I'm not a financial advisor, just a retard YOLO'ing my savings into long calls, so make your own decisions.
TLDR: Blackberry is the market leader in an industry that McKinsey projects will fucking 🚀🚀🚀 to $750BN by 2030. BlackBerry has already grown their annual revenue for 2020 by 15.04% from 2019, so stap in your tendies because BB are going to the fucking moon. https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/automotive%20and%20assembly/our%20insights/monetizing%20car%20data/monetizing-car-data.ashx
Other relevant DD:

• Market position analysis - https://new.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/l4ehan/blackberry_dd/
• BB Comprehensive guide - https://new.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/le53ol/comprehensive_guide_about_bb_and_how_it_shall/
• Amazon/BB partnership in the AV space - https://new.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/l5sno2/blackberry_bb_why_you_need_it/
• Other BB analysis - https://new.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/l0a1p5/the_full_dd_on_bb_an_elon_muskjeff_bezos_sandwich/

1) BB has nothing to do with smartphones. Throw those 2007 notions out of your mind and bring yourself to the future
2) Whilst the whole stock market has been pissing themselves for years over EV/AV industry speculation, the reality is that these are hardware companies with low margin, and limited scale potential.
Even Tesla, owned and run by the richest man in the world, has yet to build more than 500,000 cars in one year. Meanwhile Tesla competitors springing up everywhere with both new challengers such as NIO and old money fucks getting into EV such as VW and GM (GM in December 2020 announced 100% by 2030 all cars would be 100% EV).
THE REAL FUCKING MONEY is not in EV production which has low margin and low scale, but in data monetization which is high margin (and being software) has unlimited scale. In the same way that Google makes only $18Bn revenue from hardware sales (phone, nest sales etc) but makes $120Bn from data monetization, $BB is going to to the fucking moon with $200BN revenue + by 2030 with 10% net whilst Tesla and other big auto are fighting over 4% margins (Tesla net profit in 2020 = 4% whilst BB sat at a juicy 10.15%).
This industry is going to the fucking moon, and BB is the only one with a front row ticket 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀. This shit is like investing in Google or Amazon in the year 2000, by the time the mainstream saw the potential 5 years later, shit was already at pluto
u/just an everyday life couldn't have put it better: "Zombie cars and QNX
QNX is the first commercial microkernel RTOS. What the fuck does that even mean nerd? For anyone like me who's not a software genius, I've done some research so we all know what we're getting into. A Real Time Operating System is developed to focus processing power on two most important things: Speed and Accuracy. This is different from shit like Windows and Mac OS (General Purpose OS or GPOS) as they spread processing power throughout the system because there isn't exactly anything that's significantly more important than the others. However, when you're using a self-driving program you need the hardware to perform the action at the exact time and speed. Your self driving program brakes too late? Crash into the car ahead of you. Your self program turns the wheel too late or too soon? Crash into a wall.
Blackberry has been working on this technology since 2014. But car makers literally couldn't develop autonomous vehicles fast enough. So these guys have just been twiddling their fucking thumbs.
Fast forward to now, where the rise of Tesla has made everyone and their momma make a self driving EV. Everyone is trying to make their own autopilot program but not their own OS. So who's OS are they using?
SONY? Blackberry QNX. Baidu? QNX baby. XPENG? Blackberry as well. If you read the article, you'll see XPEV is using DESAY's autopilot program that's built on QNX. Know who else is using DESAY autopilot? Li Auto But what about Nio you might ask? Well on NIO day, it was announced that NIO will be using Nvidia DRIVE....which is also built on QNX. What about the Apple car? There's no confirmation yet, but rumors of them reaching out to both Canoo and Hyundai makes me skeptical that Apple has succeeded in creating their own RTOS even after rumors of them starting 7 years ago. But even if they did... it doesn't even matter.
You might have noticed that I didn't mention Tesla at all. That's because they have developed their own Linux-based Operating system, which Tesla has been having trouble getting it approved by US safety regulations. QNX on the other hand, already is. $BB to the fucking moon🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀"
3) BB is a cash flow positive, growing company with near nil competitors in an industry that is skyrocketing. Despite this, the boomer fucks who still believe BB is a smartphone company, have in their own glorious act of autism, have massively shorted BB bringing the share price down.
BB is a growth company in a growth industry, these hedge funds are going to need to borrow more money if they want to buy tendies after the wider market realizes the market inefficiency that is an undervalued BB. u/Tradergurue went into a lot of detail in his $BB short interest post here https://new.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/l8pg8x/short_interest_in_bb_its_increasing/
TLDR: hedge funds caught with their dicks in their hands are about to get Royally Fucked as the market corrects itself with a BB rise over the next month

So you bought $BB at $11 pre-market friday. Smart move my fellow degens 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 strap in, cause you're in for a ride to the moons of fucking pluto.
TL;DR Blackberry/AWS IVY will be in every single vehicle produced after 2022. EV or ICE, self-driving or boomer driving, it doesn't fucking matter. It 🚀 will 🚀 be 🚀 in 🚀 every 🚀 single 🚀 one 🚀 Oh, and Blackberry QNX Neutrinos RTOS is fun too.
Before you start reading, I'd suggest grabbing a snack and a drink. Cause I'm about to drop a fucking novel.
You've probably heard Blackberry QNX a few times around other DDs but you're wondering wtf is it and who the hell is even using it. QNX is an Real Time Operating System (more on this later) meant for vehicles, and it's been around for a really long time. Currently there are at least 175m cars running around with QNX. As for what cars those are, I'll keep it short: Apple Car Play was developed on QNX.
So why haven't we heard more about Blackberry in recent years since there's so many QNX cars around? 2 reasons. 1: Dumbasses like you thought it was a phone company. 2: QNX is so ahead of the fucking game that boomer auto manufacturers like Ford and Mercedes were too stupid to use it effectively. For the last few years it's just been used to turn on your car's radio. But things have changed now.
Zombie cars and QNX
QNX is the first commercial microkernel RTOS. What the fuck does that even mean nerd? For anyone like me who's not a software genius, I've done some research so we all know what we're getting into. A Real Time Operating System is developed to focus processing power on two most important things: Speed and Accuracy. This is different from shit like Windows and Mac OS (General Purpose OS or GPOS) as they spread processing power throughout the system because there isn't exactly anything that's significantly more important than the others. However, when you're using a self-driving program you need the hardware to perform the action at the exact time and speed. Your self driving program brakes too late? Crash into the car ahead of you. Your self program turns the wheel too late or too soon? Crash into a wall.
Blackberry has been working on this technology since 2014. But car makers literally couldn't develop autonomous vehicles fast enough. So these guys have just been twiddling their fucking thumbs.
Fast forward to now, where the rise of Tesla has made everyone and their momma make a self driving EV. Everyone is trying to make their own autopilot program but not their own OS. So who's OS are they using?
SONY? Blackberry QNX. Baidu? QNX baby. XPENG? Blackberry as well. If you read the article, you'll see XPEV is using DESAY's autopilot program that's built on QNX. Know who else is using DESAY autopilot? Li Auto But what about Nio you might ask? Well on NIO day, it was announced that NIO will be using Nvidia DRIVE....which is also built on QNX. What about the Apple car? There's no confirmation yet, but rumors of them reaching out to both Canoo and Hyundai makes me skeptical that Apple has succeeded in creating their own RTOS even after rumors of them starting 7 years ago. But even if they did... it doesn't even matter.
You might have noticed that I didn't mention Tesla at all. That's because they have developed their own Linux-based Operating system, which Tesla has been having trouble getting it approved by US safety regulations. QNX on the other hand, already is. $BB to the fucking moon🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀
Linux is also an open source OS and this becomes a huge problem when we talk about zombie cars.
That's right. Motherfucking zombie cars. You know that scene in "Fate of the Furious" where Charlize Theron straight up just hacks all the cars in the city and starts slamming them into buildings? Yea, this is a legitimate fear of the U.S. government and Linux is not going to pass any safety regulations. And you better believe after SolarWind and FireEye hacks, Cybersecurity is the hottest topic right now when it comes to national security. You better believe the U.S. Government won't just allow open source OS flowing around millions of autonomous driving cars that can be hijacked at any time of day.
You know who does have MULTIPLE government certifications already though? Blackberry bb. I won't get it, but you can read u/josh_moworld's post right here to get a better idea Blackberry's history with the U.S. government and security.
The best part about it all is, Blackberry designed QNX to be 100% POSIX compliant. In dumbass terms it basically means any LINUX based program can be ported over easily. Come join the dark side, Elon.
Now that you're pretty much caught up to speed on QNX, let's move over to IVY and why I believe IVY will be Blackberry's return to the throne 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀
Blackberry x AWS IVY
IVY is a co-development between Blackberry and Amazon and it is a 50/50 partnership. That's right; Jeff Bezos, the second richest man in the world and king of predatory business practices chose to partner with a company that has a $5.5b market cap. All hail, John Chen 👑👑👑
So what is IVY? Basically IVY cloud-based software that OEMs can install into their QNX vehicles (or any OS) and read sensor data from the vehicle's DCUs (domain controller units). These are basically sensors that give you data such as: times that you unlocked and locked your car, your car's wheel speed sensors, wiper arm sensors, tire pressure etc. In a Tesla, which is loaded with sensors, you will also see: sentry mode data, when an small object hits your car while parked, how hard you step on the accelerator, how hard you brake etc.
IVY basically captures this data and in real time sends it to OEMs for them to analyze. Cars are going to be fitted with more and more sensors (regardless of if they have autonomous systems or not) and the data that IVY provides is very helpful. This allows OEMs to see their customer's car preferences or driving styles and can further develop their future vehicles to match customer's interests. Also, since the data is transferred in REAL TIME, things like horrible weather conditions, traffic updates, and icy roads can be communicated to all vehicles within the OEM network so that people can be notified ahead of time.
But you know which industry would love this? Insurance companies. OEMs can gather all the safety data that IVY delivers and actually PROVE to insurance companies that their cars are safer. You know how Tesla had to come up with their own auto insurance? That was because Insurance companies were charging crazy high rates for Tesla's that had auto pilot. They didn't know exactly how to rate the risk, or who would take the blame. With Blackberry IVY, OEMs and insurance companies can partner together and have reliable data to work off of.
Best part of it all, IVY is extremely scalable and is a subscription based service. There isn't an exact price announced yet, but you know if Jeff Bezos is involved then there will definitely be a lot of profits flowing in from IVY.
For me, I'm long-term on $BB with some options to take advantage of the recent hype. I plan on holding shares until I see an actual competitor to QNX and IVY... which I've looked all over the internet and I can't find any. And honestly, Blackberry's security suite has so much to offer this isn't even the complete DD. I've just been typing for too long and figured it was a good time to stop. Maybe I will write another post in the future.

How the Hunt Brothers Cornered the Silver Market and Then Lost it All

TL:DR: yes its long. Grab a beer.

​
Until his dying day in 2014, Nelson Bunker Hunt, who had once been the world’s wealthiest man, denied that he and his brother plotted to corner the global silver market.
Sure, back in 1980, Bunker, his younger brother Herbert, and other members of the Hunt clan owned roughly two-thirds of all the privately held silver on earth. But the historic stockpiling of bullion hadn’t been a ploy to manipulate the market, they and their sizable legal team would insist in the following years. Instead, it was a strategy to hedge against the voracious inflation of the 1970s—a monumental bet against the U.S. dollar.
Whatever the motive, it was a bet that went historically sour. The debt-fueled boom and bust of the global silver market not only decimated the Hunt fortune, but threatened to take down the U.S. financial system.
The panic of “Silver Thursday” took place over 35 years ago, but it still raises questions about the nature of financial manipulation. While many view the Hunt brothers as members of a long succession of white collar crooks, from Charles Ponzi to Bernie Madoff, others see the endearingly eccentric Texans as the victims of overstepping regulators and vindictive insiders who couldn’t stand the thought of being played by a couple of southern yokels.
In either case, the story of the Hunt brothers just goes to show how difficult it can be to distinguish illegal market manipulation from the old fashioned wheeling and dealing that make our markets work.
The Real-Life Ewings
Whatever their foibles, the Hunts make for an interesting cast of characters. Evidently CBS thought so; the family is rumored to be the basis for the Ewings, the fictional Texas oil dynasty of Dallas fame.
Sitting at the top of the family tree was H.L. Hunt, a man who allegedly purchased his first oil field with poker winnings and made a fortune drilling in east Texas. H.L. was a well-known oddball to boot, and his sons inherited many of their father’s quirks.
For one, there was the stinginess. Despite being the richest man on earth in the 1960s, Bunker Hunt (who went by his middle name), along with his younger brothers Herbert (first name William) and Lamar, cultivated an image as unpretentious good old boys. They drove old Cadillacs, flew coach, and when they eventually went to trial in New York City in 1988, they took the subway. As one Texas editor was quoted in the New York Times, Bunker Hunt was “the kind of guy who orders chicken-fried steak and Jello-O, spills some on his tie, and then goes out and buys all the silver in the world.”
Cheap suits aside, the Hunts were not without their ostentation. At the end of the 1970s, Bunker boasted a stable of over 500 horses and his little brother Lamar owned the Kansas City Chiefs. All six children of H.L.’s first marriage (the patriarch of the Hunt family had fifteen children by three women before he died in 1974) lived on estates befitting the scions of a Texas billionaire. These lifestyles were financed by trusts, but also risky investments in oil, real estate, and a host of commodities including sugar beets, soybeans, and, before long, silver.
The Hunt brothers also inherited their father’s political inclinations. A zealous anti-Communist, Bunker Hunt bankrolled conservative causes and was a prominent member of the John Birch Society, a group whose founder once speculated that Dwight Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent” of Soviet conspiracy. In November of 1963, Hunt sponsored a particularly ill-timed political campaign, which distributed pamphlets around Dallas condemning President Kennedy for alleged slights against the Constitution on the day that he was assassinated. JFK conspiracy theorists have been obsessed with Hunt ever since.
In fact, it was the Hunt brand of politics that partially explains what led Bunker and Herbert to start buying silver in 1973.
Hard Money
The 1970s were not kind to the U.S. dollar.
Years of wartime spending and unresponsive monetary policy pushed inflation upward throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. Then, in October of 1973, war broke out in the Middle East and an oil embargo was declared against the United States. Inflation jumped above 10%. It would stay high throughout the decade, peaking in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution at an annual average of 13.5% in 1980.
Over the same period of time, the global monetary system underwent a historic transformation. Since the first Roosevelt administration, the U.S. dollar had been pegged to the value of gold at a predictable rate of $35 per ounce. But in 1971, President Nixon, responding to inflationary pressures, suspended that relationship. For the first time in modern history, the paper dollar did not represent some fixed amount of tangible, precious metal sitting in a vault somewhere.
For conservative commodity traders like the Hunts, who blamed government spending for inflation and held grave reservations about the viability of fiat currency, the perceived stability of precious metal offered a financial safe harbor. It was illegal to trade gold in the early 1970s, so the Hunts turned to the next best thing.
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Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; chart by Priceonomics

