simple understanding of the world.
• Nexsys - provides a streamlined approach to the closing process with their Clear Sign and Clear HOI technologies - taking care of closing day authentications and sharing of homeowners insurance information.
• Lendesk - Lendesk specifically provides solutions for the mortgage market in Canada
• Edison Financial - Basically the “front end” of Lendesk that Canadian clients would interact with.

Home Sale and Search

• Rocket Homes - Rocket Homes is a proprietary home search platform and real estate agent referral network. Basically this matches buyers, sellers, and agents, and is a key aspect of keeping clients completely working within RKT for all aspects of real estate buying/selling/financing.
• For Sale By Owner - A digital marketplace designed to let clients buy and sell real estate on their own. I think it’s absolutely brilliant that RKT owns this, but more on that later.

Auto & Personal Financing

• Rocket Auto - Supports rental and online car purchasing platforms.
• Rocket Loans - online personal loan solutions for clients.

Media

• Core Digital Media - a major advertiser in the mortgage, financial, insurance, and education sectors.
• Lower My Bills - this company is basically a “portal” business model that connects people with providers of various loan and insurance products.

Services & Technology Development

• Rock Connections - Basically a sales and support platform that handles appointments, prequalifications, generating leads, and data analysis among other things.
• Rock Central - I will generalize this as “business support”. HR, administration, etc.
• Rocket Innovation Studio - A tech incubator to gather and engage top talent and ideas.

Recent Acquisitions
RKT, through Lendesk, acquired Finmo back in October of 2020 (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/rocket-companies-subsidiary-acquires-fast-182042594.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAALnvnNBoglSnmMP0O61AqgXBJokNS53LjJYuG3NvYKhayp4I6ZH2RpfmFUbSsCAU4xmnBNGMTwiEG-Ly29EabVy1-OjPIGfkYoQ3389gn3Edebs9sIwWOy1tPzqjRwOwwGA_PWg0cNzEFCe7HBTilMwADUT_y0QxWw8vizWecGcv) Finmo is a rapidly growing Canadian digital mortgage platform and this acquisition I think was perfect - it shows RKTs dedication to embracing a fully digital experience, and making sure they’re the ones leading that charge.
Management
I do not have much to say here, aside from this. The RKT team is not the new kids on the block, they have decades of industry experience. Also, I value leaders that make people feel valued. And on that note, under CEO Jay Farner Quicken Loans has been in the top 30 of Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” list for 17 consecutive years.
Financials and Growth
When it comes to the numbers, RKT is killing it. I don’t want to just spout a bunch of numbers that anyone can easily go look up so here’s a couple that stood out to me from the Q3 earnings announcement and related data:
$4.63 billion in revenue, which is 163% YoY growth.
From that revenue, they beat EPS estimates with $1.21 for the quarter vs $1.09 expected.
Net income was $2.4 billion which represents a YoY growth of 365%.
Closed loan volume YoY growth was 122% to $89B.
Net rate lock volume was $94.7 Billion (101% growth).
RKT has brought in $13.1 billion in revenue in the first 3 quarters and seems to be on track to close out Q4 with yearly revs above $15 billion.
That’s awesome but what I really like is that they pair this amazing growth with $3.5B cash on hand. That’s great because I want them to be able to scale as they grow, and make acquisitions as needed (see Finmo) to ensure they can keep that growth going without getting overextended and failing to capitalize.
RKTs ability to recapture clients is one of the keys to their future success in my uneducated opinion. Their recapture rate is 4.6x the industry average. The Q3 earnings transcript includes a statement by the CEO on how when interest rates fall, retention rate falls, refinance activity is larger. The high recapture rate RKT has serves as a natural hedge to their retention of existing clients because their recapture is so much higher than average in the industry.
Quick aside - RKT announced a $1 billion share buyback program. They’ll be able to repurchase shares from time to time starting Nov10 2020, ending in two years. I don’t love the idea of share buybacks because I think this can be detrimental to actual business growth for the sake of shareholder value. However, with the large cash position RKT has (and it doubled from December 2019 to September 2020) I think this is a reasonable way to deploy some of that cash for now.
Ok so what about valuation using DCF, free cash flow analysis, something like that? Honestly I’m not convinced this is as useful as some people make it out to be. It’s nice to know what the numbers indicate, but I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about an exact price target based on anything like this. That said, you can crunch the numbers yourself or check out something like the Finbox resources:
https://finbox.com/NYSE:RKT/models/dcf-growth-exit-5yr
I don’t believe that fair value estimate for an instant, but it's a part of the puzzle to consider. Finbox has various models you can check out, but it’s also just a nice place to view aggregate data other than directly from the SEC filings.
Product Channels
RKTs direct-to-consumer channel is their main source of revenue right now, but I think they will be successful in their efforts to grow their partner channels as well. Why do I say that? Numbers don’t lie:

