Lots More With Luke Kawa on Memestock Mania 2.0

This episode dives into the resurgence of meme stock trading, focusing on how social media and market dynamics influence stock prices.

1. The meme stock phenomenon challenges traditional market predictions, showing unexpected stock movements can still surprise the market.
2. Social media platforms significantly impact stock prices, with communities like WallStreetBets driving coordinated buying sprees.
3. Market makers and hedge funds have adapted to meme stock strategies, potentially dampening the effects of coordinated retail trading.
4. The episode highlights a shift from fundamental to momentum-driven trading among retail investors.
5. The discussion underscores the broader implications of meme stocks on market structure and investor behavior.

1: Introduction

Hosts introduce the episode's focus on the resurgence of meme stocks, questioning market predictability.
Joe Weisenthal: "Tracy, do you think the meme stock thing is, like, already over already?"

2: Market Mechanics

Discussion on how options trading influences stock prices and market dynamics.
Luke Kawa: "One of the things that really struck a chord with me was you saw a lot of intrigue on maybe smaller names or story stocks."

3: Social Media's Role

Exploration of WallStreetBets and its influence on meme stocks.
Tracy Alloway: "And the other reason we wanted to talk to Luke, other than the fact that he's fun to talk to, is he was one of the first people at Bloomberg who took what was happening on WallstreetBets fairly seriously."

4: Future of Meme Stocks

Speculation on the sustainability and future trends of meme stock movements.
Joe Weisenthal: "It's so crazy. By the way, I know this is not the point. It's so wild to me that Microsoft is still the biggest company in the entire world."

• Monitor social media trends to gauge market sentiment.
• Consider the influence of retail investors when analyzing stock movements.
• Stay informed about market mechanics, especially regarding options and short selling.
• Diversify investments to mitigate risks associated with volatile stocks.
• Engage with financial news and media to understand ongoing market dynamics.

Remember GameStop? The poster-child for 2021's memestock mania recently surged almost 5x in a matter of days — and it was all catalyzed by a few tweets from Keith Gill, aka "Roaring Kitty." So what's going on? How similar and how different was this move to what captivated the world's attention three years ago? On this episode of Lots More, we speak with Luke Kawa, markets editor at Sherwood Media, who was one of the first to chronicle the world of WallStreetBets and memestocks for Bloomberg News. He breaks down what we just saw and the lessons we can take away from it.

People

Luke Kawa, Joe Weisenthal, Tracy Alloway

Companies

GameStop, Microsoft, AMC

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

Luke Kawa

Content Warnings:

None

Joe Weisenthal
As a real estate manager, principal asset management harnesses the power of a 360 degree perspective, delivering local insights and global expertise across public and private equity and debt. Their teams apply local insights and global perspectives to help identify the most compelling investing opportunities. Principal asset management actively invested. Learn more@principalam.com Dot investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal. Principal Asset Management SM is a trade name of Principal Global Investors, LLC.

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Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts. Radio News.

Joe Weisenthal
Tracy, do you think the meme stock thing is, like, already over already? I'm serious. Well, you know what? I'm looking at the chart of GameStop, and it went up a lot and now it's coming down a lot. The thing I think is kind of funny is if you view the entire meme stock phenomenon from an efficient markets hypothesis, you get really interesting questions like, why didn't the market already price in the risk?

Tracy Alloway
Or the possibility of roaring kitty coming back on Twitter and tweeting a picture of a guy sitting up in a chair that should have been priced in. Yeah, I totally agree. As you know, I am the world's biggest believer in the efficient market hypothesis. It's always priced in all the time. And for the first time in my life, at age 43, something has come along to shake my faith.

Joe Weisenthal
And it is the fact that. Was it RFK? No, it is the fact that the market did not price in. Apparently, the possibility that after, like, three years of radio silence, we would get a tweet of a guy leaning forward from the roaring kitty sending the stock. High, and then RFK junior tweeting that he was investing in GameStop.

I have to completely rethink my fundamental assumptions about how all markets work. Based on the GameStop chart of the last ten or so days, I'm completely revisiting all my core assumptions. It's good that the apes have you thinking.

I did a deadlift. One, two, three. Hegemony. Okay, go.

