This post about Cellar Boxing is a direct and unedited reproduction of the original Reddit post by u/thabat. Apes Army does not endorse any of this information, nor should it be regarded as financial advice. Always do your own research.
I found the entire naked shorting game plan playbook posted on a forum in 2004. They called it “Cellar Boxing”. + Yahoo / Morningstar censoring GME data depending on your IP. It’s not a glitch.
Hello beautiful apes!
I have 2 points to show you. First is that Yahoo is showing completely different values depending on your IP. Try using a VPN with a different country and you’ll see.
Second is that I stumbled upon the ENTIRE FUCKING GAME PLAN of the naked shorting scheme. I guess an insider spilled the beans anonymously on some forum in 2004.
What is going on with GME over the last 9 months is a game plan called “Cellar Boxing”.
The link is at the end of this post. If you don’t give a FUCK about the Yahoo data, then just skip to the end and read that. Seriously EVERYONE NEEDS TO READ THAT POST. It is like the holy grail. I got emotional reading it as it confirmed all of our combined DD about naked shorting, rule exemptions, dividends, zombies, even talks about shills…..EVERYTHING… in one fell swoop.
I wrote all this Yahoo stuff before I found that link and I just had to stop and stare at the wall for a bit.. This was going to be a much longer post, but I decided to just stick to the facts without speculative walls of text so you’re not overwhelmed.
Because trust me, reading that post from 2004 is going to blow your fucking mind. It blew mine and everyone I showed it to.
Okay so first point:
Here’s the Yahoo data from my IP in the USA
Here’s the data from a European VPN
First thing that stands out to me is Enterprise Value.
According to
Market capitalization is the sum total of all the outstanding shares of a company. Enterprise value takes into account the debt that the company has taken on. Enterprise value, therefore, can identify strengths or weaknesses that market cap cannot.
And https://www.arborinvestmentplanner.com/enterprise-value-ev-calculating-enterprise-value-ratios/
A company with more debt than cash will have an enterprise value greater than its market capitalization. Companies with identical market capitalizations can have radically different enterprise values.
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I had thought perhaps they’re doing some kind of fuckery with convertible preferred shares, or convertible bonds. Which they very well may be, but I can’t prove that right this second. So I leave this idea in speculation land.
But let’s hand it off to u/semerien for the actual reason for this discrepancy:
Total cash per share is 5.64
Cash at 1.72 billion
Which means Yahoo thinks there is just over 300 million shares
Enterprise value is using that share count at current price
57 billion for ev using 304 million shares at 190 price, cash at 1.7B and debt at 0.7 billion
I may have rounded every single number cuz I’m lazy but what’s a few 100 million in rounding errors
—————————————————Okay ok gimme my mic back lmao
So.. No speculation. Mathematical Fact: Yahoo’s calculating on 300M~ shares for outside USA when factoring Enterprise Value.
Where does Yahoo get this data?
https://help.yahoo.com/kb/finance-for-web/SLN2310.html?locale=en_US
- Financial statements, valuation ratios, market cap and shares outstanding data provided by Morningstar.
Okay so Yahoo gets this specific data from Morningstar.
Who does Morningstar get it’s data from?
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1289419/000110465906031591/a06-11178_28k.htm
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We collect most of our data from original source documents that are publicly available, such as regulatory filings and fund company documents. This is the main source of operations data for securities in our open-end, closed-end, exchange-traded fund, and variable annuity databases, as well as for financial statement data in our equity database. This information is available at no cost.
For performance-related information (including total returns, net asset values, dividends, and capital gains), we receive daily electronic updates from individual fund companies, transfer agents, and custodians. We don’t need to pay any fees to obtain this performance data. In some markets we supplement this information with a standard market feed such as Nasdaq for daily net asset values, which we use for quality assurance and filling in any gaps in fund-specific performance data. We also receive most of the details on underlying portfolio holdings for mutual funds, closed-end funds, exchange-traded funds, and variable annuities electronically from fund companies, custodians, and transfer agents.