• Direct-to-consumer Q3 growth: 131% YoY ($53.5B closed loan volume)
• Partner Network growth 127% YoY ($29.6B closed volume)
  • Adjusted Revenue for Partner Network is up 502% YTD vs 2019 ( see Q3 earnings transcript)

The partner network volume is a little over half of the direct-to-consumer volume but the growth rate is just so damn juicy. That revenue growth is hellathicc.
Current Market and outlook
Right now, rates are low. The average 30-yr mortgage fixed rate is 2.92% (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/03/mortgage-refinancing-surges-but-high-home-prices-stop-buyers.html)
I cannot say how long interest rates will remain low but I believe RKT is positioned to continue to grow regardless of what rates do moving forward. They just cover so much of the space, and they do it with a focus on applied technology.
Here’s some blatant speculation. I think as we move into 2021 and the vaccine becomes more prevalent, millennials will buy, sell, and borrow against real estate with renewed intensity. I think RKT is uniquely positioned to capture that market.
Positions: RKT shares. Cost basis of $21.14.

Edit: adding 🚀🚀🚀🏠📈🌕
Edit: Cathie Wood has a ton of this in ARK ETFs already
I’m a Realtor in one of the test markets for Opendoor (Charlotte) and I firmly believe that this company is going to go far. They are going to completely disrupt and revitalize the real estate industry.
A bit of background about me and my credentials for writing this Due Diligence: I have been a licensee since early 2013. My husband is real estate closing attorney . His office handles 300+ real estate closings per month with 4 offices and 18-20 full-time employees.
My husband was not always a real estate closing attorney. Back in 2010 – 2015, his main bread and butter was handling foreclosure defense. He represented people who were facing foreclosure and helped them avoid it by delaying the process through the court system, helping them apply for and obtain loan modifications or negotiating short sales with their lender. Back then, the market was still recovering from the 2008 crash and there were a lot of people who were upside down in their houses. They simply couldn’t sell them and move on. They owed way more money than houses were selling for and had to convince the bank to allow them to sell the house. The fed bailed out the banks by allowing short sales and taking a lesser payoff than what was originally lent out, but the process for getting them to agree to do so on an individual level was long, complicated and very difficult. As a Realtor, I assisted with this many times and listed dozens of short sales. During the markets in 2008-2014, this was a huge majority of houses. Around 2015, the scales tipped back and the market, for the most part, was nearly recovered. Currently, there are no short sales. VERY rare, if so.
Currently, the market in Charlotte is such that inventory cannot keep up with the demand. I talked to a Realtor yesterday who was in the middle of a bidding war with 53 other offers on the table. It is common for most houses to get 20+ offers within hours of listing. It’s an absolute bloodbath out there.
To say that I understand this industry is an understatement. I know it in and out, up and down, left and right. I eat, sleep and dream in real estate and have for a long time.
iBuying is going to shift the entire landscape of how real estate is purchased. I am seeing it happen here now, in real time. So, let me explain…
Realtors have always been the vehicle of connecting buyers and sellers to one another in the process of buying or selling a home. They hold the coveted keys to the castle. This current age of free data and knowledge with the internet has slowly started to shift that power away from them over the past 20 years. The Association of Realtors has done an excellent job of protecting the industry over the past 2 decades, but technology is getting to the point where they won’t be able to continue to do this in the way they have in the past.
Only Realtors have access to MLS, however MLS shares that data with online listing websites like Zillow and Realtor.com. Those websites then attract buyers in the market looking at property, they capture the data and then sell the data to the Realtors as leads. It’s ironic, but Realtors have funded the vehicles that will be the end of their industry eventually.
Every property listed on the MLS is usually listed with a Supra iBox that houses the keys for the house for showings. Only Realtors are allowed to hold the keys to these Supra boxes and everytime they are opened, that data is captured and stored. Opendoor has created their own system for lockboxes and showings. They have their own lockboxes. And anyone can download the app to their phone and access the Opendoor properties. Without a Realtor.
In most situations, sellers list their home while they are still living in the property. They have to because until recently, there were only retail buyers who bought them and sellers needed the proceeds from their sale to buy their next house. Sellers listed their house and dealt with the headaches of showings and repairs, negotiations and strict timelines for closings. Sellers went to closing in a moving truck and so did buyers. Everything relied on perfect timing for everything to happen. Lots of drama and massive potential for any one thing to go wrong that sends the entire house of cards tumbling. Delayed lender, appraisal, yada yada yada.
You take a lot of Xanax in this industry….
Enter Opendoor. A company that pulls the power of the transaction away from the coveted few, and puts it right into the consumers’ hands. On both the buyer and seller sides. You see, they have the capital to do this. They have the money to purchase the house without the headache of the buyer’s side and their drama. Seller calls the shots on when closing happens. Seller doesn’t have to deal with showings. Seller doesn’t have to deal with fixing up their house or repair negotiations. Seller doesn’t have to hear about the buyer’s demands. Seller doesn’t have to rely on the buyer’s lender’s drama. Seller doesn’t have to deal with Realtors. Seller doesn’t have to pay commission. (Oftentimes 6%). Seller is in control. Seller has total power of the transaction. Opendoor makes it easy.