Tracy Alloway
Barges. This is an after school special, except. I've decided I'm gonna base my entire personality going forward on campaigning for a strategic pork reserve in the US. Where's the vest? Squid ink?

These are the important questions. Is it robots taking over the world? No, I think that, like, in a couple years, the AI will do a really good job of making the ad loads podcast. And people are saying I don't really need to listen to Joe and Tracy anymore. We do have cha ching, the perfect guest.

You're listening to lots more where we catch up with friends about what's going on right now. Because even when the odd lots is over, there's always lots more. And we really do have the perfect guest.

Joe Weisenthal
What do you think? Why wasn't it priced in already? I guess my favorite way is to answer a question with a question. And I think the bigger one is, why the heck? If your management of GME and you've seen your stock get memed before, how the hell do you not have a shelf ready to go that says we can sell shares into this anytime?

Luke Kawa
But as for why folks were expecting this, I would say look at what you have haven't gotten from the roaring Kitty Twitter account or anything from Keith Gill since, let's call it mid 2021, didn't participate in the book or the movie effectively made about him. It just seemed like, I don't know if the roaring kitty just kind of went into to pseudo hibernation. It seemed like nine lives over and was gone from the scene. So not something that was on anyone's radar, certainly. Of all the crazy things in markets that happened, this was not one when I was coming back into journalism that I was expecting to get hit over the head with.

Tracy Alloway
We are speaking with Luke Kawa, our former colleague at Bloomberg. We worked together with him for many years, and then he left us to join UBS and do serious financial jobs. And now he's back in journalism. He's a markets editor over at Robinhood's Sherwood media. So a very triumphant return to financial.

Joe Weisenthal
Journalism, timed, I guess. It's like, great. It's like we're gonna go to Robin Hood's media arm and immediately the GameStop thing happens. It's like fate, right? That's right.

Tracy Alloway
And the other reason we wanted to talk to Luke, other than the fact that he's fun to talk to, is he was one of the first people at Bloomberg who took what was happening on WallstreetBets fairly seriously, and I think was one of the first writers of our big cover story on Wall street bets when it actually started to take off. And this was way back in. Let's see, early 2020. Is that right, Luke? Yep.

Luke Kawa
Yep. That's the, I'd say late 2019. Early 2020 was when we got the prelude or the proof of concept to a lot of things. That we would see in later years. And I love the transition from went to go do serious work and now he's back covering the meme stocks.

So. Yeah, well, one of the things that I really liked about the way you wrote about the meme stock phenomenon and Wall street bets at the time was like, okay, yes, there was this whole cultural phenomenon attached to it where we get to throw around words like autistic and apes and lots of profanity, which I'm not going to say on the show because then we'll just have to bleep everything out. But you kind of approached it from a market's angle, which I think tends to get very forgotten nowadays. Everyone's just like, haha, GameStop, isn't this silly? But when all of this first started happening, it was kind of an experiment in market structure, and I think people forget that.

Tracy Alloway
So the idea was that basically if you bought a bunch of options on a particular stock, then market makers would have to go out and hedge their own risk, and they might do that by buying the stock. And so you get this sort of like perpetual motion machine that effectively forces the stock to go up. Yeah, that's a great explanation, I think. Like what? Where I had my kind of eureka moment, so to speak, was there's obviously Wallstreetbetch was a place where people were pitching their they're crazy option bets, they're large positions, they're yolos, what have you.

Luke Kawa
Although with some of the stocks getting memed several times now, I don't know if YoLo is the way to describe it. You get two or three opportunities. Seemingly on a lot of these you. Only live once, but if you miss it, you get to live a second time. Exactly.

But one of the things that really struck a chord with me was you saw a lot of intrigue on maybe smaller names or story stocks. Tesla was obviously a early favorite of the Wall street bets community, but there was one user who one time made the argument, and this was after that. You know, I did a little publishing on the perpetual motion machine, as you have it, the quote unquote forced gamma squeeze. If we're getting into the Greeks. But one person said, we should try to do this with Microsoft tomorrow in the pre market.

And I saw this, but I go like, okay, let's relax. You're going to meme Microsoft now. Like this is going to be a thing you're going to try to do. Why not? Come on, stick to your own knitting kind of stuff.

