The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 14 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Ryan Cohen: Committing $500M of personal capital to eBay transaction
“I'm putting five hundred million of my own money into this transaction.”
Cohen: Supplier gifts signal overpaying, while supplier anger signals optimal pricing
“If our suppliers are sending us gifts in the mail, that's a really bad sign. It means we're overpaying. If our suppliers are telling us they never want to speak to us again, it means we're getting the right price.”
Cohen: $2B in costs can be immediately cut from eBay
“Number one is on immediately improving earnings through cutting costs. And Pulling two billion dollars of costs out of the business and on the operating base of, you know, close to five and a half billion of expenses and 2.4 billion spent on sales and marketin…”
Cohen: In-game digital item market could exceed eBay physical market
“But if you look at in-game digital items, there's no marketplace that is providing liquidity for them. And so I would use eBay to provide liquidity for in-game digital items. And I believe that addressable market is significantly larger than could be much larg…”
GameStop originally invited Ryan Cohen to board to fend off activist
“Well, when it came to GameStop, originally it was a passive investment and I owned under five percent and the CEO actually reached out to me because they were fighting an activist and they wanted me to join the board.”
Cohen: Applying Chewy's playbook to GameStop was a 'really stupid' mistake
“I went in and I had this bias from Chewy, which is basically like everything that I learned at Chewy, I was going to apply to GameStop. And it took me about, I don't know, maybe Just over a year to realize that was really, really stupid.”
GameStop pays cash on the spot for graded PSA 8+ cards
“You can bring in a, Graded PSA card eight and above, and we will give you cash on the spot. We buy back the card, and then we either sell it in the store, or we bring it back to our warehouses, and we sell it online.”
Ryan Cohen: Chewy could have been profitable sooner with less marketing spend
“It could have been a five hundred million dollar business. It could have been a hundred million dollar business. It could have been profitable if we would have spent a lot less money on marketing, but life is too short to do it small.”
Cohen: eBay active users have dropped by 30 million since COVID
“I mean, if you just look at how they've done in the past since COVID, Every important metric is down. GMV is down. Active users is down by thirty million.”
Ryan Cohen: Chewy reached billions in revenue with negative working capital
“And we had negative working capital, and so it was a business that was able to get billions of dollars in revenue and not consume a lot of capital.”