Money is merely a measurement of stored time and energy. People underestimate how valuable that is. Opendoor provides value in saving both for the seller. They eliminate the stress and uncertainly of the unknown.
Opendoor owns the house after closing. They then ready the property to list for sale. They have entire departments devoted to this and marketers on staff who understand exactly what sells a house the quickest. They optimize the house with the knowledge they have.
Then they list it. Except they don’t use one of those mysterious Supra boxes to house the keys to the house that only Realtors have access to. They use their own lockboxes. And they give the power of the showings to the consumer (Buyer) directly. No agent required. The buyer can download their app and access any of their properties, on their schedule. No working around some Realtor’s schedule. The buyer has the power to steer the ship in their own home buying process.
When buyer is ready to make an offer, they can fill it out directly on the Opendoor website. The form is so easy to understand that a child could navigate it. The form fills in the contract and meets the specific legal requirements for each state. In the past, this was where Realtors could valuable. The contracts were so hard to understand, the regular consumer couldn’t manage them without help. Opendoor makes it possible to. Kinda like Turbo Tax with taxes. Similar in that regard.
Additionally, Opendoor offers the buyers discounts for making offers to them directly.
Opendoor: “ If you buy with Opendoor and finance with Opendoor Home loans (ODHL), you can save up to 1% of your home price via a combination of an ODHL lender credit and either a seller credit at closing (If buying directly) or a commission refund (If working with an Opendoor agent). Amounts vary.”
And yes, Opendoor has their own in-house mortgage company to finance your home as well.
Opendoor: “ Finance with Opendoor Home Loans and get up to $1,000 credit at closing”
Now is the time where I recommend you move over to Opendoor.com and spend 5 minutes browsing their website directly. You will quickly see how easy the interface is to navigate. Yes, even for the retards on this sub.
In a few years, legislation will catch up and it will start allowing eNotary services on closing documents. Covid is the vehicle for pushing this through. Notes, Deed of Trusts, even deeds will legally be signed electronically. Eventually, even the closing will be able to happen all online. Opendoor says they will handle this part through their app too.
The real estate iBuying ecommerce market is going to EXPLODE with Millennials and Zoomers and even some Gen X coming into the market. As a Millennial myself, I don’t like or want to deal with other people. We grew up behind the screen and we simple don’t know or understand the social skills it takes to communicate face to face. Not only that, we don’t want to. It’s a waste of time. We want to control everything and we want instant gratification.
Currently Opendoor is only active in 20 markets in the US. They plan to scale to 100 markets within a year. In the Charlotte market I work in, I have seen the closing attorney who handles the Opendoor closings (NOT my husband) scale from 1 employee to over 100 employees within 2 years.
Comment from an Opendoor employee on my original post: casrox
I have some insight. Former employee. Basically the way opendoor works is by buying houses for less than market price and creating a floating inventory of product(houses) they they actual place in a holding subsidiary. Some of these houses are in hot markets so flip relatively easily, some are in colder markets so the price will be lower and it will take longer to sell. All these factors + condition of house and title issues come into play when they buy a house or sell a house at a certain price. They use a proprietary algorithm so don't know all the specifics as I wasn't a programmer and never messed with that. They make their money from a combination of closing fees, title work fees and profit off their house flipping. A sellebuyer can also bring their own realtor in, but will end up paying both opendoor fee and realtor fee. A lot of times they are able to make pretty decent profit on hot market houses that cover the losses they might suffer on a property they are having a hard time selling or that ends up being a complete wash due to unforseen circumstances(a house that had a murder happen in it and company was never informed for instance). They have well informed title teams with full curative and escrow staff in house due to their acquisition of title company named osnational. They were doing so much prior to acquisition that osnational created subsidiary companies that's exclusively worked on title and closings for opendoor. Due to this they are able to complete title work extremely fast and in some cases 24-48hr closings were not out of the question. They make money in other ways as well, such as doing outside contract title work for other companies and having a mortgage company built into business(opendoor mortgage) to increase the number of fingers they have in the proverbial pie. I never saw the numbers, as I was just a cog in the machine, but I can tell you the output/transactions increased month over month for many months prior to my leaving. The only real risk they run is of housing market does cool and they are stuck with too much inventory(just like of car market cooled and carving had too many cars and no buyers). With interest rates low tho they also get a steady income stream from refinances so not sure how big of a hit they would take if the cool off only lasted a couple months. I still do same job, just for another company, and will say the whole housing industry(buying/selling transactions) is booming. So much so that at the company I work for now, we are understaffed and 60hr+ weeks are not uncommon in order to keep up with massive volume. Opendoor flips primarily low-mid price range houses - which I assume is because it lowers the risk in case cool off period happens. The place I currently work does real high end boutique place(1.5mil-3mil is average price range) and we are slammed so I can assume pretty easily that opendoor is even more slammed. Finally, opendoor is also increasing to more and more markets. Since I left they have expanded to a handful of markets I know about and I'm sure others that they haven't disclosed publicly yet. Anyway, thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