Then there was the next morning, a crazy amount of call activity in Microsoft and buying in the pre market and Microsoft up, it was something like two and a half to 3% for no reason. And that's when I started to take it more seriously as a, okay, well coordinated buying power at certain times through certain vehicles can even leave an imprint on what was then probably still is now the largest us stock by market cap. So that's something that really blew my mind then and was something worth following up on as it became kind of even more coordinated, even more revolving around kind of certain stories. And then the success, the proof of concept, grew to a point where you, you know, you get more and more power. Because if nothing else, this is a momentum play that just got, you know, more momentum as it got more attention.

Joe Weisenthal
It's so crazy. By the way, I know this is not the point. It's so wild to me that Microsoft is still the biggest company in the entire world, given it was the biggest company in the entire world or more or less decades ago and so many different things that ostensibly would have disrupted it from the Internet to whatever, Apple, et cetera, and yet still at it. But I knew that's a divergence, Joe. No one wants to talk about.

I know. That's just one of those facts that still blows my mind. That being said. All right, so you mentioned, you know, GME management should have had that shelf registration ready to go. AMC, which always seemed like, I guess I would say, played a little bit more cynically into the meme stock crowd than the GMC management.

They did have that plan ready to go. They did do something because they got a little. Broke. The emergency meme stock glass. Yeah.

Tracy Alloway
Right off the shelf. Yeah. So, yes, but what happened with AMC during this round was they had a, they had a shelf offering that they had pretty much sold out of, so to speak, by, by the end of. So just as it was starting, they had an opportunity to sell a little more into it. And I remember, you know, on the, on the Monday or something going like, geez, AMC really, really blew this one.

Luke Kawa
Really blew this opportunity. And it's weird because as you know, you know, the CEO there, Aaron, has done a, I would say a fantastic job in recognizing that to a certain extent, the shareholder base is a lot of the product, both in terms of, you know, integration into, you know, rewards that you get to go to the theater and also in, in terms of some of the more shrewd, let's call them, financing angles that have been litigated back and forth through the courts but seem to have mainly served the purpose of raising more capital from AMC, from people that just wanted to see the stock go up and the company succeed. And then, of course, AMC right after you think that even they kind of missed the window here the next day, they, you know, effectively, I've called it, you know, they turned memes into a debt jubilee and able to issue trade, trade shares for, for debt, retire, effectively the debt. And it's, that's one of my favorite parts about this, is just watching the, the memes make things happen in real life for companies that is going to have a meaningful impact on their, on their ability as a going forward concern in the months, quarters, possibly years to come. What was a little different about GME was that as this was happening, as this was starting, GME was already in its earnings blackout period.

So typically, that is something that is going to preclude you from coming forward. If you don't already have an existing shelf open to be able to sell shares at marketing, that's going to preclude you from bringing one to the market at that point, unless you're also willing to come forward with your, you know, kind of preliminary earnings results. So it's probably more likely that the, you know, effectively, the choke point on GME being able to cash in more on this from the management perspective was just the, you know, I think it was five days it probably took for them to get those numbers together. So they were able to say, like, hey, here's our numbers also. Yes, we, we want to sell another 45 million in shares if, if you'll have them at a price.

But, you know, by that time, we had already seen a lot of deflation in the, in the stock price by then. Yeah, I've said this before, but I think one of the nicer interpretations of the meme stock phenomenon is people basically treating the stock market, buying shares of a company that is very much struggling to maintain or achieve profitability as a giant GoFundMe for businesses that they kind of like or feel some sense of nostalgia for, which, again, in 2021, when no one was able to go to the movie theater, that did actually make a big difference for AMC. See, Luke, I have a really important question for you. As a fellow redditor. Is it true that you may be a mod on Wall street bets?

Tracy Alloway
And how did that rumor get started? Wow. I can say confidently. So I am not a cat and I am not allstreetbets subreddit monitor. I am a mod on nowhere on Reddit.

Luke Kawa
I have no clue where at all this got started. I think it's may come from the era where I was, you know, back in 2020, where I was more kind of fervently having back and forths with folks there. And I think I remember most vividly about that is I was probably, I think, the only one posting Bloomberg charts on Wall street best, because everyone was like, what is this Robin machine? What is this chart background? A lot of, a lot of e trades and stuff of that nature.

