In this episode of the Futurum Tech Webcast, I was joined by my colleague here at Futurum, Fred McClimans, for a conversation about the GameStop trading saga. We started with a conversation with a brief history on the stock market and the popularity of short selling and then offered a quick recap on what exactly happened with GameStop, the Reddit community and the amateur investing platforms in the past week.
We discussed:
- The backstory of trading platform Robinhood;
- The tech aspect of trading that has made this situation possible;
- The role other companies and individuals have played like WeBull, TD Ameritrade, and Elon Musk;
This unprecedented trading situation was made possible by technology advancements both within and outside the stock market. Fred walked us through the digitization of the market including applications that brokers, traders, and amateurs use to make frictionless trades. We also explored the social aspect of this situation and the potential, but highly unlikely claim that collusion happened. Fred also explored the potential outcome of this situation and the chance that short selling could be eliminated by the fear of short squeezes. While the subject matter can be complicated, it’s actually incredibly fascinating how a group of amateurs can put the screws to the professional traders.
Lastly, we did a quick fire round on people and companies on the edges of this situation and the impact they’ve had. We covered, Elon Musk, Dogecoin, Bitcoin, and Tesla. Elon Musk has notoriously baited people into short selling Tesla so we think it will be interesting to watch how the aftermath of the GameStop trading situation impacts other short selling positions.
This is a fascinating conversation that covers the ins and outs of this situation in an easy-to-understand format. It’s definitely one you don’t want to miss.
Watch the video interview here:
Grab the audio here:
Disclaimer: The Futurum Tech Webcast is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this podcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors and we do not ask that you treat us as such.
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Transcript:
Daniel Newman: Hello and welcome to Futurum Tech Podcast and Futurum Tech TV. I’m Daniel Newman, your host today, joined by Fred McClimans, Senior Analyst Research Director on our team at Futurum Research. It’s a Friday we’re recording this, but it may be a Monday, a Wednesday, a Saturday when you’re listening to this, because we don’t really know, because the beauty of content online is it lives as long as people are willing to click that button. Interesting show we have today, Fred. First of all, happy Friday. Welcome to the show. This is a show that you and I offline loved talking about this topic, but very rarely have a good excuse to put this on the air.
Fred McClimans: That is true. It’s one of those many subject areas that there’s just so much out there that’s interesting, you just dive in. Making the time to actually get it out there and have these great conversations in front of other people, that’s the important part, to put our ideas out there in the light of day.
Daniel Newman: Well, as analysts, that’s what we do. We ingest. We enrich, we digest, hopefully nurture data. I mean, we’re like computers. We’re like algorithms, and we need an opportunity, we need somewhere for this to all go.
Fred McClimans: I was just thinking we’re like Splunk in a way, that massive data ingestion engine. We categorize. We analyze. We derive insights.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. And as you know, Splunk’s a good one. We’re kind of an observability tool, but then at some point we’re also like business intelligence. Yeah, absolutely, Fred. So great show here today, and if you wonder by now what we’re talking about, you see that little header. If you’re listening and you’re not seeing the headers, we’re on video, but some people listen on Spotify or Apple. Wherever you’re listening, thank you for doing that, by the way. The header says, “What happened in the markets this week?” Yes. We’re riding a trend. Yes, everybody right now is talking about, really, they’re talking about GameStop. Everybody. Like the day of the big short, when everybody had a soundbite about what had happened to the housing market, well, now everybody’s going to have a soundbite about short selling, market makers, Robinhood, and GameStop. We want to hopefully use our chops and our work as industry and financial analysts, we cross that chasm pretty well doing a little bit of both, to provide some clarity on the market and also some opinion, because that’s what this is.
So before I jump in and we officially start the conversation, let me just say this show is for information and entertainment purposes only. I want to be very clear about that, especially with today’s content. So while we will be talking about publicly traded companies, we will be talking about the markets, we are not suggesting that anything we say should be taken as financial advice. Fred McClimans, I’ve been talking a lot. I haven’t said much yet, but why don’t you give the rundown real quick? What happened this week?
Fred McClimans: Dan, I’ll try and make this as short and concise as possible. For the last number of decades, the stock market has been manipulated to an extent by short sellers and also to an extent activist investors, who go out and they take a position in a company and they use their leverage to achieve a particular outcome, usually an increase in the value of an equity. Short sellers, on the other hand, have found an interesting way to bet that the stock price or the value of a company is going to go down over time, and they bet in that direction. So you have people investing long term going up, people short selling going down.
