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If that's the case then the market functioned exactly like a free market should- corrected an undervalued price. I don't see an issue! If the people who shorted the stock had a hand in undervaluing it... ooops. Manipulators got out manipulated. | |||||||
I think what is scaring these people most is the ease in which a public app got so many people involved so quickly. Oops, we just took your 401k and risked it all and then some new paradigm justed kicked our ass? Who knew the stock market could be so fickle? This is nothing like the bundling of bad mortgages and selling them as stocks, that could have killed the economy. This is a minor setback. If Robinhood caved to pressure then the next company hopefully will have the stones not to and capitalism will function like it should. Idiots! | |||||||
I think it is unlikely and there are supposed to be rules in place specifically to prevent that kind of domino effect from ever happening again BUUUT these guys also were able to short 1.4 times the total number of stock available. Given that half the stock is internally held or in long term holdings they really shorted something like x5 or x6 the amount of stock available which is why the squeeze is going to be VERY painful. Back in 2008 when Volkswagen went through a squeeze it only ended up being about x1 of the market (i.e. these short-sellers had to cover every single stock floating out there) and over 2 weeks of extreme market volatility it ended up blowing up from ~$150 a share to $1,000 a share before slowly cooling back down. Literally like a pressure cooker blowing its top, or a volcano. Pick your metaphor. Now reason why it is a pressure cooker is that every day that goes by that they don't cover their short sale, they owe interest on the stock they "borrowed". Some of these interest rates are insane, 20%. 30% etc. And as the price of the stock goes higher, their interest rates climb so they either have to bite the bullet HARD or get bled dry because of interest rates. This time around it is, as I said, x5 or x6 as bad AND you have a sizeable segment of the market not just looking to put the squeeze on but purposefully passing on decent profits in hopes of sending the squeeze to the moon. What we are seeing is unprecedented which I think is why they froze the markets. When the stock blew right past $450 and nobody was selling people in charge threw a fit and within 10 minutes it was frozen because it was on track to go ASTRONOMICAL. Entering untrodden territories. What happens when a stupid overleveraged hedge faces losses in the tens of billions of dollars? Hundreds of billions? The shares that they already sold have to come from somewhere and if not enough people are selling to feed that position you're going to see hits at just stupid mind blowing prices. There is a good chance while the market was frozen these short sellers ate their losses, took their 30% losses and tomorrow the market will crash without that constant pressure pushing it upwards. OR there is a good chance that the arrogant hedge funders thought they could manipulate the market like they always do and reset their shorts with the expectation that they panicked all these solo investors to panic sell and the stock would crash. I would recommend not putting any money into it as an investment because it is a gamble. Do you think that wall street hedge fund managers are willing to admit they made a bad mistake and leave gracefully? Or do you think they are arrogant enough to think they can outplay a bunch of joe schmoe investors and have leveraged themselves even further in hopes the market crashes and they can recoup their losses? | |||||||
That's pretty much the whole basis for shorting stock. The fund (or a business competitor, etc) gets their hands on a bunch of stock...and then dumps it on the market in large quantities, at prices below the current trading value. People see a lot of stock being traded, at lower prices, and usually go, "Oh, crap...the value's dropping, I should get out while I still can!" so they sell theirs off as fast as they can, which deflates the stock value even more. It's ethically dubious, at best. I mean, it's one thing for stock prices to drop because the company is failing, had a far-below-predicted profit report, changed leadership, etc. It's another thing for the price to drop because some guy decided he was going to use his money or connections to arrange for a false drop in prices. It may be legal...but that doesn't make it ethical. | |||||||
I re-read Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor about 2018, and it just strikes me how insane P/E ratios have gotten, and that's just for the overall market, that's not even getting into some of the controversies about particular companies whose valuations are just bizarre. To be clear, there are legitimate uses of derivatives, they are not new by any means (See Thales and his olive presses) but these are supposed to be used responsibly to A) hedge costs and B) to transfer risks from parties which are not able to bear them to those which are. I understand that for party A to hedge, party B must speculate. In less words, real life markets are complicated, I get that. But when a reasonable person cannot take financial statements, a pocket calculator and a formula and assume a discount rate and value a company to at least the correct degree of magnitude (obviously you will never get a precise valuation this way in the real world, discount rates aren't actually knowable, neither is goodwill), something is deeply, fundamentally broken. Kudos to these traders. They didn't create it, good on them for seeing the opening. This message was last edited by the user at 03:16, Fri 29 Jan. | |||||||
