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The nihilism of r/wallstreetbets

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Re: The nihilism of r/wallstreetbets

#251

Post by TheCoelacanth »

jeffbee wrote: post #212
cwhiz wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short selling is not a fundamental activity. Short selling should be the thing that is illegal. None of this nonsense would exist if it weren’t for the absurd nonsense that is borrowing a stock, selling it, waiting for the price to drop, buying a stock, and giving it back. Short selling is absurd. All options trading should be banned by the SEC.

What you are suggesting is a one-sided market where prices can only go up and there is no restoring force. That's dumb. What's worth knowing is that immoral conspiracies among short sellers are incredibly rare. I challenge you to find a documented case. By contrast, there have been many, many pump-and-dump sell-side scams, and without the short side there would be many more.

> What you are suggesting is a one-sided market where prices can only go up and there is no restoring force.

Aren't there other ways to take a short position on a stock without actually short selling it? Like buying a put option?

Re: The nihilism of r/wallstreetbets

#252

Post by chasebank »

29athrowaway wrote: post #125
jsonne wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't have enough money to pay your rent but winning means getting a Ferrari then yes. Losing means nothing and winning is everything. At least that's the point I was trying to make.

That is not the case in WSB. Many of them gamble with amounts well beyond their bankroll, which is not possible with most casino games.

No, they're just leveraged beyond their bankroll. Any broker will have a backend stop-loss and force margin call them before the broker lets the client go negative.

Re: The nihilism of r/wallstreetbets

#253

Post by derision »

some_furry wrote: post #195
derision wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not sufficient, because the culture of WSB is such that they refer to themselves as autists. To not use the term would be an inaccurate description

You don't have to use the same language as the people you're talking about. See, for example, ThoughtSlime's coverage of fascist militias. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZMWQDvZQZs

Or we can stop bending over backwards to try to satisfy everyone's delicate sensibilities

Re: The nihilism of r/wallstreetbets

#254

Post by jeffbee »

cwhiz wrote: post #242
jeffbee wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short selling came in the seventeenth century with the rest of stock markets. You can’t really have a functional market without it.

Yes, you certainly can.

Your position is essentially that the price-finding function of stock markets is not necessary, in which case I wonder why we have the stock market at all.

Re: The nihilism of r/wallstreetbets

#255

Post by TheCoelacanth »

qeternity wrote: post #29
koolk3ychain wrote: post #3

I don't understand why people think /r/wallstreetbets is really that interesting or provides insight into actual wall street? Anyone who knows anything about actual options trading / building strategies knows these people are idiots. Sure, there's a lot of money flowing around - but most people don't realize that to many $60k is pocket change.

I don't think anybody thinks that it has anything to do with Wall Street, and anyone who thinks that Wall Street has anything to do with modern markets is also about 15 years behind the times (hint: Chicago is much more important than NYC). But as someone who spent most of their career running sizeable vol books, there are a few people on /r/wsb who do understand options, or at least they understand gamma, which is m…

"Wall Street" is a metonym for the US finance industry. It doesn't refer to the actual location. Much like how if "the White House" does something, it means someone working for the POTUS, regardless of whether they're in that specific building or not.

Re: The nihilism of r/wallstreetbets

#256

Post by at_a_remove »

Somewhere on the internet there exists a photo of a boy who looks enraged, looming over a chessboard, captioned (in Impact, probably) "STOP LIKING WHAT I DON'T LIKE."

"Stop investing the way I don't approve of" is probably what we're seeing here. Some folks are having fun in an unapproved of manner, and to make their situation more impenetrable, they have invented (and reinvent) jargon likely to "trigger" the people who are, as far as I can tell, continually prowling over Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and such, looking for something to be angry over, and better yet, get a bunch of other people to be angry over. Something of defiling an abandoned church so you can have a speakeasy in the basement, where the bluenoses dare not look.

You can tell because most of the criticisms will revolve around some variant of men who have "refused to grow up," whatever that means, but it usually mentions maturity or lack of interest in settling into a harness pulling a plow, like Boxer in Animal Farm. Just as a compare and contrast, when did you last hear "woman-child" as an insult?

Re: The nihilism of r/wallstreetbets

#257

Post by jeffbee »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #251
jeffbee wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are suggesting is a one-sided market where prices can only go up and there is no restoring force. That's dumb. What's worth knowing is that immoral conspiracies among short sellers are incredibly rare. I challenge you to find a documented case. By contrast, there have been many, many pump-and-dump sell-side scams, and without the short side there would be many more.

> What you are suggesting is a one-sided market where prices can only go up and there is no restoring force. Aren't there other ways to take a short position on a stock without actually short selling it? Like buying a put option?

That's a way to profit from the price falling but it doesn't serve the price-finding function of the market because it doesn't actually increase the supply of shares for sale.

Re: The nihilism of r/wallstreetbets

#258

Post by safog »

interstice wrote: post #232
safog wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Along this note, the new generational warfare is Gen Z vs Millenials. Gen Z posters are mostly tired of the millenial narrative of boo-hoo the system is rigged, I'm so poor, why won't someone give me free stuff and it's a meme to make fun of millenials on TikTok for saying this. I wonder how it'll go for them given they're mostly still in college / high school but we shall see. They've mostly graduated into a booming…

There's a bit of survivorship bias in this response, some eras are a lot less forgiving than others. It would be disingenuous to claim that hard work is the only factor for success.

Yeah that's fair. I think I need some concrete data before making statements like these - In absolute numbers, Millenials haven't been hitting the financial milestones that their parents did (incomes, home ownership %, retirement savings etc.).

If that's worth the non stop complaining, I have to figure out.

Re: The nihilism of r/wallstreetbets

#259

Post by mox1 »

buryat wrote: post #189
whoknew1122 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Language like WSB uses is meant to amuse edgelords and (hopefully) upset 'normies'. When normies are offended by cavalier use of slurs and labels (and if you're offended, you're by definition a normie), the edgelords point and laugh at the normie who doesn't share their same nihilistic worldview. WSB is what happens when immature, nihilistic, overly online middle class boys grow up into immature, nihilistic, overly o…

WSB is more about laughing at themselves rather than trying to amuse or offend someone. WSB doesn’t care much about so called “normies”, they have never attacked anyone outside of wsb and labels don’t spread outside of wsb either. WSB never had nihilistic worldview, there’s plenty of people supporting each other, there’s regular donations to charities, and etc. WSB is just a tongue-in-cheek ridicule of the finance wo…

As someone who has spent the last few months following WSB, to me it feels very much like an old school Internet club/social scene/etc. Reminds me a lot being involved in a niche IRC community or something.

Along with all the silliness, there are a lot of smart people posting very interesting things on the forum. Open, free for anyone to read (in a hack-the-finance-planet) sorta way.

You have people writing in-dept thesis' on which way a stock is heading / what happened yesterday / how to "play" the trade. Its clear some of the people are serious as they put hundreds of thousands up against their theory.

Along with this you get a bit of a stick-it-to-the-man feeling as well. I will shed 0 tears if a bunch of people on reddit bring multiple hedge funds down. Perhaps the entire finance world should be more open, equitable and accessible!

Re: The nihilism of r/wallstreetbets

#260

Post by arcticbull »

aaahayatav wrote: post #247
missedthecue wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But your typical home did not cost $35k then, and your typical home does not cost $700k now

While prices vary wildly from city to city and type to type, I'd like to show you the King County price index that shows the trend in housing prices since 1975. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS53033A

Indeed, you're looking at supply not keeping up with demand due to artificial constraints imposed by King County.
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