AMC To $100,000? | Tom Zuzolo Talks About The Future of AMC

Boom, people! Welcome back to the show. Today we got with us Tom Zuzolo. Did I say that right? Tom Zuzolo?

That is correct. A lot—

there it is—

with that, but you got it.

Tom, welcome on. Uh, it's— I'm excited to have you on here. So Tom, if some of you guys don't know, Tom's got an awesome, well, company just launching right now, and then a YouTube channel that he talks through trades, most notably AMC. And right now AMC's been this hot Stock that we've seen all over the place. We've been talking about it for 6 months. This last 2 weeks it's had a huge rally. I think today, what is it at, $61, something like that?

It's at $62.55 right now.

$62.55. And, and what, like 7 days ago it was trading around $15, $16, something like that, right?

We were getting into it around— my average price was— is about $11. I started entering the position at about $10, but I really can't take any credit. All the credit goes to Reddit and the amazing community over there, and even some of the community members over on YouTube and stuff. I draw all my inspiration from them, so I'm not the genius who came up with this thing.

Well, it's awesome. Well, you do a good job of presenting it on your channel. By the way, go give Tom— subscribe to his channel. He puts out great content on there. And by the way, we are filming this Wednesday, June 2nd. We are— the plan is to post this— we're filming today, our plan is to post it tomorrow. This should be pretty up-to-date market stuff. Tom's gonna take us on a ride through through his thoughts on, on AMC, where it's going, all that kind of stuff in this episode. It should be a pretty fun time. Now, Tom, take us back a little bit though. Uh, give us— I know there's— there might be people listening on this show that have heard of the WallStreetBets community, Reddit community, but they don't really know much about it. They're just— they're, you know, interested. Take us back to the beginning of how did this whole movement of apes and, you know, emojis and memes and all that kind of stuff come about?

Well, firstly, I wouldn't say I'm the expert on the— or the spokesman for the whole community, but my interpretation of it, a lot of the AMC stuff comes from the r/AMCStock community, which is kind of a subcategory or a spinoff of the original Reddit WallStreetBets community. There's also other subcommunities like r/SuperStock and some other certain communities as well. And I think initially there was a lot of attention around GameStop, obviously, and even there still is. But I think what really caused the spinoff to be as big as it is right now is the fact that the short sellers never learned their lesson from the GameStop scenario. If you go and look back at GameStop, they didn't really learn their lesson and they actually continued to grow their short position in companies like AMC and GameStop even after we had that, you know, dangerous squeeze for them. One would think that they would learn their lesson, but I think there's kind of a lot of pride that goes into that industry. And a lot of them think that the retail investors are the dumb money and that they're the smart money. But realistically, I think we're starting to realize that if we all group together, we're a lot smarter and more powerful than these institutions. And I think that answers your question of where this all started. We just realized we're better and smarter and more powerful than these institutions are.

Yeah, well, it's, it's cool to see, and I love hopping in Threads and seeing just what's happening. We have 44 million new traders in the last 12 months that are, that are trading now, which is just insane. It's, it's really shifted markets, um, entirely. We have that many traders that are just regular Joes out here trading and making, you know, trying to make a little, a couple bucks on the side. I think it's pretty cool. Um, now I got a few questions for you, and we'll— and we're gonna dive in and pull up charts, all that kind of stuff here in just a second.

Cool.

But I want to ask you, How do you, you know, you have these threads, these groups, how do you know this is not like, you know, there's scammers or bots coming in that are— how do you decipher between the good stuff and the bad stuff? Because anybody can go in there and post. I mean, you could have hedge fund guys coming in and posting whatever that favors their position. How do you know, you know, who's actually posting, what to trust?

Well, a lot of the information, it's not exactly information that somebody on Reddit came up with. It's more, it's It's more of a more accurate and quicker way of spreading preexisting information. Like, for instance, there might be something that the CEO of AMC tweets about, and that is easily spread and deciphered. Or maybe certain people look through disclosures, or they see different buying and selling that's going on. And I really only cover stuff that can be independently verified because you're right, there are bots on Reddit because Reddit is starting to become a much larger community, and there's even bots on YouTube.