As an investment, there was a lot to like about silver. The Hunts were not alone in fleeing to bullion amid all the inflation and geopolitical turbulence, so the price was ticking up. Plus, light-sensitive silver halide is a key component of photographic film. With the growth of the consumer photography market, new production from mines struggled to keep up with demand.
And so, in 1973, Bunker and Herbert bought over 35 million ounces of silver, most of which they flew to Switzerland in specifically designed airplanes guarded by armed Texas ranch hands. According to one source, the Hunt’s purchases were big enough to move the global market.
But silver was not the Hunts' only speculative venture in the 1970s. Nor was it the only one that got them into trouble with regulators.
Soy Before Silver
In 1977, the price of soybeans was rising fast. Trade restrictions on Brazil and growing demand from China made the legume a hot commodity, and both Bunker and Herbert decided to enter the futures market in April of that year.
A future is an agreement to buy or sell some quantity of a commodity at an agreed upon price at a later date. If someone contracts to buy soybeans in the future (they are said to take the “long” position), they will benefit if the price of soybeans rise, since they have locked in the lower price ahead of time. Likewise, if someone contracts to sell (that’s called the “short” position), they benefit if the price falls, since they have locked in the old, higher price.
While futures contracts can be used by soybean farmers and soy milk producers to guard against price swings, most futures are traded by people who wouldn’t necessarily know tofu from cream cheese. As a de facto insurance contract against market volatility, futures can be used to hedge other investments or simply to gamble on prices going up (by going long) or down (by going short).
When the Hunts decided to go long in the soybean futures market, they went very, very long. Between Bunker, Herbert, and the accounts of five of their children, the Hunts collectively purchased the right to buy one-third of the entire autumn soybean harvest of the United States.
To some, it appeared as if the Hunts were attempting to corner the soybean market.
In its simplest version, a corner occurs when someone buys up all (or at least, most) of the available quantity of a commodity. This creates an artificial shortage, which drives up the price, and allows the market manipulator to sell some of his stockpile at a higher profit.
Futures markets introduce some additional complexity to the cornerer’s scheme. Recall that when a trader takes a short position on a contract, he or she is pledging to sell a certain amount of product to the holder of the long position. But if the holder of the long position just so happens to be sitting on all the readily available supply of the commodity under contract, the short seller faces an unenviable choice: go scrounge up some of the very scarce product in order to “make delivery” or just pay the cornerer a hefty premium and nullify the deal entirely.
In this case, the cornerer is actually counting on the shorts to do the latter, says Craig Pirrong, professor of finance at the University of Houston. If too many short sellers find that it actually costs less to deliver the product, the market manipulator will be stuck with warehouses full of inventory. Finance experts refer to selling the all the excess supply after building a corner as “burying the corpse.”
“That is when the price collapses,” explains Pirrong. “But if the number of deliveries isn’t too high, the loss from selling at the low price after the corner is smaller than the profit from selling contracts at the high price.”
📷

The Chicago Board of Trade trading floor. Photo credit: Jeremy Kemp

Even so, when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission found that a single family from Texas had contracted to buy a sizable portion of the 1977 soybean crop, they did not accuse the Hunts of outright market manipulation. Instead, noting that the Hunts had exceeded the 3 million bushel aggregate limit on soybean holdings by about 20 million, the CFTC noted that the Hunt’s “excessive holdings threaten disruption of the market and could cause serious injury to the American public.” The CFTC ordered the Hunts to sell and to pay a penalty of $500,000.
Though the Hunts made tens of millions of dollars on paper while soybean prices skyrocketed, it’s unclear whether they were able to cash out before the regulatory intervention. In any case, the Hunts were none too pleased with the decision.
“Apparently the CFTC is trying to repeal the law of supply and demand,” Bunker complained to the press.
Silver Thursday
Despite the run in with regulators, the Hunts were not dissuaded. Bunker and Herbert had eased up on silver after their initial big buy in 1973, but in the fall of 1979, they were back with a vengeance. By the end of the year, Bunker and Herbert owned 21 million ounces of physical silver each. They had even larger positions in the silver futures market: Bunker was long on 45 million ounces, while Herbert held contracts for 20 million. Their little brother Lamar also had a more “modest” position.
By the new year, with every dollar increase in the price of silver, the Hunts were making $100 million on paper. But unlike most investors, when their profitable futures contracts expired, they took delivery. As in 1973, they arranged to have the metal flown to Switzerland. Intentional or not, this helped create a shortage of the metal for industrial supply.
Naturally, the industrialists were unhappy. From a spot price of around $6 per ounce in early 1979, the price of silver shot up to $50.42 in January of 1980. In the same week, silver futures contracts were trading at $46.80. Film companies like Kodak saw costs go through the roof, while the British film producer, Ilford, was forced to lay off workers. Traditional bullion dealers, caught in a squeeze, cried foul to the commodity exchanges, and the New York jewelry house Tiffany & Co. took out a full page ad in the New York Times slamming the “unconscionable” Hunt brothers. They were right to single out the Hunts; in mid-January, they controlled 69% of all the silver futures contracts on the Commodity Exchange (COMEX) in New York.
📷

Source: New York Times

But as the high prices persisted, new silver began to come out of the woodwork.
“In the U.S., people rifled their dresser drawers and sofa cushions to find dimes and quarters with silver content and had them melted down,” says Pirrong, from the University of Houston. “Silver is a classic part of a bride’s trousseau in India, and when prices got high, women sold silver out of their trousseaus.”
According to a Washington Post article published that March, the D.C. police warned residents of a rash of home burglaries targeting silver.
Unfortunately for the Hunts, all this new supply had a predictable effect. Rather than close out their contracts, short sellers suddenly found it was easier to get their hands on new supplies of silver and deliver.
“The main factor that has caused corners to fail [throughout history] is that the manipulator has underestimated how much will be delivered to him if he succeeds [at] raising the price to artificial levels,” says Pirrong. “Eventually, the Hunts ran out of money to pay for all the silver that was thrown at them.”
In financial terms, the brothers had a large corpse on their hands—and no way to bury it.
This proved to be an especially big problem, because it wasn’t just the Hunt fortune that was on the line. Of the $6.6 billion worth of silver the Hunts held at the top of the market, the brothers had “only” spent a little over $1 billion of their own money. The rest was borrowed from over 20 banks and brokerage houses.
At the same time, COMEX decided to crack down. On January 7, 1980, the exchange’s board of governors announced that it would cap the size of silver futures exposure to 3 million ounces. Those in excess of the cap (say, by the tens of millions) were given until the following month to bring themselves into compliance. But that was too long for the Chicago Board of Trade exchange, which suspended the issue of any new silver futures on January 21. Silver futures traders would only be allowed to square up old contracts.
Predictably, silver prices began to slide. As the various banks and other firms that had backed the Hunt bullion binge began to recognize the tenuousness of their financial position, they issued margin calls, asking the brothers to put up more money as collateral for their debts. The Hunts, unable to sell silver lest they trigger a panic, borrowed even more. By early March, futures contracts had fallen to the mid-$30 range.
Matters finally came to a head on March 25, when one of the Hunts’ largest backers, the Bache Group, asked for $100 million more in collateral. The brothers were out of cash, and Bache was unwilling to accept silver in its place, as it had been doing throughout the month. With the Hunts in default, Bache did the only thing it could to start recouping its losses: it start to unload silver.
On March 27, “Silver Thursday,” the silver futures market dropped by a third to $10.80. Just two months earlier, these contracts had been trading at four times that amount.
The Aftermath
After the oil bust of the early 1980s and a series of lawsuits polished off the remainder of the Hunt brothers’ once historic fortune, the two declared bankruptcy in 1988. Bunker, who had been worth an estimated $16 billion in the 1960s, emerged with under $10 million to his name. That’s not exactly chump change, but it wasn’t enough to maintain his 500-plus stable of horses,.
The Hunts almost dragged their lenders into bankruptcy too—and with them, a sizable chunk of the U.S. financial system. Over twenty financial institutions had extended over a billion dollars in credit to the Hunt brothers. The default and resulting collapse of silver prices blew holes in balance sheets across Wall Street. A privately orchestrated bailout loan from a number of banks allowed the brothers to start paying off their debts and keep their creditors afloat, but the markets and regulators were rattled.
Silver Spot Prices Per Ounce (January, 1979 - June, 1980)
📷

Source: Trading Economics

In the words of then CFTC chief James Stone, the Hunts’ antics had threatened to punch a hole in the “financial fabric of the United States” like nothing had in decades. Writing about the entire episode a year later, Harper’s Magazine described Silver Thursday as “the first great panic since October 1929.”
The trouble was not over for the Hunts. In the following years, the brothers were dragged before Congressional hearings, got into a legal spat with their lenders, and were sued by a Peruvian mineral marketing company, which had suffered big losses in the crash. In 1988, a New York City jury found for the South American firm, levying a penalty of over $130 million against the Hunts and finding that they had deliberately conspired to corner the silver market.
Surprisingly, there is still some disagreement on that point.
Bunker Hunt attributed the whole affair to the political motives of COMEX insiders and regulators. Referring to himself later as “a favorite whipping boy” of an eastern financial establishment riddled with liberals and socialists, Bunker and his brother, Herbert, are still perceived as martyrs by some on the far-right.
“Political and financial insiders repeatedly changed the rules of the game,” wrote the New American. “There is little evidence to support the ‘corner the market’ narrative.”
Though the Hunt brothers clearly amassed a staggering amount of silver and silver derivatives at the end of the 1970s, it is impossible to prove definitively that market manipulation was in their hearts. Maybe, as the Hunts always claimed, they just really believed in the enduring value of silver.
Or maybe, as others have noted, the Hunt brothers had no idea what they were doing. Call it the stupidity defense.
“They’re terribly unsophisticated,” an anonymous associated was quoted as saying of the Hunts in a Chicago Tribune article from 1989. “They make all the mistakes most other people make,” said another.
p.s. credit to Ben Christopher
​

Fellow retards,
I noticed that this sub is going to hit 2 million people soon, and I have decided to put aside my project assignments to write this DD (albeit more towards psychologically) on why luck is extremely important in the stock market, and what you can do to potentially get in favor of luck. Before I start, I want to congratulate you on being here. You have came a long way in life, and there’s more to come. Be happy.
TLDR at the last paragraph.
I want to talk mainly 3 things; luck, the psychology behind investing and what you should do to maximize profits.
Luck
In the book 'The Drunkard's Walk', under chapter of 'Illusions of Patterns and Patterns of Illusion', and I quote: "In 1978, Koppett revealed a system that he claimed could determine, by the end of January every year, whether the stock market would go up or down in that calendar year. His system had correctly predicted the market, he said, for the past eleven years. Of course, stock-picking systems are easy to identify in hindsight; the true test is whether they will work in the future. Koppett's system passed that test too: judging the market by the Dow Jones Industrial Average, it worked for eleven straight years, from 1979 through 1989, got it wrong in 1990, and was correct again every year until 1998. But although Koppett's predictions were correct for a streak of eighteen out of nineteen years, I feel confident in asserting that his streak involved no skill whatsoever. Why? Because Leonard Koppett was a columnist for Sporting News, and his system was based on the results of the Super Bowl, the championship game of professional football. Whenever the team from the (original) National Football league won, the stock market, he predicted, would rise."
In the book 'Fooled by Randomness', the Prologue mentioned "...luck disguised and perceived as nonluck (that is, skills) and, more generally, randomness disguised and perceived as non-randomness (that is, determinism). "
In the book ‘The Black Swan’ by Taleb Nassim Nicholas, Page 119 mentioned " A successful person will try to convince you that his achievements could not possibly be accidental, just as a gambler who wins at roulette seven times in a row will explain to you that the odds against such a streak are one in several million, so you either have to believe some transcendental intervention is in play or accept his skills and insight in picking the winning numbers." More often than not, luck is rarely on your side. I can provide many other articles, but I believe you get the point. To emphasize it, "the habit of mistaking luck for skill is most prevalent - and most conspicuous - and that is the world of markets."
So why am I saying all these? What I am trying to imply is, do appreciate your GME gains, or whatever astronomical gains that you have. These gains, more often than not, are results of extremely lucky happenstances, where most people are incapable of harnessing them. Yes, there are tons of good DDs. But you yourselves are incredibly lucky to be part of WSB, and personally reading the DDs yourselves, and lucky enough to decide that you would be retarded enough to take the risk. You should be happy and grateful about it, because like I said, this is hugely, and heavily dependent on luck. Humans are flawed, because we have the tendency to look for specific causes that lead to effects. We often find it hard to accept that an event can be the result of total randomness, but sometimes it is. In financial forecasting, several times random volatility is mistaken for accurate prediction. In a group of many analysts, it is normal to expect that someone's predictions will turn out to be true (u/DeepFuckingValue). So, in case you get way too ahead of yourselves thinking you are absolutely a genius for having triple percentage gains in your portfolio, remember you're most likely just lucky. And since you're lucky, be appreciative and do not be complacent.
Psychology behind Investing
Several studies have fooled people into believing they are in control of something they actually have no control over. In fact, human decision-making shows systematic simplifications and deviations from the tenets of rationality (‘heuristics’) that may lead to suboptimal decisional outcomes (‘cognitive biases’). There are currently three prevailing theoretical perspectives on the origin of heuristics and cognitive biases: a cognitive-psychological, an ecological and an evolutionary perspective. To simplify that, it basically means that cognitive biases arise from intrinsic brain mechanisms that are fundamental for the working of our neural networks. Your mind is always on the cautious side of things, because it is trying to protect you.
Remember a time when you were very near the edge of a building/cliff, and all of a sudden you feel hypersensitive to the surrounding around you? You are aware of every rocks and stones that might sabotage you. Another example can be that you shiver when peeing, because your body is exaggerating the signal that you are rapidly losing body heat, and is trying to shiver up the muscle fiber to keep you warm, etc. You get the idea.
This unfortunately, applies in investing as well. Your mind will inevitably forces you to be on the safer side. A dip? Oh no... you panic. But relax, that is normal. In my last point, I will explain what you can do to overcome it.
What you can do to stay calm?
So now you know that it is in human nature to be a paper handed bitch. The first step is realizing that your own neural networks are playing a huge part in giving you a paper hand. When you realized that it is your own mind that is keeping you on the safer side, perhaps you can be more self-aware. Being impatient in the market is the worst mistake that you would commit while investing in the stocks. You have to know that if you do not have good patience in the market then you would find difficulty in getting the right stocks for your investment. You have to finally take your own decisions when you wish to select the stocks. Remember however, you do have to be lucky to hit the jackpot on certain investments as per my first point.
Confirmation bias is also a bitch. As philosopher Francis Bacon put it in 1620, "the human understanding, once it has adopted an opinion, collects any instances that confirm it, and though the contrary instances may be more numerous and more weighty, it either does not notice them or else rejects them, in order that this opinion will remain unshaken." This happens very often in WSB, and I want you to be cautious as well. To show you how easy confirmation bias is, imagine I have 5 numbers here. After presenting you these numbers, I want you to guess what is the rule of the game. Here are the 5 numbers: 4 6 8 10 12. What will your next 3 numbers be? What is the rule of the game? The rule is: Increasing Numbers, the next 3 numbers can be 13 14 15 Most of you might have guessed "increasing even numbers and provided with 14 16 18, when in fact it is not.
Luck does not solely come from deciding whether to listen to another retard's DD on a thread, and YOLO-ing your life savings onto some stocks. It also comes in the form of your birth status, etc. Having a $100,000 head start in the stock market, is almost always better than someone having $1000 as a starting capital (or worse still, negative capital simply because your parents are poor, that's unlucky).
That being said, I believe all of us here are in some way privileged to be gathered here and discussing individually. The poor kids in some countries have to fight for clean water and food. So the next time you realized that you are earning money in the stock market, remember, it is incredibly hard to do it, and you should be proud of yourselves. And in the scenario where you lose your money, well, you shouldn't be surprised either way. You are bound to be losing.
Here are some books you can refer to if you're interested: The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow (How Randomness Rules Our Lives), Fooled by Randomness by Taleb N, The Black Swan by Taleb N, Who’s in Charge? by Michael S. Gazzaniga (on Free will and the science of the brain), Success and Luck by Robert H. Frank, The Most Good You Can Do (How effective altruism is changing ideas about living ethically) by Peter Singer.
Clarification: Some people mentioned if this post was directed to "diminish the contributions of skill and the hard effort of anyone". Absolutely not. This post is assuming that in the top few % (if you're reading this, yourself included), everyone is just as talented. But to be part of that 1% in that 1%, to be the richest among the richest, you have to be incredibly lucky.
TLDR: If you make huge gains, go and give some of it to other people that may not have been so lucky. Go and give it to the homeless people at the unemployment line, who ain't so lucky as you. Maybe buy him food. Get him clothes. Donate to your local charities. Most importantly, give it back to your parents, because your parents are the one who, most likely, set you up in this direction, and you are lucky enough to be here today. If you did not make any gains, remember, it is perfectly okay.
Shorter TLDR: Be happy, be grateful.
🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀

RoyalRoad
Index
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Zakabara Prime-Second Border
One of the key principles to survival in space as a human military ship was to remain undetected.
Unfortunately for Commandant Laurent, one of the key principles for deterrence is that you have to let the other side know that you're still there. Once in a while. Just to make sure they don't try anything too stupid.
Today, their target of intimidation was a lightly armed Zakabaran destroyer stationed right at the established midpoint line between Prime and Second. The goal is to paint them as a target on radar, get close, say hi to their radio operator to let them know they were still there, and then get back into stealth as fast as possible.
"We're coming up behind him, two hundred klicks," said Martin, her experienced pilot, "should we announce ourselves?"
Laurent took a deep breath, then nodded, "attention, crew: battle stations!"
There were only four other people in her highly automated destroyer, but it was still a good habit to remain disciplined and official in battle.
She felt her ears pop and the unpleasant telltale signs of decompression as they drained the atmosphere out of the crew compartment into compressed reserves.
The ship became much quieter, eclipsed by the sound of her breathing. Then, the acceleration kicked in as the ship fired the main thrusters to make itself a more difficult target in case they were shot at.
"Switching on active radar."
"We've detected a ship on radar!" shouted the nervous pilot of a Zakabaran Prime ship.
"It must be the human invaders! Where are they? Find out where they are!"
He scanned around on the radar screen, but he didn't see any ships, until…
"HOSTILE SHIP TO OUR REAR! Turn and face it!" the commander ordered.
"I have it in our sights, commander!"
"What are you waiting for?! Shoot them!"
"VAMPIRE! VAMPIRE! VAMPIRE!" shouted Martin, "missile launch detected from target ship! One hundred fifty klicks! Thirty-two seconds to intercept! Defending!"
Laurent felt the ship shift vector and her blood chill. She had only faced this situation in simulators and practice before. It's one thing to chase down pirates from out of their range, and something else entirely to have a target that could shoot back. Then, reverting to the calm of her training, she queried, "can we go dark?"
"Negative. We're getting painted by active radar," Martin replied, looking at his instruments, "and we don't have anything to hide behind them. Recommend we launch active kill countermeasures and maneuver between them and Second."
"Do it. Launch all four."
At her command, four small, agile missiles dropped away from the maneuvering ship, raced towards the incoming triangle on the tactical map for a precious ten seconds, and then…
"Splash! The first one got it," Martin breathed a sigh of relief.
Then, after a second, as he put the background radiation of Second behind them, "we've gone dark. I'm detonating the remaining countermeasures to prevent capture. Should we lock them with Fox Threes?"
"No. They were probably just spooked," Laurent replied as she recalled the specifics from her orders, "let's avoid an interstellar war today if we can."
"Understood."
"Hm, those missiles," Martin said after a while, "so they can do that now."
A team of engineers on Zakabara Prime looked intently at the slow motion telescopic silent footage of the human ship firing four missiles, one of which appeared to successfully engage and destroy the outgoing friendly missile.
"Hm, those missiles," the lead engineer said after a while, "so they can do that now."
Olgix
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in the 1990s, McDonald's opened a franchise at the heart of the West's former foe. They planted the symbol of capitalism about one mile from Red Square in Moscow. Lines stretched around the block for months.
Some highly optimistic political commentators started to believe in a rosy view of the future of human conflict. They proposed a tongue-in-cheek observation they called the McDonald's Theory of Peace: no two countries with McDonald's had nor will they ever fight a war against each other.
The theory explains that McDonald's only enters and succeeds in markets where countries are stable and a large middle class is present. These countries tended not to fight against each other.
Several counterexamples have been given. One prominent one is the rocky relationship between Pakistan and India, both of which had franchises of the fast food chain in their countries during numerous border skirmishes and limited wars.
In any case, at least one thing McDonald's has never been known to do on Earth was to start a conflict.
City of Lights Spaceport, Olgix
The newly constructed concrete and steel building at the outskirts of the spaceport was the first of its kind, a monument to the fusion of human engineering and Olg laborers.
Olgix had been sending its skilled laborers to Earth for a few years now. Some of those worked in construction in humanity's many new projects during the economic boom, and they were trained to work with human materials, logistics, and project management. When some of them returned to their homeworld, the central Olg government lavished them with credits and put them to work on new construction projects that tested their newly acquired skills.
It not only had the basic utilities that the first offworld fast food restaurant on Gakrek did, it even boasted several new features. Central heating and cooling, fireproof insulation, and even several large windows that featured prominently in modern human architecture.
It was a thing of beauty, and for Olgs, a point of pride. It represented the alien ideal that one day, they too might be able to develop their economies to resemble Earth's prosperity.
Not to be outdone, the Gak refugee community nearby contracted a similar construction project. After all, they were the descendants of some of the richest and most skilled craftsbeings that were sent from Gakrek millennia ago. They solicited donations from their homeworld. Gaks, eager to impress the galaxy, sent money and expertise via their new traders.
Their construction site was nearing completion when McDonald's came surveying sites for its first Olgix expansion.
This competition for franchise sites led to some ugly fights and debate in the Olgix political sphere. Ethnic resentments that had been buried by the humans years ago were resurfacing.
Today, it was another Gak protest in front of the Olg spaceport building. It started out peacefully. Then, some Gaks started throwing rotten fruit and tree branches at the government soldiers guarding it. Luckily for everyone involved, they decided to request help instead of taking matters into their own hands.
The humans were called in. The Olgs requested a riot control squad from Constellar. Reese and his team responded.
"This has been declared an illegal gathering," Reese yelled into the bullhorn, "please calmly return to your homes. We do not wish to use force."
The crowd groused and shouted insults, but ultimately, they complied. The humans' weapons and big armored vehicles were scary, sure, but the human faces were what really convinced them to calm down. After all, everyone knew the humans were the good guys, even if they were protecting the Olgs here.
The mob left.
Then, a small band of Gaks returned two nights later, and smashed every window of the new building.
"My human friends, we can't let the sneaky Gaks get away with this!" Reeptar begged. She was the local administrator of the spaceport, which made her the local representative of the Olgix government.
Reese couldn't help but feel sympathy for her. The windows would be costly to replace. And it was so hard to say no to her, when she was giving him the puppy wolf eyes. But he said, "Reeptar, we've been over this. We will do our best to look for the culprits and bring them to justice, but we're not gonna just go and help you get some revenge on innocent random Gaks that probably don't have anything to do with this!"
"How much would it cost to get you to change your mind?" she asked.
Even before the introduction of credits, bribery was a common theme on Olgix. Here Reeptar was hoping that the only reason Reese and his team hadn't gone out to shoot up a Gak school was she hadn't offered them enough credits.
"No, that's not it," Reese put on a kind, patient smile, "think about it, Reeptar. If we go and destroy something of theirs, they'll come back tomorrow and do it right back to you. What if they come back with one of their bombs?"
"They won't!" she declared, "because then we'll just kill more of them."
Reese tried his hardest not to roll his eyes. "That hasn't stopped them in the past, and you know it. It's not worth it to take that risk, is it?"
She whined, and she pleaded. In the end, her irrational love for her precious building trumped her irrational hatred of the Gaks. He managed to extract a promise from her not to do anything stupid.
XBC Studios, Earth
"Welcome to Good Morning Galaxy. We have several good programs for you today, my fellow aliens," Zurim read on the teleprompter, "and our first guest today is one teddy bear from Gakrek. The famous Gubarak, Ambassador for the Gaks at the Galactic Union for four years! Everyone, give a hearty welcome to Gubarak!"
"Thank you for coming on. How are you doing this morning, Ambassador?" Zurim asked.
"Oh, good. So good. I had some sushi right before I came here, and I'm still feeling its buoying effects," he replied earnestly.
The studio audience gave that a little chuckle. Gaks on Earth eating sushi for breakfast was a common meme.
"Sushi for breakfast?" Zurim mocked outrage as he completed the joke, "now I wish I'd gone into government service instead of broadcasting."
Cue some more laughter. The audience knew that Zurim was one of the richest Zeepils in the galaxy. He could get sushi any time.
"Speaking of food, ambassador," Zurim turned serious, "how is the harvest on Gakrek looking this year?"
"Amazing," Gubarak got down to business. This was his bread and butter. "Gakrek's agricultural industry continues to industrialize, and we expect our food production to grow to forty times its size as it had when we first met humanity."
"Wow, really! Forty times?! That's fantastic news, really fantastic."
Gubarak's entire job here was to advertise his planet as an attractive destination for investors, so he got to it. "And our service industry is growing. Our spaceport at Gophor? It recently opened its third business! A noodle shop this time. I highly recommend it if you ever visit!"
"Gophor, eh?" Zurim asked, "is that the one with the first McDonald's-"
"The very one," Gubarak beamed. Time to drop some names. "I visited Ms. Rey Crawley when all these shops opened, and she said she expected dozens of similar restaurants to pop up in Gophor within two years!"
"Wow. Speaking of McDonald's, what do you think about this little expansion they got going on Olgix?"
"Our community on Olgix is filled with skilled and talented workers," Gubarak replied, looking straight into the TV camera, "and we expect that we will have no problems getting McDonald's to pick our location as a first franchise instead of the spaceport, which we all know is in a rather unstable location. Last I heard, a band of criminals stormed their building at night and broke all their windows. If they can't even take care of their own security…"
City of Lights Spaceport, Olgix
"And so you had your soldiers sneak in and destroy their interior scaffolding?!" Reese asked as if he couldn't believe she'd done this. The problem was, he had no problems actually believing it. She was as vindictive as she was deceitful.
In this case though, she didn't even bother lying.
"Yup. It wasn't that hard. There wasn't anyone at the Gak community center because they all went home for the weekend," Reeptar replied gleefully. "My pack just cut them down with a saw they left lying around. Just as a little warning to them."
"Now you're gonna need to beef up security at your own restaurant, and it's a never-ending escalation that'll cost you more money! I thought we went over this!" Reese felt like punting her through the door.
"That was before their ambassador went on Zurim to insult our building," she replied smugly, "and look who has security issues now!"
"Okay, we're going to fix this," Reese calmed down and decided, "you're going to go to the Gaks and apologize. Say you made a mistake. And then pay to fix their scaffolding."
"What? No!" Reeptar was appalled. Why were humans always so annoying? It was just some cheap wooden platform. "That defeats the point of destroying them in the first place."
Sensing no way to reason her out of it, he went for threats. "Reeptar, you're going to do as I say, or I'm going to call Constellar headquarters and recommend that we pull out of here. And then maybe we go over to the Gaks and ask them whether they need some security services."
"You can't do that! We have a contract!" she almost started crying. The idea of her limited number of soldiers facing down the inevitable mob of local Gaks that would come at her if Reese and his men left was honestly frightening to her.
"Our contract specifically states that you have to do as we ask in terms of security concerns. This is one of those. Now, go be a good neighbor and offer to fix what you broke."
Reeptar reluctantly did as Reese asked. She went over, apologized to the manager of the Gak community center, and offered to pay expenses for replacing the scaffolding they destroyed.
It was humiliating, but at least the Gak didn't rub it in. He graciously accepted the offer for a few credits to fix the damage, and promised they would do their best to help find the criminals that destroyed the Olgs' windows. He didn't want war either.
Gakrek's Avengers Underground Meeting
"They paid for the damages," Gripon reported, "and apologized for it. It sounded sincere to me."
They were meeting at an abandoned warehouse right next to the community center and the new construction building that was shaping up nicely.
Grouchik was not convinced. Many in her family back on Gakrek had died during the famine, and she blamed the Olgs. "They shouldn't have done it in the first place. And Reeptar only did it because that human made her do it."
"That's a good thing," Gripon moderated, "it means they can learn. The humans are having a good influence on them."
"Whatever. We're not stopping what we're doing," Grouchik insisted, "they can't be allowed to get the bid for the franchise. We should really be striking at the spaceport authorities to show that their building isn't safe."
"Don't go out and do anything stupid, Grouchik," he cautioned. "Windows are one thing, but we don't want to be responsible for breaking the truce."
Yeah, yeah, she thought, you only care about your precious peace and your silly building.
Grouchik was sane enough to know that very few creatures wanted war, despite the undercurrent of resentment for each other. With that human leader next to the Olg teaching her how to manage the situation, Grouchik would never get the revenge she wanted.
He must go.
City of Lights Spaceport, Olgix
"Wow, this is all very impressive," Isabella complimented. She was telling the truth too. This was the first offworld chain she'd seen using all the modern building techniques that Earth restaurants took for granted.
"Thank you," Reeptar grinned, "our people are very proud of this construction. You'll have no problems finding new customers among them!"
"I'm sure," Isabella said. Then she glanced over at the workers mounting new glass windows onto the frames. "I heard what happened with the Gaks a few weeks ago. My sympathies for your losses. Are there any new developments in the situation?"
"No," Reeptar replied, "the Gaks can't find the criminals that did this." Then she added petulantly, "or maybe they don't want to."
"Well, we'll certainly consider this deal seriously," Isabella said cautiously, "but we'll have to factor in the insurance costs and everything. And we're here to look at alternate sites as well. After all, we want to make sure our first launch here goes smoothly."
City of Lights Gak Community Center, Olgix
"This is fantastic!" Isabella praised.
It was getting hard to tell which site was better. They had similarly modern specifications. The Gak site was cheaper, but the spaceport site would have some more foot traffic from the flights, even if they will get less business from the locals.
"Yes, Gaks worked very hard on this," Gripon replied with a large smile. "This is a way better site to open a restaurant than the ugly spaceport, and we have good security."
"That is one thing we are concerned about," Isabella added, "security. If there's another attack here on Olgix, it could wipe out several months to years of profits on a single day."
"Of course, of course," Gripon assured, "we've come to an agreement with Reeptar and the spaceport authorities. We both only want the best for our people."
Isabella wasn't sure what exactly this meant, so she was still skeptical.
Seeing her expression, Gripon added, "and we're in negotiations with the Olgs so they can visit the community center too. That will surely add to the number of customers you will get every day!"
"Honestly, both lots are equally good. My intuition says whichever we pick is going to be wildly successful," Isabella reported to her manager. "The Olg site could be a slightly more lucrative deal at 140,000 a month. Or we could go for the lower risk 30,000 for the Gak site."
"That is pretty hard to decide," he said, "what about the security situation?"
"It seems… in flux," she replied, "they both assured me that there was nothing untoward happening, and they have a deal. But there's always the risk that the one we don't pick is gonna renege on it and decide to take it out on our store."
"That's not ideal."
"Yeah, but the risk can't be that great, right? The insurance company thinks that the threat of conflict on Olgix is overrated," she frowned, "which is weird of them considering they never give up an opportunity to overcharge us."
Her manager chuckled, "they've been overrating too many threats offworld, and the regulatory agencies are coming down on them hard. They're just using this as an opportunity to lower their apparent margins. We probably shouldn't trust those ratings too much."
"Alright, what do I tell Olgix?" Isabela asked, waiting for a final decision.
"You said it was 140,000 and 30,000, right?" he asked.
"Right, that's what we got them down to," she said, "either of them will still probably be making a chunk of profit off it almost right away."
"We can double down. The prices aren't that much for a first expansion onto a new planet. Can you go ask them whether they'd agree to do both sites and give us a discount?"
"Both sites?" she asked. "Isn't that a bit redundant?"
"From what I can tell, it appears that the Gak site is gonna be majority Gak customers, and the Olg site will be mostly traders and Olgs, so the overlap seems minimal. Besides, not to play politics here, but the security benefit of both sides not shooting at each other's store is gotta be worth something here."
"Sure, I'll ask them. The least they can do is say no."
City of Lights Spaceport, Olgix
Isabella asked them both to meet her at the hangar where she was storing her ship. Technically, this was not neutral territory, being on the spaceport. But these two species were just going to have to learn to ignore those kinds of symbolic concerns if they were going into business.
"What?!" they both exclaimed simultaneously when she made them the offer. She wanted both spaces for 5,000 a month less than they were asking, so she was essentially asking them both to give up some profits so the other could get cut in on the deal.
"Both sites?" Reeptar barked. Her angry wolf-like face looked almost like a husky pup, Isabella thought. "Why are you also putting a franchise on the stupid Gak site?"
"But the whole point of us making a bid was so the Olgs don't get it!" Gripon complained.
Isabella sighed. This was going to be a hard sell. The unfortunate reality was that one of the reasons that both these creatures wanted to be picked over the other was simple ethnic pride. Given that they were almost willing to burn each other down a few weeks ago, it was probably an even bigger sticking point than the discount.
Which is why it was even more important that she got both sites, or she got none. If there was a loser here, there would be no winners. This was some kind of convoluted variation of a prisoner's dilemma, she thought.
Heading off the argument, she said firmly, "we've decided that both of your sites are wonderful. We'd only rent either one if we also got the other."
Reeptar challenged, "if you put a restaurant on both our sites, they would steal customers away from each other."
That's an apt description of the problem, Isabella thought. These aliens were definitely not stupid. Just irrational. "Yes, we've thought of that as well. We think that the cannibalism would be minimal, and there is a big enough market in the City of Lights to support both."
"We are willing to go down to 25,000 under some conditions," Gripon cautioned, "but my people will not like that we're doing it so the Olgs get their restaurant too."
"It's not like we're thrilled that you guys get to leech off our people," Reeptar snapped back at him, "you Gaks already have your own McDonald's restaurants back on your homeworld, and you still want to come here and steal ours!"
"Look, guys!" Isabella stopped them before this devolved into an uglier argument. "You will both make a significant profit off this deal. Your people will get new jobs and new customers. And your economies will both grow tremendously, like other planets and communities have!
"Besides, aren't you both tired of throwing good credits down the drain for a rivalry that we all know leads nowhere good for either of you? Talk amongst yourselves and come back to me when you decide to be adults."
Second & Main Street Intersection, City of Lights
Grouchik laid prone on the second-story balcony as she watched the convoy coming down the street. It was some sales representative from Earth who was visiting the spaceport. She was personally more interested in the man in the lead vehicle, the one who kept ruining all her plans.
She didn't get approval from Gripon for an attack like this. When she told a Zakabaran trader from some faraway planet her problem, the trader had come back a few days later with a few bags of explosives and a remote detonator. The trader even gave her a big discount, which was weirdly generous of him, but she didn't question it.
Grouchik had waited until it was dark to dig a small hole in the street and hide the bags. Given the poor state of the roads, she reasonably assumed that it wouldn't be found.
She fingered the detonator and thought of her dead family as the humans drove right up to where she'd place it.
Death to the Olgs and their collaborators, Grouchik thought.
She triggered the detonator.
Humanity had been fighting industrial-scale warfare for as long as they had industry. The mass production of most of the goods involved in the manufacturing of an improvised explosive device were cheaply available on Earth.
Constellar mercenaries, many of whom had gotten their start with combat roles in the sandbox against experienced practitioners of guerilla warfare, were intimately familiar with these devices.
That's why there was a Duke Counter-IED Electronic Warfare jammer mounted on every single one of their armored cars.
Reese's heart skipped a beat as the module made a loud "bzzzt" sound to indicate that someone had attempted to detonate a device near their vehicle.
"We've got movement, three o'clock, second-floor balcony," the remote gunner called out as he swiveled his turret in that direction.
Another bzzzt. He made a split second decision, and called into the radio, "driver! Get us and the VIP out of here! Echo squad, go check out that building!"
Grouchik was confused when the explosive didn't go off. She pressed the trigger again. Still nothing.
The bird must have sold me a bad device! Too bad. I'll have to go get another one and try for another time, she thought as she got back up into the building.
As she started packing her equipment, she heard boots thundering up the stairs. Grabbing her rifle, she aimed it at the door fearfully.
Something smashed the door open. Grouchik readied herself for a last stand, waiting to light up the collaborators coming through the door any moment now. I'll get at least one or two of them, she thought. Not as good as getting their leader, but she wasn't going to die with regret.
Then her ears experienced the loudest bang she'd ever heard in her life, and the brightness of ten thousand suns exploded into her vision.
Painfully deafened and blinded, Grouchik screamed and covered her eyes, dropping her weapon. She felt herself being tackled into the ground by something heavy and lost consciousness.
Outside Galactic Union Headquarters
"Ambassador Gubarak, can you comment on the three-way deal your people have agreed to with the Olgs in the City of Lights?"
"Did you have a hand in crafting what pundits are now calling Fast Food Diplomacy?"
A crowd of reporters had swarmed him as he left the building, all shoving their microphones and cameras into his face.
"Ahem. I have a statement."
"The fates of the people of Olgix and Gakrek have been tied for as long as our species have seen each other across the stars. Last night's three-way deal with the City of Lights Spaceport and McDonald's is simply a recognition of that reality. Our communities on Olgix are grateful for the opportunity to show the galaxy our growing skills and hospitality. While we believe that of the two franchises, ours will see bigger profits, this deal is in the best interests of both our peoples."
He continued. "Furthermore, Ambassador Luperca and I have agreed to gradually begin the process of opening up Gak communities on Olgix to their people. As long as their intentions are peaceful, we are not opposed on principle to welcome them into our businesses and even our families…"
Galactic Union HQ
"The missile incident from last night must never happen again," Amanda said strictly to the face of the parrot on her screen, "you were lucky that our ships chose not to shoot back."
"We have a right to defend our space! This is in the charter of your Galactic Union!" Popptaw said indignantly. She hadn't ordered the ships to fire, but she was still going to defend their mistake to the death anyway. "The invasion of the Zakabaran system shows the galaxy what hypocrites your people are!"
"It's your Galactic Union too," Amanda replied, then added, "and our ships were invited by the citizens of Second, which is recognized as a separate planet under our charter."
"They're our people, whether they realize it or not," the parrot insisted, "and we have the right to stop your people from flooding our spaceports with your cheap goods. Haven't you hurt our people enough?"
"Isn't it true that Zakabara Prime has increased its production output and total credits volume every year since humanity's entry to the galaxy?" Amanda asked, trying a different line of persuasion.
"Our people are working hard! We've invested heavily into developing our economy so we can compete with everyone else!" Popptaw said, apparently not getting the actual point, "we intend to get our fair share of the pie!"
This was going nowhere, Amanda realized, with a species, or maybe just its headstrong leader, that can't see the interaction between sentient beings as anything more than a fixed sum game designed to extract as many resources out of others as efficiently as possible.
"Popptaw, you are getting your fair share. We've allowed you to close down the spaceports on your planet despite the sensible experts' recommendation not to, but that doesn't mean Second has to. This is your final warning: we will not allow you to subjugate the people of another plane-"
"OUR planets!" Popptaw looked like her eyes were going to bulge out of their sockets, and chirped angrily, "we will decide what to do with our own people! You can't bully us out of our cultural heritage! And other species will not stand for it either, human, you can't fight all of us at once no matter how many credits you have in your account!"
Hanging up, Amanda saw the work of years, the dreams of a united and peaceful galaxy, teetering in the balance because of one lunatic leader's inability to see sense.
She picked up the phone. "Get me Senator Hawthorne again."
List of wars/conflicts that have been fought between states with McDonald's: US-Panama invasion, India-Pakistan border conflicts, NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, Israel-Hezbollah War in Lebanon, Russia-Georgia, Russia-Ukraine.
At the time of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iraq had a blatant rip off of the fast food chain called MaDonal, which sells hamburgers they call Big Macks. It remains in business today. There is also an authorized McDonald's franchise in the Baghdad Green Zone.
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I wanted to make a post about ABML because for one it seems like its had super low following on here and even in the recent 'What are your long holds' its only got a few mentions. But aside from that I also wanted to clear up some misunderstandings that seem to be out there.
Before I get into that just to say I've worked in Engineering for 15 years, Automotive for 7 and recently worked for Biotech start up. Which hopefully gives some understanding as to where all this comes from.
So the first thing I've seen commented as to why it gets ignored is there isn't much glamour to what it does. Well to put that in context, one of the richest people in China (probably overtaken now) ran a company which was paid to take away some of US's recycling. It was put on all the returning container ships (probably cost next to nothing as they were going that anyway, mostly empty), processed in China, and raw materials were sold on. Money goes to who positions themselves best. Hence why supply chains that follow industry leaders can be massive too.
Anyway, back to automotive/EV, I watched Tesla disrupt the petrol/diesel paradigm from the inside. It was hilarious to watch the automotive dinosaurs discount them and laugh at Tesla's panel gap tolerances (like that even matters these days). But by the end of my time in automotive everything was going electrification. By 2030 no new petrol/diesel cars will be sold in the UK (and probably the same everywhere else). This part of the story I suppose has been done to death, but basically we're just reaching the point where first electric cars batteries are gonna need to be recycled (in the UK and EU manufactures are responsible for correct disposal of the vehicles batteries so if they can get them bought for recycling, they will). So we know the EV car market is going to be huge, and the recycling of batteries will have to be also. Retrieving the RARE earth metals is essential for EVs continual growth, it'll get too costly, difficult and maybe even impossible to dig enough up to maintain the growth.
Which obviously brings us back to ABML, so they're clearly well positioned. But another comment I see is 'they haven't even built their pilot plant yet!'
Well to explain why this isn't a problem lets consider the typical start up process (the biotech I worked were funded by US VCs so this is likely standard process). Stage A is feasibility study / R&D, a company gets a bunch of money to show an idea / science or process is scientifically possible. If you do that you get funding for Stage B, which is proof of concept / design where you actually build either small scale or beta products. Do that successfully and then the VC will give you funding for phase 3 - which along with continued development includes productionisation of process / manufacture.
Stage 3 is effectively where ABML are and more than that they now own the land and the rights to productionize based upon whatever IP they created upto now. The argument they don't do anything or haven't built anything is slightly off base.
More than that, they aren't actually a start up... the company description in my broker has a detailed description of their activities as a lithium mining company. So with a bit of conjecture its not hard to conclude they were doing their mining thing, then launched R&D into recycling, and when they proved it worked decided to pivot away from mining (where their are numerous competitors) to solve the shortfall in rare earth metals in a more unique way.
The other comment I've seen is they don't make any money. Well they likely made some originally to from their old business model to cover the R&D and Proof of concept work. And now just as they are about to launch into productionisation, they've just got a $4.5million dollar grant which will easily have them covered until its built this year.. I've also read the market is there for them to make money from day 1, so they that should start this year too.
Lets also not forget a Lithium Ion car battery is fundamentally (if quite different in specifics) of a bunch of small voltage lithium ion batteries strapped together. So on top of the EV battery market, there is already a market for the recycling of all the other types of Li battery out there, which their process likely covers.
So in conclusion they have the funds, they have the IP (they wouldn't have got the grant otherwise), they have the grounds and utilities, they have the licences, they have a huge market to tap into, they're down the road from Tesla, they have ex Tesla employees. What more do you need?
And on top of all that, my impression is this has fallen under the retail investors radar and much of the movement has been institutional led. Its was really telling to see it hit its ATH of about $3.50 and bounce against its resistance at $3.20 for 3 hours, before people started getting in early for next week finishing at $3.34.
If you think you're too late consider this has a good chance of following NIO or FUELs trajectory or last year. This is just getting started.
Edit - If you have any already... just hold! If you dont know when to get in, dollar cost average!
🚀