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So that answers the question as to why the float changed from 126M to 248M in the same day.
This is not a glitch.
One way or the other, the data got pushed “from individual fund companies, transfer agents, and custodians” to Morningstar, to Yahoo. Intraday.
Why Morningstar shows different than Yahoo? I won’t speculate. But it can’t be a glitch. Just based on the source and how it’s updated. Speculate on why or how they’re censoring it, not on it being a glitch.
These different values I believe are important because they paint a picture of intent to hide the true data. It’s bits of the real data slipping through the cracks.
Let’s look at the numbers:
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Enterprise Value in USA = 14.22B
Forward P/E in USA = 36.67
—
Enterprise Value in other countries = 57.07B
Forward P/E in other countries = $6,347.00
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EV is calculated on 300 ish million shares. People say “Yahoo’s data is always screwy”. I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s the opposite. The market is always being FUCKED with. As you’ll see in the post I’m going to link to. And Yahoo just has a hard time cleaning it up and censoring it. Because of SO MUCH FUCKERY. And sometimes shit slips through unintentionally.
Forward P/E.. What the fuck is forward P/E some of you might be wondering?
(Side note: Yahoo gets this data from a data analytics company called Refinitiv.)
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https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/forwardpe.asp
Forward price-to-earnings (forward P/E) is a version of the ratio of price-to-earnings (P/E) that uses forecasted earnings for the P/E calculation.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/050515/what-does-forward-pe-indicate-about-company.asp
A company with a higher forward P/E ratio than the industry or market average indicates an expectation the company is likely to experience a significant amount of growth*. … Ultimately, the P/E ratio is a metric that allows investors to determine how valuable a stock is, more so than the market price alone.*
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Here’s an example for Tesla:
https://finbox.com/NASDAQGS:TSLA/explorer/pe_ltm
“Tesla’s p/e ratio for fiscal years ending December 2016 to 2020 averaged 211.2x. Tesla’s operated at median p/e ratio of -37.2x from fiscal years ending December 2016 to 2020. Looking back at the last five years, Tesla’s p/e ratio peaked in December 2020 at 1,255.0x.”
So we all know what happened with Tesla. The P/E ratio seems to be pretty good at calculating the growth. The higher the number, the bigger the growth. A number in the thousands is basically “Oh shit we got a winner”.
Thing is, you get the number by calculating the share price divided by the estimated future earnings per share.
“For example, assume that a company has a current share price of $50 and this year’s earnings per share are $5. Analysts estimate that the company’s earnings will grow by 10% over the next fiscal year. The company has a current P/E ratio of $50 / 5 = 10x. “
Well Gamestop’s at 190, let’s say for what ever crazy fucking reason we’re expecting future earnings per share to be at 5 dollars per share. We’re currently expecting around 1 dollar in January but for sake of argument let’s pretend it’s $5.
$190 / 5 = 38.
Okay interesting so far that makes sense for the USA calculation roughly.
But HOW THE FUCK DO WE GET $6,347?
It’s impossible. Unless.. wait a sec..
$31,735 / 5 = $6,347
Could it be the true value of GME is actually $31,735 right now?
I mean even if we use the 1 dollar per share earning thing from January, that’s still assuming CURRENT VALUE = $6,347 per share….
It is my belief that based on these two numbers, the fact that they change depending on your IP + the float being at 248M, as well as THE MIND BLOWING INFORMATION contained within the post I’m about to link to in a second…
That the Yahoo thing isn’t a glitch.
It’s a hole in the fuckery veil they’re trying to place upon our eyes.
It’s to hide the fact that the float is shorted at LEAST 3x verifiably.
(I believe it to be 50x by now)
And also to stop us from deducing the actual share price in what ever dark pool of death the shorts are hiding in using these numbers. They’re hiding the company’s fucking growth from us.
In comparison for shits and giggles, I checked movie stock in the VPN and Yahoo’s changing that data too.
But not to hide the shorts or hide growth. Instead to hide a decline.
