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Sometimes there is no middle ground in the cutthroat world of business.

You are either a winner.

Or you are a loser.

A winner wins because they are doing something better than everyone else, usually over a long stretch of time. Through a mixture of perseverance, creativity, and executional excellence, the winner builds on their success and widens their lead.

There is a dose of luck to this too.

A loser, well, does the complete opposite of this playbook.

I return with this simple message following another wild week of trading in shares of GameStop (GME) — one dominated by an unverified social media account allegedly led by a guy known for a red headband, lame T-shirts, and a penchant for flexing his alleged dollars in a trading account.

GameStop stinks. It's 100% going to be a long-term loser. Maybe 110%.

And you know what, friends?

To reiterate this point, I'm not going to use a lick of the sophisticated analysis I taught myself while covering 55 retail companies as an independent stock analyst. I will do two things.

First, point out that the company's first quarter sales cratered 29% year over year. The company lost $32.3 million in the quarter compared to a loss of $50.5 million a year earlier.

The business trends are getting WORSE!

Here are those numbers via the company's laughably brief earnings release Friday morning.

Second, I'm going to link to the company's latest annual report here, then add these rapid-fire observations:

1. The company refuses to aggressively shrink a store base that numbers 4,169 locations worldwide. Shops that sell similar products such as Walmart (WMT) are aggressively investing in AI and same-day delivery services — practically making visits to competing stores a waste of time.

2. The company is losing gobs of money amid a persistent, structural downtrend in sales.

3. Margins are under pressure, and have been.

4. The company is overly reliant on consoles — 56.8% of sales came from hardware and accessories last year. But console sales face an increasingly grim outlook as PCs and smartphones compete for market share.

5. The three objectives listed under the "business strategy" section — establish retail excellence, achieve profitability, and leverage brand value — aren't being consistently executed on.

You GME fans may not want to admit this, but fundamentally analyzing a company still matters. That's how the mechanisms of the market work. That's how true wealth is built.