TLDR: I am long and bullish on AST Spacemobile (“Spacemobile”) which is merging with the SPAC $NPA. The risks presented by this investment are, for me, heavily outweighed by many factors including: • Two billionaires and a KKR Partner on Spacemobile’s Board of Directors, indicating possible investment from private equity • Massive investment from key technological partners like Vodafone, Samsung, Rakuten, AT&T, American Tower, and others. • Due diligence process during the transaction adding another layer of examination of Spacemobile’s intellectual property, including patents • Extremely conservative valuation NPA used to price the deal, allowing room for significant upside while the $10 floor minimizes pre-merger downside.
There have been plenty of prior DD posts on NPA/Spacemobile, including here and here. My goal isn’t to regurgitate the same information – if you want to know why Spacemobile doesn’t compete with SpaceX, click the links – but to look through the preliminary proxy filed by the company on December 23, 2020 to assess new and key information and apply that information to identified risks of investing in Spacemobile. Here are my thoughts.
Key Learning #1: Spacemobile has a strong connection to KKR, the behemoth global investment and private equity firm.
One of Spacemobile’s post-merger Directors is Richard Sarnoff, a partner Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, otherwise known as KKR. From his bio: “Richard Sarnoff (New York) is Partner and Chairman of Media, Entertainment, and Education for KKR’s Private Equity platform in the Americas, and serves as a member of the TMT growth equity investment committee. From 2014 through 2017, he served as Managing Director and Head of the Media and Communications industry group, leading investments in the Media, Telecom, Information Services, Digital Media and Education sectors in the US. “
There’s a lot there, so I want to break it down. First, Sarnoff is a Partner at KKR, meaning that he is at the highest tiers of the firm – he’s a heavyweight, not just some guy that works there. Second, what is KKR’s TMT private equity fund? They describe it here as “focused on generating strong returns for investors by investing in market-leading, high-growth companies.” Importantly, they also state that the fund “seeks to invest in secular growth areas with structured downside protection, limited leverage and will seek to take on execution risk as opposed to fundamental technology risk.”
Now, we do not know whether KKR has directly invested in Spacemobile (they don’t have disclosure obligations unless their ownership percentage is greater than 5%, I think) nor do we know that the TMT fund has invested. But we do know that the person that was the head of the TMT fund for the Americas for and is still a member of the investment committee will sit on the Spacemobile board. His presence makes it very possible that KKR has invested, though again that is not known.
There’s another big reason why KKR’s connection to Spacemobile matters: KKR has three very large investments in companies that provide mobile broadband. Specifically: • Hivory: this is the the largest independent telecoms tower company in France and third largest European tower company. KKR has a 49.99% stake in the company, which used its portfolio 10,000 cellular towers to “partner with all mobile operators to develop their coverage” in France and “seek to contribute to the development of French technology infrastructure and innovation, supporting telecom players on the eve of the ‘New Deal’ for French mobile and 5G roll out.” Basically, KKR has a huge mobile broadband investment in France/Europe. • Telxius: KKR bought a 40% stake in Telxius in 2017 for 1.275 euros ($1.55 billion today). Telxius owns and operates over 16,000 telecommunications towers in five countries. , • Jio: Just in 2020, KKR invested $1.5 billion into a 2.32% stake in Reliance Jio Platforms, a top Indian telecom operator. As the Techcrunch article notes, “India has emerged as one of the biggest global battlegrounds for Silicon Valley and Chinese firms that are looking to win the nation’s 1.3 billion people, most of whom remain without a smartphone and internet connection.”
Why this all matters: • Sarnoff’s presence is a huge validation of the Spacemobile technology and business model. People like Sarnoff with huge investment experience do not give their credibility to crappy, vaporware companies. • One of the key risks I have seen discussed is that setbacks or delays could result in Spacemobile not having enough cash to fund Phase I. KKR is a HUGE potential resource if additional financing is eventually needed. • Phase I for Spacemobile very likely includes India – see here – so KKR’s presence on Spacemobile’s board and investment into a massive Indian telecom means they have an already-existing connection to the incredibly large and lucrative Indian market not to mention Europe (through Hivory), and Latin America (through Telxius and Adrianan Cisneros).
Key Learning #2: There are also multiple billionaires on the Spacemobile Board
• Hiroshi “Mickey” Mikitani: he’s the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Rakuten, Inc. He’s worth about $6 billion and has a multi-billion dollar investment into making Rakuten Mobile a dominant player in Japan. Per the proxy, he’s also going to remain a 15.5% shareholder post-merger (assuming no redemptions) and, like all insiders, has agreed to a one year lockup of his shares. • Adriana Cisneros: CEO of the Cisneros Group, a privately-held media, entertainment, digital advertisement, and real estate. According to Forbes, the Cisneros family is worth over $1 billion. Notably, the Cisneros group (led by Ms. Cisneros’ father at the time) rolled out satellite television service DirecTV in Latin America in the 1990s.
Why this matters: The presence of multiple billionaires tells me that Spacemobile has strong connections to liquidity if it’s needed, and those players in turn have strong connections with financial institutions. Spacemobile should be able to leverage those connections to raise debt (particularly in this low-interest environment) or use other means to facilitate financing if necessary.
Key Learning #3: The diligence done in the transaction included a deep dive into Spacemobile’s intellectual property
Spacemobile believes that its 836 patent claims (as of December 1, 2020), which include proprietary and innovative satellite technologies, create a high barrier to entry and leave no competitors to Spacemobile. The company itself has stated that it cannot publicly explain how the technology works or it would give away its competitive edge, which many potential investors (including myself) see as a significant risk.
However, we do know that NPA hired Kirkland & Ellis LLP (“Kirkland”), one of the top law firms in the country, to do due diligence for the deal. According to the proxy, that diligence included: • Reviewing documents in a “virtual data room” including Spacemobile’s intellectual property (patents) • Intellectual property database searches • Conference calls with AST Spacemobile’s management and NPA “to discuss AST’s patent portfolio in order to diligence AST’s claims relative to AST’s market competitors” Why this matters: • Lawyers aren’t scientists, but the fact that Spacemobile’s patents were looked at closely by very smart people with various science degrees (as IP have lawyers) during diligence, in addition to the scientists at Vodafone/Rakuten/American ToweSamsung NEXT, is another sign that the technology is legit
Key Learning #4: The valuation used to price Spacemobile is VERY conservative
Before the deal was finalized, the NPA Board of Directors met and considered whether they should go forward with the merger. Their entire thought process, including the benefits and risks they considered, are laid out in the proxy. At the end of the meeting, “it was the view of the Board that AST was an attractive target company and the proposed transaction contemplated a conservative valuation of AST.” Certainly a self-serving statement, but helpfully they laid out the exact comps they used to come to that conclusion for us to see. In short, since “no single company conducts business that is identical to AST,” they compared Spacemobile to a bunch of different potential comparable business including: (i) satellite (Iridium) (ii) space tourism (Galactic) (iii) telecom (T-Mobile, Verizon) (iv) cable (Altice, Charter Communications) (v) towers (American Tower, Crown Castle, SBA) and (vi) high growth SPACs (Hyliion, Lordstown, Desktop Metal and Luminar). They then took the enterprise value of each of these companies and divided it by each company’s projected 2021 EBITDA (or 2024/2025 EBITDA for space tourism and high-growth SPACs) to get an EBITDA multiple for each:
Company Name / Multiple Iridium Satellite LLC / 16.7x Virgin Galactic / 33.5x T-Mobile 8.3x Verizon / 7.3x Altice USA, Inc. / 9.8x Charter Communications, Inc. / 11.8x American Tower International, Inc. / 21.7x Crown Castle International / 23.9x SBA Communications Corporation / 26.3x Hyliion Holdings Corp. / 3.5x Lordstown Motors Corp. / 4.1x Desktop Metal, Inc. / 13.3x Luminar Technologies, Inc. / 24.4x
The deal here values Spacemobile at $1.4 billion (assuming $10/share price), meaning its projected $1.014 billion EBITDA in 2024 gives it a 1.4x multiple – substantially lower than all of these. To me, that is an EXTREMELY conservative valuation and why I think this company and its share price is poised to substantially increase. Moreover, NPA’s board also noted that a 13-15x multiple, “which NPA’s management selected based on their professional experience and judgment,” would give Spacemobile a value of somewhere between $7.6 and $8.8 billion.
Why this matters: • NPA’s valuation at $10/share comes in drastically below every comp that was looked at by the NPA board and that exists. If you use those multiples, NPA’s share price should be $25 (Hyliion multiple) or $239 (Vergin Galactic). • NPA’s board considers 13-15x (and after an annual discount of 20%) to be the appropriate multiple for the industry, which would lead to a $7.6-$8.8 billion valuation. That implies a share price of $54 to $62 (if my math is right). • Pre-merger, there is a $10 floor to common shares of NPA. So, with NPA closing today at $12.69 per share, there is a ~21% risk (assuming a fall all the way to $10, which is highly unlikely) for a return of somewhere between 2-5x. I personally think that is a very favorable risk/reward scenario and expect the stock to climb substantially from now until the merger, expected in late February/early March.
Disclosure: I am long 50k commons and 45k warrants