All right, Tom, so what do you think the play is on AMC right now, uh, from your seat? Again, it's not financial advice from here, but what's the— what are you seeing from your chair for the future of AMC?

Um, I did— I think from my perspective, the most important thing moving forward is the sentiment and, and also making sure that these hedge funds don't get away with what's called a pseudo squeeze, or at least what we've, we've been calling a pseudo squeeze. Um, I think that they kind of got away with it with the GameStop situation. They kind of convinced everybody That basically the squeeze was over. Everybody had their fun, everybody got a couple hundred dollars out of it, but after that it was back to usual business. And I think that's what they're going to try to pull with the AMC situation. We know that some of these institutions can manipulate the media. They already have been trying to purchase Discord channels and YouTube channels, and, and they obviously can get the news interviews very easily. And I, I really think the, the play that they're going to try to— the, the cards that they're going to try to play They're going to try to convince us that, you know, we had our fun at $65 or $62, but after that, nothing else is realistic. But what they maybe are trying to conceal from us is the fact that we have the best possible hand here, and basically we have the royal flush, and they're going to try to convince us to fold it. And I think the most important thing here is not only to buy and hold, but also to continue to combat the, the untruthful sentiment, fear, uncertainty, and doubt that they're going to be trying to spread into the markets, because it's going to be warfare out here. And honestly, we're just getting started. And if you think that these hedge funds are going to try to, you know, just let you get away with grabbing a couple hundred thousand dollars from them, you're out of your mind. They're going to fight you tooth and nail for that money. And that's what they've been doing for centuries. And they're going to continue to try to do that. The big difference here is that now we have more power than them.

So you're calling it a pseudo squeeze, meaning are hedge funds— like, they have a short position, they're gonna buy up the stock so that retail investors believe, oh, we won, we must have completed the short squeeze. And little did we know, they actually are still holding on and waiting for everyone to sell and it come back down where they can exit their squeeze. Is that correct?

Well, I, I believe that most of these hedge funds also have some, some long shares that they're holding off to the side. We've seen them purchase some long shares over time. And, and I wouldn't be surprised if they have some long shares that they're going to dump into the market at a reasonably high level, not maybe the, the highest level, but maybe when we hit around $100 or $75, they might start dumping some long shares into the market. Um, and, and then that, and then that, I think, is when they're going to be pushing this narrative that the squeeze is over because there's going to be a big sell volume type of, type of appearance. And I think they're going to be pushing that narrative, and I think that's going to be something that a lot of young retail investors might fall into. And I think we're especially susceptible to that because we have a lot of young retail investors getting started into AMC. AMC is the first big position that a lot of new retail investors are taking. And because of that, they might have less awareness of some of the tricks that these institutions are going to try to pull, at least in my opinion.

Interesting. So Um, so in your opinion, it's what, $63 right now? I mean, we've had this huge run-up. In your opinion, is we need to— you need to play long then? Hold for a long time? Don't take off? It still needs to go higher? The short squeeze is not complete? To what end? When, when do you know if a short squeeze is complete? And, and are you— well, I don't ask you personally— are you in for the, for the next 18 months, 3 years, 5 years on AMC? Are you here to make a quick quick buck and get out? What's, what's the game plan? And what are your thoughts?

So obviously, I'm never going to be able to predict with accuracy when exactly this short squeeze could end, or really how high it could go. The thing I do believe is that we have the power to basically name our price for whatever we want to. You have to remember, these, these institutions, they have hundreds of millions of synthetic shares that they need to buy back They also have all these short positions that they need to cover. And a lot of these are going to be forcefully executed through margin calls or through whatever. And eventually, they're going to have to buy a ton of shares. That's the one thing we know. The other thing we know is we have a large community of people who are going to refuse to sell their shares until we reach an astronomical level. If we get to the point where some of these hedge funds run out of shares to buy, and they have to start purchasing it, from these last diamond-handed investors, we basically get to name our price. And that's why I get a lot of flak for saying this, but I honestly do believe that a $100,000 share price is theoretically possible. Will it happen? A lot of things, you know, could change if that'll happen or not. It's really based on how large this movement grows. But I do honestly think that we could hit a situation where we get at least $100,000, because you got to remember, there's hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of retail investors who are not willing to sell their shares for less than $100,000. If you have a big market of people trying to buy—

$100,000, wouldn't the market cap be, you know, half a trillion on AMC then or something like that?