Movie Stock’s Forward P/E is N/A for USA but for other countries it’s -68.71
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https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/negativeeps.asp
“A negative P/E ratio means the company has negative earnings or is losing money*. … Investors buying stock in a company with a negative P/E should be aware that they are buying shares of an unprofitable company and be mindful of the associated risks.”*
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If I’m right about this whole thing, then this by itself is proof that GME is the MOASS and whoever’s doing it, either Yahoo, or Morningstar, whoever doesn’t want us to know that movie stock is obviously not the MOASS.
Now……..
Whether you agree with me or not, you MUST read this post:
Archived in case it gets deleted
You know what, just in case you’re too lazy to click it, I’ll copy and paste the whole thing. You can click the link to verify. It’s that important to read.
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Sunday, 03/07/04 07:56:25 PM
“Cellar Boxing”
There’s a form of the securities fraud known as naked short selling that is becoming very popular and lucrative to the market makers that practice it. It is known as “CELLAR BOXING” and it has to do with the fact that the NASD and the SEC had to arbitrarily set a minimum level at which a stock can trade. This level was set at $.0001 or one-one hundredth of a penny.
This level is appropriately referred to as “the CELLAR”. This $.0001 level can be used as a “backstop” for all kinds of market maker and naked short selling manipulations.
“CELLAR BOXING” has been one of the security frauds du jour since 1999 when the market went to a “decimalization” basis. In the pre-decimalization days the minimum market spread for most stocks was set at 1/8th of a dollar and the market makers were guaranteed a healthy “spread”.
Since decimalization came into effect, those one-eighth of a dollar spreads now are often only a penny as you can see in Microsoft’s quote throughout the day. Where did the unscrupulous MMs go to make up for all of this lost income?
They headed “south” to the OTCBB and Pink Sheets where the protective effects from naked short selling like Rule 10-a, and NASD Rules 3350, 3360, and 3370 are nonexistent.
The unique aspect of needing an arbitrary “CELLAR” level is that the lowest possible incremental gain above this CELLAR level represents a 100% spread available to MMs making a market in these securities.
When compared to the typical spread in Microsoft of perhaps four-tenths of 1%, this is pretty tempting territory. In fact, when the market is no bid to $.0001 offer there is theoretically an infinite spread.
In order to participate in “CELLAR BOXING”, the MMs first need to pummel the price per share down to these levels. The lower they can force the share price, the larger are the percentage spreads to feed off of.
This is easily done via garden variety naked short selling. In fact if the MM is large enough and has enough visibility of buy and sell orders as well as order flow, he can simultaneously be acting as the conduit for the sale of nonexistent shares through Canadian co-conspiring broker/dealers and their associates with his right hand at the same time that his left hand is naked short selling into every buy order that appears through its own proprietary accounts.
The key here is to be a dominant enough of a MM to have visibility of these buy orders. This is referred to as “broker/dealer internalization” or naked short selling via “desking” which refers to the market makers trading desk.
While the right hand is busy flooding the victim company’s market with “counterfeit” shares that can be sold at any instant in time the left hand is nullifying any upward pressure in share price by neutralizing the demand for the securities. The net effect becomes no demonstrable demand for shares and a huge oversupply of shares which induces a downward spiral in share price.
In fact, until the “beefed up” version of Rule 3370 (Affirmative determination in writing of “borrowability” by settlement date) becomes effective, U.S. MMs have been “legally” processing naked short sale orders out of Canada and other offshore locations even though they and the clearing firms involved knew by history that these shares were in no way going to be delivered.
The question that then begs to be asked is how “the system” can allow these obviously bogus sell orders to clear and settle.
To find the answer to this one need look no further than to Addendum “C” to the Rules and Regulations of the NSCC subdivision of the DTCC. This gaping loophole allows the DTCC, which is basically the 11,000 b/ds and banks that we refer to as “Wall Street”, to borrow shares from those investors naive enough to hold these shares in “street name” at their brokerage firm.
This amounts to about 95% of us. Theoretically, this “borrow” was designed to allow trades to clear and settle that involved LEGITIMATE 1 OR 2 DAY delays in delivery.