wHat AbOuT tHe CrAsH cOmInG! wE aRe In A bUbBlE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
As someone who was in the industry during the recovery during the 2008 crash and who helped people avoid foreclosure firsthand, I can explain to you how what we see happening now is NOTHING like what we saw happen then.
The catalyst for the 2008 crash was the teaser ARM (Adjustable rate mortgage) rates that people were given for their mortgages. These rates fluctuated as such a volatile rate, that homeowners found themselves in situations where they could not pay their mortgage within a few years of buying. They did not understand the implications of the ARM loans when they signed on at a teaser, discounted interest rate and did not realize how drastically their mortgage payments would change once those rates adjusted.
The majority of home owners now are at a 2-5% FIXED, 30 year interest rate. Their mortgage payments are about 50% less than what the going rental rate is (at least in my market). People are literally saving thousands of dollars by owning their homes vs. renting. It’s cheaper.
Additionally, the 2008 crash happened because people were able to get mortgages by stating their income. There was no underwriting process that verified anything. They called them NINJA loans- No Income, No Job, No Asaets. This simply can't happen anymore are at any point after the 08 crash. Lenders verify income, debt and credit 3 times during underwriting now, even the day of closing.
Sidenote: I bought a foreclosure and the prior owner took out 3 cash out refis in 2007 within the same week. He didn't tell the lenders about one another at all. There was NO underwriting process that would have caught this at the time. The guy took all the cash and used it to buy a horse ranch in the same city. He never made a payment to any of the 3 lenders and knew it would go to foreclosure. He didn't care because he won. He beat the system, and you know what? He got away with it. Because he was one of thousands just like him who did the exact same thing and the banks realized it would be cheaper to eat it than fight it through the court systems and try to collect against most people who had no assets. This was 2008. This will never be possible again.
wHaT AbOuT tHe PaNdEmIc and tHe ImPeNdInG FoReClOsUrEs????
As someone who works in this industry, I am seeing firsthand that every lender is pushing the unpaid mortgage payments on the backend of the notes. This will allow people to avoid paying large lump sums up front.
Additionally, NO ONE IS UNDERWATER in their houses right now. So if, for some reason, a lender were to demand payment, the seller could simply sell and walk away. I haven’t seen a single lender do this. Not one.
tHiS iS lIKe CARVANA, bUt ReAl EsTaTe iS rIsKiEr.
No, owning real estate is no riskier than owning cars.
Cars are a depreciating asset.
Real estate is an appreciating asset.
95% of millionaires are made with owning real estate, myself included.
Many people see real estate as a safer store of value than even gold or other goods. Definitely safer than having it sit in the bank.
Of course there are exceptions to everything. People are able to sell their house after owning it for 30 years and make retirement level money. People retire off their equity. You can't sell your daily driver after using it for 10 years and make the equivalent rate of return. Appreciating vs depreciating. Of course exceptions exist like Condos in RE and rare classic cars. But for the most part, in 99% situations, real estate gains value while personal property loses it. This is economics 101.
Comment: If I knew I was selling my property for less then fair market value, potentially tens of thousands of dollars, I’d suck it up and hire an agent.
My Response:
Everyone has their different requirements, desires and wants. Many have different ones. Grandma afraid of Covid and doesn't want showings? No Problemo! No Realtor interview process or dealing with them in the house either? Yes please! Closing happens on my watch at my desired time without crazy buyers in a moving truck barking up my ass? Sign me up! I control the entire transaction myself without relying on a Realtor to do it for me? Sold.
Some people don't care about a few thousand bucks if they know that the time, energy and stress was less. Those things have value too.
People don't realize that Money is merely a storage of value for work/time/energy.
Retail buyers require 10x the headache and energy. You may end up making $2k more on paper, but you've lost it all (and more) by the end of the transaction with the time and energy you had to spend to get there.
tHiS iS tHe UbEr Of HoUsEs:
No, it’s not. Uber has zero assets. They don’t own a single car.
They have nothing but their systems and software.
Opendoor actually holds tangible assets unlike companies that literally own nothing like DoorDash, Airbnb, etc.
Sidenote: I would wager that it's VERY likely that they eventually create a property management interface on their app that connects landlords with tenants for a fee and handles the Property Management side of things. This is an obvious next play. I can't confirm this, but it's just what I would be implementing of this were my company.
Okay, I think I’m going to wrap this up. I’m sure Ill think of more stuff and will add to it later but I have to get some work done.
My position: 14 contracts, calls shorts and leaps. 1000 shares.