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Second chapter I released today. Make sure to check the previous chapter if you missed it!
I'm a new writer trying to improve. As always, feedback about the story or my writing are all very welcome, and I read every one of them.
As Zoron waited for refueling, she took notice of the growing economy that has popped up inside the Livermore spaceport itself. There were several very nice restaurants for human tourists who wanted to come eat and watch spaceships take off and land right next to them. There were also a number of duty free shops for expensive goods.
Few aliens could really afford to indulge in these luxuries, Zoron included, but for them, it was as fun to shop as it was for the tourists to gawk at aliens.
The ubiquitous advertising billboards occasionally caught her eye. Advertising preceded ink and paper in human society, and the galaxy was not unfamiliar with its use or effects. What fascinated Zoron was the amazing amount of consumer goods that were being sold, some of them she hadn't even seen before. She would have to remember to ask the human sellers about their prices and see if she could get a sample for her next shipment.
Today, she noticed a new billboard put up by some company named Terra Corp. What they were advertising, however, was not new to her, and she was very, very interested.
Terra Corp was a successful aerospace defense contractor before the aliens arrived. They made propulsion systems, and had clients in militaries and government agencies like NASA, who wanted them to make parts for anything from missiles to satellites.
The market was very lucrative. On their assembly lines, Terra Corp made the most efficient engines for light years around, and rocket launch costs on Earth were lowered into the tens of millions.
Then, the aliens came.
When the government started buying up alien ships, some of them fell into NASA's laps. As a publicly funded agency, NASA couldn't keep many secrets, both practically and legally. Their reverse engineering studies on the alien ships were quickly posted or leaked onto the Internet, depending on which day of the week it was.
Refusing to die, Terra Corp pivoted: they started adapting alien designs into their products. Terra still had several advantages over the many startups that had cropped up eyeing their business: their supply chains and talent. They invested their large cash hoard, and decided to cut their previous clients out of the loop entirely.
After a few months, they had designed the galaxy's first human galactic trade ship. They called it Terra One.
Zoron did not have a phone, but there appeared to be nothing on Earth that can't be negotiated for a small fee. A human vendor had agreed to rent her a phone for a bit. She fiddled a bit with her universal translator and started dialing.
"Terra Corp, how can I help you?" The pleasant voice of the woman on the other end.
"Hi, I was looking at a billboard for a spaceship called Terra One and was wondering if I could buy one."
"Of course, let me transfer you to our customer inquiry department."
There were a few short seconds of some strange but not unpleasant music, and a voice replied, a man this time.
"Hello, my name is Noah, sales representative for Terra. I heard you were asking about our Terra One spaceship line?"
"Yes, yes. How many credits would it cost to buy one?"
"Credits? I'm sorry, may I have the pleasure of knowing who I'm speaking with?"
"My name is Zoron. Nice to meet you, Noah," she said, and as she did, she heard some scrambling on the other end of the phone.
"Uh, Zoron, I'm going to direct you to our VP of Sales. Please hold on for just one moment."
Some more music, then a woman picked up a phone.
"Hello Zoron, I'm Erin. Welcome to Earth. How are you doing today?"
Erin was in Seattle, but she immediately agreed to fly down to Livermore to talk to Zoron.
Zoron had her spaceship moved off the landing pad into a hangar so she would not be blocking the pad for other traders.
For a small fee, of course.
Erin was in her 50s. She'd had a long career at Terra's headquarters in Seattle, right next to where Boeing assembled their rockets and planes, interrupted only by a short marriage and the birth of her only child.
She was in a meeting when an intern ran into the conference room. He took a terrified look at the dozen middle and upper management execs seated at the table, who each made his total net worth in salary every hour, now all staring at him.
The intern decided that this was probably important enough and blurted out, "there's an alien trying to buy our spaceship on the phone!"
That proved very favorable for the future career of the intern.
The flight from Sea-Tac Spaceport to Livermore only took 15 minutes. She met Zoron at the hangar. This was the first alien Erin had ever talked to.
After somewhat awkward introductions, she got down to business, "Terra One actually just entered the production phase, and the first models are scheduled to roll off the line in eight months. So far we have a lot of interest, but you're the first non-human that's called us about it. Is this your spaceship by the way? It's absolutely gorgeous!"
"Yes," Zoron said proudly, "it's been in my family for fourteen generations. I can give you a tour."
"Oh, yes. Please." And what a tour it was. Erin asked a lot of questions about various components in it as Zoron described their function. She was very knowledgeable. It was nice to talk shop with an enthusiast. Occasionally, Erin would ask a question about the internal performance of this part or that and Zoron would not know how to answer, but she did not seem bothered by that and quickly moved on.
"Wow, this is a very impressive spaceship. Wow."
Then Erin switched tracks, "as I was saying, our own Terra Ones will be ready to fly in eight months. We expect the performance specifications for sublight speed and range to be similar to what you already have, but we also boast a few features that I'm sure you've noticed on our ads."
There, she pulled out a tablet and started giving the well practiced sales pitch.
"Our FTL range is expected to be about 6-7 times longer than average alien made spacecraft due to the more efficient fuel injection, and we have a slightly bigger fuel tank. You will likely save more than 50% on reactor fuel costs alone."
There she flipped to a slide with a captivating video showing the differences between the human and alien reactor modules burning side by side.
"Because our reactor has been miniaturized, we have more space for cargo or passengers. Our passenger liner model can carry up to 92 people, or fitted with a more luxurious interior. Our cargo hauler model comes with the standard pallet rail and can carry… well, as much mass as you want. Unlike most other trader ships on the market, as long as you can fit it into the hold, it will fly no problem unless you're hauling something much heavier than tungsten composites. It has a total size restriction of about 120 cubic meters, not including the pilot cabin."
Here she flipped to a picture showing a beautiful white interior of the pilot cabin, with two comfortable looking reclining seats made of memory foam, a triple pane reinforced glass cockpit, digital touchscreen displays, HOTAS controls, and a pull out bunk.
Zoron had to close her mouth to stop from drooling all over the tablet.
"So… um… how much would the basic model cost?" Zoron had learned enough about human consumer goods to know about the add-on business model.
"The Terra One basic package is the cargo hauler. It's going to come out to seventeen million Dollars, or credits, not including taxes and fees. Your blink away cost should come to within two million of that," Erin replied automatically.
Zoron tried to keep the disappointment out of her face but was only partially successful. She was one of the wealthier traders in the galaxy, but her entire bank account had not even crossed the one million mark. Indeed, the only alien trader to become a millionaire was another Zeepil whose entry into what the humans called the "two comma club" was celebrated as a major event on Traders Only.
Seeing her expression, Erin reassured, "we also have several loan options, if you're open to those?"
Zoron shook her head. Debt = bad. She said, "thank you for the introduction. I'm sorry to have wasted your time today."
Erin was not a woman who took no for an answer, figuratively speaking. You don't get to be where she was in life that way. "Ok, what about a trade in for a pre-order? You hand us your ship, stay on Earth for a few months. We'll pay for your expenses. And when your Terra One is ready, we'll give you a significant discount. Consider it… a loan from you to us."
Up to this point, Terra had not managed to buy any alien trade ships yet. They weren't unaffordable for a corporation, but traders often did not want to end up grounded on Earth. This could be an exciting opportunity for them to inspect a live one.
"How much would the discount be," sniffed Zoron. She was skeptical about this reverse loan. This Erin human was evidently very competent and Zoron knew that whenever you felt like you were taking advantage of someone smart, you were the mark. But… Erin had a point. It's not like she could fly two spaceships at once, and she did want the new ship.
"Well, we'll have to figure that part out. I'll have my engineers come down here to take a look and we'll get you sorted."
Over the next few days, Erin and Zoron haggled over the financial details. Zoron was a good businessbeing, and Erin was a professional. In this case though, it was a classic case of a win-win. Terra Corp wanted the alien spacecraft to inspect and do research over; it was worth more to them than a single production craft. Zoron wanted the straight upgrade.
They ended up agreeing to do a like-for-like trade, Zoron's original spacecraft for a new Terra Corp production.
Also known as a barter. Irony is not dead.
They flew Zoron up to Seattle and settled her into a rented single family home in a middle class suburbia near Northgate.
She was a novelty to her neighbors for a while, and Terra took a while to finally navigate her visa through USCIS. But she settled in and got used to it.
She decided this was where she was going to retire to when she grew old and her bones started aching.
Everyone at Livermore had heard about the trade-in.
It's not that someone dug up her tax forms or someone did their due diligence on Terra Corp.
It's not that they saw Terra Corp engineers take apart her spacecraft piece by piece into carefully labelled crates and flew them around the country.
Nah, she bragged about it on Traders Only, which had a several hundred pages long thread about Zoron's proud pictures in front of her new under construction Terra One. Moderators had to restrict it after numerous unpleasant comments against Zoron and her species.
"This is a good sign, right?" Sarah said, remarking on the trade, "it's… barter but aliens are upgrading their ships to human ones." She said "barter" with a disgust on her face, as if it were a crime.
"Yes, and no," ah, it's another complicated answer from Dr Stearns, "it's great for Zoron. Looking at the deal she claimed she got on Traders Only, she sold it well above the market price. Terra just wanted to take a look at the insides. No other trader would get a trade-in value like that."
"The bad thing is, as I've started to realize and think about these past few months after the Gak disaster," he continued, "the aliens have been bleeding their economies into Earth."
"Hypothetically speaking, if you plop down a rich city into a poor area today, what would immediately happen to the poor area is very bad. The people in the city would have so much money and goods that they would start sucking up all the economy in the area like a vacuum cleaner. Say you're a farmer in the poor area, you can bring food to the city, which they don't make, but literally everyone else in the area is doing the same, so they don't have to pay you that much, and you can't buy that much stuff from the city because everything is expensive. That's the best case scenario."
"You could be… I dunno… a construction worker. You can't compete with the hundreds of people in the city who all already have contacts and experience working in the city. They're also going to come out into the poor area with their fancy machines and concrete trucks and put you out of business. Your only chance would be to move into the city to find work as well. Not ideal for everyone, but bearable."
"If you're unlucky, you're a businessman. You're immediately put out of business by people in the city because you can't compete with their scale and efficiency. In fact, the big corporate franchises in the city can easily drive most businesses in the surrounding areas into bankruptcy. Wealth and people flow one-way into the city. So while it's normally a good idea to be near a big market, the poor area doesn't always improve when there's a sudden change in their surrounding area. Sometimes, it might. It would all depend," Stearns wavered here trying to think about whether to elaborate on the cases and conditions.
"I see your analogy, but the aliens have been improving! Gak is now affording goods and food with a little bit of stimulus and aid, and some of their farms are now able to use late 19th century human farming utilities! Other worlds are industrializing too," Sarah said. She was proud of what they'd achieved so far and was not about to let Stearns' negative nancy attitude piss all over it.
"Yes," Stearns said, and sighed coming to his conclusion, "but we've been doing that at the expense of draining the technological reserves, so to speak, of the aliens. What Zoron sold Terra Corp was six, maybe seven centuries of wealth accumulation from a whole family, and if it weren't an R and D opportunity for them, it would be… oh maybe a quarter of the worth of a new Terra One."
"Imagine someone from the 1400s with the biggest shop in… say London. Imagine their children inherited it. Imagine they made all the right plays, invested in all the right things. They went all in on the tulip trade at the right time, and sold right before the bubble popped. In the 20th century, they had stocks in IBM, Microsoft, Apple at all the right times. They become the top ten richest families of their species. That's Zoron's family."
"She's the literal point oh oh oh oh one percent of the galaxy, if not her planet. And she just traded in her entire wealth for something Terra Corp is probably going to make obsolete with another version in a year because there are thousands of multi-millionaires in just America that won't mind a new space yacht. Don't get me wrong, it was the right financial move: if she hadn't traded hers in, it would be obsolete too. But you see where I'm going with this? Pretty soon, the aliens are going to run out of new technology that we want to copy."
"And our economy is going to crash too?" Sarah asked in horror.
"Oh heavens no, we'll be filthy rich, like the city in the story. I mean… probably. I'm an economist, not a fortune teller," Stearns replied, "but I'm bullish because our economy is booming from all this new alien tech. On the other hand, the aliens can't make all the stuff we're introducing because they literally don't have the infrastructure yet. Selling spaceships was the sound of a domino falling, one that we'd been hearing about for a while."
"What happened on Gak a year ago, it's going to start happening everywhere."
"Not this again, what do we do?" Wailed Jen.
"I think we caught it in time, this time. A friend of mine caught up with me last week. Apparently last year, someone wrote an article describing this exact scenario in one of the journals, and he found it while doing some research on capital flow. Anyway," Stearns went on, "we can mitigate a lot of these effects, here's what we do…"
Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Border Security and Immigration
Hearing on Alien Refugees and Migrant Workers
"Please! Please! May we have order?... Thank you." The open room was packed with people, and a few faces of unfamiliar species in the gallery too.
"I'll make this brief. We are holding this hearing today on the one year anniversary of the Great Gak Spacelift…"
"... a celebration of our values and our common interest with the galactic community..."
"... greatest gift of all, life and the pursuit of opportunity…"
"... brave men and women from all around the world stepped head first into this challenge…"
This was not brief. At all.
"... beacon of light, we strive to be a shining city on a hill for the galaxy…"
Eyes were rolling, c'mon let's get this going Senator.
"... which brings us to the purpose of this hearing: The laws of the land have remained in limbo for months, and we have debated and delayed, but the business of governance can wait no longer. We have no doubt that the rights we hold sacred, the ones enshrined in our Constitution: they apply to all sentient beings, but the question remains of how the remainder of our customs and regulations, our hundreds of years of precedence, how they will affect our relationship with our visitors from outer space."
"We will now hear testimony from several experts. Ladies and gentlemen," the Chairwoman beckoned to her colleagues on the bench, "call your witnesses."
There was a long line of experts and leaders from academia, from corporations, from unions, from colleges, from special interest groups, from every industry that would be affected by whatever came of this, including the payment company that started it all.
"Ms. Miller, your company benefits from alien labor, does it not?"
"Yes, Senator, as we are all aware," Sarah answered unsure where this line of questions were going, "we consider our payment of credits to space truckers to facilitate the Great Gak Spacelift to be a donation to the cause of sentinency."
"That's not what I'm referring to," the honorable Senator said, putting up a number of documents onto the projector, "we have records that your company has hired representatives of other species, on other worlds, in order to sell Offworld Trading Terminals. You benefit from cheap alien labor, do you not? Is that not why you are here, lobbying to allow galactic aliens to legally enter and remain in the United States for work and refuge?"
"Yes," Sarah sighed, this was going to be a long hearing, "as you know very well, Senator, our interests lie in both the galactic community and our country. Galactic Credits are the grease for the gears of galactic commerce that enable trade with the aliens and feed into our booming economy. A rising tide lifts all boats..."
Stearns beamed proudly at his boss, student, and now friend from one of the VIP seats in the galley.
You might expect that the biggest destination for galactic alien visas and green cards into America would be California, being the most populous state with the most temperate climate and all. Or maybe Texas, with the fastest growing population. Or maybe even Florida or Hawaii, for their year-round sunny beach weather. You could even be forgiven for guessing Alaska, because some aliens sure love the cold tundra.
You would be mistaken. Weather has a big effect on migration, but the number one factor is and will always be: opportunity.
A year after Gak, for a while, it was West Virginia.
West Virginia had a large mining economy. Specifically coal mining. The restrictions of which had just been lifted with the nullification of climate change. Even with the ever decreasing price of cleaner sources of energy, it was still cheaper to burn coal… if you didn't care what you were doing to the environment around you and the lungs of your children. In terms of making energy, things really didn't get much cheaper than setting rocks on fire.
For the workers who did the job, one of the most unfortunate effects of coal mining was pneumoconiosis. Also known among coal miners as black lung. Modern technology and medicine had reduced some of its risks and effects, but not all.
See… some aliens, unlike fragile humans, don't have picky lungs. Especially species from Bohor and other polluted planets that had adapted to the toxic fumes that their homeworld called an atmosphere. Companies paid for the meager cost of transporting them en masse onto Earth and put them to work. Save a little here on ventilators, a little there on masks.
A lot of the aliens don't get too picky about the amount of credits they're being paid either.