It would be over $50 trillion. It would be more than the entire stock market combined. And I know that's going to sound crazy to a lot of your viewers, but, you know, a lot of people would have said $62 is crazy a year ago. And you have to just break this down. We have hundreds of millions of shares that need to be purchased. They don't have another option. They have to purchase these shares. They've printed synthetic shares, you know, too many to count. We don't even know how many synthetic shares have been printed by these hedge funds. They also have massive short positions. We know from Adam Aron, the CEO of AMC, that there are at least 3.2 million of us in the United States and Canada. That occupies at least 80% of the retail or of the shares total. We have all these investors.

80% is held by 3.2 million shareholders that are retail traders in small, small lot sizes.

Just in Canada and the US. And there's probably— interesting. And that's from the CEO. I'm not making that up. That's, that's something we know. So we know we have a ton of shares that need to be purchased. We know we have a ton of retail investors. Of those retail investors, I would estimate that about a quarter of them have committed not to sell until $100,000. Now I know it sounds crazy, but it's just how it is. There's a quarter of those retail investors that are not selling until we hit $100,000. I am personally one of them. You can mark me on the record. I'm going to be holding until $100,000. I might take a little bit of profit with some of my shares, to be totally honest, if we reach, let's say, over $1,000 or $10,000. But I'm not going to be selling the bulk of them until we reach $100,000. If there's a big amount of purchasing going on, There might be a situation where they have to execute on some of those expensive shares because there could be such a share shortage that there's really no other option. And that's really the big fundamental theory behind this, and that's why so many people are interested in what goes on with AMC, because a lot of people, myself included, genuinely do believe that we could see a $100,000 share price. Will we see it? That depends on external factors. But could we see it? I believe we could.

Interesting. And so, I mean, this is— and AMC stock is a perfect stock to do this on. What's the estimate on the total short position? Do you have a ballpark of how many synthetic shares they've created? Do you guys have any data behind that?

So, I don't remember the exact number, but I might— so, I might get it a little bit off, but there's roughly 106 million shares traded per day on average. That's the trading volume. So that means over the past 3 months, there have been, I believe, 8 or 9 billion shares traded. And what that means, there's a float of around 400 to 500 million shares. I believe last time I checked, it was about 416 million shares in the float. I could be wrong on that. So basically what this means is that the shares have overall been traded, if we only had the true shares, Those numbers would indicate or prove that the entire float has been traded 19 times over in the past 3 months. Now you have to remember, 80% of these investors are long-holding retail investors. Do you think they're trading the entire float 19 times? Probably not. Which indicates to me that there are a ton of synthetic shares in the market which are being traded around and around and around, and that's what's increasing this volume so much. To boil it all down, there's an insane amount of volume in AMC, and there's really not that much trading volume that we can account for, which indicates to me that there's a lot of synthetic shares in the market. I would estimate at least 300 million synthetic shares and possibly higher. I can prove that there are over 80 million synthetic shares, but I think that's a very low number. And so that's my estimation.

Interesting. Would you account for high-frequency traders in that trading pool, or is that not counted there if there's high-frequency traders?

No, there could be high-frequency traders there. I'm sure they're not—

Account for the, the amount of volume being 19 times traded, or is that, is that not factored in?