This “borrow” is done unbeknownst to the investor that purchased the shares in question and amounts to probably the largest “conflict of interest” known to mankind. The question becomes would these investors knowingly loan, without compensation, their shares to those whose intent is to bankrupt their investment if they knew that the loan process was the key mechanism needed for the naked short sellers to effect their goal?
Another question that arises is should the investor’s b/d who just earned a commission and therefore owes its client a fiduciary duty of care, be acting as the intermediary in this loan process keeping in mind that this b/d is being paid the cash value of the shares being loaned as a means of collateralizing the loan, all unbeknownst to his client the purchaser.
An interesting phenomenon occurs at these “CELLAR” levels. Since NASD Rule 3370 allows MMs to legally naked short sell into markets characterized by a plethora of buy orders at a time when few sell orders are in existence, a MM can theoretically “legally” sit at the $.0001 level and sell nonexistent shares all day long because at no bid and $.0001 ask there is obviously a huge disparity between buy orders and sell orders.
What tends to happen is that every time the share price tries to get off of the CELLAR floor and onto the first step of the stairway at $.0001 there is somebody there to step on the hands of the victim corporation’s market.
Once a given micro cap corporation is “boxed in the CELLAR” it doesn’t have a whole lot of options to climb its way out of the CELLAR. One obvious option would be for it to reverse split its way out of the CELLAR but history has shown that these are counter-productive as the market capitalization typically gets hammered and the post split share price level starts heading back to its original pre-split level.
Another option would be to organize a sustained buying effort and muscle your way out of the CELLAR but typically there will, as if by magic, be a naked short sell order there to meet each and every buy order. Sometimes the shareholder base can muster up enough buying pressure to put the market at $.0001 bid and $.0002 offer for a limited amount of time.
Later the market makers will typically pound the $.0001 bids with a blitzkrieg of selling to wipe out all of the bids and the market goes back to no bid and $.0001 offer. When the weak-kneed shareholders see this a few times they usually make up their mind to sell their shares the next time that a $.0001 bid appears and to get the heck out of Dodge.
This phenomenon is referred to as “shaking the tree” for weak-kneed investors and it is very effective.
At times the market will go to $.0001 bid and $.0003 offer. This sets up a juicy 200% spread for the MMs and tends to dissuade any buyers from reaching up to the “lofty” level of $.0003. If a $.0002 bid should appear from a MM not “playing ball” with the unscrupulous MMs, it will be hit so quickly that Level 2 will never reveal the existence of the bid.
The $.0001 bid at $.0003 offer market sets up a “stalemate” wherein market makers can leisurely enjoy the huge spreads while the victim company slowly dilutes itself to death by paying the monthly bills with “real” shares sold at incredibly low levels. Since all of these development-stage corporations have to pay their monthly bills, time becomes on the side of the naked short sellers.
At times it almost seems that the unscrupulous market makers are not actively trying to kill the victim corporation but instead want to milk the situation for as long of a period of time as possible and let the corporation die a slow death by dilution.
The reality is that it is extremely easy to strip away 99% of a victim company’s share price or market cap and to keep the victim corporation “boxed“ in the CELLAR, but it really is difficult to kill a corporation especially after management and the shareholder base have figured out the game that is being played at their expense.
As the weeks and months go by the market makers make a fortune with these huge percentage spreads but the net aggregate naked short positions become astronomical from all of this activity. This leads to some apprehension amongst the co-conspiring MMs.
The predicament they find themselves in is that they can’t even stop naked short selling into every buy order that appears because if they do the share price will gap and this will put tremendous pressures on net capital reserves for the MMs and margin maintenance requirements for the co-conspiring hedge funds and others operating out of the more than 13,000 naked short selling margin accounts set up in Canada.
And of course covering the naked short position is out of the question since they can’t even stop the day-to-day naked short selling in the first place and you can’t be covering at the same time you continue to naked short sell.
What typically happens in these situations is that the victim company has to massively dilute its share structure from the constant paying of the monthly burn rate with money received from the selling of “real” shares at artificially low levels.