So I think that's maybe why I stood out to some folks back then. You would be a really good Wall street bet mod. So I'm just saying I would probably be even more inclined to pay attention to it if you were. But I will trust your denial. I don't think you would be dishonest with us that you're not one of the people secretly running that page.

Joe Weisenthal
Here's the other thing I'm thinking about, like, with this sort of seemingly brief round of game meme stock mania over, like, it all felt like, I don't know, people are saying like, what a stuck culture we have. We're doing this again. It's like we know how the story begins, we know how the story ends, and so why not just like fast forward the tape and get through the entire process quickly, like all of the ups and downs without the sort of awe and mysticism around at this time? Yeah, I would say this was a lot more of a, of a cynical episode. And I think if you just compare and contrast the previous rounds we've had, you can see it in the, you can see it kind of in the raw numbers, whether we want to talk about like, how much total call volumes rose, how much volumes rose, turnover, value traded, yada, yada, yada.

Luke Kawa
All of that is very different from now to then, but it's almost kind of like a chicken and egg question there, because is there something about the story that was different? Is there something about the market structure that was different this time around? I would say yes on both sides. I'll start with the story first. Heading into 2021, there had already been a small crowd, including Rory and Kitty, including Rod Altman.

I think you've had on in the past who are, who are really making the vigorous value case for GameStop, that you have this one big last puff, so to speak, of the legacy business that was being priced as though it was going to imminently go out of business, but it probably had a lot more Runway in terms of another full cycle of generating some free cash flow. And then maybe you also have this big effective option on the loyal GameStop subscribers that you can maybe turn into and monetize a little bit better than you are. Couple that with also the high amount of short interest. So that was a story that started good, got even better when the stock four x effectively over the final four or so months of 2020. And then you had Ryan Cohen coming in in early January.

So there was actually like a lot of potential catalysts that were happening at that time. I think you also got another, another round of stemi checks. And on the entertainment side, I don't know how much pro sports we really had back on then. So all the stars really aligned for the story to be a lot better and that to be able to command a lot more mind share compared to now. Nothing's been happening in GameStop.

There's been really no change in the fundamental story. All that really happened is, you know, right before this shares got back to where they were in January 2021, right before they went parabolic. So that's really all that changed this time. I would also say potentially something to highlight on the market structure side that may have changed a little bit. It's tough to quantify, and this is still somewhat of a more embryonic hypothesis on my end.

But if you just want to compare the, let's look at the peak in call volumes traded on GME at different times. At this, the call volume peak was about 650,000. And today, back in January 2021, that peaked at over 4 million. So one of the factors that goes into options pricing is effectively, the more an option is in demand, the higher the implied volatility for that option. That is, its cost should be.

What happened this time was, we did see, in my eyes, for a lower amount of volume and for a lower move in the stock, some of those options, those lottery ticket options, you start to see the implied volatility jack up a lot faster than they had in the past. So that's a bit of a sign that maybe if GME didn't have the shelf ready to go, market makers had their playbook ready to go on how more or less they were going to respond to something like this happening again and build themselves a little better margin of safety. I would say so. Just worse story and better market mechanics probably are things that help thistle out a lot, lot quicker and just be a lot more about making a quick buck than any kind of grand story you can wrap around about sticking it to the man or sticking it to a particular hedge fund. Yeah, I think that's right.

Tracy Alloway
Especially about the market makers being more prepared for this. And also maybe even the hedge funds. And you see this discourse on Wallstreetbets itself where people talk about how, like, Wall street couldn't beat them and so they decided to join them instead. And now you have a lot of hedge funds that are actively monitoring all sorts of social media, but Wall street bets is certainly one of them, or plugging into discord servers and things like that to try to track sentiment. So in some ways, the big irony here is that I guess Wall street bets has kind of become more intertwined with Wall street itself.

Luke Kawa
I think if you, if you know that momentum is a factor, if you have seen this story play out before, I think there's a reason why a lot of the stocks with the kind of similar characteristics or have had these similar history during previous rounds of retail mania. I don't think it's a surprise that, you know, to some extent they traded like a bit of a basket. That is, that's something that suggests a, you know, a lot more professional piggybacking at play here, rather than just a more grassroots move in all of these names. At the same time.

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Visit www dot choose stifl.com Stifel Nicholas. And company incorporated member SIPC and NYSE. I find at this point I hadn't, I, unlike Tracy, I don't troll. Troll Wall street bets. I troll, too.

