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I, sadly, no longer own material amounts of Chipotle, which was previously my best performing investment inclusive of angel investments. I put about $4k into it total, $2k from Bingo Card Profits, and held almost all of it until 2020, when I sold because pandemic.
As long as I'm telling ancient stories about Chipotle stock, it was once one of the empirical counterexamples to the efficient markets hypothesis. In the 2004-2006ish timeframe, it was a very retail driven stock and relatively heavily shorted by the smart money.
There existed a second share class, CMG.B, which had a multiple of votes per share but same economic claim as CMG.A, the share class any discount brokerage would give you when you tried to buy Chipotle. CMG.B is strictly more valuable than CMG.A, right. No, 10% discount.
Why discount? Because the people who actually wanted to buy Chipotle were either insufficiently sophisticated to know "share classes" exist in the world, or they were unable to get their existing brokerage account to buy the Bs, and still wanting Chipotle, bought the As.
Why didn't smart money just arb this out? Because it was too expensive to do in sufficient quantity to close. The strategy is "buy B, short A, wait for convergence", but A was heavily shorted both because of this issue and because smart money didn't like Chipotle on fundamentals.
There were articles in e.g. the WSJ for a year about this anomaly. I read them, concluded "But I *do* like CMG on the fundamentals", and then called my discount brokerage to say "I'm sure you actually have a way I can buy the B share class of one of the most popular stocks."
Some years later, smart money controlled enough B to convince the company to convert B to A (stripped the extra voting rights in favor of immediately closing out the arb opportunity), and I enjoyed a free 10% kicker to the investment, which was by then already doing well.
Correcting record: I actually looked at cmg-cost-basis-calculation.txt in Dropbox and it looks like I was off by a few years and a few dollars. Since not particularly sensitive and easier to screenshot than type corrections: https://t.co/wjHk6grEzW