Then the goal of the naked short sellers is to point out to the investors, usually via paid “Internet bashers”, that with the, let’s say, 50 billion shares currently issued and outstanding, that this lousy company is not worth the $5 million market cap it is trading at, especially if it is just a shell company whose primary business plan was wiped out by the naked short sellers’ tortuous interference earlier on.
The truth of the matter is that the single biggest asset of these victim companies often becomes the astronomically large aggregate naked short position that has accumulated throughout the initial “bear raid” and also during the “CELLAR BOXING” phase.
The goal of the victim company now becomes to avoid the 3 main goals of the naked short sellers, namely: bankruptcy, a reverse split, or the forced signing of a death spiral convertible debenture out of desperation.
As long as the victim company can continue to pay the monthly burn rate, then the game plan becomes to make some of the strategic moves that hundreds of victim companies have been forced into doing which includes name changes, CUSIP # changes, cancel/reissue procedures, dividend distributions, amending of by-laws and Articles of Corporation, etc.
Nevada domiciled companies usually cancel all of their shares in the system, both real and fake, and force shareholders and their b/ds to PROVE the ownership of the old “real” shares before they get a new “real” share. Many also file their civil suits at this time also.
This indirect forcing of hundreds of U.S. micro cap corporations to go through all of these extraneous hoops and hurdles as a means to survive, whether it be due to regulatory apathy or lack of resources, is probably one of the biggest black eyes the U.S. financial systems have ever sustained.
In a perfect world it would be the regulators that periodically audit the “C” and “D” sub-accounts at the DTCC, the proprietary accounts of the MMs, clearing firms, and Canadian b/ds, and force the buy-in of counterfeit shares, many of which are hiding behind altered CUSIP #s, that are detected above the Rule 11830 guidelines for allowable “failed deliveries” of one half of 1% of the shares issued. U.S. micro cap corporations should not have to periodically “purge” their share structure of counterfeit electronic book entries but if the regulators will not do it then management has a fiduciary duty to do it.
A lot of management teams become overwhelmed with grief and guilt in regards to the huge increase in the number of shares issued and outstanding that have accumulated during their “watch”. The truth however is that as long as management made the proper corporate governance moves throughout this ordeal then a huge number of resultant shares issued and outstanding is unavoidable and often indicative of an astronomically high naked short position and is nothing to be ashamed of.
These massive naked short positions need to be looked upon as huge assets that need to be developed. Hopefully the regulators will come to grips with the reality of naked short selling and tactics like “CELLAR BOXING” and quickly address this fraud that has decimated thousands of U.S. micro cap corporations and the tens of millions of U.S. investors therein.
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HO….LEEEEEE……FUQ
Bruh..
This was written in 2004.
I really don’t have anything more to say.
(Last minute about to finish this post and u/Hopeless_Dreams713 showed me a patent found by u/Toxsic99
https://patents.google.com/patent/US7904377B2/en which I THINK is a fucking patent for ladder attacks but I have no more brain power to spend after reading/writing this. So I include it as a bonus for any wrinkles with extra brain power to decipher.)
TL;DR Yahoo changes data depending on the IP. Seems like only USA gets censored data. Based on the forward P/E of the uncensored data, it’s possible GME is anywhere between 6k to 31k per share on some dark side of the fence. And “Cellar Boxing” is the game plan shorts use to destroy America.
Edit 2:
Edit 3:
Smart ape found reply in the post basically confirming that us requesting the share certificates is fucking them up the bum bum
Edit 4:
Edit 5:
Can’t just be a Yahoo glitch. Impossible.
https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/gme
Edit 6:
Bruh, we literally got onto the top 15 of Popular of all of Reddit with this. We’re breaking the simulation. LFGOOOOOO. And also if you’re new here from the rest of the Reddit and don’t know about Superstonk, we love you and this post is undeniable that the stock market is rigged and GME about to blow.
