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The Battle of GameStop

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Re: The Battle of GameStop

#271

Post by PartiallyTyped »

asiando wrote: post #268
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it is out of spite. I am up >200% in January, with all of my life savings, and I am willing to lose everything so that they bleed and they lose everything. I have nothing to lose because I am used to living with nothing. I have but my chains to lose. The '08 crisis was in part for a similar reason. Some hedge funds shorted housing stocks and crashed everything. We were at the risk of losing our home, my mother wo…

What a joke. You’re willing to go broke so they lose 2% of their capital? Good job.

I am already broke. The money I invested isn't enough to change my life, but the returns are. I can fast for a week or two, I can walk to school instead of taking the metro. I am poor af and they can't take that away from me.

But you know, melvin capital is already 30% of their equity down in January.

They have everything to lose. I have nothing.

Re: The Battle of GameStop

#272

Post by TeMPOraL »

mpoteat wrote: post #197
jameshart wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You played a game, you played it well, and you won. Well done. But don't pretend that that means everyone can do it, because patently they can't: you won your bets, a bunch of other people lost theirs. No value that wouldn't otherwise have been created got made, you just shifted the balance of how the rewards are distributed in your favor, and away from someone else. As a system for distributing the benefits of econo…

Isn't modern human intelligence widely considered to be the result of evolutionarily optimizing complex iterated social games?

Yes, but one of the most important aspects of human intelligence is being able to realize and transcend this.

Re: The Battle of GameStop

#273

Post by m3kw9 »

taway0125210 wrote: post #161
shouldiquitamzn wrote: post #17

I’ve made millions on WSB options plays. I can finally quit my job and stop being a cubicle slave. The visceral reaction from the media on this is disgusting. Major hedge funds got caught on the wrong side of this, and have been making a huge stink about it. CNBC to the rescue, demonizing young middle class Reddit investors. This whole thing has opened my eyes to how even my FAANG compensation is peasant money, it’s…

Here's my account, that might be survivorship bias. I also traded tech stocks and cryptos and was able to significantly beat the market on the former and quit (also from Amazon) a few years ago. I invested in NVidia after recognizing GPU shortages due to ML continuing hype. I switched to AMD after recognizing their Zen CPUs are slowly beating Intel. I switched to TSMC after realizing their accomplishments are signifi…

I have the exact same thought, quants and AI cannot predict long term, and that’s where to compete. Didn’t think I’d find similarly thinking people out here, where do I find more to talk to?!

Re: The Battle of GameStop

#274

Post by thaumasiotes »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #261
thaumasiotes wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what? The same share can be bought more than once in just the same way it can be sold more than once; in fact, the one necessarily entails the other.

What happens if nobody sells? Say 40% of total shares are floating. You the hedge fund owe 60% of the shares because you shorted them. Even if your position is closed immediately (hint, it won't), you would still need to find the remaining 20% of the shares that you owe. Who will give you that 20%? Well I of course, but the difference is, I get to dictate what the market price is. We saw this happen in 2008 with Volk…

> What happens if nobody sells?

This has nothing to do with the ratio of short shares to float. What happens if there are 300 shares floating, 20 short shares, and nobody sells?

Re: The Battle of GameStop

#275

Post by xibalba »

mempko wrote: post #163
pyrrhotech wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea and Elon Musk made 170B. Meanwhile, the average HN user probably made somewhere around 200k. I made 1.3 million last year. I know it's not a lot because I know people several orders of magnitude richer than myself, but I also know that there are risks worth taking in life, and no one becomes Elon Musk, Ken Griffin, DeepFuckingValue or even myself by calmly working a desk job. You have to have balls to really succ…

Ok, but what did you make the year before?

And, more importantly, will be they be able to preserve that capital over the next 5 years? Will they survive a significant correction?

Re: The Battle of GameStop

#276

Post by TeMPOraL »

aeternum wrote: post #179
jameshart wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You played a game, you played it well, and you won. Well done. But don't pretend that that means everyone can do it, because patently they can't: you won your bets, a bunch of other people lost theirs. No value that wouldn't otherwise have been created got made, you just shifted the balance of how the rewards are distributed in your favor, and away from someone else. As a system for distributing the benefits of econo…

If you believe that op played the game well, then he successfully took capital from less efficient companies and allocated it to new more efficient companies. This creates value.

Does anybody truly believe that this is a good thing?

The stock market is detached from reality. It creates its own universe. The efficiency we're talking about here is self-referential - it's not efficiency in producing object-level value, it's efficiency in enriching participants of the stock market. Which depends as much on the company itself as it depends on the hype the funds and the shareholders can make around it.

That WSB can tank or revive companies just for teh lulz only shows to demonstrate how the stock market is an universe of its own.

Re: The Battle of GameStop

#277

Post by PartiallyTyped »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #274
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens if nobody sells? Say 40% of total shares are floating. You the hedge fund owe 60% of the shares because you shorted them. Even if your position is closed immediately (hint, it won't), you would still need to find the remaining 20% of the shares that you owe. Who will give you that 20%? Well I of course, but the difference is, I get to dictate what the market price is. We saw this happen in 2008 with Volk…

> What happens if nobody sells? This has nothing to do with the ratio of short shares to float. What happens if there are 300 shares floating, 20 short shares, and nobody sells?

They owe more shares than there are available and they pay interest on said shares. Even if nobody sells, the interest gets accumulated and they are bleeding.

Re: The Battle of GameStop

#278

Post by pseudo0 »

SifJar wrote: post #196
Spivak wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These people play with our lives and get fantastically wealthy by gambling with our retirement accounts. I’m actually kinda confused by this. Are we not rooting for them in some respect? As long as I make money too and my retirement account grows what do I care if they take some off the top? The returns I get are way better than I could get on my own.

And likewise - if they lose loads of money, isn't that a bunch of people's retirement accounts? We're not just talking about some Wall Street traders losing some money (who can likely afford to), but regular people may suddenly be finding they can't afford to retire as soon as they had planned.

Hedge funds are only allowed to manage the money of accredited investors, people with over $1 million in assets and sophisticated financial knowledge and experience. So when a hedge fund screws up, its investors might have to put off getting a new Ferrari for a year or two, but no one is ending up destitute.

Re: The Battle of GameStop

#280

Post by a_imho »

tempsy wrote: post #143
jeffbee wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK but this is not exactly risk-free. You are on the hook for the downside risk of whatever you own behind those calls. Selling covered calls comes with a lot of exposure.

it’s safer than just holding stock which is what 99% of people do...so how is that more exposure than your average long retirement account?

I'm not able to follow the logic. Why is it safer? Isn't the exposure from the options additive to holding stock?
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