I have no horse in the GME "fight" right now. I wish you all the best, and it is the biggest trading mistake of my life so far. I was talking about GME with my friends in March 2020, and even did trade some options then for a loss. I must have read DFV at some point, as we were discussing Burry and a "technical short squeeze" happening. But I missed the real boat, so good on DFV and all of the rest of you degenerates.
Instead, I focused my market attention during quarantine on precious metals. My opinion is that in the long term (10+ years) they will provide the only real hedge against inflation in the world as every CB on the planet is exploding the supply of fiat to deal with COVID economic disruption.
In the short term, I believe that the "powers that be" are engineering the largest short squeeze in the history of markets. We do not have the power to effect whether this happens, it is simply an inevitability. HFs, banks, and other large institutions are going to extract an enormous amount of wealth from the world during this squeeze. This money will be taken from the future pocket of every consumer of industrial goods for the next several decades in the form of inflated prices on everything: batteries, electronics, solar panels, EVs...even jewelry and silverware.
We cannot stop them, but I have decided to try to hop on for the ride. The last few months aside, I never saw WSB as a force for societal change, because the people who control the money are always going to win the most in the end. WSB is a place where we can learn the tricks of a market that is structurally rigged against us, and use those tricks to our advantage. To use an analogy that I think we all know: I am not, and will never be, Ender. But I can learn that the Enemy's Gate is Down, and play The Game that way.
The tl;dr is this: the market for silver is the most manipulated physical market in the history of the world. $SLV is the vehicle that is currently being used behind the scenes to vaccum up ownership of every available physical bar of silver in major bullion vaults in the world. When it has completed doing that, the "paper" markets that have held down the price of silver for decades will become disconnected from the physical markets. The energy that has been artificially held back for decades by this paper will explode the price of physical silver, and I have no idea how high it will go. $SLV will stand (mostly) alone as the world's exchange traded product for electronic trading of physical silver.