Hey dad,
I made a human friend and she let me use her phone to send this message to the trader mail office at home. My life here is great, and I am making many friends.
The air in the mines is clean and crisp compared to the ones at home. We aren't allowed to work more than 8 hours a day, but the human inspectors can't tell our faces apart, so sometimes we sneak in with a different name to work two shifts a day.
They have a sign on the wall that shows the number of days since the last accident. It is at 130 today. Can you imagine such a sign in a Gak mine? They would just never change it from zero. Do not worry about me. I am very careful. I even sometimes wear the silly looking hats they give us.
On some days, they do not let us work the mines, so I learned to drive a vehicle and deliver people to places, like a fancy security guard. This doesn't pay as much as the mines, but I meet many new people. I have even met other non-humans!
Even though my human language skills are not very good, I am learning. The mine boss has a translator, so he can help me with them.
Please stay healthy. I will send you another 300 GC this month. I miss you. Say hello to all my brothers and sisters for me.
Love, Gromor

Gromor,
Harvest is very good this year. The soil is rich with water, and the new seeds we bought at the market made so much we may not be able to collect them all before the winter sets in!
Do not worry about me or your siblings. We are all still alive. Did you find the people I was talking to you about? It is very important that you do.
Dad

"Money they send home is quickly becoming a major portion of these economies. This allows the people on those planets to buy investments into their own business. Agricultural output is up, despite the fact that less people are working in agriculture and most are moving into industrial work. Some planets are even producing materials that Earth corporations are importing in bulk, and many of them are building a multiplanetary supply chain."
"Furthermore, a large alien population has rapidly scaled the demand for a large amount of consumer goods," Stearns continued, "they can send home all they want but they still need to eat, sleep, and consume while they are on Earth. Many previously rusting towns, especially in rural areas with a lot of space and cheap cost of living are booming back up. Many of them are restarting their old factories to mass produce cheap late 19th and early 20th century machinery and consumer goods, and these are selling especially well in the better developed alien trade ports."
"So does that mean our strategy is working?" Jen asked impatiently.
"In a word, yes," Stearns summarized, "there have been massive improvements to many of the poorest economies that are now feeding their populations to richer planets, and from those to planets to Earth. We are single handedly dragging the galaxy into industrializing, though the long term effects are uncertain. If our own economy ever got into trouble, I imagine very bad things will happen to all of them."
"Ok, we'll take things one step at a time. How are our own people handling it?" Sarah asked.
"Fairly well, all things considered. There have been a few interspecies conflicts, but those are generally confined to areas where there are very few of them. I hear they make good neighbors and it's hard for people who know them to get angry at teddy bears and otters from outer space. Also, it helps that many of the jobs they have been taking are the ones that are so shitty that even the Indians and Nigerians don't want to do them."
"That's good to hear," Sarah replied, breathing a sigh of relief.
"Yup. Earth is getting richer. And this time, some of the aliens' are too."
Louisa plopped down at the couch as she got home, and started scrolling through her phone. She couldn't wait for her boyfriend to get home. He was supposed to cook today, and Gary is an excellent chef.
She noticed a new message:

Hey Louisa and Gary,
One of my sons has finally found you. We are all very good. We have a lot of food now.
I hope you are doing well. If you ever come to Gakrek again, you are welcome to stay at our house. Our roof does not leak any more.
I named two of my children after you. I hope you do not mind. I asked the trader office to attach a picture of them to send to you.
Gordorker

The migration of people and their remittances may be the most controversial topic to be discussed in the story, but unavoidable.
The examples I looked at were economic studies of remittances in Armenia, which has a significant portion of its economy being money sent back from migrant workers in Russia and Azerbaijan. Families with emigrant laborers were more likely to have bank accounts and savings, to own businesses, to make domestic investments...etc. Despite major security concerns and regional instability, Armenia's economic growth in the past 30 years have generally been decent, in good years even mirroring the growth rate of the four Asian Tigers in the 60s-90s.
There is no conclusive economic evidence that higher remittances and dependence on it lead to overall greater or lesser economic growth in the long run, only that it can pull underdeveloped countries out of the gutter, which is essentially what the alien economies in the story are.
I am trying out something new in the next chapter. The working title is: Last Resort
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Hello and thank you for your attention. As a Norwegian, it is was with immense pride that Alussa Energy Acquisition Corp. is bringing the Norwegian start-up battery maker company FREYR public. Now, that in itself is not the reason why I have invested, so I'll do my best to present my key findings and and why this is, in my opinion, a great investment opportunity.
Disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor, and you should always do your own research before making your own investment. This piece only express my opinions and why I am invested. My positions are 18.000 shares at $14.18 average and 30.000 shares in FREYR (OTC) at 14.61 Norwegian Kroners average.
Now, this is gonna be a hefty piece, so strap on and brew yourself a coffee and enjoy the DD-ride on this one.

