Paul Kasaija

1/27/2021

10:58 PM

 

What is the big deal with the GameStop stock rising to an unsustainably high valuation? What are the consequences of this stock bubble? Today I read up on the effects of viral stock buyers on the market, and I was quite amused to find the results. But that is a topic for afterward: today I finished editing the completed commentaries on Zero to One and made the writing more coherent to read. Just editing some of my previous articles gave me a headache, though it was more because I had to read all those words rather than because of grammatical or other mistakes. I will continue to re-edit any mistakes that haven’t already been caught but I believe I fixed the majority of them today.

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For a run-down on my thought process while editing the commentary: first I have to get a clear big-picture view of the whole article. Therefore, my first step is to read the article like a reader would, parsing any mistakes that could mess up the reading experience. Since I don’t have a proofreader tool or much of a grammatical tool (besides Grammarly which doesn’t even work on Wix well), I have to edit the article after every mistake I find. As I correct these errors, the biggest one that stands out is a lack of gaps between quote (“”) markers and text; of course that drives me bananas from repetition, but it’s honestly better than more major blunders. The next biggest errors are un-italicized quotes, quotes that are lost within the paragraph, and fixing these paragraph sizes to a better length. I generally don’t use Wix’s quote tool unless it is from a source that I myself am using to support or counter an argument I made, rather than using it for every book quote. I would say that this is mainly because I used a lot of quotes in the commentary and it would have been distracting to have 100s of Wix quote boxes while reading. So in doing that task myself I can have a bit of tedious work ahead because of formatting issues that occur while porting my work from Google Docs to Wix Blog.

 

By the way, heads up to anyone using the Wix Blog— make sure to back up your work on Google Docs or your preferred word processing software because there is no real way to get your work back otherwise (maybe besides resetting the site to an earlier version but that has its own complications). The reason why is because the right-click-menu "Undo" button is broken (I don’t know why). That’s why I write all of the site articles first on Google Docs. I also write my journals on external writing software for quicker access.

 

Anyways, the next main editing task is to correct my own logical and (bigger) grammatical errors. One will probably never catch all of them in the same run, so I do multiple once-overs of possible biggies that I may have missed (and I would suggest other writers do that as well). Once that is completed, I’m mostly done— then I will continue reading and make some big edits to help improve the flow, tone, and style of the writing. After that, I just click publish and move on to whatever else I am doing during the day. This routine might happen again in a few days after the next commentary, so let’s just say that I used a bit of spare time to prepare myself for all of these long days ahead. That’s why I’m glad to be done with that arc of writing and to move on to find other interesting subjects.

 

As for Gamestop (GME) stock valuation, I actually came across the r/Wallstreetbets subreddit on Sunday and saw the (now-famous & viral) post that encouraged buying GameStop stocks and raising the price with some explicit language from both poster and commenters. It was honestly just funny to see such a savage-looking post make some Redditors some serious money, and cause such a splash in the stock community and the internet. According to one post on Twitter by the stock news site MarketWatch, the Redditors were simply taking advantage of their big numbers to mess with the stock prices, and that effectively hurt short-sellers and actual investors in the process. However, short-sellers are those traders who stock and sell it for a profit before rebuying it at a lower price to return to the borrower; they are only profiting off of the stock in a parasitic way and don’t deserve pity for losing money on GME. Rather, it is ironic that MarketWatch is against this younger generation of stock buyers because it affects the bigwigs in the existing market, despite the fact that they genuinely sought an opportunity in the stock market and turned it into a profit. I believe that anybody, even bandwagoning Redditors, who takes the risk deserves the profit. So I’d say just don’t believe the articles that describe it as a “dangerous trend” of investing, and go for it if you are willing to take the risk.