They didn't just freeze out buying, they (Robinhood and few others) starting selling investors options without their permission. Now, in some cases this was on the margin (probably in most cases), but there is a lot of talk of savvy investors who owned the stock through Robinhood (and others) getting their stocks sold out on on them, and being sold at rock bottom price. We'll have to wait till the dust clears to see how all that shakes out... if true, it's big. | |||||||
I have an "auto bill pay" system I worked on that has like 500 different checks to make sure the right amount is being withdrawn because if we grab even a penny extra we are now liable for tens of thousands of $$$ in fines. One stock, even at its peak price of $480 isn't going to be worth that. | |||||||
For people / businesses with "money to throw around" doing it is "business as usual". Just as wrong but they have the money to make sure it is not "a crime". | |||||||
It also has come out that another big hedge that lost 20% already is a $200M investor behind Robinhood. I'm kind of excited to see the congressional hearings where it comes out that these day trade eplatforms are all just fronts for big hedge funds to siphon money out of. | |||||||
That's because margin stock isn't actually ownership, it's purchasing into a "percentage" of a stock that the company owns, they're just letting you ride their coattails on that stock. (basically)
Which if true will suck for those customers. But I agree with you, which is more likely? A whole bunch of Joe Sixpack customers failed to understand their own stock positions and the type of buyer accounts they had with Robinhood (etc) and are now making outrageous claims and pissing up the wind, or that Robinhood (etc) had to sell out customers to cover themselves in the short, and cost themselves money, prestige, and trust in the long. The first disrupts those companies right now*, the second could cause them to shut their doors for good. * And breeds slightly savvier Joe Sixpack investors. At the least some people got 'burned and learned' to read user agreements and account settings. But I know how people operate, so maybe 1 in 5 learned something yesterday... the rest are reaching right back into the fire. | |||||||
- All the major financial reports are saying that the hedge funds have unwound their positions, closed their hundred million positions and have moved out. These are legitimate reports which should be crushing and devastating except it has come out that they "adjusted" how they calculate the short %. One of the report leads straight up admitted that before they are during real short % (Number of shorts / Number of shares ) but are now doing something they call "True Short %" (Number of shorts / (Number of Shares + Shorts)) which is absolute B.S. Because we know the number of shares we can now back into the actual Number of shorts and low and behold it is still over 120%. Out of 67million shares available there are over 100million shares "shorted". By all accounts the hedge funds may have closed some of their most toxic shorts but just turned around and opened up new ones confident in their ability to ride this bubble. - The price has gone from a steady $300 to a steady $200. This seems really bad (and morale at times is pretty grim) but this is all to be expected. The actual trading volume is really low. Last week when this kicked off we were seeing 10s of millions of trades an hour. Now we're seeing barely 1 million an hour. Nobody is selling, everyone is buying which just keeps putting pressure on them becaausee.... - You aren't supposed to be able to short > 100% because at that point you're trading in counterfeit shares. If only 67 million shares are available how are they moving around 100+ million shares? Well technically firms are allowed to create "counterfeit" shares in order to facilitate proper transfers but in practice these "naked shorts" are used like counterfeit bills. They're passed around to dillute the supply and drive the price down. Now normally these shares have a shelf life (3 days for regular joes, 21 days for market makers) but there are a sophisticated (and highly illegal) ways that hedge funds can "reset the clock" and analysts on WSB have been digging through reports and have found a mountain of evidence that this is what they've been doing for years. It is highly illegal but difficult to prove...apparently. Even though people working with public data and a couple weeks focus figured it out... but whatever. The point is this is how they're driving the price down even though there's a feeding frenzy of buyers. By constantly creating new shares and selling them at below market price they're flooding the market and driving the price down. And to be fair they have a lot more capital to apply pressure down than millions of guppies buying 1 or 2 shares can exert up so we're kind of in a stand still...until... - Last Friday a whale entered the buyer side and bought up $640 million of these shares. And that launched the price up $100 easy. One or two more whales entering the fight might do it but until then it looks like it is going to be a slug fest. - Technically there is a time limit. Ultimately their shorts are being charged interest so the hedge funds have to pay tens of millions of $$ a day no matter what dirty tricks they use to hide their shorts. Ultimately they still "took out a loan" on a lot of shares. Behind the scenes it seems like the hedges are trying to shift the burden onto the market makers through more securities fraud and I'm curious if the market makers are going to let them. By all accounts the market makers are asleep at the wheel or complicit based on how blatantly manipulated the market is getting. It reminds me of 2008 where the ratings agencies that were supposed to be regulating the banks were basically employees of the bank and rubber stamping AAA on whatever dog poopy bond was put on their desk because they liked the money they were making. There