u/ZeusGato

The Odyssey

Spider-Man: Brand New Day — July 31, 2026

Super Troopers 3 — August 2026

The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping — November 20, 2026

Jumanji 3 — December 2026 window

Avengers: Doomsday — December 18, 2026

Dune: Part Three — December 18, 2026

xxxx share holder here, and I have been thinking about the whole idea of a Requel a lot lately. Last week everyone was (rightfully) staring at the record Q1 numbers and the eBay drama, but the line I keep coming back to got maybe four seconds of airtime : the board unanimously approved a 2 billion dollar buyback through 2029.

That line is doing way more work than people think. And we've literally seen this movie before. From this exact company.

The neglected part of the GME story:

Everybody can recite 2021, almost nobody starts the story in the right year.

March 2019. GameStop is a $4 stock the entire market has left for dead. The board authorizes a $300M buyback.

August 2019, MBrry (good ol doc) starts sending letters to the board telling them to actually use it. His whole point was that at these prices they could retire a massive chunk of the company for pocket change.

And they did. Roughly $178M out the door, about 38 million shares retired (pre split numbers). Shares outstanding went from 102M to 65M. They bought back something like a third of the entire company at under $5/share.

Now line up the dates:

• Buyback executes through 2019
• September 2019: some guy named DFV posts his first YOLO. Go back and read his early DD, the shrinking share count is literally part of the thesis
• August 2020: RC Ventures files its 13D and Cohen shows up
• January 2021: short interest gets reported at ~140% of float and you know the rest

That 140% number was a fraction. Everyone focuses on the top of it, the shorts who oversized their bets. Nobody talks about the bottom. The float they were short against had been shrunk by a third, by the company itself, the year before. The denominator was the trap.

MBrry demanded the buyback. DFV did the math on it. Cohen walked in after the spring was already loaded.

This isn't a GME one-off either

Dillard's. Heavily shorted department store, "dying retail,"= sound familiar? The family retired over half the shares while shorts kept pressing. Stock went from $25 in 2020 to over $400 in about two years. When shorts finally had to cover there was nothing left to buy. That's what covering into a vanished float looks like.

AutoZone is the slow-motion version. 150M shares in the late 90s, under 20M today. No squeeze headline, just 25 years of the share count grinding lower and shorts getting strangled the whole way down.

Two speeds, same physics. Tender offers are the fast gulp (Dillards). Open market programs are the slow ratchet (AutoZone). Both end badly for the short side.

Now reread the new authorization

$2B through June 2029. At $22-23ish that's about 87 million shares. Call it 19% of the 448.65M outstanding.

But the real number is uglier than that if you're short. Take out Cohen's 42M shares that are never trading, the other insiders, and everything parked at Computershare, and $2B can eat something like a quarter of the the actual street float.

What that does, no matter where any short exposure "lives":

• Retired shares leave the lending pool forever. Less borrow supply, higher borrow cost, every day
• Short interest as a % of float goes UP without one new share being shorted. Same numerator, shrinking denominator. We've seen that fraction before
• A buyback is a buyer that never sells and doesn't care about price. You can't shake it out

And for the swap theorists: parking a short inside a total return swap doesn't make it disappear. The dealer on the other side hedges with real stock. Real borrow, real margin. When price gets marked up, the swap holder gets the collateral call. Ask Archegos how that goes.

In 2019 they did this with $178M. This authorization is eleven times that, coming from a company with $8.4B in cash and its most profitable Q1 ever instead of a retailer circling the drain.

The detail that convinced me this is real and not just PR

Cohen's new comp package vests on total market cap hurdles. $20B, then $30B, all the way up to $100B. Buybacks shrink the share count which means the share PRICE has to climb even higher to hit each market cap level. And per the proxy, the hurdles get adjusted for acquisitions, spinoffs, and dividends, but buybacks are not on the adjustment list.

So the board just approved a program that makes the CEO's own options harder to vest. And Cohen, who lets be honest controls that board, signed off on it anyway. You dont do that for optics. You do that when you think the stock is too cheap to leave alone, even at the cost of your own payday math.

How it fits the bigger picture

Step back. 2024-2025 they raised the war chest, $4B+ in converts (the raise that got reported under the Project Rocket codename). 2026 they swung it at eBay (Project Sling). The buyback is the third leg, and it feeds the deal too: the eBay offer is half GameStop stock, so every dollar higher GME trades means fewer shares issued and less dilution if a deal ever closes.