Norway - The richest country in the world because of OIL - Now moving into renewable energy.

The Norwegian oil adventure began in the late 60's after a big finding in the North Sea. Up until then, the country didn't really believe in the prosperity of the petroleum industry. But after this huge oil field was found, massive investment was made on infrastructure, building new companies and gathering the best minds to harness the opportunity. Now, fast forward about 50 years to 2021 and you have numbers like this:
- Oil and Gas counts for 42,2% of total exported goods from Norway- The industry employs over 225.000 workers (incredible as Norway is a small country with 5 million people)- The massive wealth made the country create one of the biggest funds in the world (The Norwegian Oil Fund) with over 1 Trillion (yes with a T) in market value.
So why is this important, you might ask? Well, Equinor, the government owned oil company, is heavily moving into renewable energy, alongside with hundreds of others too. They need to grow in other areas of energy consumption and storage because we only have so and so much oil. Also, in order to save the planet this is absolutely paramount. Norway as a country are pioneers in the oil industry and we want to be leaders and pioners in renewable energy. We already have huge businesses in renewable energy from wind, sea and mountain rivers - also hydrogen. But there is one thing that we still lack and that is a new Industrial Adventure, like we got with the oil in the late 1960's. The country is asking themselves everyday: "What are we going to make a living on, after the oil ends?".
Here comes FREYR ($ALUS).
FREYR - The New Norwegian Industrial Adventure
First of all, let's have a look at the team behind FREYR.
CEO Tom Einar Jensen
- Was Vice President at Saga Petroleum and Norwegian Hydro from late 90's to 2010.- Frontrunner and Pioneer in renewable energy- Successful Serial Entrepreneur
VP Operations Kenneth Yan
- Former CEO of Chinese battery maker CHAM Battery- Former GM of Inventus Power- Former GM of TWS Technology
CTO Ryuta Kawaguchi
- Former Solution Owner at Dyson EV Battery Systems- Former Manager at Nissan, leading electric powertrain technology and strategy for EVs- Former Senior Manager at Automotive Energy Supply
COO Einar Kilde
- Former C-level executive at BANE Nor leading the infrastructure development- Executive VP at REC (manaufacture of silicon for battery production)
There are many more key stakeholders within the team, that has extensive experience in huge industrial companies in Norway. They have the experience and connections to make their battery plant a reality.

Now, let's have a look at their partnerships so far.

- Innovation Norway - Maersk- Siemens Energy - 24M - SINTEF - Rana Municipality (they are investors and this is the place where the plant will be built)and many more...

Skilled workers are needed - Norway is a engineering "Mekka"

As CTO Ryuta Kawaguchi explains briefly in this introductionary video: Watch here - Norway is not short on highly skilled industrial workers. As a wealthy country with huge industrial success because of technology and engineering workforce, FREYR can recruit domestically - and my hypothesis is that a substantial amount of them will find great purpose of joining this new adventure. I feel it is comparable with Silicon Valley.
The momentum in the Scandinavian region for battery production is fantastic. You might have heard of Northvolt or Morrow Batteries respectively Swedish and Norwegian. The more the merrier, as it will just keep the snowball rolling with bigger market potential, more government help and subsidies and more skilled workers to be created. The Nordics, because of our world leading adoption of EVs, are set up to be one of the dominant regions of battery production.
The Factory - key USPs
- Targeting 20% lower battery cell costs- 43 GWh of capacity by 2025 to position as one of Europe’s largest cell suppliers, displacing dependency on Asian imports- Cell production is the segment with the highest revenue share within the battery value chain- Targeting 81% Lower CO2 e Emissions- Projected 2025e Revenue and EBITDA of $2.9 billion and $703 million, respectively

Catalyst for share price to increase next 12 months

- Merger date announcement (to be around Q2)- Voting and merger confirmed- New Partnerships- New customers (they are in talks with Auto OEMS as we speak)- Subsidies and help from government
$ALUS is sitting at a very intriguing price at give or take 14 dollars which implies a 1.8B valuation if merger is successful. Downside is back to 10. Now, I don't expect obviously to see this run to 100 like $QS, but would not surprise me if we see 40's and 50's by the end of the year because of the momentum in the green shift and ecosystems of renewable energy - especially in the EV sector.
I'm keep this for the next 12 months and am very excited to follow this company.
Thanks for reading.

Third entitled person one for the day.
When I was working at the smash repairs, we provided loan cars to people who's vehicles we were repairing. We did not charge for the loan car, we saw it as a perk of them giving us the business.
One day a lady who was affiliated with a car dealership we dealt with brought her car in for some repairs. Lady presented herself as wealthy, we knew for a fact that she was related to the family that owned this extremely large dealership. Family members of the dealership had married into one of the richest families in Australia, and were always in the society pages.
I get a notification on a Monday morning, that she had had an accident in the car. She said that the brakes failed, she was going down a hill, she went over a roundabout and into a telegraph pole.
We get the car picked up and ask her to come in and complete a claim form so we could submit it to our insurance company. I sit down with her and we complete the form. Usual standard questions, had you had anything to drink (yes), how much (2 glasses of wine with lunch - the accident happened at night), etc. She reads over what has been written on the claim form and signs it, confirming that this is her recollection of the incident.
Unfortunately for her, I have been in the related industries for a long time, including being an automotive insurance broker and working for an automotive assessor. Something doesn't sit right with me, so I tell my boss we should apply for a copy of the police report, as the owner of the vehicle.
He gives me the go ahead, and I complete the form, get a signed cheque, and post everything off to the relevant police department.
The police report comes in, her blood alcohol level was 0.13, almost 3 times the legal limit. The officers on the scene had noted that she was unsteady on her feet and slurring her words. Not knowing whether this was because of the accident or something else, they arranged for blood to be drawn at the hospital. This was done 30 minutes after the alleged time of the accident, so would only have gone down from what it was when the accident occurred.
This means that our insurance company is not going to pay out, as she was breaking the law by driving under the influence.
Now, I arrange for an assessor to provide us with the pre-accident market value on the car, which came in at around $8,500.
We send her a letter of demand. She has boasted of her wealth to everyone (she was one of those, don't you know who I am and who I am connected to? type of people). She is furious when she finds out that we had the police report. She expected to lie on the claim form, pay a $500 excess (if she couldnt' talk us into waving up because of her connections), and the insurance company would pay out.
I knew that the claims division of the insurance company would ask for a copy of the police report (it is standard procedure), and if we had submitted a false claim we would have been in trouble.
She had also burnt her bridges with the family and they were not prepared to bail her out, and she was the type of person to live beyond her means. Her solicitor contacts us, and to keep on good terms with her family (who gave us a MAJOR amount of work), we agreed to reduce the payout to $5,000.
And she had to pay that in instalments of $100 per fortnight because she couldn't afford anything else. And each fortnight there would be a snarky note with the cheque about how we should have just put the claim through insurance.

