Take-Two shares jumped in premarket trading Friday because a bunch of guys who get paid six figures to watch YouTube issued bullish notes on a f*cking trailer. Not a product. Not revenue. A two-minute video.
The analysts saw the Grand Theft Auto 6 preview and concluded that people want to buy it. Groundbreaking work. Really earning that Bloomberg terminal subscription. Next they'll discover that water is wet and charge institutional clients $500 per insight.
This is the same industry that needed a focus group to determine whether the iPhone would sell. The same brilliant minds who downgraded Amazon at $300 because books don't make money. Now they're confidently predicting blockbuster demand based on trailer views like they cracked the Da Vinci Code.
Retail traders read these notes and think they're getting alpha. They're not. They're getting confirmation that other people also saw the thing they saw. But it comes from a man with Vice President in his email signature, so it must mean something.
The previous GTA game made $1 billion in three days and has sold 190 million copies. It prints money like the Federal Reserve with a coke habit. But sure, we needed Morgan Stanley to tell us the sequel might do well.
Somewhere a day trader is canceling his daughter's piano lessons to buy Take-Two calls at open because an analyst with a 37% accuracy rating said the trailer looked good. He'll be underwater by lunch and blame manipulation.
The stock will probably go up anyway, which means the analysts will claim they nailed it and retail will claim they're geniuses for following them, and none of it will have anything to do with a trailer that everyone with an internet connection already watched for free.
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