They sold stock through the ATMs at $28-30+. Now they're authorized to buy it back at $23. Sell high, buy low, with your own equity. That's not a contradiction. That's the playbook.

Before someone calls this hopium**, the caveats are real:**

• An authorization is not execution. Its discretionary through 2029. Watch what they actually do, not what they announce
• Open market buybacks are speed limited (roughly 25% of daily volume under the SEC safe harbor, plus blackout windows). $2B takes months. Rising tide, not flash flood. UNLESS they do a tender offer or an ASR, which takes a giant gulp at once. If you ever see GameStop announce a dutch tender, that's the loud signal
• The October warrants can put shares back into the float when exercised, which offsets some of this
• The cash has other jobs. Settling the eBay derivatives could eat ~$4.4B on its own, and that cash also backs the credibility of the bid. They cant max everything at once
• A shrinking float doesn't force anyone to cover. It just makes staying short more expensive every month until conviction breaks. Pressure cooker, not landmine

What I'm watching

1. The 10-Q drops this today/tomorrow. The cover page shows shares outstanding as of the filing date. If that number is already under 448,650,736, they didn't wait
2. Borrow rates and utilization creeping up with no news
3. SI as a % of float rising without new shorts being added
4. Any tender offer/ASR announcement. That's the board switching from ratchet to gulp

The 2019 buyback was the quiet first domino of everything that happened in 2021. The people running this company now, including the guy whose letters kicked the whole thing off, know that history better than anyone on this sub.

And yes, im fully aware of the irony that the man who begged for buybacks in 2019 sold his entire position a few weeks before they announced the biggest one in company history. I had to laugh in thinking about this whole thing.

They just reloaded with 11x the ammo.

TLDR: GameStop's own 2019 buyback ($178M, roughly a third of the company at under $5) shrank the float that made the 140% SI number possible in 2021. Burry demanded it, DFV's DD cited it, Cohen arrived after. Dillard's and AutoZone show shrinking floats kill shorts every time, fast or slow. The new $2B authorization is 11x the 2019 firepower, it quietly makes Cohen's own comp harder to vest (which tells you its sincere), and it props up the eBay deal currency at the same time. Watch the 10-Q share count this week.

Look at the major indices since April 1st, they’ve been on historical runs and look like they are in a double top. Nasdaq 100 finished outside its weekly Bollinger bands for the 6th week in a row, something not done since the 80’s. Semis are up 75% in less than 2 months, it’s honestly unfathomable. People will say that this crash has been called for years but not materializing, however that’s because of central bank intervention and bailout programs (Bank Term Funding Program, Repurchase Management etc). Short positions are built on collateral and these other stocks are the collateral holding up the short positions (Study Archegos collapse).

Bond yields rising to the highest level since the Global Financial Crisis is no coincidence. People will say it’s the war, and sure that is part of it, but doesn’t fully explain the sovereign debt crisis every developed country in the world is experiencing. Runaway deficits and funding shortages will have to be dealt with. They will crash the stock market to save the bond market. In fact I think bond yields have already peaked, look at US and Japan 30 Year Govt bonds. A credit crisis is usually how this plays out, something central planners have not allowed to play out since 2008-09 GFC. Problem is you have all these zombie companies sucking up capital they are being unproductive with. Between Private Equity, Private Credit, Commercial Real Estate, Non-Depository Financial Institutions (Hedge Funds), the system has gotten too big to bailout.

The traditional financial powers controlling financial markets with an iron fist through paper markets and derivatives are reaching their limits. I believe we are in the midst of a transformation in financial markets, the likes of which we’ve never seen and there will be winners and losers. GameStop is well positioned to be one of the leaders in this new era.

I know the price action can be frustrating for many, it seems especially for those that don’t follow macroeconomics, but this particular ticker is a widow maker for the shorts. Ryan Cohen has built a ticking time bomb on the ticker between Convertible bonds and warrants, that all it really takes are GME longs closing their bond (hedge) shorts and warrant holders exercising to force the many floats of the legacy shorts to close. I believe this will all start playing out before the annual shareholders meeting on 7/7.

Happy Memorial Day Weekend Everyone

I like the Stock

Source: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1411579/000141157926000052/xslF345X06/primary\_doc.xml