Redditors vs Wall Street

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And having read all this, I'm still unclear who's lost out on this other than people who deliberately bet more than they could afford to lose on a game they didn't understand as well as they thought they did.
It isn't really clear if anyone has yet. The major funds will have to take a hit when their shorts are due and they have to buy the shares to cover. I have not seen any dates for when they have to settle.

Right now the reddit people are talking about how much they have made. But if they are holding their shares, they haven't made any yet. They need to sell to get their money, and once the sell off starts, the value of the share will fall. First to sell makes the most money. Most will probably walk away with a profit, but holding on too long may end up losing money.

So far it is mostly theoretical.
 

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IT'S A SERIOUS CRIME.
 
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Dakota Tebaldi

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Yeah it might have surprised some people to see extreme right-wing personalities cheerleading what's happening, but it shouldn't. The right-wing in the US is all about pro-business and the free market; but no matter what they may say, they also still believe that banking and Wall Street are run by "the Jews" and as far as they are concerned, "hurting" Wall Streeters in any way is hurting "the Jews", so they love it.
 
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Bartholomew Gallacher

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They are playing with my pension fund's money and most likely with yours as well.
I don't like these self proclaimed Robin Hoods at all.
They have just as 'noble' goals as the Wall Street funds.
Ah, you found the lamest excuse ever!

It's the stock market, for heaven's sake! The stock market is pure gambling, nothing more nothing less! If you lose and cannot afford it, don't go to the stock market, or invest wiser.

And if stuff like this happens don't blame the other side - blame your fond managers. This time they are on the receiving side for such an event, normally they are on the giving side.
 
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Bartholomew Gallacher

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And exactly what is now the crime part about it? Short sells are always high risk business with unclear outcome, just ask the short sellers who several times took a bet on Tesla and lost. If you cannot risk the money, don't go in. There's no legally guaranteed return of investment on the stock market exchange, and when a group of people decides to buy stock and not sell them at all that's their decision. The stocks are their property, and they can do with their property what they want.

Big investment funds, which are used for national pensions, normally have strict rules and diversify their investments a lot. They'll only put a tiny fraction of their money in hedge fonds because of the strict rules.

So if "pension funds" is referring to such a thing: it will just have a small impact, if all. If "pension funds" refers though to your personally managed stock portfolio: that's life.
 
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Kamilah Hauptmann

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Hi, peripheral experience with pension management here. Pension managers are some of the most conservative investors in existence. The pensions that were harmed in the 2007-2008 implosion were due to deregulation that allowed super bullshit crap to be rolled into high rated Frankenstein amalgamations and sold in a bundle.

Not that there is not STUPID among pension managers. (If your pension is in hedge funds it might be time to transfer that to what in Canada is called a 'locked in Retirement Savings Plan' or your country's equivalent because it's my belied that a pension should not be at the roulette wheel. Though it's hilariously rough going now that we're in two decades of comically low interest rates causing all manner of bubbles. But that's a whole other semi-related rant.)
 
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Bartholomew Gallacher

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Well around 20+ years ago I met the co-owner of a local private bank, so obviously he knows his way around finance stuff.

He back then told me: "The stock exchange is only a good thing for people, which do have a certain amount of money and can afford to loose it entirely in the worst case without this loss affecting their life style. If you cannot afford to loose the money you want to put into the stock market, better diversify or look for something else."

BTW if you want to have the prime example of very conversative investors just look at the roman catholic church. They own in some towns I do know more than 50% of the city, normally it's really quite pretty much obscured, and are just called "the dead hand investors", because they are moving so slow.
 
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Innula Zenovka

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They are playing with my pension fund's money and most likely with yours as well.
I don't like these self proclaimed Robin Hoods at all.
They have just as 'noble' goals as the Wall Street funds.
I don't think that's right, Sid, at least not about your pension.

I can't imagine your pension fund managers are involved in this sort of high-risk derivatives trading. Pension funds are about very safe investments that guarantee income -- primarily government bonds and the like -- and they're very tightly controlled by government, at least in most places, with strict regulations about what risks managers can take with the funds under their control.
 