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Not all traders were taking Galactic Credits.
That was consistently a problem whenever cards and virtual currencies replaced cash in human society.
In tech business terms, this is called adoption.
In financial terms, there's a slightly fancier name for the people who didn't have an account: the unbanked. In modern banking, it is sometimes used as a more politically correct synonym for "poor".
Unfortunately for Galactic Credits, adoption was low, and the unbanked were the vast majority of traders.
In a human financial system, the way that banks solved this problem eventually was through incentives. Other than simply being convenient, credit cards were exclusive and gave off a feel of luxury. It made people feel richer than they are. But what really drove adoption over the edge was spamming them to everyone through the mail and promising they'd get discounts and money for using them.
Also unfortunately for Galactic Credits, the alien traders that used it didn't feel luxurious and rich. Instead, they had a sneaking suspicion that they were being ripped off by the humans. They just weren't sure how.
Some, like Zikzik, saw the convenience benefits, but the galactic aversion to debt and taboo of anything more advanced than a barter system counterbalanced with their innate businessbeings' need for efficiency.
Sarah had no idea why. All she knew was that only a quarter of the traders coming in were open to using Galactic Credits, and new traders were coming in every day. She can't go down to the spaceport, set up a booth, and try to talk every new merchant into ignoring all their financial instincts to adopt GCs!
This was unsustainable.
It was time to get an expert. They needed someone who could help resolve the problem and get more traders on board.
She'd found him on social media.
Dr. Max Stearns had struck it rich working at an early fin-tech startup, got bought out by Bank of America, and then retired at 35. He came out of retirement to teach graduate level Economics classes at a local college, and then somehow fumbled his way into a Professor position. Darn it, he was just here to not be bored out of his mind, not get a second wind in his career as an academic at age 50!
For a profession that was increasingly favoring non-tenured instructors over professors, it was a testament to how much they wanted to keep him there. It turns out he was almost as good at explaining things to students as he was at designing financial systems.
So, when Sarah, who was most definitely not a student though she could probably pass as one if she wanted to, came to his predictably empty office hours, he thought maybe she was lost. After the initial confusion, apology, and introduction, Sarah started explaining her problem.
In short, aliens have an extreme reluctance to adopt credits, blah blah blah.
Normally, Stearns was thinking, people would be charging for this. But like all nerds who know a good problem when they see one, he couldn't resist tackling it. He was nerd-sniped.
"You actually have two problems," he began, "first, your system isn't worthy of trust. Your company is non-sustainable and everyone knows it. The other human traders bought into it because they know they wouldn't risk much by doing it. As you can see in these charts you're showing me, they're immediately converting their GCs back into cash. And when they want credits because they've agreed generally to use it, they come back to you, buy GCs with cash, and then immediately use them on the traders."
"The human traders are well aware of your position, but they're temporarily using the system because it is far, far more convenient than barter. Unfortunately, the alien traders don't have that intuition. You're being kept afloat now by selling and trading goods, not by your business of being a financial firm," Stearns continued.
"I've thought about starting to charge the other human traders a fee to keep the business sustainable," Sarah explained, "but wouldn't that drive them away?"
"No. In fact, judging by what you're saying because the transaction costs of bartering is so high, the benefits the human side derives would keep them there even if you charged what would normally be considered absurdly high fees. This is one of those very few cases where charging people money might actually make them more likely to use your business!" Stearns replied. Then, he made a rough waving gesture with his hands. "I need to see more details and there needs to be an iterative process to build a model, but I suspect you would keep almost all of your human traders even if you charged a fee as high as about 20% for each transaction."
"Twenty percent!" Sarah yelped, "that sounds like an exorbitant fee! Wouldn't they just start another currency system?"
"Hah, it's an estimate, and you probably don't have room to lose any human trader right now. But no, they can't replace you. They'll face the exact same problems you face now. If they try to replace you, they'll also have to deal with the fact that they've just discredited your credits system. In fact, the aliens will probably trust them even less."
"Ok, I'll think about adding a fee structure for the humans," Sarah said thoughtfully, "what was the other problem you were going to mention?"
"Your second problem is actually an opportunity. Every functional economic system is a system of incentives and disincentives. The only incentive you're giving the aliens to switch to your credits is one they clearly don't understand. You need to provide incentives they do understand. Or, in this case, maybe disincentives if they don't switch."
"Like what? Get the spaceport to ban them from trading if they don't recognize GC?" Sarah asked.
"Nothing that extreme. And if you did that, I suspect they would simply meet up in orbit and exchange goods there. Without money, it won't be efficient for them, but for some, it would be an acceptable alternative. No, you'd need to provide them a more soft touch but clear disincentive that they understand when trading without GCs to drive them away from barter."
"Can you give me an example?" Sarah asked.
"Ah this is where I normally start charging an hourly consulting fee," Stearns smiled but made a dismissive wave as Sarah began the motion of pulling out a wallet, "but I think I'd rather have a stake in this. A bit of your company and the opportunity to go into space and see what I suspect is about to happen there if your little venture succeeds. Think about it, and let me know."
"I'll be in my office."
Sarah and Jen split the company evenly four ways: one for each of them, one for Benny and Junior combined, and one for Stearns. It was incredibly generous, they knew. Normally, the first few startup employees would get up to one or two percent of the firm, but this was a financial company without anyone with financial experience, and they'd owe it to Benny that they'd gotten their start.
After all, it didn't matter how big their portion of the pie was, if the pie was zero. And that's what their pie was right now: a big fat zero. It didn't make any money; it facilitated some of their food trades and ensured they got more profits there, sure, but it required them to be constantly recruiting and cutting into their time actually selling stuff to the aliens.
Sarah was sure that it was only a matter of time before a big bank caught wind of this and simply put them out of business. The only advantage GC had was they started first. Stearns had said that the first mover was an edge, yes, but they'd be nuts if they were gonna just rest on their laurels and depend on it.
They needed Stearns, and from their meeting, he seemed genuinely interested in helping them grow the enterprise. He had seemed to be surprised to be offered that much stake in the company, but the women both agreed that all they had so far was a good idea, which was worth nothing without good execution.
If anyone could turn their novelty into a business, Dr. Stearns was their guy.
And if him giving notice to his employers that it was going to be his last quarter at the college a week later was any indication, it was generous enough.
The first thing Stearns did was institute a human merchant transaction fee as he had suggested.
Except in very rare circumstances, most payment networks used by humanity charged a fee. In the US, this was around 1-3%.
In countries where networks are growing, the percentage is lower to encourage growth.
In countries where networks have high transaction costs, the percentage is higher to reflect costs. Having to barter was the ultimate transaction cost.
At Galactic Credits, they charged 8%. This was an extraordinarily high fee, calculated using careful models, but the alternative was literally bartering, which all the human have agreed by now is just plain dumb.
So, they grumbled at the fee, but not a single human trader got off the network.
They used this newfound income and the allure of the stars to poach the branch manager and several of his employees at the BoA office next doors, and put them to work selling the idea of cards and currency to the aliens.
As time went on, they noticed that more and more human traders were beginning to specialize. It used to be they all bought and sold. Now, some were only buying, or only selling. As Stearns had predicted it would, behavior started to change.
The aliens saw that more humans were now coming to the spaceport with only a card and driving away with goods, or vice versa. It signified trust in the system. Some of them started signing up not intending to use it, but just to try to figure out what the humans were doing.
A few of the more daring ones even started asking about using credits to pay for their fuel at the spaceport facilities, which many of the human traders were happy to facilitate, for a fee.
Stearns put a stop to that pretty quickly when he learned about it. They just signed up the spaceport authorities for an account and cut out the middlemen.
Sarah and Jen also noticed that some human traders complained about the transaction fees to the alien traders in small talk.
For the alien businessbeings who saw trade as an adversarial relationship where the trader on the other side of the table was someone to be convinced or even defeated, the humans’ complaints actually increased trust in the Galactic Credits system.
After all, if Sarah was ripping the other guy off, maybe she’s not ripping me off so much.
Adoption among aliens reached half by the end of the week.
The second thing Stearns did was to start offering incentives for the aliens to sign up, or rather he made it uncomfortable for them not to.
Normally in a payment system, the merchant eats the cost of each transaction. When you swipe your card at a point of sale terminal, you don't pay the fee, the merchant does. She may charge you more money to use a card, which is not supposed to be allowed, or she may just quietly up some of her prices, but that's another story.
In the Galactic Credits system, because all the transactions took place in the hands of a human, the human had to pay the cost of doing business on both sides, both when they were buying and selling goods. This was the target of a lot of the complaints from human traders, especially the increasing number of exclusive buyers.
This was where the incentive came in.
Human traders that agreed to only buy items from aliens that took galactic credits had their buy fees waived.
This incentive was supposed to be enough to drive business towards the alien traders taking credits at the expense of the others, but not enough to force humans who exclusively sold items (fruit truckers like Benny) to become exclusive buyers to avoid fees. After all, the fee was 8% but this was a gold mine. Everyone was making exorbitant profits from the aliens.
Moreover, Stearns wanted the complaints to change. The human traders could still complain, but he wanted them to complain about something else.
He reasoned that businessbeings that were part of a standardized galactic trade network instinctively understood the value of institutions. An institution responsive to complaints is an institution good for business. This would logically drive up adoption.
Unexpectedly, this second reason did not even come into play. They would only much later learn why.
The incentives themselves, on the other hand, started to work…
Gorok belongs to a species that developed out of an ocean planet, called Ara. The R is silent.
Their civilization had started underwater, and after hundreds of thousands of years of development, the Arans managed to breach the surface of their ocean world and reach the stars using technology developed and refined in water.
To the casual human eye, they were humanoid robots, robotic feet and manipulators, with a head peeking out from an aquarium. Many traders called them "dolphinheads" behind their backs.
Because of how long it takes for an underwater species to develop anything, they often took a long view of things. The dolphinheads were an old species. They didn't mind taking things slow. Some might even call them patient.
In Sarah's view, they were just goddamn stubborn.
Gorok isn't a particularly obstinate member of her species, but the average of stubborn is still stubborn. It was annoying to have to deal with her, and a few of the human traders openly joked about punching her and her stupid fishbowl face if the security guards were not there.
Gorok does not trust these human Galactic Credits.
N'har is an unremarkable bipedal humanoid businessman. His planet, Yis'meh is known for incredibly beautiful and jarring landscapes, formed from active tectonic plate behavior and extreme weather patterns at high altitudes.
On the list of most interesting things on his planet, his species does not rank top 50.
Like most of the galaxy, he too had no concept of money, credit, or literally any economic system more complex than barter.
N'har does not trust these human Galactic Credits.
Scrulvi is from a species of six foot tall hedgehog-like quadrupeds called the Dlaivo.
They are born with incredibly hard shells, grow poisonous spikes on their back, and can gallop deceptively fast. Also, they breed very quickly. In the early days of their development, some combination of these factors was how they survived.
It was definitely not their brains. Most galactic species consider the Dlaivo to be the dumbest species to ever gain sentience and reach the stars. They survive in spite of their brains.
When they finally discovered FTL, predators on their home planet were actually still a major threat to their average resident because the Dlaivo had never found a solution to them. A neighboring species (the Bhaks) pitied them, decided to use their planet as a military training camp, and killed off all their natural predators for them over a couple of months of target practice exercises.
The Dlaivo thanked them profusely and never considered the possibility that they might be there to occupy and sell their people into slavery. Which, to their credit, the Bhaks did not do.
The Dlaivo were the butt of many village idiot jokes in the galactic community. For example, some would joke that the underwater Arans actually discovered how to make fire at an earlier point in their development than the Dlaivo.
Like other galactic beings, however, their prejudice against credits ran deep.
Scrulvi does not trust these human Galactic Credits.
Scrulvi trusted the humans, though. After all, Sarah and Jen had never cheated him. None of the human traders ever did. Sure, it seemed like they were giving the other traders better goods for their items, but the humans’ goods were very valuable, everyone could win, and Scrulvi almost always stumbled into one small profit or another anyway.
When Sarah offered to give him a credit account and to start trading with credits, he didn't understand, but Sarah is so nice! Surely, what she's offering can't be bad for him.
So Scrulvi stumbled into the greatest profit of his life when he was the only trader landed on the spaceport taking credits when Stearns’ incentives program got announced.
He offloaded all his sale items, filled his cargo hold with the highest quality fruit, all in record time, and with a fairly big chunk of change in his credits account.
He didn't know what to do with the credits, but maybe he can ask Sarah about that the next time he comes back to Earth… oh well.
N'har, the unremarkable, did not trust these credits, but he was seeing with his own six eyes what it's doing. For some reason, all the humans wanted to trade with the idiot Dlaivo next to him first.
Thinking about it, hah, they must be scamming him out of all his goods.
When Scrulvi took off half an hour later with a full hold, he was shocked. This must be some new scheme the humans are running with their new credits.
But when another Dlaiva (seriously, how did these morons even figure out how to operate spaceships?) took off ten minutes after she started taking credits, he was beginning to wonder.
Alright, maybe he was the mark, but he was burning to know what the trick was. The worst he has to lose is a little of his cargo, right? And whatever clever scam the humans thought up, maybe he could learn it and try it on someone else later.
He beckoned Sarah over, got a credits account, and took off half an hour later with a full hold of fruit and some leftovers in his credits account.
Must be a long con.
Gorok did not fill her hold that day. She watched angrily as the other traders around her all offloaded their goods and filled their cargo with fresh fruit.
One after another took off.
She refused to take credits from this Sarah human.
It was silly. It's just all numbers on a viewscreen.
She was a trader. She traded goods, for goods.
That's how it's done. That's how it's always been done. And that's how it'll always be done.
Eventually, the other traders in orbit complained that she was occupying the landing pad for far too long. She was forced to leave Earth without conducting a single sale or transaction.
After this trip, Gorok did not make many sales. Dwindling profits meant that she was forced to trade her ship in for a relatively small underwater plot near where she grew up. She built a beautiful home, had many little Arans, and lived happily ever after.
Not everyone was built for the offworld trading life.
They quit the fruit business. That was a side hustle that built up capital for them initially. What Galactic Credit had now was a bustling bank business that no longer needed that extra profit on the side to sustain their business model. And they didn’t want to remain in competition against their customers.
Benny Jr and Jen had done a little side project on a jailbroken Bohor air filter, and found that with a little tweaking, they could have the air filters intake the aerosolized oxides of carbon clogging up the atmosphere and forge them into beautiful pure diamonds.
They were selling that on the side for now, purely because of how profitable it was, but it was likely once everyone else figured that out, the artificial diamonds flooding the market would force a commodity crash, like gold had when alien gold flooded Earth's markets. There were rumors that the De Beers diamond monopoly company was buying up numerous Bohor air filters from the newly opened Johannesburg spaceport in South Africa.
Other than that, the fees were more than covering all their cost of doing business. The lawyers, the accountants, the servers, and a sizable salary for every founding employee.
Over the alien trader booths, more and more traders started putting up the signs that said, "I ❤️ GC”. Sarah was especially proud of those signs. They were given to traders who would take GC for all transactions to signal to humans that they were open for business.
By now, this was most of them.
Some new traders would occasionally come down and not have an account. They would quickly get an account and one of the GC signs, or rarely, they would refuse and be asked to leave by other traders waiting in line in orbit.
As it turns out, peer pressure was often just as powerful an economic force as a market incentive.
Getting the alien FTL comms tech from a bunch of technical drawings to interface with the Galactic Credits site was not easy, but Jen and her team of engineers had done it. They'd put together the first financial application on the GalacticNet, and to go with it, the first offworld point of sale system in the galaxy.
You can instantaneously access your credits account from one side of the galaxy to another. Several backup systems were also copied from existing human credit card systems, like offline transaction storage and carbon copy card sales slips.
After the traders' credits cards were upgraded to chip cards, Galactic Credits were rapidly becoming indistinguishable from any other payment systems on Earth.
As a result of the aliens' consumer economies being restricted in scale by barter, their GalacticNet was used much like the human Internet was in its early days: for academic, governmental, or military use.
Much of the traffic was for big picture information exchange. What passed through the FTL comms were big news headlines, research data, emergency calls for help…etc. Without widespread consumer goods in most societies, there were no personal computers, tablets, and phones.
It's not that aliens couldn't produce those goods; in fact, their electronics were in some ways much more advanced than human ones, but few people had them. They were produced in big batches, and then bartered off one by one to people with goods that electronics makers had.
The first consumer apps on the GalacticNet were made by humans because the first consumers on the GalacticNet were humans. And like the academics who watched normies flood the Internet in its early days, the existing users on the GalacticNet were filled with fascination, mixed with a noticeable trace of horror, as the residents of Earth began to flood the GalacticNet with porn, social media, games, businesses, and more porn.
At first, it was lonely. The GalacticNet wasn't much different from the Internet, plus a few brave aliens who would venture to upload videos introducing themselves to the masses of Earth.
Not to be left behind, some other civilizations started buying consumer electronics from Earth traders and handed them out to their people. And what started as a lonely project was starting to make the galaxy a closer, more connected place.
What the residents of Earth saw was definitely not what they expected.
As Sarah learned more about the way the galaxy worked, the more she felt bad for the aliens. From what she heard from the traders, saying that life sucked outside of Earth was an understatement.
There were always shortages. Not enough things were always being produced, so beings had to share things that shouldn't be shared. Most beings lived in absolute squalor.
The tiny percent of traders that she'd interacted with are supposedly some of the richest beings to have ever existed in the galaxy, and yet they still sometimes have trouble upgrading their ships, finding supplies or maintenance, or even just to buy a nest or house. They had few luxuries and quality of life goods.
"Without widespread usage of currency, economies are extremely limited. Bartering is so primitive by human standards, that there are some economic historians who say no barter economy has ever existed in human history because currency is so vital to any real economic activity that they have always gone together," Stearns had said.
Other economic experts on Earth have been predicting the same thing since the news of lack of money spread. She didn't believe it until she saw the footage on GalacticNet. Video of what the aliens considered to be normal life looked like ghettos, or even worse, disaster zones.
They had been able to make and acquire the ships and goods they had, through tens or hundreds of thousands of years of inheritance and hand-me-downs. They could create technological marvels beyond humanity's current means, but they could only do so with time. Lots and lots of time.
On a technological basis, they were collectively a bit further advanced than Earth. They could travel between the stars, cure cancer, and modify the atmosphere!
On a GDP or production per year basis, forget about industrialization. The galaxy hasn't even fully entered the feudal age.
This paradox shocked humans to their core.
For Sarah: At first Galactic Credits was a project to make money off aliens. At some point, it started being a project to make aliens smarter, to make them understand money, so it was easier to make money off them. And now, she could only see a path forward for it as a charity or some kind of galactic advancement project.
The galaxy needed help — now.
Galactic Credits was about to hold the galaxy's hands through a speed run of the last three millennia of human economic development.
A couple months after Stearns started making changes, the whole company drove down to the spaceport.
As Sarah and co reached the trader booths, they noticed a mix of human and alien traders chatting and joking around.
"Oh how about this one. What's the easiest way to become a millionaire?" Asked a human trader, with one of the oldest money jokes in the book. After a pause where the other human traders respectfully didn't ruin his joke, he delivered the punchline, "you start as a billionaire and let your son go shopping with your credit card harharhar."
The humans grinned and the aliens made their approximations of laughter.
"Hey it's Sarah and Jen! Speak of credits and cards, and here she comes!" Zarko said as he noticed them approaching.
"Hey-o Zarko, here's Dr. Stearns. Dr. Stearns, Zarko," Sarah introduced the two, and they nodded at each other in the traditional universal greeting that's become commonplace on the spaceport.
"Ah! Dr. Stearns," said Oliver, a human trader, grinning, "I hope you're not here to increase our fees again."
"You better believe your fees are increasing. I know what you put in that OJ you sell. That much sugar isn't good for the poor alien children, you know?" replied Stearns, who could take it and hit back about as good as any boomer could.
The other traders pretended to look at Oliver scandalously. Hah, as if they weren't all pumping their goods full of additive sugars to get the aliens hooked.
"Speaking of orange juice, I was trying to offload two tons of it for some reactor fuel on Zakabara Prime, and unfortunately the exchanges there did not accept fruit juice as an acceptable trade item for reactor fuel. Guess I won't be taking my business there again," huffed Zarko.
The other traders nodded knowingly. Zakabara Prime rarely accepted food products in exchange. The Zakabarans were an incredibly protectionist planet that had many farmers who didn't like the incredible competition that Earth was bringing to the table.
"Actually, that's one of the things we came here to talk about," Stearns put on his serious face, "we're about to start making offworld Galactic Credits consoles available to the trading public, within a year. It would allow you beings to buy and sell from other traders from anywhere in the galaxy!"
By this point, many of the alien traders that had normally bartered or traded with each other would come to Earth to use the terminals that the human merchants had to conduct fractional transactions, for a processing fee from the humans, of course. There was a small but growing number of human traders that would come with just their tablets and process cargo for aliens for free all day.
Technically, this was rent seeking of the worst kind, but GC had not discouraged this type of behavior. For one, Earth was growing to be an increasingly popular destination for traders galaxy-wide. This was excellent for business, and it was cementing Earth as the trade goods and exchange center of the galaxy. All trade routes led to Sol.
For another, technically these processing merchants were providing a service, one that was only necessary because there was no offworld usage of credits.
Now, GC was about to put them all out of business.
The implications of this were not lost on the aliens. They didn't understand money, but they are not stupid.
Well, except the Dlaivo.
Those oversized hedgehogs are very stupid.
What the traders knew is that whatever the humans were doing with these credits on Earth was very profitable for the traders, and they no longer thought of credits as a scam or scheme, but rather an intricate new institution that was rapidly expanding.
Traders everywhere were whispering about Earth's new system. The idea of a currency was becoming less of a taboo. The pamphlets freely handed out at its spaceports certainly didn't hurt.
Skeptics were still coming down the gravity well to see how it all worked, and not all of them were convinced. But many lifted off with a full cargo of fresh fruit and a credits account…
If you could use human credits offworld, no one was really sure what could happen.
Not even the humans.
"Sounds good, where do I sign up?"
Sneak peek on themes for the next chapter:

This chapter was meant to be a natural stopping point for the first arc of the story. The next chapter gets a bit darker and deals with some pretty mature themes to set up the next arc. There's quite a bit of death, not due to war.

RoyalRoad
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