LET'S START AT THE BEGINNING: WHY IS SILVER IMPORTANT?

Silver has been used as real currency for thousands of years, and there is an argument to be made for returning to "sound" money through the use of silver and gold. However, that is not the argument that I am making.
Silver is a highly industrial metal, and it's usage for industry will only continue to expand as we electrify the future. Silver is important for electrical applications b/c it is the most-conductive / least-resistive metal in the universe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_resistivity_and_conductivity#Resistivity_and_conductivity_of_various_materials). It is used heavily in all electronic applications (even more since RoHS has pushed us away from Tin/Lead and towards Tin/Silver solder blends, with silver being added to mitigate the longevity problems of 100% Tin solder growing Tin whiskers and shorting out components). But the largest new demands on silver are going to come from solar panels and EVs. Utility-scale solar is now virtually tied with wind as the cheapest new sources of energy in the world and is only getting cheaper every year. As fossil fuel plants continue to reach the end of their service life, they are going to be replaced with solar and wind technologies. As EVs become more prevalent, their components (ESPECIALLY their batteries) will produce additional demand for Silver.
As smart investors are wont to do, this coming demand for industrial silver has been front-run and large quantites of silver have been sucked into investment products so that they can produce financial returns when demand begins to increase. 2020 showed remarkable investor interest in silver, to the tune of an estimated 350Mtoz moving into exchange traded products like $SLV. $SLV alone added ~200Mtoz of silver to it's holdings in 2020.
Unfortunately for the market, supply cannot meet demand: Of the 930.9Mtoz estimated for 2020 demand, only 236Mtoz was available for physical investment, because the rest was consumed by industrial uses. This means that $SLV alone absorbed almost the entire world's capacity for silver investment in 2020, and as you'll see soon, this is only accelerating in 2021.
Source for demand/supply/investment numbers: https://www.silverinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/SilverInstitute2020InterimPR.pdf

LETS GET PHYSICAL, PHYSICAL

Now it's important to understand that huge amounts of "silver" is traded on "paper" markets, and these markets have historically decided the approximate cost of physical silver in the world, in the form of the "spot price". I'm not going to give anyone a primer on how this works, go read about the London Fix and COMEX paper on your own time. But the important thing to know is that there are a bunch of silver bars in vaults in London and in the U.S., and electronic claims on them are traded on the LBMA and COMEX continuously, without the silver ever leaving the vaults.
However, these vaults have concrete numbers of physical bars in them, and trading contracts against them technically means that you can show up at a window somewhere and demand your 5x 1000oz bars that a COMEX warrant entitle you to. This redemption happens all the time, and it can be used to extract physical silver from the unallocated storage at bullion vaults and release it to industrial or consumer bullion uses. However, these bars can also be moved into "registered" or "allocated" accounts without them leaving the overall vault storage. This means that a quantity of individual silver bars that an owner holds title to can be physically moved inside the vault onto a different rack, and the owner has individual serial numbers of bars that they own. These bars can be withdrawn on demand only by their owner and are not available for general redemption of a COMEX warrant.
So how many bars are there? Well between LBMA and COMEX, there are 1480.3Mtoz sitting in vaults (sources below when I start doing math). This includes all allocated AND unallocated bars. Now, obviously London and NY are separated by an ocean, but people always like to bring up that bars could be moved b/w London <-> American COMEX vaults. This is an enormous undertaking, but let's make a "spherical chicken in a vaccuum" level assumption and say that LBMA + COMEX vaults are a singular source of inventory for both $SLV and other market participants.
If you read the $SLV S-1 (which I did: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1330568/000119312505127244/ds1.htm) you would learn that the custodian of the $SLV trust is required to hold all silver weight (with an exception for 1100toz of unallocated, lol) that is owned by the trust in allocated accounts, where the individual bars are physically segregated inside the vaults, and the serial numbers of the owned bars are explicitly recorded. The idea that there is "no physical silver" backing the SLV trust and "you could get settled with cash" is ridiculous. iShares publishes a report listing every serial number of every bar that is owned by the trust, along with the total weight contained in the bars. It is 10847 pages long (you can read it here if you have trouble sleeping at night: https://emea-markets.jpmorgan.com/metalicsWebAppJanus/publicUnauthenticated/BONY_SLV.pdf) and is updated frequently.
The underlying silver is owned by the trust. It cannot be removed from the trust unless "baskets" of 50000 shares are redeemed by an "Authorized Participant" which is only a few large brokers. It cannot be removed by the bullion vaults and given to other customers because it is physically segregated inside the vaults.
People who have recently beaten down the idea of a silver squeeze love to talk about how JP Morgan is the custodian for the SLV trust. And because JPM just paid a $1B fine for historical manipulation of the paper silver market, they aren't going to be honest about this. This is crazy talk.
When it comes to the dishonesty of a big bank, there is "fraud" and there is FRAUD. "Fraud" would be them saying "Oh sorry, we didn't realize that a laundromat bringing in $300k/week of dirty dollar bills was out of the ordinary". "Fraud" happens all the time, and the banks get away with it regularly. FRAUD would be them saying "Oh yes, 3rd party customer (iShares) who services dozens of other large banking institutions in the world, here is objective evidence, with serial numbers, that we have these silver bars in the vault" and then just making up the data. It is QANON-level crazy, IMHO, to think that JPM is going to commit FRAUD by publishing a list of serial numbers that is completely fake.
I believe the exact opposite: since they have just gotten caught, they are playing it straight this time and have just switched sides in order to go long. On the COMEX alone, JP Morgan Chase is long 193.9Mtoz, or just north of $5B.
(COMEX depository data by weight: https://www.cmegroup.com/delivery_reports/Silver_stocks.xls)
The problem for the futures and options markets is that their continual trading of paper contracts is chasing a smaller and smaller amount of physical silver that is not owned by $SLV. And the market participants (minus, now, JPM) who have gotten away with naked selling of paper contracts and mostly settling them for cash are going to soon find the underlying vaults empty and no metal to give to warrant holders who come looking for it.