I don't think so. I mean, you have to remember, like, like our, like our CEO has told us, 80% or 90% of the traders are just like me. We bought AMC once, we keep buying it. And we're holding on to it until we reach hundreds of thousands of dollars in our account. And I don't think that we can account for, you know, 8 or 9 billion shares traded in the past 3 months if we're just looking at the natural shares. I think there's a lot of synthetic shares out there which may be high-frequency traded. But I don't— I mean, it's my personal opinion. You're welcome to disagree. But personally, I think it's more likely that there's a lot of synthetic shares. versus the likelihood that retail investors, mom-and-pop investors, have been, you know, frequently trading this stock. I think we're more likely to be seeing a lot of synthetic shares, especially since we already know there are a lot. It's just a matter of how many.

Interesting. Um, yeah, it'll be curious to see what goes on. Now I want to ask, how, you know, why, why AMC? Why not another company? You know, what, what put the target— what, where, why did this become the battleground? Maybe going back in history, just a little bit of, of the history of AMC, but were there, you know, how did, how did you guys target this many synthetic shares or this big of a short position on companies, you know, like a GameStop or like, uh, like, uh, AMC? Thoughts there on, on that and where that information came from?

Um, well, I can't speak for everybody. I'm, I'm not the leader of the movement, so to speak. I would say I'm a follower, but For me personally, I got into AMC for a couple of reasons. I liked how the CEO was engaging with the retail investors. He just announced today that they're going to be doing special, you know, free popcorn for the retail investors and a special membership. I love it. I also liked, you know, a lot of the data I was seeing about these synthetic shares and the shares sold, short sold. And then on top of that, I liked— just for me personally, I like to look for stocks that are getting a lot of engagement online so that not only can I invest in them, but I can also make videos talking about them. And I saw AMC was really trending on Google Trends and on the Reddit sentiment trackers. And I thought— for a while, I dismissed it because I just thought the people at AMC were crazy. But as I learned more about it, I just fell in love with the community and what I was seeing. And so I can't speak for everybody. I'm sure everybody gets into it for different reasons. But for me personally, it was a combination of those 3 factors.

Gotcha. Well, and I feel like that's a, you know, what you just described is a common tale for these 44 million new traders and investors in the last year is, you know, they, they see something trending or they saw, you know, and they— and it feels like this movement of, of the, the people versus the suits, right? And, uh, I think it's an incredible movement and we'll, you know, we'll see what happens. It was I mean, the GameStop was so fun to follow and see. For people to know, I personally don't really buy. I've never bought AMC, GameStop, Dogecoin, any of those. I like to watch it and follow. I'm more of a, I guess, traditional investor, you'd say, a long-term investor with my portfolio. I haven't dabbled even at all into those. Maybe you're going to convince me, though, to get some AMC. I don't know. After this call, I might go buy some. We'll see.

Yeah. Well, I used to consider myself the exact same. I didn't touch GameStop. I thought the people who invested in GameStop were insane. I never touched Dogecoin. Actually, I did. I bought, I bought $1,000 of Dogecoin back in, in, uh, last year, and it would be worth $400,000 today. But, but that's besides the point.

Wow.

Um, I sold it out of fear. So, but I was, I was all into long-term investing. Um, but I realized that sometimes if a lot of people are super passionate about a certain stock, you know, maybe, maybe there's— it's worth looking into. And I regret dismissing the GameStop situation as much as I did. And I didn't want to regret dismissing another situation like AMC. And it's kind of one of those things, either 3.2 million of us are dead wrong, or maybe we have a point. And that's up to the individual viewer to decide. But it might be just worth looking into before you deem everybody as stupid. Maybe they have a point. Now, I'm not talking to you, I'm talking to the average viewer.

Yeah.

I know you don't think that, but But yeah, that's that's my opinion.

It's interesting. I I why I love the movement and I love what's going on. I want to ask you a different question on. I know Congress had a big hearing after GameStop and and looked into a lot of things. I've got my personal opinions, but I want to hear your opinion on the SEC and them handling. I mean, it seems they have. First off, I just want to say the SEC has has their hands full right now between cryptocurrencies and all these new traders and Reddit groups and people like you on YouTube and even myself that talk. financial, the financial world right now. And, uh, any thoughts from, from you on the SEC hearing that they did with— on the— after the GameStop, um, GameStop whole situation? Any thoughts from you on regulators and what they should be doing and what they shouldn't be doing?