What’s interesting here is it’s worth pointing out that the original intent of the stock market was for companies to actually raise capital a public way, and to have their investors benefit from the successes of the company so that everybody would uplift at the same time. But over the past couple of decades, especially with short selling and now with high frequency trading, that purpose has gone by the wayside. The way people make money today is by executing on the trend, the quick up or down movements in the stock market. So a couple of weeks ago, it became clear that there were some really heavy short positions in GameStop. So there were a lot of people that had very strong, short positions in GameStop. In particular, some very significant funds out there that as their general business practice, that’s what they do. They find companies that they believe are overvalued and they buy short positions in there.
Well, it turns out that when you have a short position, without getting into the mechanics of how that all works, at a certain point in time if the stock goes down in value, you essentially take the short position. You are borrowing stock, you’re selling it at a lower price, and then pretty much just covering that spread there. That works out great. But if the price of the stock goes up in the marketplace, you find yourself in a very squeezed, very tight position where you’ve borrowed the stock at X value and agreed to pay whatever the current value is, and if that goes up, you have to pay a lot more.
So WallStreetBets, Reddit, community investment forums. These have been around for ages. You see them everywhere from the chat rooms and the Stocktwits rooms, and people just generally going in and individuals discussing what’s going on with the stock. Well, these groups now have gotten to the point where they are so massive, there are hundreds of thousands of people. They’re connected in real time through social media. They are able to not just put their ideas out there, but share their ideas with hundreds of thousands of other people. Now, let’s also bring in applications like Robinhood and Webull and others that have allowed these people to actually trade in almost a frictionless manner. It’s a gamification of trading. You have your app. It’s very easy. You go, “Yes. I want these shares.” Tap, tap, tap. Flowers and rainbows come up. I bought the stock, great. Well, these guys figured out that there was this short squeeze with GameStop, and they went after it aggressively.
They started promoting the stock. They started talking about, “Hey guys, let’s all get in. Let’s go for this. Let’s drive this stock higher, and let’s really put it to these guys.” And they did, to the tune of maybe 20 plus billion dollars they put it to these guys. So they essentially got the short sellers in a position where short sellers had to cover, on the wrong side of the equation, the difference in value. That has been a significant change in the marketplace. Nobody really likes short sellers. They’re out there. They make their little plays. They also, by the way, the institutions that do this, a lot of these guys and just short sells in general, they’ll do whatever they need to do publicly to push that stock down. They’ll talk about why they think it’s going to tank, how quickly it’s going to tank, how far it’s going to tank. Basically what happened is the community, the crowd, the investment community out there, investment crowd, the wisdom of the crowd, they have beaten the short sellers at the short sellers’ game.
Now, this had some pretty significant ramifications, because yesterday Robinhood and Webull and TD Ameritrade and a few others actually stopped the purchase ability of their investors to buy new shares in GameStop and a few other equities. The reason they did that was because at the end of the day, when you’re done with all this trading back and forth, there’s a margin call and you have to settle up, and they need a certain amount of cash available to cover this margin call. That’s where we’re at today, where the volatility and the increase in price has gotten so great that the system just isn’t built to support this high level of volume, and this massive 50, 100, 200% increase in the valuation of companies into the tens of billions of dollars that fast.
So right now, everybody’s taking a collective breath. Politicians are weighing in, saying, “Hey, wait a minute, Robinhood and others. You can’t stop the trading from taking place.” The investors, the individuals, the retail investors in these communities, they’re pissed off because they feel that Robinhood and others have given the institutional side an unfair advantage, because while Robinhood users were shut out from buying equities, they could still sell, but more importantly, the institutional investors, they could buy and they could sell and they could short and do whatever they wanted to do during this period.
Is it fair? No, it’s not fair, but it is the way it is right now, and I think at the end of the day, the retail investors are still putting it to the shorts. I think the idea of short selling as a way to make money in this market overnight has been fundamentally changed. It’s going to be an interesting battle. Fortunately, I think that that battle is going to cause a lot of disruption in the equities market, and by default, in the enterprises. In the businesses, the brands, the organizations, the companies out there that are publicly traded, or that do business with firms that are publicly traded, because the economic landscape right now has become very uneasy. Think of it as that nice beach front by the ocean, that all of a sudden the beach front’s not quite as stable and firm as it was, and if your house is too close to the beach, maybe there’s a little bit of risk there.
