Ever wish you could go back in time and do Blockbuster over again? Like, how obvious was it ten years ago that renting VHS tapes (and DVDs) was going to be a buggy whip business, and yet how many people reading this shorted the stock?
Or, for that matter, Barnes & Noble (BKS)? Barnes & Noble is still around, and probably isn't going anywhere, but the stock used to be a lot higher. This is another business that technology has nearly made obsolete.
As they say, history may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Have you ever driven by a GameStop (GME) and said to yourself, why is that business still around? Don't they sell physical video games? Isn't there something called the, uh, internet?
Well, there is more to the story. GameStop has been a great business because you do not only buy new games there, you can sell your old ones and trade them in. And GameStop actually makes a lot of money in the secondary market for video games. But more importantly, it does what all successful retail stores do nowadays -- it is more than a place to buy video games, it is a community. It is a place where you can go and hang out and shoot the breeze about video games. It is probably the only store where the adults who work there are cool enough for kids to talk to.
And oddly enough, people still go there to buy games even though there is the, uh, Internet. Why is that? Well, I did a little digging and found out. Today's games are so sophisticated that they take a really long time to download. Nobody wants to wait for the games to download! They would rather just go pick them up at the store. But help is on the way -- the game developers have figured out a way to download the relevant parts of the code first so that you can start playing right away, and download the rest of it while you play.
Goodnight, GameStop.
I'm not the first person to come up with this idea, but the stock has been a stubborn short. Well, the company is doing a buyback (this is 2014, after all) and paying a hefty dividend. The short interest is high. Have you ever looked at one of those charts of an index of stocks with the highest short interest? To the moon. The last two years have been murder on short sellers, even in cases when it makes great fundamental sense. It's only a matter of time -- GameStop's business is going to disappear.
The company realizes this, and it has a strategy, but I think it is a bad strategy. It wants to focus on mobile gaming, and mobile devices. Loosely translated, it wants to become a cell phone store. That doesn't seem like such a hot idea. GameStop is pretty excited about it, though. It talks about how big the market for mobile gaming is going to get, and who knows, it might be right! But I don't think the stock is accurately pricing in the risks, here. You're talking about a big change in strategic direction. When Barnes and Noble tried the Nook, it took quite a few years to figure out that this was the wrong strategy, and then it became very difficult to reverse course. It almost killed the company.
GameStop is a short candidate for me, but I'm cognizant that shorts like this often don't work until the whole market turns. Be advised.
At the time of publication, Jared Dillian had no position in any of the securities mentioned.