This installment of The One Board originally appeared in Bowlers Journal International, March, 2021
Every so often, something happens that makes an otherwise disinterested general public take notice of a particular niche. This niche is usually known in some sense to all and is beloved and fully understood by a dedicated minority, but seems kind of weird, complicated and even standoffish to regular humans.
Bowling has infiltrated mainstream society on several occasions, but while such an instance may increase broad interest and inspire someone to ask you who you think you are and then assert he is, it rarely translates into an influx of new fans debating which shoe sole they should be using when the humidity is higher than 60%.
In recent days, the niche claiming mainstream fame has been the stock market. In particular, GameStop (GME).
GameStop, whose name itself is an anathema to bowling as we all know there is never a reason to stop a game, rose from around $18 to nearly $500 per share in January alone, despite nothing in the company’s earnings or operations as a brick-and-mortar store in an anti-brick-and-mortar world suggesting it was worth anywhere near that much (or even worth $18; it was barely $2.50 in April of 2020).
Why?
A group of people on the internet challenged hedge fund managers who were shorting GME stock.
If you’re like most, such a premise is fascinating, but in order to fully understand it, you need to know what a hedge fund is, what shorting a stock is and how a group of people on the internet can use this information to create a short squeeze on hedge fund managers and temporarily make GameStop into a Fortune 500 company.
Even this is an oversimplified description and doesn’t get into the countermeasures employed by the hedge funds or the trading restrictions put in place by several companies. Still, beginning with the basics allows us to intrigue people enough that we can then get into the details with some level of knowledge.
In this way, the GME craze directly correlates with bowling. The premise—rolling a ball and trying to knock down as many pins as possible—is fascinating, which is why 67 million people bowl at least once every year (well, maybe not last year) in the United States alone. But to truly understand the game at its highest level can be an overwhelming, mind-boggling pursuit for a beginner.
If a stock-market expert tried to explain what’s going on with GME by first launching into the minutiae of hedge funds, shorts, short squeezes and other intricately detailed non-intuitive topics without explaining what those things actually are, novices would be overwhelmed before they had a chance to truly care about what’s going on.
Likewise, if we start with detailed explanations on oil breakdown (even though a beginner may not know there is oil at all), cover stocks (even though a beginner just wants to know where he can get a ball with a rose in it), rev rates (what?), axis tilts (you lost me), traffic (on the way to the bowling alley?), topography (I’m no cartographer) and match-play matrices (my head hurts), we’ll invariably be greeted with glazed-over eyes and blank faces.
If we can learn one thing from the GME hoopla (aside from the obvious fact that even the Matrix of Fairness can’t prevent the big guys from winning), it’s that we need to be smarter about how we introduce people to bowling. We must teach that there is oil before we can dissect how the oil breaks down. Here’s a simple mnemonic device to help: oil before breakdown, except after C squad.
The whole enterprise of day trading is fascinating and yet, if one wants to take a genuine interest in it, one is confronted by an inordinately inaccessible pile of convoluted jargon relayed through an incomprehensible lexicon that no normal human being could possibly understand without first learning the basics.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to shed the asym and find a shinier cover with a stronger layout that, when crisp, will breeze through the heads and get to the spot without a skid-flippy reaction after a four-and-two move two frames after a zone change following a blower 7 on the uphill left lane, knowing I need the first two hits to even have a chance at seeing cashers round.