HOW BIG OF A PROBLEM IS $SLV FOR THE NAKED SHORTS IN THE PAPER MARKET? LET'S DO SOME MATH.

$SLV inventory math:
$SLV is holding 669,357,789.40 troy ounces in trust, and has 720,500,000 shares outstanding.
(If you are curious why $SLV/share trades below the spot price, it's because: 669.4Mtoz / 720.5M shares = .929 toz / share)
($SLV data from here: https://www.ishares.com/us/products/239855/ishares-silver-trust-fund?qt=SLV#/ )
(screenshot from tonight for posterity: https://imgur.com/a/0sqcMFr)
Bullion vault inventory math:
London (LBMA) silver stocks are 1080.5Mtoz (http://www.lbma.org.uk/london-precious-metals-physical-holdings-statistics)
US COMEX silver stocks are 399.8Mtoz (https://www.cmegroup.com/delivery_reports/Silver_stocks.xls)
669.4/(1080.5 + 399.8) = 45.2% of the vaulted silver in the world is already owned by SLV
Subtracting what SLV already owns, leaves us with: (1080.5 + 399.8) - 669.4 = 810.9Mtoz
(This is completely ignoring the fact that a lot of that remaining silver is owned in registered or allocated accounts by individual owners. E.g. there is 150.2Mtoz in "registered" on the COMEX which means those bars are already specifically deeded to an individual owner. But they could theoretically sell it to SLV so I included it as available.)
810.9Mtoz is the ABSOLUTE THEORETICAL MAXIMUM available in LBMA + COMEX silver that is not already owned by SLV.
Now how short are the shorts? Some more math:
OI on COMEX futures: https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/metals/precious/silver-futures-and-options.html

+ 179786*5000toz + 130402*5000toz + 8245*1000toz + 1903*2500toz ---------------- 1,563,942,500 = 1563.9Mtoz 

in currently open interest that could be demanded for delivery. Just on the COMEX, there could be demand for twice as much silver as there is in the combined LBMA + COMEX vaults that is not explicitly owned by $SLV right now.
Caveats:

• I have not included any London futures contracts that may have claims on metal here. I am not versed in their contracts at all and don't have a good data source right now. If anyone knows how to calculate the short obligation for London I would be glad to add it.
  
• I have not analyzed any of the strike prices on COMEX options or dates on COMEX futures...some of them could be way out of the money or way in the future. Many silver producers sell futures years in advance to lock in prices, and then deliver the physical to satisfy the contracts.
  

Using the same basic methodology–total shorts divided by shares [toz in this case] outstanding–as is used on a stock to calculate short interest (and gave us the infamous 140% short interest on GME) we get......drumroll please:
1563.9 short / 810.9 physical = 192.9% short interest.
OPEN INTEREST ON COMEX SILVER FUTURES AND OPTIONS IS EQUIVALENT TO A 192.9% SHORT INTEREST AGAINST ALL LONDON AND U.S. AVAILABLE INVENTORY.
But it gets even worse.

WANNA ADD A GAMMA SQUEEZE??

