Disclaimer: I am speculating wildly about market forces. I am not licensed to provide financial advice, I'm just autistic.
BlackRock owns a proprietary asset management and analysis software they have affectionately called Aladdin — or Asset Liability and Debt and Derivatives Investment Network — and no one outside of BlackRock knows what it can see. I think it's at the gravitational center of the GME saga.
GameStop may be the vehicle for a reverse bust-out scheme to put an effective end to the practice of naked short selling, thought to be part of the bread and butter of market makers like Citadel Securities. BlackRock is the second-largest institutional holder of GME after Vanguard and would benefit immensely from a mother of all short squeezes and the disappearance of naked short selling from the market. They may have also tipped off Ryan Cohen, the current chairman of the board.
Ryan — a billionaire of Chewy wealth, a company BlackRock was an integral investor in — bought his way onto the GameStop board, validating the at-the-time insane conviction people like Keith Gill (u/DeepFuckingValue on reddit, @RoaringKitty on YouTube) had in the company. Then he was voted in as chairman in a landslide by the social media hype GameStop now had from the semi-squeeze of early 2021, and is quietly pivoting the company toward its tech/entertainment/blockchain ambitions.
Taking Chewy public and directly competing with Amazon may have been a ploy to see what seems to mysteriously happen to the stock of Amazon competitors, of which much has now been written by financial gumshoes. If Ryan has friends in high places at BlackRock with exclusive data, they could have hatched the plan to take over GameStop, which now intends to directly compete with Amazon, and has in fact already poached Amazon executives.
References:
- Financial Times (via archive.today) — BlackRock’s black box: the technology hub of modern finance
- u/jumpster81 via reddit — Amazon, Bain Capital and Citadel Bust Out the Competition
- Susanne Trimbath via Spiramus Press — Naked, Short and Greedy: Wall Street's Failure to Deliver
- Citadel Securities LLC via SEC.gov — 2021 Financial Statement (PDF)
- Fintel — BlackRock Inc. ownership in GME
- Fintel — Vanguard Group Inc. ownership in GME
- Reuters — BlackRock may have raked in $2.4 billion on GameStop's retail-driven stock frenzy
- Harvard Business Review — The Founder of Chewy.com on Finding the Financing to Achieve Scale
- u/DeepFuckingValue via reddit — Hey Burry thanks a lot for jacking up my cost basis
- @RoaringKitty via YouTube — 100%+ short interest in GameStop stock (GME) – fundamental & technical deep value analysis
- USPTO Trademark & Patent Filings — GME Entertainment, LLC
- u/throwawaylurker012 via reddit — In 2017 months before its bankruptcy, Sears got a letter near seething with rage. The secretive Swiss family office Memento S.A. had 1 demand: tell them to stop fucking naked shorting our stock.
- u/Criand via reddit — The Puzzle Pieces of Quarterly Movements, Equity Total Return Swaps, DOOMPs, ITM CALLs, Short Interest, and Futures Roll Periods. Or, "The Theory of Everything"
- Insider — GameStop just made its third hire from Amazon as the game retailer continues poaching new executives from the tech giant