And I’m so happy that this information has a chance to be seen by more people. These hedgefunds have been destroying America for decades. Stunting our growth as a species. What kind of medical advances could we have made by now? Science? Technology? All shorted to hell because of some greedy hedge fund pricks.
Please share this with everyone you know so that more people can be aware of their tactics. It is important that they know they lost. And when we are in the financial position of power, we must be better human beings. And invest into technology and medicine and help the world become what it could have been.
This is our one chance at changing the world for the better.
Edit 7:
Edit 8:
WE MADE TOP 5 of r/all holy shit. *insert another emotional speech*
Also:
https://www.dtcc.com/about/leadership/board/david-goone
Edit 9:
Letter to the SEC from 2008 mentioning all this.
https://www.sec.gov/comments/s7-08-08/s70808-144.htm
Edit 10:
SUPER SMOOTH BRAIN EXPLANATION for those who have NO idea what is going on:
When you buy a stock, you’re betting that it’s going up.
But if you feel it’s going to go down, then there’s a bet for that.
It’s called a short bet. It’s pretty simple.
Imagine your friend has a watch priced at $100. And you think tomorrow it’s going to be worth $50. You say to your friend “Hey lemme borrow dat real quick” and you go and pawn it at a pawn shop for $100.
What happened? So far you have a contract to buy back the watch to give back to your friend, but you also have $100.
Tomorrow comes, and the price is $50. You go and buy the watch back for $50. You keep the $50 left over. Give the friend back is watch + like 5% interest and everyone’s happy.
But what if that watch increased in price instead of decreased?
You go to buy the watch back, and it’s $200?? Uh oh.. You now have a contract to buy the watch, and you’ll have to pay $100 out of pocket to buy it back. So you lost money.
You wait and figure it’ll go back down. To your surprise, the watch price just keeps increasing. $300, $500, $1,000 to $10,000 to $100,000 to $10,000,000
You owe your friend that watch at any price. No matter what. But you can keep waiting by simply paying him a fee every day to borrow. It’s called a borrow fee, oddly enough.
Unfortunately you only have limited assets. So sooner or later you won’t have enough money to pay the borrow fee. And then you’re forced to go bankrupt and sell all your assets and your house, and your car, and your boat, and your planes to pay for the watch.
So that’s what’s going on with GME. But instead of 1 watch, it’s billions and billions of shares. And they’re making fake copies of shares that they don’t even have.
Sooner or later, they must buy back the shares. And at any cost. And they will be forced to sell everything they own to do it.
Up until now we’ve only reverse engineered the idea and processes behind “HOW” they’re doing it. This post from 2004 detailed every step of the way. And it is very emotional to us because we were right. And they tried gaslighting us for 9 months that we were wrong.
Edit 11:
This question gets popped up alot. So if you’re wondering about how it affects movie stock, look at this comment chain:
Edit 12:
Some people are saying Cellar Boxing doesn’t apply to GME because it’s not at sub penny levels.
BUT YOU GUYS ARE MISSING THE FACT THAT GME WAS AT 3 DOLLARS A SHARE.
In order to CELLAR BOX the stock, they would have to first NAKED SHORT IT TO HELL.
They short it from 3 dollars hoping for it to go to below a dollar and then get it into that cellar range. BUT THEY FAILED. That’s what those people saying it’s not relevant to GME are missing.
It IS relevant to GME. Because CELLAR BOXING was the GAME PLAN. Imagine you have a playbook with strategies on how to play a game. THATS CELLAR BOXING. Naked shorting is a PART OF the CELLAR BOXING PLAYBOOK.
The funny thing is ppl who are saying to “stop talking about Cellar boxing” are also talking about movie stock. So …..
Edit 13:
Bruh.. SEC deleted the letter from Edit 9 of this post.
Here’s the archived of the file they deleted after this post blew up:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210912094334/https://www.sec.gov/comments/s7-08-08/s70808-144.htm
Edit 14:
Reached 40k character limit. Number 5 explanation:
Edit 15:
Edit 1: Promised link at end of the post, even though the whole post is contained within this msg lol https://archive.is/KSS6m