I think regulation is fine, but I think, I think selective regulation is not okay. And I think that these regulators let these hedge funds get away with murder, and then when it comes to, you know, a random, a random person in a random part of the world who doesn't have much money, then all of a sudden it's time to get all strict. And I think that their eyes are looking in the wrong places. A lot of what's going on with AMC is straight-up fraud as far as I'm concerned with what some of these hedge funds have been able to get away with. And I would welcome any type of intercession from regulators as long as they're fair and they regulate everybody equally. I think there is a point to be made about if people should be allowed to essentially get together and pump up a valuation of a stock. Personally, I think it's fine, but if regulators want to be involved with that, they need to also regulate the hedge funds who do it and the institutions who do it as well.

It's the hypocrisy of it. I love how you touched on that. They are getting worried that You know, retail investors doing the same thing hedge funds have been doing forever. Yeah, I think you're spot on. You mentioned you touched on things that potentially are fraudulent inside of the AMC community. What do you mean specifically?

I think that creating synthetic shares should be illegal. I don't think that they should have been able to get away with this. Basically, when they naked short a company, they basically print a share out of thin air and give it to somebody and call it shorting. That, as far as I'm concerned, is not shorting. That's fraud. And that also messes up with the supply and demand of the whole, you know, company, or the shares of the company.

Right.

And so I think that's fraudulent. And personally, I also think that some of the manipulation that they are doing to the stock is also fraudulent. A lot of what they do is just spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and just straight-up untruthful information about the company. And I don't believe in it. But at the same time, Now we're playing, you know, we're fighting against them and now they're starting to get butthurt about it, but it's too late for that and we're here to take their money and I don't care.

That's awesome. I love it. And there's a lot of talk too that there's more hedge funds on the long side, on the buy side with the Wall Street Rebel crew. And, you know, you see there's talk of these big, you know, they act like it's the Wall Street Rebel movement, but in reality, it's some big players behind the scenes also pushing that movement. Thoughts there on— from you, do you really, do you really think it's just individual retail traders doing this, or do you feel like there's a lot of movement from big institutions also pushing stocks in a certain way? They're, they're seeing the same thing you guys are, and they're riding the wave along with you. Any thoughts there?

Um, I, I know that personally I'm, I'm planning on someday starting a hedge fund, uh, you know, kind of, kind of in a similar vein. I know we're, we're going to talk about that on my channel, but, but I think there's a tendency to take credit away from how powerful the retail investor actually is. And I think some of that can sometimes get into people trying to take away credit. But I wouldn't be surprised at all if there's institutional-level investors who are in the crew, so to speak. And I know there are, as you say. But honestly, I do think that the majority of the power comes from just people like you and me who just group together, and we know we're stronger together than than a bunch of these institutions. And so, to answer your question, I think there's some of that. I think there are institutions who are starting to wake up to what's going on here. But at the same time, I got to give credit to us because I think what we're doing in the community is more responsible than anybody else.

I like it a lot. Yeah. And it's interesting to see this. It's definitely changed the The markets a lot. I love there's a book called Reminiscences of a Stock Operator. Fantastic book, and it talks about the 1920s and how the trading frenzies happen, and and a lot of retail traders were trading, and we had these roaring 20s. He had market manipulators, all stuff. And the book has it was written in I think the 30s, 1930s or 40s, and is one of the most famous finance books of all time because the same things in 1920s, by the way, are before the SEC. The SEC was made in 1933. And to control some of this stuff. And the reason that book has stood the test of time is because all the stuff that happened before the SEC is still happening today. All these market manipulators and things changing. You just mentioned a number of things, right? Creating synthetic shares and naked shorts and all this sort of stuff. They talk about it in the 1920s and it's still happening today, even with all this regulation. And it's one of my favorite books. They have these bucket shops and they trade. And it's a quite a fun read if you're in the markets at all. It's funny to draw parallels that we really haven't. I mean, we're in the same game we were 1920s where it's like you mentioned, a battlefield and you're sticking out to win. I love it. Tom, for people to come, I know we mentioned your channel before. Go give a subscribe to Tom's channel. It's really cool if you want to learn more about AMC, what he's doing. Tom, also talk to us about your new project you're working on.

