Trading can be very tricky for people who have little to no insight into stocks. Getting in on the right stock at the right time provides nearly the same level of excitement as winning the lottery. With that said, if you do not know what you are doing when it comes to investing, you could throw away a lot of money. This is the reason I mine Bitcoin, but that conversation is for another day!

Right now, everyone is eyeing the GameStop drama. Some of the electronic trading platforms halted transactions of buying and selling GameStop. This was more than likely due to the lack of transparency behind what was causing the stock to rise. , To understand the gravity of the situation, one must investigate the stock. So, we start by taking the stock ticker. It is the symbol for the company. Tickers can change if the company changes names or merges. Right about now, people are seeing this pop up when they type in GME!

Market Volatility

“In the interest of helping to mitigate risk, we have put restrictions in place on certain securities. Restrictions may include actions like increasing margin requirements or limiting certain types of transactions in the current market conditions. For the latest list of impacted stocks, visit tdameritrade.com/restricted.“

We are looking at GameStop the ticker, is GME it is selling at over 300 bucks per share. Now, this is the issue that prompted the sites to shut the sales down. First of all, you can check a stock’s history. I like reading about the history because it tells you what the stock has been doing for weeks, all the way up to years. So, GME was positioned at 96.80 per share five days ago. One month ago, it was 19.38 cents per share. Six months ago, it was 4.06 per share. So, let’s look at the news. If a stock has risen from $4.06 to $333.00 in six months, we would expect to see some earth-shattering news.

So, the next thing we look at is the news related to GameStop. In December, there was an article published by The Motley Fool. It went into explaining why GameStop would have to close 800 of their stores. This means the store will take in less revenue unless they can revamp their store to move their products to gamers. https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/12/17/why-is-gamestop-closing-stores-after-its-best-sale/

Right now, we have companies like Steam and Epic who are selling PC games, and companies like Epic have free giveaways weekly. Many of the games found at GameStop are being sold online with Xbox subscriptions and PlayStation subscriptions. These subs let players play as many games as they want for a set amount of money each month. So, players no longer have to go to stores to get their favorite games.

We haven’t purchased a game in a store for years. We use Steam and Epic when it comes to gaming. One of the reasons was because of the wear and tear of the disk. When it comes to GameStop and the future, look for similar reasons. People buy online because it is faster. They do not have to worry about scratches, and they never have to worry about putting the disk in. If you look at the future and how everything is geared towards right now and here, companies like GameStop will not last much longer. Especially, when the platforms that make these games are cutting out the middle man. This is the reason for the warning. If this stock goes down, there is a fear that people can do this to others in the future.

Don’t get me wrong, if you entered in this stock six months ago, you made some money over the last two days, but I would be very cautious about moving forward because it is a store on the brink unless they can turn into something like a Steam or Epic for Playstation or the other game systems.