Joe Weisenthal
You troll, too. You troll, and you troll. But I don't troll. I don't troll either. But I don't troll.

I did not realize this phenomenon, that the inherent richness of the options as measured by their, the volatility had gone up so much faster. And this whole phenomenon with the market makers just getting better, it's like, oh, we've seen this before. We're going to price them more when we sell these call options to end retail that we're going to, like, make them pay more right off the bat because we've seen that playbook before. I find that really interesting. Well, the other thing that I noticed looking at WallstreetBets recently is that, like, roaring Kitty has basically been excommunicated from that subreddit.

Tracy Alloway
So when he tweeted, someone made a post about it. But then the moderators came in and said, you can't really talk about roaring Kitty. And if you wanna talk about GameStop, then go over to super stonk or there's a dedicated GME subreddit as well. When did that happen and why? Like, why is roaring Kitty basically not part of Wall street bets anymore?

Luke Kawa
At least I can say that in terms of the, the archived post, like, they're, they'll still there. So the, the record of, you know, all of Roy and Kitty's position updates, all of that still there in terms of the, the lack of GME AMC, I think that is more a legal liability thing wrought on by, you know, that particular subreddit mods opinions on what is tolerable, what is not, in the wake of a lot of people based SEC investigations after 2021 and had demanded all their SEC, demanded all their messages on Reddit, this and that, any other message boards, any discords scrubbing for that, and at pretty amazing legal expense. I think that's certainly an angle here in terms of those folks trying to cover some legal liability. Also, around the same time, I think there's been more of a divide or divorce among that mods community of which I was never a part, including one that saw the effect of the first founder, Jamie Rogozinski, exit around during these times and in the wake of publishing his book and some question over trademarks, some questions over self promotion, I believe still in legal battles with, with Reddit over that to this day. So I think just with all the attention that came on the sub because of GME, AMC and roaring kitty.

You know, they say there's no such thing as good press, but I guess when good press can lead to potentially high legal bills, then maybe that's, that's a way where it can. I think you meant to say there's no such thing as bad press, but I actually think there's no such thing as good. Pressure is actually. I did mean to. Yeah, yeah, no, I think that's probably true.

Joe Weisenthal
Never talk to the media. I kind of believe that. Don't ever. No one ignore that, especially future audiences. So you do realize what we're doing here, right?

Tracy Alloway
Well, we're media. Talking to media right now, but on other days, people outside of the media do talk to us. Why, though? Who talks to media? I would never talk to media.

Joe Weisenthal
Don't. But don't no one pay attention, please. For the sake of this podcast, everyone who's listening, don't. Don't take that to heart. Ignore Joe.

Okay. You know the other thing, when the first round of meme stock mania happened, there was all of this sort of, I would call it like, amateur anthropology, or maybe amateur sociology is like men and they're gambling and blah, blah, blah. And, you know, that faded. But now we have sports betting, which people talk about. The explosion of crypto has been doing very well.

Is there, is that a thing? Did it, like, spread out? Did it metastasize to other areas? Or was there really sort of this fever pitch in 2021 with that stuff that we haven't really come back to? I'd say a little bit from column, a little bit from column b here.

Luke Kawa
I think if you see, you know, a lot of the accounts that are, you know, willing to, you know, post their, sell gme to the moon, I bought even, you know, 100% into the move, bought more options type of folks. Those are also the same kind of people who, their next tweet will be a coin I've never heard of or a lot of altcoins that I've never heard of, effectively, that are also preferred vehicles of theirs. So I think having it be more dispersed, more outlets effectively for you to speculate in, I wouldn't be surprised if that's something that helped. Kind of cool this round a lot more, but I really don't think it can be emphasized as much. The complete lack of a story, like, at least last time, my, my, my personal view is that nobody ever really cared about roaring kitty story.

If you look back at, you know, the, the streams he used to do, the last one he did. And he talked about this in front of Congress. The last stream he did in December 2020 stocks already up 300% by this time in a matter of months, had 96 concurrent viewers. It isn't until the stock starts to move more in January and people, you know, roaring kitty effectively connects the dots that, yes, I'm also a deep effing value that you start to see all of the interest in him picked up, pick up. It picked up because he was winning.

