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Anybody else get in on GME last week?
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MacNNFamous
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Jan 26, 2021, 07:07 PM
 
Got in at 43.

Buckle up retards. Tomorrow is gonna be wild.
     
Thorzdad
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Jan 26, 2021, 07:14 PM
 
GME?
     
subego
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Jan 26, 2021, 07:19 PM
 
Originally Posted by Thorzdad View Post
GME?
Good Morning Emerica
     
BLAZE_MkIV
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Jan 26, 2021, 08:42 PM
 
He's talking about a stock if you didn't guess from context.

I would probably considered it if I found out about it when it was < $20. Now its a spectator sport for the billionairs.
     
andi*pandi
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Jan 26, 2021, 09:04 PM
 
Weren't they about to go bankrupt in March when they closed all their stores?
     
Waragainstsleep
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Jan 27, 2021, 05:19 AM
 
Redditors caused it to jump.
I have plenty of more important things to do, if only I could bring myself to do them....
     
Laminar
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Jan 27, 2021, 10:00 AM
 
Reddit's r/WallStreetBets subreddit saw major investment firms shorting the stock so they all started buying it up to drive the price up and cost the investment firms billions.

https://markets.businessinsider.com/...1-1-1030003305
     
Brien
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Jan 28, 2021, 02:06 AM
 
Man. It was $3 last year. Closed close to $370.

Could have made so.much. money. Ack.

I do wonder if this could be seen as a pump and dump.
     
BLAZE_MkIV
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Jan 28, 2021, 07:37 PM
 
Apparently for pump and dump you have to lie about the value of the company to pump up the stock. Increasing the value of the stock by buying it doesn’t count.

The real crime that’s going to go unpunished is selling %140 of the stock.
     
OreoCookie
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Jan 28, 2021, 10:13 PM
 
Originally Posted by Brien View Post
I do wonder if this could be seen as a pump and dump.
Hmmm, I don’t see how. The 2008 financial crash was caused by similar herd behavior, and nobody was held accountable. And that time the behavior was by powerful institutions and professionals rather than Redditors. I think it just exposes one of the weaknesses of the stock market in that the stock market very often does not reflect real world economics.
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Jan 29, 2021, 09:47 AM
 
This is really interesting. Not going to invest for sure, although it might be fun to buy one share to burn some hedge fund managers, but I love that they're doing this.

For those not aware - GameStop is going down because of the death of retail, but they're going down slowly, not quickly. They have enough cash to pivot if they can find the will to do so, and recently got a new investor onto their board with lots of ideas and seemingly some drive. Some hedge fund managers decided to short them to make money. Some redditors realized that the actual available stock was much less than one might expect, because GameStop have paid executives with stock to make them stay, and they can't legally sell that stock easily. Redditors decided to buy up stock to squeeze the short, and so far this is working - the funds that are short have to buy high to cover their positions, especially if they shorted naked (which seems to be still legal in the US? It isn't in Europe). They cover this by shorting again, because now the stock is obviously overpriced, and the squeeze continues.

The issue now is how anyone gets out of this alive. If anyone starts selling off their position to realize the gain, the price will crater because the hedge fund managers can then cover their positions. If the hedge fund managers give up and stop shorting, they will go bankrupt - but since the demand for the stock also disappears, the price craters anyway. In a perfect world, people could agree to sell off a little of their stock to let the hedge funds limit their losses and still realize some of the gain, but that doesn't seem likely given how disorganized this is.
The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.
     
Waragainstsleep
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Jan 29, 2021, 01:14 PM
 
Then there is the ironically named robinhood app that seems to be illegally propping up the hedge funds. Cue a massive backlash and pressure on the Biden admin to set the SEC on Robinhood.
I have plenty of more important things to do, if only I could bring myself to do them....
     
Thorzdad
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Jan 29, 2021, 01:19 PM
 
Congresscritters are already making noise about doing just that with Robinhood.
     
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Jan 29, 2021, 06:25 PM
 
Robin Hood is a distraction. The correct response is to do something about the hedge funds. Some explain this to me - are naked shorts legal in the US or not? Because I checked, and they’re illegal for Euro-backed securities since 2011.

Although the back and forth between AOC and Ted Cruz was somewhat amusing.
The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.
     
OreoCookie
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Jan 29, 2021, 08:34 PM
 
@P
Completely agreed. The mob has beaten hedge funds at their own gain and now they complain that the game isn’t fair.
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el chupacabra
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Jan 30, 2021, 02:46 PM
 
… …
( Last edited by el chupacabra; Jan 5, 2024 at 12:06 AM. )
     
MacNNFamous  (op)
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Jan 30, 2021, 05:58 PM
 
Originally Posted by el chupacabra View Post
Wallstreetbets, despite being in a perfect position to win, will likely lose this battle. Despite their intense hate for the wealthy, they simply don't have the attention span, discipline, intelligence, or organizational social skills, to beat rich people.
You underestimate the power of focus that hatred brings about. We are going to get our tendies.