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Cristiano

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Bartholomew Gallacher

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Well the CEO of Reddit views this here as an important disruption; it clearly shows the power of retail traders in his opinion, also a transfer of some power from big investment firms to retail traders as well.

“With all of our communities that do their best to be good citizens of Reddit, we try to do our best by them as well,” Huffman said on the Clubhouse app. He called the forum’s outsize influence on GameStop Corp. stock a “culture war of Wall Street versus everybody else.”

He said anyone who thinks the users of the forum are “idiots” should spend more time reading the discussions. “It’s this idiot swagger that masks what I think is this charming intelligence,” Huffman said.

The forum’s unprecedented influence on GameStop’s stock shows that markets must adapt to a world where retail investors are gaining some of the power big financial firms have long held, according to Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of the online forum.

“This is something, I think, for a lot of people, that was a statement as much as an investment,” Ohanian, who left Reddit’s board last year, said on Bloomberg Television on Thursday. “I’d equate it to, like, folks voting with their dollars in order to get back at or make a statement towards big finance.”

Asked about the risk that internet forums can pose as a source of potential financial misinformation or market hype, Ohanian punted, saying the same question exists around political issues. “This is a question for the decade,” he said.

 

Sid

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I don't think that's right, Sid, at least not about your pension.

I can't imagine your pension fund managers are involved in this sort of high-risk derivative trading. Pension funds are about very safe investments that guarantee income -- primarily government bonds and the like, and they're very tightly controlled by government, at least in most places, with strict regulations about what risks managers can take with the funds under their control.
The pension fund that gets/takes my money (there is no free choice in NL) is one of the biggest in the world: ABP (the fund for people who work in public services in NL) and of course they spread capital. Only a percentage is at the stock market.
But government bonds don't bring enough or even nothing these days. Or you have to buy the ones from more risky countries like Italy and Greece. In countries like the NL, the treasury departments fills their money orders with offering negative interest.

This current Reddit trick will be used by every idiot with a few coins to spare if it turns out to be succesful in the end. So then we will have a few thousands of those Robin Hood Cowboys clubs very soon worldwide. And then all stocks will be at risk at the same time. That will make long term investors very nervous and when they decide to leave on masse to keep the money safe, that could result in a deep financial crisis IMHO.
 
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Holy crap.

Google is actively removing negative reviews of the Robinhood app from the Google Play Store, the company confirmed to The Verge. After some disgruntled Robinhood users organized campaigns to give the app a one-star review on Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store — and succeeded in review-bombing it all the way down to a one-star rating — the company has now deleted enough reviews to bring it back up to nearly four stars.
Maybe it IS an army...
 

bubblesort

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It isn't really clear if anyone has yet. The major funds will have to take a hit when their shorts are due and they have to buy the shares to cover. I have not seen any dates for when they have to settle.

Right now the reddit people are talking about how much they have made. But if they are holding their shares, they haven't made any yet. They need to sell to get their money, and once the sell off starts, the value of the share will fall. First to sell makes the most money. Most will probably walk away with a profit, but holding on too long may end up losing money.

So far it is mostly theoretical.
Shorts don't expire like that. You are thinking about options, which are a part of this, kinda on the sideline, but the shorts are the main attraction. The metrics reddit is using to decide when to pull the trigger are the % of shares shorted, and days to cover. Those have not budged yet, so the shorts are not squeezed.

If reddit pulls out now they are just taking money from each other, which is not that much fun. Redditor pockets are shallow. Hedge funds have much deeper pockets to rummage through. So they are waiting until the shorts squeeze and send the price through the roof, so reddit can empty their pockets. These hedge fund assholes are still holding their short positions, and doing everything in their power to not close out of their short positions, even as interest payments from volatility bleed them dry.

Personally, though, if I somehow got mixed up in this (which would never happen), I'd absolutely sell at least half the shares in a long position around $300. In any arrangement like this, the larger the conspiracy is, the more profitable it is to betray your fellow conspirators.
 

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