is an atomic bomb being passed around behind the scenes and I can only hope market makers wake up and crack the whip on the hedge funds before they pass the risk off. tl;dr: Who knows how long this will go on. Reddit has hedge funds PROPERLY and COMPLETELY screwed but hedge funds are basically doing the equivalent of taking out a credit card to pay off their old credit card debt. They just keep kicking the can down the road accumulating more interest and transfer fees and so far the credit card companies are viewing it as free money but, in theory, SOMEONE is going to deny them a new card and then the jig is up for them. Or the retail investor line breaks and it all comes tumbling down. SO YOU WANT TO INVEST? No. No. No. No. This isn't an investment. This isn't lik a 401k where you put some money in today and at the end of the year it is bigger. This is a gamble. This is a casino bet at 10:1 odds whether a mob of 10 million random internet users can be disciplined and hold their shares and not get spooked and panicked for weeks or even months. So far it is proving to be a good bet but I'll be honest, the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) that is being exerted by hedge funds is powerful. All reddit has to do is hold until it pops but even I got my nerves shaken a few times. If you want to get in, realize that while the payoff is enticing this isn't guaranteed money. The hedge funds have already shown just blatant willingness to commit securities fraud because they know it will be difficult to definitively prove in court or that the SEC fines are a joke. Do not bet money you can't afford to lose. The math is on Reddit's side but this could end in tears and the stock plummeting down to $5 a share once again. If you do want to get in, take some time to do your research first. There is a lot of information on wallstreet bets but you have to dig for it because nobody is going to tell you what to do as they aren't financial advisors and telling you how to spend your money is unethical and maybe even illegal (market manipulation etc. we don't have a billion dollars to throw at a legal team to fend of the SEC) but the information is there. So far most etrade platforms have been kneecapping their own investors. Robinhood famously blocked people's ability to buy allowing hedge funds to escape a squeeze (the price jumped up $100 in 10 minutes and wasn't stopping). Etoro automatically sells people's shares at a loss "to protect them" if the price drops low enough. The only platforms that nobody has complained about is Vanguard and Fidelity. This isn't an endorsement per se, just acknowledgement that so far those are the only two retail platforms that haven't kneecapped their users at one point or another. Also most major banks allow you to open up free brokerage accounts. Finally any sane financial advisor would tell you to stay away from this. This is NOT, I repeat, NOT, an investment. It is a spin of the roulette wheel. But it is a roulette wheel that only has 2 numbers on it instead of the normal 32 because the house screwed up. Now the house (usually) always wins so they might just take everyone's money, kick em out of the casino because they're confident that even if lawsuits and fines occur, its cheaper than letting the betters win BUT that would, in my opinion, be worth the price of admission because it would fully expose just how broken the stock market is and all the shenanigans that happened in 2008 are once again happening. Giant "too big to fail" hedges are overleveraged by trading in counterfeit shares that they're using to try and intentionally bankrupt an otherwise perfectly healthy business that employs 14,000 people and that cannot stand, in my opinion. Full disclosure, I've bought a few shares not to make stupid amounts of money but if I can spend a paycheck to make these hedge funds bleed a little bit and expose them for the corrupt pieces of poo that they are, that is money well spent in my opinion. | |||||||
LS | |||||||
That's the wrong way to look at this. This isn't a gamble. Nor is it an investment. The best way to look at this is thus: if you decide to go in, you are buying bullets that you are loading in the gun that will, if we load it with enough bullets kill a few hedge funds, crash some of the market, destabilize the rest of the market, and absolutely declare class warfare between the working classes and the investor class. Do not go in believing you "might, maybe, if you're really lucky" make money. Go in believing you are lighting that money on fire in the hopes that fire will rise and burn down a hedge fund. And know that as the fire builds the government and the other market makers are nervously eyeing the firetrucks they can dispatch to put it out, and nervously because they aren't sure they can put it out or what the spill over damage* will be if they do put it out. * IE it's clear there is a certain segment of the populace that is fed up waiting for the regulators to regulate what Wall Street keeps illegally getting away with and have taken justice quite legally into their own hands. Shutting down this perfectly legal 'vigilantism' will have effects beyond saving a few straining hedge funds. The kind of effects that can end with governments changing. So while it might look like the feds are gearing up to prop up a few hedge funds, I bet they aren't. I bet their gearing up to rescue the other market makers when the hedge funds finally stumble and the avalanche of failing hedge funds starts in earnest. | |||||||