Yeah. So, it's kind of in the vein of what I've been talking about here in this interview, but I'm sick and tired of what is going on in these markets. And I think a lot of people have a passive role in it, and that's totally fine. But I'm young and I have energy and capital, and I want to take more of an active role in it. And so, I have a free organization. Anybody can join. There's no money asked. You can pay $0. It's completely free. Um, but basically we release, uh, we legally release insider information to retail investors because, you know, these hedge funds, they, they get all this information and then we're left here, you know, with nothing to trade with. And I'm sick and tired of it. And so now we're releasing it, legally releasing insider information. We're SEC compliant. We have lawyers and stuff like that. So it's not illegal. But honestly, I don't care if I'm sued. I don't care if I'm driven into the ground financially. I'm sick and tired of what I'm seeing in these markets, and it's time for retail investors to have the same level of information as everybody else. I don't know why, you know, a rich guy with a hedge fund gets to have all this extra trading information, and then the guy who actually needs the money doesn't get any trading information. And so that's why we release it. We leak a lot of stuff. We just got done with our first information drop. A lot of warm reception on that. And that's kind of what I'm working on. We're completely funded by donations, so we don't ask for any money, but we do have very generous supporters who just give us money for what we do because they believe in the cause. But yeah, that's basically my company I'm working on.

What's the name of it and how do people find it?

insider.services. It'll probably be linked below, I'm guessing. But yeah, it's— I'm not asking for anything. I'm just asking for you to give it a check out, see if you're interested in it. And I think it might be something of value for your trading or investing.

Gotcha. insider.services.

Yep.

Right. We'll put it below. You guys can check it out. Very interesting. I know on there you were saying you guys are going to use drone footage, all sorts of different tactics to get this kind of insider trading. Now, I want to ask just a follow-up question on that. How do you make sure it's legal? What are the— and I'm just— this is just me being curious. How do you go about that in a legal way? I'm very curious how that works.

Okay, so if we discover the information ourselves, such as with drones or with research or whatever, it's legal. We can release it however we want. Now, we get a lot of insider tips. I actually have a lot of associates who work in hedge funds and work in institutions, and they tell me stuff all the time. That was where the initial inspiration for this came to be. And that's a lot more tricky. Basically, we have to, you know, Ask them if they have received this information illegally or if they have the right to share this information. If they verify that it is true, then legally we're off the hook and we can share it however we like. On top of that, a lot of the information—

If you verify that they can actually share it or if it's true.

We verify both. So we ask—

Verify both. It's got to be true and they've got to be okay to share it from their corporate.

Okay. We have them sign off and verify that they are legally allowed to share this. If they lie on the disclosure, it is what it is. That's not our problem. If they tell us the information and they tell us they have the right to share it, then, you know, that's on their hands. That's not on our hands. And then also, a lot of the information we get, it will point us in the direction of disclosures that we can actually research ourselves. So a lot of these companies, they dump information hidden in these disclosures that nobody ever reads. And a lot of our tips will point us into those disclosures, and we'll be able to find out interesting stuff about what's going on or read between the lines. Yes, it's a tricky game. We're going to get sued. We're probably going to eventually go bankrupt, but it is what it is. Like I said, I'm young. I have capital. I'm willing to make a dent in Wall Street, and I don't really care what happens. The bottom line is I'm sick of it. I'm sick of what's going on on Wall Street, and we're changing it.

Wow, I love it. Investor.Services. Go check them out. Or sorry, insider.services. We'll have it below as well. Pretty cool. I love the movement you're leading. And I mean, your channel's blown up. You've had a lot of people on there and checking you out, and, and obviously for good reason. I mean, you have some great content on your channel as well. So go check out Tom's channel. And Tom, thank you for coming on.

Thank you so much for having me.

It's been a pleasure. Thanks.