People weren't interested in fundamentals. They turned the fundamental guy into their momentum catalyst. So that's all it was. And this time we started from that standpoint with nothing on the fundamental side. And that to me, is another just huge reason why this is just a really, really faint echo of what we've seen before.

We can't even pretend there's a story. Tracy, like I said, I haven't been following Wall street bets as much. Do people still sort of post their negative screenshots just as enthusiastic? Yeah, the lost point. You know, I read this biography once of a professional poker player, and he said he had a friend trying to think how I could say who would get into a state of arousal upon losing a big hand in poker.

Joe Weisenthal
And I'm just sort of curious if that's still a thing there where people seem to just get just excited about losing money as they make money. Ew. I'll find that book. Luke, one thing I was wondering is so roaring kitty on Twitter, I think he follows 90 people just about. I know he follows you and he follows me.

Tracy Alloway
He follows me randomly. He does not follow you. I checked. He does follow me. I'll show you the screenshot right now.

All right, we can argue about this. Have you. You don't have to argue. I have it right here. Look, wait, I'm going to walk over to Tracy.

Joe Weisenthal
1 second. I can't believe we're arguing over who. Roaring kitty follows me. Oh, that's weird. Okay, fine, fine.

Tracy Alloway
Joe wins that round. But have you had people reaching out to you, asking for you to get in touch with roaring Kitty for them? Because this has happened to be to both me and Sid recently, which is kind of nuts. Like this idea that there's one guy on Twitter who is tweeting out at the moment memes and clips from movies and not actually saying anything about specific stocks. But you have a bunch of people who are like, oh, please, please put me in touch with roaring Kitty.

Luke Kawa
Yes, I will say a big deluge, a lot of it from just general. Can you get me in touch? Egg adjacent type accounts, but also, I would say, a lot of interest from people who operate in the, in the social media sphere, wanting to be able to contact, to effectively say, like, hey, will you do, you know, sponsored or integrated sponsored content? I'd be, you know, interested in letting you do that. And, you know, I.

My kind of personal view on that is certainly not, you know, passing any of them along. I would love to get in contact first, though. I don't think that's necessarily a very high probability endeavor. I assume we've all tried dming him. We've all tried, and I assume he's.

Joe Weisenthal
Responded to none of us. Yes. I made an exercise. I made a meme of the, the guy sitting up and I put on the screen odd lots, hoping, and I sent it to him hoping that that would entice him. But I'm afraid to say it hasn't worked yet.

Luke Kawa
Yeah, no, exactly. So a lot of that and the. I mean, the. I think the social media angle is very interesting because, again, there was at the beginning, a lot of confusion, misinformation. Is this actually Keith Gill?

Is this a performance art scene? Was his account sold to someone? No reports I've seen that suggested it isn't him, and the reports that suggest it's sold have been debunked. But I think that's where you have to really think hard. In contrast, the, like, the reason why this had the power to move, the move certain stocks this time around was because of the decentralized nature of the trust.

I would say that Keith Gill built up as a person. He was one man doing fundamental research, betting big, doubling down, doubling down, and winning consistently, and never selling as far as. As far as anyone knew. So compare and contrast that to even Elon Musk. Now, if you look at, if you look at the action that happened in any argentinian ADR's or just ETF's that us investors can access what happened after Elon Musk said, invest in Argentina.

I love Argentina. Javier is great. Really didn't see a pickup in anything there. So it really just goes to show the newfound focus on who we select to trust to tell us about whether things will go up or not. Elon Musk has obviously spent a lot of currency on.

On different vehicles, effectively, in terms of things that might degrade his trust by talking about different things that you have gone up and then down a lot. Keith Gill hadn't. So, you know, that's what kind of makes the. That's what kind of adds a certain cache to the comments coming out of this account, and certainly why people would want to use this account if they could to be able to promote their own ventures. That's why there's seemingly a lot of interest in that.

Tracy Alloway
You know what else is funny? On that note, no one refers to Keith Gill as anything other than Keith Gill or roaring kitty anymore. And of course, originally on Reddit he was known as deep effing value. I think I can say that. But no one says that anymore.

Value is dead, Tracy. The only person in the meme arena that I trust is not Keith or Elon is Luke Kawa. That's fair.

Joe Weisenthal
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Tracy Alloway
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