Daniel Newman: A lot to unpack there, Fred. I’ve definitely followed the whole situation very closely here. It’s an interesting set of circumstances that have come together. A lot of questions are being raised, like how sophisticated is this group of investors? Is sharing an idea online with a group of people that decide to form a common goal and then work together, meet the criteria for certain trading activities that are deemed as illegal or unfavorable among SEC and regulators? That’s going to be something that’s going to need to be looked at very closely. I read a lot of that meme type content about people being able to go on CNBC, these hedge fund managers will be able to go on CNBC forever and hock their ideas. Not to mention that disclosures of short positions was never a requirement. These funds could actually be talking about a company, not necessarily disclosing specifically that they’re short on these companies, which is an interesting difference. You’ll see they’ll say who they’re long on, but they don’t actually have to disclose when there’s a short position.
And then of course, there’s the indirect circumstances of these kinds of situations here. We’ve seen some heavy selling that have been done, and on these days in which these small groups of activists, Reddit investors have been pushing up the prices of not really just GameStop, but Blackberry, AMC. There’s a dozen other companies indirectly saw effect. Maybe even more. There was a lot of trimming of the flowers in order to pay for the weeds. The thing about that is a lot of this goes back to, well, why does somebody short? Well, somebody shorts generally because these companies are fundamentally at risk of a going concern. People wonder, are these going to be companies that are going to survive? GameStop is a retail video game store in a world of streaming and on demand. Is that a long-term great business proposition? A lot of it were low end reits. They’re Bed Bath & Beyond, or retail. Do you really need to go to a store to get your sheets anymore in the world of Amazon?
You know, there’s shorts in every stock. There’s going to be people that are going to short Apple. There’s going to be people that are short Tesla. But usually the short as a percentage of the float is relatively small. These are the people that played the do not pass line in a casino when the table gets cold. They’re making a decision based on momentum. But this here was, I believe GameStop at its peak at something around 140% of the float was short, which is an astronomical number without getting too technical for the audience. That basically meant when people go short, they borrow the shares, and then basically they get holed up when they close the position. So if the stock goes down, they actually get money when they close the position. If the stock goes up, they have to pay money when they close the position. It was a little bit like the big short with the housing though, where these collateral debt obligations were being 20 to one in 100. They were repackaging the same loan 20, 40, 60, 80. This was, these were brokers that were reborrowing out one share more than one time.
So this created a real opportunity for this, but I do think that there’s really two sides. So I want to change directions here for a little bit, because the real question, problem, and concern I think that everybody’s so interested in this week is all this technology that’s brought us together. Digital information, social high-frequency trading. So the backstory on Robinhood, let’s just talk about Robinhood for a minute, because they are getting the most prominence the platform. So Robinhood is known for their tweet, “Let them trade.” Robinhood is the, “We are going to save the common man for missing out the opportunity to be part of the economy.” This was the theory in the way at least the company was positioned. Now, the underpinnings and the not so secret part of Robinhood is it’s number one, I believe number one. And please, everybody can fact check me on this. But the number one financial backer of Robinhood is a company called Citadel, owned by a hedge fund billionaire by the name of Ken Griffin from my hometown here in Chicago.
Citadel, by the way, happens to be the backer of Melvin Capital of Citron to the tune of billions, and it was the company that covered Melvin when Melvin would have gone bankrupt in a normal world. So basically, it was able to short without any caution, because there was a backstop. But the long and short is the reason why Citadel was involved in Robinhood was that they wanted to be able to get ahead of the retail trade flow. So the deal is that yes, if you are the common person buying five shares of Apple and five shares of Amazon and whatever for your portfolio, they would get the first look. So Citadel would get that data a little bit ahead of the market and be able to, you start looking at high-frequency though, you’ve got hundreds of thousands and millions of users and you can see trade flow. That gives a pretty great advantage to a hedge fund that wants to initiate positions. So that’s the one.
The only other thing I’ll say about this whole Robinhood thing, so that’s a little bit of a conflict of interest that I think the SEC and regulators are going to have to look at very closely. The second conflict is going to be the decision that the CEO has gone all over the air to talk about, “Well, we were letting anybody that wanted to continue selling their stock.” When I’m listening to this, Fred, I’m like, you would have to be a moron to not realize how contradictory that is. The whole deal of this, the whole gamma squeeze was all about generating money you didn’t have on the way up, so you just kept purchasing. Most of these people were opening margin accounts and they were purchasing on every last cent they had. Selling was the fastest way to bankrupt these people. Selling was the way to take out the bottom from these people, because the momentum was the only way they were going to make money. By allowing sell, you basically created stop loss rates.