If the market crashes, oh well, guess they'll just get another free government bailout again.
     
OreoCookie
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Jan 30, 2021, 08:51 PM
 
Originally Posted by el chupacabra View Post
This reminds me of the saying “if you aren’t paying for the product you are the product”. Robinhood is free (but not free behind the scenes) so doesn’t owe anyone premium service. The conundrum here is they’ve been sued before by people claiming Robinhood made it too easy to engage in high risk trades causing losses.
Right, and I think this argument has merit. In part it attracts people who are also susceptible to gambling. This is a problem. It should be a moral question that had been carefully considered by Robinhood’s management.
Originally Posted by el chupacabra View Post
They’ve been criticized for a suicide when a trader thought he lost $700k because he couldn't do simple math, or use google, or email tech support. So they could just use the excuse “they were protecting people from losing all their money when gme inevitably crashes”.
Robinhood has been criticized for far more, including effectively non-existent fraud protection.
Originally Posted by el chupacabra View Post
With GME, Robinhood claim they didn't have collateral for the GME trades.
I think it is important to look at the time line, their initial justification was not about collateral. That’s part of the problem, it looked very much like Robinhood was protecting its customers from the people who trade on their platform. And like you said, since people who trade on their platform aren’t their money makers, I still think this has had an influence on their decisions.
Originally Posted by el chupacabra View Post
Wallstreetbets, despite being in a perfect position to win, will likely lose this battle.
I don’t think so, because they have the numbers behind them. Even if their reddit closes, they can communicate in other viral ways.
Originally Posted by el chupacabra View Post
Despite their intense hate for the wealthy, they simply don't have the attention span, discipline, intelligence, or organizational social skills, to beat rich people. But I’m ever hopefully rooting for them none the less.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/why...ng-51611967696
I think this is too simplistic, you are superimposing a cookie cutter image you have of people. Hating hedge funds and their business practices is very different from hating rich people per se. Given what happened during the 2008 financial crisis, I don’t think this is unfounded: governments have bailed out banks, but not individuals. What is worse, there were few regulations put in place in the US as a result from what was learnt.

Somewhat poignantly, the reddit mob used the exact same tactics that some hedge funds have used for years and years at the expense of some companies’s lives: they have betted against companies succeeding until it impacted them so much that they didn’t. You can see this in reverse now: AMC is given a second lease of life, because the run on their stock allowed them to get rid of hundreds of millions in debt. If this had happened the other way around, hedge funds could have caused the AMC’s demise just as easily while making hundreds of millions in the process. I don’t think this is a sign of healthy capitalism. Hedge funds aren’t producing anything, they don’t employ many people and many parts of their business are involved in destroying businesses (hence, employment) rather than creating it.
Originally Posted by el chupacabra View Post
A lot of this could be fixed if we banned margin trading, & brought fees back instead of pretending the trades are free in the name of making stuff seem easy. The easier something is, the worse the quality.
There are tons of things that need to be banned and made more difficult. High frequency trading is another thing, where in physicist’s terms you extract energy from vacuum fluctuations. Imposing fees and causing more friction in the right places could help prevent artificially made catastrophes that are not caused by economic developments in the real world.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
     
el chupacabra
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Feb 2, 2021, 05:43 PM
 
…. …
( Last edited by el chupacabra; Jan 5, 2024 at 12:05 AM. )
     
MacNNFamous  (op)
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Feb 4, 2021, 10:45 AM
 
Anybody see Elon's tweets this morning?

"I am become meme,
Destroyer of shorts"
     
Laminar
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Feb 4, 2021, 10:55 AM
 
Originally Posted by el chupacabra View Post
But then maybe not, the world becomes more boring when you're able to understand & predict people so well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunnin...3Kruger_effect
     
OreoCookie
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Feb 4, 2021, 07:55 PM
 