I pulled the data for all current OI in SLV options. There is a large number (5.7 million) of call contracts open (here are the totals: https://imgur.com/tiqPA34)
Using the .929toz/share number, we can calculate that there are up to 527.2Mtoz that would have to be bought during an absolute runaway Gamma Squeeze. Call options on $SLV max out right now at $55, so the spot price would only have to increase by around 122% to reach the point that all of that weight would need to have been purchased. But at some point, it could become self-reinforcing, and the gamma squeeze continues to cause more gamma squeezing.
I believe that this almost happened Sunday evening (2021-01-31) as evidenced by the huge premium that $SLV was trading to the futures price for a few minutes when trading opened. (My comparison chart: https://i.imgur.com/UPjL3zm.png)
The Silver ETF that trades on Sunday in Tel Aviv (https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/TCHF82:IT) closed up >6% (and was consistenly rising for the entire session) before any american spot markets opened. I believe that hedging algorithms at MM firms that write options saw this spike as a need to buy shares in $SLV to cover their deltas, and so they bought the opening of $SLV like crazy. $SLV opened up 17.6%, while paper only opened up about 6%. Paper market players had to sell 23.8Mtoz of paper in the first minute of trading to keep the price under control. I have never seen an imbalance like this before, and it was covered up quickly (within 2 hours of trading). But to me, it sounds like Vincent's heartbeat monitor in GATTACA when he runs out of fake signal: there was a cover up required to hide this explosion.
When the day comes that this cover up is not executed properly, stuff is going to get ugly, b/c $SLV won't just gamma squeeze like a normal stock...

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! A TRADITIONAL GAMMA/SHORT SQUEEZE WILL SEEM LIKE NOTHING IN SILVER

The squeeze in silver will be FAR WORSE than the combination of a gamma and short squeeze in a stock, because shares of stock cannot be removed from the market. Eventually somebody holding $VW or $GME is going to say "sure, I'll sell at $42,000.69 per share" and that share can go back to cover a short. But if instead of doing that, the holder of that share withdrew it from the market by converting it to a physical token b/c they thought that the physical token would be more valuable than the share (the retail premium on physical silver vs. paper silver), the short interest would INCREASE as shares were converted into tokens. And since there are currently more "shares" of silver than there are bars of silver in the vault, the shorts can be caught with a literally illiquid market that has nothing to buy.
Zero. Zilch. No silver available.
The doomsday scenario (for paper silver holders and writers) is the following combination:

• holders of COMEX warrants will see the rising premium of physical bullion to the spot price and decide to redeem their warrants for physical
  
• a rising spot price will Gamma Squeeze the writers of $SLV options into buying more shares in a runaway fashion and the trust will absorb all available vault inventory as it issues new shares
  

COMEX warrant holders who try to demand metal that doesn't exist will literally break the market.
The CBOE will probably step in and decide to force settle the contracts for cash at the last known good price, and COMEX paper warrants will cease trading forever.
The physical market price will then be disconnected from the paper market, and $SLV as an exchange traded product will stand (mostly) alone as the new "paper" market for silver.

SO WTF DO I DO? [NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE]

Well I could always buy physical silver, if I can stomach the premium and wait 8 weeks for it to show up. Or, I could just get long on $SLV. Since I believe that $SLV will stand alone after the dust settles as the one true claim on bars in the vaults, I could be long the actual $SLV ticker in several ways:

• Buying shares (duh, but it worked for $GME)
  
• Buying long dated calls (Gamma Squeeze go BRRRRR, but who knows when)
  
• Buying option spreads (my personal favorite)
  

If I wanted to maximize my contribution to the Gamma Squeeze, I'd probably buy as much Delta/$ as I could get using weeklies, which would be 2/5 $26.5C or 2/12 $28C
(Max delta/$ calculations: https://i.imgur.com/Az3o85v.png and https://i.imgur.com/eRPQo6k.png)
Current open positions for me are: (https://imgur.com/vWZrziG)

• Jan'22 50/55 call spread (costs .17, moonshot pays $5, 29x)
  
• 4/16 40/55 call spread (costs .18, moonshot pays $15, 83x)
  
• 2/5 $26.5 call (to maximize delta/$)
  
• jan'22 $40 call (to minimize risk of missing the big one)
  
• $AG shares and jan'23 10/35 call spread (added, sorry i forgot this one: https://imgur.com/fz80V6J)
  

Footnote, all the pictures I think I used, in case i missed something: https://imgur.com/a/0sqcMFr