I mean, the second that the back channels were, that the hedge funds knew that they could buy and sell while others could only sell, all they had to do is start initiating positions to drive that price down, drive the stop loss rates, continue pushing it up, and that’s why you got that wild volatility. Here’s the thing, and Fred, I’ll turn it back to you as I’ve been talking for a while. If this was done in cahoots, if all parties knew that this was being done and there was a time that was being allotted, Robinhood, TD, Webull, that was massively illegal. That’s why I think there’s some sweat right now down the brow of these CEOs, because there’s a lot of speculation. That’s all it is right now is speculation.
Nobody knows anything though, that there was some sort of in cahoots, done much like this Reddit group did in cahoots, but nobody can really prove it. Nobody can say that any Redditor made another Redditor buy anything, and nobody for sure at this point can say that the CEOs or these hedge fund managers pressured these platforms, but it sure does stink.
Fred McClimans: Well, you know, you said something interesting there. And you’re right. There’s a lot of sniff tests that aren’t being passed here with this. But when you look at Robinhood, the way they make their money, they are one of the zero commission trading apps out there. That’s pretty much the way the entire market has gone over the last five, 10 years, from pay your commission and get your expertise to here, you trade on your own. We’ll give you advice if you want, but we don’t charge you a commission. Great attraction for small individuals in the retail space to get in.
Daniel Newman: Yep.
Fred McClimans: They make their money on the actual transaction. So they take their trades, anybody that’s doing this. They take their trades, they provide those to the clearing house. There’s a function that takes place there where a broker dealer actually buys and sells the individual shares of stock. So in the case of Robinhood and some of the other apps, they can make money on a piece of that transaction that’s coming through there if they choose, but they can also make money off the data, the value of that data that’s going into that pipeline where all the trades are taking place. If you’re a high-frequency trader, getting access to that data, well, that’s really important. You want to monitor that as quickly as possible. That’s one of the things that the big funds out there, and the high-frequency traders and the algorithm traders out there, they’ve been doing that for years now. They’ve been getting access to this data and they’ve been using that to make their buy-sell decisions when they’re not looking at a long position in here.
With shorting a stock, you’re making a bet and you’re essentially buying or taking an option to buy or sell the stock at a particular price. You don’t actually own the shares when you’re doing this. Probably more importantly, these short options, they have different strike prices at different dates. So it’s an incredibly complex thing that they have figured out a way to excel at. The individual investors here, they have found a way to collectively and collaboratively, as a group, without breaking any rules that I can see, I mean, I’m not an expert in that space. I’ve run equity research departments in the past, but don’t take my advice on this year. I’m just saying it doesn’t appear that they’ve done anything that would on the surface be fundamentally wrong.
So let’s take a look here at the tech aspect of this and what’s making this really possible. On the one hand, we have all of the trading systems now in the digital space. I mean, NASDAQ was sort of the original pioneer. The New York Stock Exchange now and all of the applications and all the broker dealers, everybody, it’s all computerized. The ability to buy and sell shares is just frictionless, like I said earlier. It’s a downloadable app. It’s quick, it’s fast. You can connect it to people around the world to get advice, and you can watch the trends, what’s being bought or sold in real time. It’s very easy for a lot of people to join a board, a bulletin board or a Stocktwits or a Reddit group here and say, “Hey, if you join this board, you agree that you’re interested in buying stock when we see stock going up. Everybody in? Great.”
Is that collusion? Yeah, I’m not sure that’s really collusion. You’re going to work as a group together and you support each other, and you share ideas with that, but you have all these things that have been made digital that are now making it easier and faster, faster to make those trades collectively as a group. The one thing that hasn’t changed is that margin settlement, that settlement date. That settlement, the idea between a trade being made and the cash actually going from one bucket into another bucket here, that’s still takes a couple of days. It’s money that sits there in limbo over that one to two day process, ideally with tech, you can get that down to a day or maybe down to hours, and you can have the actual settlement occur. So when I sell you, Dan, a share of stock we’re talking here about the amount of time it takes for you to actually give me the money, me get the money into my account, and we consider the trade settled and done.
