Redditors vs Wall Street

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Well holy shit:

Spoiler: lol

 

[bubblesort]

Also, Robin Hood is running margin calls on their customers, forcing them to sell the GME stock. This is probably legal, but it's sleazy as hell.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

 

[Cristiano]

Biden Continues Reading ‘The Pet Goat’ To Schoolchildren After Being Informed Of GameStop Situation

SARASOTA, FL—The nation teetering on the edge of chaos far greater than he had yet comprehended, President Joe Biden reportedly continued reading a passage from The Pet Goat to schoolchildren Thursday after being informed of the GameStop situation. According to observers, White House chief of...

www.theonion.com

 

[Veritable Quandry]

 

[bubblesort]

I got a screen snip to show you guys what to follow, if you want to see why reddit didn't walk away from GME yet.

This is from GME's page on the Market Watch web site. I circled and hilighted the % of float shorted metric, because that's the metric everybody is watching.

% of float shorted shows a percentage of outstanding shares that short sellers owe to lenders, divided by outstanding shares that can be traded. Remember, when you open a short position, you borrow the stock, and sell it immediately, and then you are obliged to buy it and give it back to the lender in order to close your short position. 120% of float shorted means that if every short position closed right now, the short sellers could not purchase enough stock to close their short position. There's just not enough stock to go around. Stocks are almost never at 120% of float shorted, which is why Reddit is doing this (also, even if this wasn't happening, gamestop isn't going bankrupt any time soon).

So when the % of float shorted goes down, that means the short sellers have given up on riding this out, and were forced to close their short positions. When that happens, they will all start frantically buying GME, driving the price through the roof. That's when reddit will sell the stock and take their gains.

% of float shorted hasn't really budged since before this all started. It's still holding steady, as the Wall St fat cats fully expect the plebes to lose their nerve. When they are tired of the fight, % of float shorted will go down, and reddit will win. Or maybe reddit will sell, the price will drop back to $4, and the fat cats will win.

Well... there is one other option. Maybe GME stock becomes a store of value, like a currency, and the fat cats become destitute forever, and redditors become the new ruling class. IDK, maybe it's possible.

It's been such a weird day.

 

[RodeejahUrquan]

This is so ridiculous and epic at the same time. Also, the unmitigated GALL of a stock app that's named after a guy who robbed from the rich to transfer the wealth to the poor stopping people from buying stock and selling their shares without their consent is just so beyond me xD

 

[danielravennest]

I've read Satoshi's paper, and I do understand it, but I still don't know why people buy crypto.

At first it was a mathematical curiosity. Then accumulating bitcoin by mining became like getting points in a game. In fact, the first exchange for trading bitcoin was called "MtGox", from "Magic the Gathering online exchange". It started as a market for physical collectible game cards. Somebody decided to pay for a couple of pizzas with bitcoin. Now it had a real-world market value, not just game points.

Since the production of bitcoin was limited by the software to 21 million, some people realized it was a collectible like gold or artwork. There was only so much, giving it scarcity value. Some other people realized it was useful for buying drugs, because bitcoin transactions don't identify who is making the transaction. Between people buying it up as a collector's item, and the people buying some to buy drugs with anonymously online, the price shot up. There are at least five major price bubbles since it was created in 2009. Each time, the rapid rise makes the news of some kind. The first couple of times it was mainly in the tech world, but after that major news media. The rapid increase bring in new buyers, which makes the bubble self-inflating until you run out of suckers. I mean investors.

When the total market value got into the billions, it also brought in underground money transfers in addition to buying retail drugs with it. The US dollar used to be the underground currency of choice, but in recent years a lot of cracking down on large amounts of cash has happened. We're talking everyone from individuals trying to get around currency controls, to those stashing funds in tax havens, to drug lords. They all had money to move that they didn't want a government to notice. The crypto exchanges served that need by obscuring who was trading what. That's the "real" market in the sense of an economic need. The rest of the crypto value is hype and speculation of the same kind that day traders do.

----

I got into bitcoin in 2011 when it was still like a game, but also when I had had several years in Second Life. So I thought of it as like the Linden Dollar, game money convertible to real money, but not controlled by a single company. I had a decent graphics card, and started mining it in the background. I rode the bubbles and crashes until 2017, when the price got into the thousands. Then I sold it all. This wasn't a plan, or genius, it was just dumb luck. I'm happy to stay out of it now.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

I just yesterday tried to talk a friend down from this but seems they gotta step on that rake.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

From yesterday:


I'm sorry, but while I am sympathetic to their pain, I fear people who've been burned by this have no one but themselves to blame.

 

[Aribeth Zelin]

I've lost some sympathies after reading this:

Markets Weekly

A weekly roundup of insights into the financial markets and economic policy, by Alexis Goldstein

marketsweekly.ghost.io

 

[Innula Zenovka]

From the FT

Anger as brokers curb retail investors’ bets on GameStop

Also

GameStop: flash mob vs Wall Street

It would be tempting for market professional to dismiss the Reddit bros as “dumb money” and their frenzied buying as a Ponzi scheme. Instead, this is a cautionary tale of how social media can be co-opted to attack the financial establishment. Reddit may be changing Wall Street in the way Twitter and Facebook have changed politics

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.

 

[Isabeau]

 

[Isabeau]

Jon Stewart just joined Twitter. His first tweet.

 

[Isabeau]

Thread:

 

[Noodles]

Isn't this normally how the market works? Some investors get foolish or lazy and other investors discipline them? Shorting stocks has always been risky and IIRC the great depression happened in no small part through leveraging and short selling in just this same way. The only difference is bucket shops are now online and "the wisdom of the crowds" is now a more informed a player because there is a bit more transparency for crowd-sourced opinion makers to make better plays on the market.

Yeah except the rich have hammer the system in a way that there wasn't supposed to actually BE any risk. It was just supposed to be win everytime.becsuse too big to fail or some other bull shit.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]