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I thought that initially but as some of the experienced and ex-wallstreet traders in the community started talking there are a lot of ways that they can ride this out and the longer it goes the more they can close their bad positions without really bumping the market too much. This is not a guarantee at all. This isn't even a "if we get enough people we will guarantee..." No. This is a gamble. The math should be on the retail investor's side but the system is so heavily rigged towards hedge funds it isn't even funny. Remember, most retailers are doing this for fun but the hedge funds and their billion dollar teams of analysts, this is their fulltime job. Don't kid yourself that they will go down without a fight. In 2008 when the big banks and firms realized they were holding essentially junk bonds they went into overdrive and were able to sell those junk bonds to overseas investors. Even though they were the cause of it and their stupidity and greed resulted in the mess many firms were able to escape situations that should have absolutely bankrupted them. Some got caught holding the bag, so to speak, but many more escaped with heavy losses. It is fun to think of these people as stupid and arrogant behemoths but it is really poor strategy to underestimate the intelligence and capabilities of your opponents. | |||||||
Which is why I didn't use that word at all. The only real hopes on my end is that if we can gold this out long enough, it might expose whichever practice is being used to keep extending the shelf life on those shorts, which are supposed to have a hard termination point, but seem to keep getting extended. Also that maybe we can put just enough sting on it to make the hedge funds stop using shorts as away to close businesses and rake up huge piles of cash. | |||||||
If this follows the paradigm of hackers and computer security, next year some of those retail traders- the best of them- will be on the billion dollar analysis teams. If I were running a brokerage and my human resources people were not already skimming through reddit I'd be pissed. | |||||||
It's one thing for an investor to research Game Stop, believe their management team is well qualified and has a great strategy for turning the company around in 5+ years by changing their business model and decide to invest in it. Or, to invert the example, maybe an existing investor decides to divest because he believes the opposite. Somwhere in between, the prices even out and that's a functional market. It's quite another thing for the equity of a real company that has real employees and real stakeholders to just fly around the market, zig zagging in ways that have nothing to do with what's actually going on with the corporation and how the industry it is in is changing. Instead of investors looking at the company carefully and making reasoned decisions about its actual value and whether they should buy its shares, it is instead speculators using every technique under the sun to guess when the optimal bailout point is. It just seems like if we put the same amount of effort into reforming the company or deciding to liquidate it and do something else instead as we have put into engineering this fiasco, we could have something of lasting economic value rather than this circus act. I don't have any answers or proposals, rather I just wish this whole thing was causing people to really think about these issues rather than where it has actually gone, but I can't say I'm surprised. | |||||||
Basically combing through it and pulling out key words is my guess. People like to brag about natural language processors but if you've ever tried to use one you know how easy it is to confuse the crap out of Alexa or Cortana and in a community like Wallstreet Bets they have their own terminology like "stonks" and "tendies" that will be difficult to parse out of the box. Not to mention half their posts are embedded into memes and gifs so that's an added complication. While this was going on it was amazing to watch how most media so obviously didn't have an intern spend 5 minutes on the site verifying reports of people moving onto this or that stock or silver or what not. While I don't expect your typical baby boomer to understand reddit it is shocking to think that they don't have SOMEONE on their staff under the age of 40 who doesn't secretly spend half their day posting memes or what not. | |||||||
Nah, there staff are all indoctrinated into the cult of Intersectionalism, they won't go into the den of the enemy where wrongthink occurs. | |||||||
I do a lot of public speaking on interpersonal relationships and if there is one thing that I could hammer into everyone's heads, its this. A lot of people think everyone is out to get them, that everything that goes wrong is direct and personal spite when it is often just ignorance. No the barista didn't mispell your name on purpose. No, Accounting didn't purposefully not get you that report, they probably just forgot about them. In this case it is probably a simple matter that they brought the wrong people together for a meeting and spent an hour trying to figure out "What is a Reddit?" when their interns were outside the room posting memes the whole time. This message was last edited by the user at 14:27, Thu 04 Feb. | |||||||
Insidious? Poe strike again.
I am presuming 'stupidity'. They allowed themselves to become echo-chambered and indoctrinated. There is often nothing malicious on the part of the victim, it's usually the people indoctrinating them with such bold lies as "[OTHER SIDE] is inherently wrong/evil/wants to hurt you" and "do not listen to [OTHER SIDE]'s propaganda for they are lying liars who lie!" and my personal favorite "everyone who is not with us is against us!" (that last one is particularly bad as I'm a centrist, so I'm pretty much never "with" anyone, at least not 100%) So yes, it's an unquestioning loyalty to "THEIR SIDE" which can be malicious, but is usually just stupidity. In the case of the "journalists" interns, have you read what passes for | |||||||
This message was last edited by the user at 18:27, Thu 04 Feb. | |||||||
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