That’s a couple of days. That’s one of the things I think has caused this issue here, because when you’re talking about this kind of volume, there’s a lot of cash and a lot of liquidity that needs to be available for these clearing houses to actually get this transaction complete and covered. That’s probably an area where there’s a lot that could be done to improve the speed of that, that would eliminate some of the issues with firms like Robinhood having to tap their credit line of a half billion and then borrowing a billion dollars overnight so that they can be comfortable and stable in what they’re doing. It’s an incredibly difficult thing to look at and figure out the long-term implications here, because there are so many variables in this.
But I do believe just from a fundamental perspective, if we get this process down pat and everybody agrees, “Hey, look, this is acceptable for these groups to go out and do this.” And by the way, they’ve been doing this but on a much smaller scale forever in the chat rooms and so forth. But if they’re able to now do this, retail investors on a large scale, what’s the implication of that? Well, it means that shorting a position is going to be incredibly difficult moving forward. These guys have now the intelligence capabilities that the large funds have had for years.
So retail investors, individuals, they’ve essentially caught up to the funds, so they can watch what’s going on and they can spot these short squeeze opportunities out there and they can pounce on them incredibly fast, which means that short-selling may not be a great idea moving forward as part of the mechanics of how the market makes money.
Well, if the market makes less money, okay. Now we have an issue here, because that’s starting to impact the overall financial structure. It’s worth pointing out Main Street, Wall Street, completely separate. But within that Wall Street business, there’s a lot of money that goes back and forth. If now because of the evolution of technology, and this let’s screw the institutions that have been screwing us for all these years, because of what’s happening there, it does make the stock market a fundamentally different market than it was a week ago. It’s now got a lot more uncertainty into it.
Because you make a long-term investment decision, and when I was on the equity side, we would put all the research out and we would hope that people would make decisions based on long-term value proposition of a company. Well, now you may have that peg. You may know exactly what’s going to happen with the company, even with 100% accuracy down the road, but you can’t stop some investor on the fund side from stepping in and putting a short position in, and a bunch of retail investors jumping all over that and causing just massive volatility in the marketplace.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. So we only have a few minutes, and this is a topic that deserves a lot of time, but for what we do, it’s not necessarily at the center, but it’s just something I think our audience could really benefit from hearing about. A couple of things I’d love to end on, a little bit of a lightning discussion here, because you and I are great at rambling for long periods of time, but it was a little back and forth.
First of all, when it comes to what happened with Robinhood and any of these others, do you see any, I still can’t make sense of why they stopped buying. I listened to his interviews. On all the networks, allowing to sell would create more liquidity challenges, and he kept talking about regulators, but the SEC didn’t force any action, so it wasn’t SEC, there aren’t regulators he’s talking about. I do understand clearing houses for trades to clear. He said it wasn’t a liquidity issue. There wasn’t a liquidity problem.
Fred McClimans: Right. Yeah, I’m not buying that.
Daniel Newman: Sounds like complete BS. I’m not saying that they did anything wrong. We don’t know yet. That will be seen. I think when you get Ted Cruz and AOC agreeing on something being a problem, you can be pretty sure there’ll be an investigation, but it just does sound like something doesn’t compute.
Fred McClimans: I agree that there are some inconsistencies in the story because we don’t have the full story yet, but it’s worth pointing out that the CEO of Webull, that’s W-E-B-U-L-L.com, and by the way, that is the number two app today on the Apple app store. Not surprisingly, Robinhood is number one and Reddit is number three in the most downloaded apps today.
Daniel Newman: It’s that time of the year.
Fred McClimans: Yeah. So this thing is just going to escalate here. But the CEO of Webull was on the air earlier talking about this, and he was asking, “Well, why did you make the decision to go ahead and to stop the purchase here?” He said, “Well, that wasn’t us at all. We really didn’t have a decision there. Our clearing house contacted us and said look, here’s the deal. They very quickly said, okay, we’ve got to go in this direction, because if we don’t start to pull back a bit on the activity, we could find ourselves in a situation where everything just collapsed.” Robinhood, they are their own clearing house, so they have to make that decision themselves. So it’s a little bit different than Webull and TD Ameritrade.