Originally Posted by el chupacabra View Post
And generally big corporations tend to win, in part cuz at the end of the day people dont want to lose what corporations are offering as they control the means of production, while individual lower class people do not control much of any importance. Even collectively, lower class people's importance & contributions are tied to the mega corporations who they demand jobs from rather than innovating themselves. They've given mega corporations their power by paying them for every little thing and relying on them so much.
That’s a very Marxist point of view — and I think quite outdated. Other democracies have fared better at mitigating concentration of power, it is not a law of nature that you can’t resist against.
Originally Posted by el chupacabra View Post
I put people into boxes because it works & allows me to make accurate predictions, or at the very least be prepared, not surprised by outcomes of people's actions.
I think your particular choice of boxes have led you to make quite inaccurate predictions.
Originally Posted by el chupacabra View Post
I realize this goes against everything a particular philosophy has been indoctrinated with their entire lives, so it's like finger nails on a chalk board to hear. I too was indoctrinated with it & had to undo much of what I'd been taught to become truly successful & understand why the world is the way it is so I could make peace with it, & finally use my understanding in ways that were compatible with the real world. Humans are a type of animal. To expand on the common joke that is truth... human psychology is like a pyramid that can be broken into parts. At the top of the pyramid is the lizard brain which thinks in the most basic instincts; eat, rest, mate, defend itself, mostly emotionless, survive. Under the lizard brain is the tribal monkey brain adding; social ability, emotion (ruled by anger for enhanced abilities to defend & retaliate), & primitive problem solving. The tribal monkey brain serves the lizard brain. The Tribal human brain adds more complex problem solving & social abilities, including religion which helped strengthen social relationships... and adds the ability to pretend monkey brain emotions are borderline magical.
What you describe is what historian Rutger Bregman calls veneer theory, that civilization is a thin veneer that sits on top of the more primal nature of human beings. Thing is, veneer theory is not supported by the latest research. It seems for humans it is survival of the kindest (in that kind, sociable people tend to have more offspring). That is because being social and social learning are humans’s super power that set it apart from all other animals, including bonobos and chimpanzees, our closest living relatives. That is also why you are missing something essential when you as yourself “what monkeys would do?” 

I could go into more detail, but I don’t want to derail the thread. If you are interested, we can create a separate thread.
Originally Posted by el chupacabra View Post
The protest should've been 10 years ago then during the last bailouts that lasted for ~5 yrs. The only people who really protested it were the stoner occupy crowd, not enough or the right people to bring change. Most people let wealthy wall street convince them the 'whole' economy would collapse into stone age if they didnt get bailouts. The bailouts shouldnt have happened, & thats 100% on the government, & the people who didnt protest the government's bailouts for billionaires. The bailouts in 2020 should've been only for people making less than 40k/yr. Bailouts for anyone making more than 40k should've resulted in massive "mostly peaceful" protests.
That’s not the whole story. I think if the bailouts were coupled to debt forgiveness, holding banks, bankers, hedge fund managers and the like accountable (including jail time) and sensible regulations, a bailout is a sensible solution. It’s just that the latter bit was entirely missing.
Originally Posted by el chupacabra View Post
Meanwhile looks like the fed is buying gamestop so I guess this is yet another form of bailout or stabilizing? When business is bad it needs to be allowed to go C7 bankrupt.
To go back to the topic at hand, I think a mass shorting by hedge funds can exaggerate how bad a situation is for a company, the reverse of what has happened now. This is not the first time this has happened, for example, many decades ago then Daimler-Benz almost managed to kill BMW. They “talked” to BMW’s banks and the bank refused to give regular credits to finance expansion of their business. BMW got lucky, because a rich family fronted the money, in exchange for a substantial share of the company. I can think of other examples. Point is, the hedge funds are distorting the market, too. So it isn’t just the health of the company that matters.

Another obvious example we are all familiar with is Apple. For decades after its near-death experience, Apple’s P/E ratio was extremely low when compared to other companies for no reason. Apple had solid fundamentals, hit product after hit product, yet “the market” expected them to do worse.
Originally Posted by el chupacabra View Post
AMC got its loans before the big squeeze. Thats part of what caused wsb to turn their heads to amc as the next squeeze. Hedge funds didnt cause the demise of amc. The movie theater business has lost half it's business in the last 18 years due to the trend of home TV screens getting bigger as they get flatter.
That wasn’t my point. My point was that the run on their shares has given them a second lease of life.
Originally Posted by el chupacabra View Post
Shorting isnt bad, they uncover fraud all the time since they have an invested interest. Shorts dont destroy companies they short companies that are already destroyed.
Of course, shorts can and have destroyed companies.
Originally Posted by el chupacabra View Post
Tsla will become a yr 2000 microsoft at some point losing for a lot of people.
Microsoft is one of the most valuable companies at the moment. And if you look at Tesla, they are not going anywhere. Tesla could become a battery company and still be one of the most valuable companies on planet earth. They could license their technologies to other companies (e. g. their Auto Pilot software and hardware), and they could live comfortably. Their foot print is so broad that they can morph into another company if the situation necessitates it.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
     
Spheric Harlot
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Feb 8, 2021, 04:06 PM
 
     
andi*pandi
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Feb 8, 2021, 05:00 PM
 
oof.
     
OptimumDrives
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Feb 10, 2021, 09:46 AM
 
O Man! That's a bug jump.
     
   
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