Daniel Newman: Like I said, so you and I, I think we had an agreement. We don’t have time left in the show for the mechanics, because like I said, this stuff’s fun. I could talk to you about it all day, Fred. You’re super good at this stuff, and thanks for it. But in the end, the only people that benefited when the selling stopped were the institutions. It’s just straightforward. The stocks just plummeted. They all went back. And by the way, they all went back to more where they should be, because these are not stocks. GameStop is not, under any fundamental analysis, worth $300 a share. There’s absolutely no way you can mathematically do it, except for the fact that it goes back to the old adage of it’s worth what people are willing to pay for it. As people will chase the opportunities and chase the gains, it does drive prices up, but this is a different level of manipulation.
Take away shorts, I mean, Fred, this morning, I have different stocks that were on the perimeter of these sort of squeezes. I saw [puts] being bought 6,000, which is basically people buying a short position and using an option instead of going short on a share. Massive short loading in the first 30 minutes of the day, or even pre-market, because certain people have pre-market access. And then what happens? Trips the short. It trips the sell, the people’s stop losses. It starts to make small retail investors that have a lot of their personal money at stake, they start getting nervous and they start selling. Remember, people, you’re supposed to sell on the way up, not on the way down, but people by nature sell on the way down. Okay. We got to put down one more thing, Fred.
Fred McClimans: Consider this. GameStop went down, went right back up again today, up 60%. It now has a market cap of, I think 22 billion, which is not that far off from Best Buy, and GameStop has revenue of three billion a year and not profitable. Best Buy revenue is significantly higher than that. You just can’t equate any value to GameStop that deserves this kind of valuation. You just can’t. Eventually that will come back down. It has to come back down.
Daniel Newman: So last thought. Lightning round. One minute. Dogecoin. Elon Musk. Whatever you want to say, let’s close out on that.
Fred McClimans: Elon Musk. So it’s interesting, because Musk and Tesla have been the target of short sellers for years here now, and he’s antagonized them on. It’s almost as if there’s a game going back and forth between Musk and the short sellers, back and forth to see who can best each other. Today, he changed his Twitter bio to include Bitcoin.
Daniel Newman: It just says Bitcoin.
Fred McClimans: Just Bitcoin. And of course, Bitcoin rises up. Again, market manipulation? I don’t know, but people react to what he says in here. He also tweeted out Gamestonk, indicating that he was at least tracking the GameStop situation here. It’s an interesting situation, because what I see happening potentially, and I saw some of this with, you can see the trends emerging with Tesla, back a couple of years ago when people were really going back and forth and trying to short it in, I could see that evolving to the point where some people intentionally take short positions trying to bait the WallStreetBets communities of the world. Just go in and pump the stock up. That’s one of the concerns that I have that we see moving into this. I’m not saying Musk has anything to do with that. That’s just sort of irrelevant, but I think that’s a big issue. And Musk, by the way, yeah. I don’t understand why Tesla is worth what it is. It’s speculation.
Daniel Newman: So I got to wrap it up here. I’m going to take my one minute lightning round. One, where’s Jim Kramer in all this? No idea where this guy disappeared to, but I’m really interested in that too. Elon Musk is an enigma. Everything he tweets, the guy actually said his stock was too expensive. I think he initiated a sell off on his own stock. Got investigated by the SEC. So that’s crazy. These companies, largely very hard to find the value. So there’s so many arguments on both sides. Really, the activity here is wild. It’s going to create a whole set of new regulations. Keep an eye out for that.
Final thought is Dogecoin is dogshit. I have no idea how that actually became a thing. It was a joke. The whole thing was created on a joke, but it just goes to show that when people can chase a profit, they will chase a profit. Now you have an $8 billion joke cryptocurrency. So Fred, on that, I want to say thank you. Fun topic. I love these conversations.
Fred McClimans: Thank you, Dan.
Daniel Newman: If we can do this every week, I think we could have a whole lot of fun. But you know what? For everybody out there, thanks for tuning into this. We know we’ll get back to our regular scheduled programming, talking about IT and talking about AI and ML, but all that stuff was part of this conversation in case you didn’t catch that. But hit that subscribe button. Join us. We’re a little wacky here. We’re willing to take some risks and talk about some things, just like the Gamestonk and what happened in the markets this week. Fred McClimans, Senior Analyst Research Director of Futurum, Thanks for joining me today.
Fred McClimans: Thank you, Dan.
Daniel Newman: All right, everybody hit that subscribe button. Hit that subscribe button. Hit that subscribe button, and we’ll see you later.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
