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Discord bans r/WallStreetBets server, subreddit went private for a while

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Re: Discord bans r/WallStreetBets server, subreddit went private for a while

#921

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything is market manipulation, its shorting over 100% of a company to push down it's share price even lower and destroy the company

Intent is very important and this keeps being lost on the layman crowd. If I go to a widely publicized open forum and say: "Let's go and squeeze the shorts so that they go bankrupt, oh and here's a picture of me doing just that." that's market manipulation and in many corners of the world, that's illegal. As in, you go to jail illegal. If I short a stock because I genuinely believe it's overpriced, that's perfectly l…

What is the difference between your argument and a saying "the big boys know how to benefit from the corruption inherent in the system and the regulators would rather persecute a bunch of powerless people than confront the corruption in their own industry"?

Re: Discord bans r/WallStreetBets server, subreddit went private for a while

#923

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a former fund manager, I think it mainly illuminates bad risk management practices at one specific fund. Why would you ever paint yourself in a corner where you lose 30% on a single name? It just makes me think all their other bets are also huge and simply lucky they haven't collapsed. Funds are also diverse, though. There will be a load of funds who have taken the other side to Melvin, based either on various fun…

Success often comes down to execution of the play. If your building something it's about quality. If your making a bet, then it's about risks. This fund has/had bad risk managers.

Or they had ordinary risk managers whose ordinary schemes got attention from an internet forum with just enough ability to counter one of them.

Re: Discord bans r/WallStreetBets server, subreddit went private for a while

#924

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We require regulation, just as we require the police, because education doesn't matter to people willing to disregard ethics and harm others for their own gains.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you, are you implying that what wsb is doing is unethical?

There are two kinds of people involved: those trying to make a point and those trying to make a buck.

Some people trying to make a point are going to make a lot of bucks as well.

And some people trying to make a buck are going to lose a lot of money. Not everyone can get out of an inflated stock with gains, pretty much by definition. And those least likely to understand the point are also probably the ones buying into the stock late (and at an inflated price).

The mix of who makes and loses money is going to affect how society sees this. It will look somewhere between an egalitarian social movement, or a few now-wealthy loudmouths who took everyone else for a ride.

Making money in a bubble is all about timing... and it gets ethically complicated when some traders have control of the timing (in this case by declaring whether the vendetta against Melvin is over or not).

Note that I have made no ethical considerations for Melvin; they knew what game they were playing and are not victims here IMO.

Re: Discord bans r/WallStreetBets server, subreddit went private for a while

#925

This is really exciting, feels like open standards, independent internet is going to continue getting extreme motivation to expand and establish, with private "freedom of speech" censorship by for-profit platforms. We're going to see more fragmentation, and growth of closed platforms perceived by users as "slightly less evil" such as telegram vs watsapp. This may also motivate the return to truly open internet ideals…

"Lemmy is similar to sites like Reddit, Lobste.rs, Raddle, or Hacker News: you subscribe to forums you're interested in, post links and discussions, then vote, and comment on them. Behind the scenes, it is very different; anyone can easily run a server, and all these servers are federated (think email), and connected to the same universe, called the Fediverse.

For a link aggregator, this means a user registered on one server can subscribe to forums on any other server, and can have discussions with users registered elsewhere."

Time for them to spin up a Lemmy server?

https://lemmy.ml/docs/en/index.html

wallstreetlemmi.ng maybe?

Re: Discord bans r/WallStreetBets server, subreddit went private for a while

#926
post #777

It does feel like a watershed moment regarding hedge funds. This is the first time netizens capitalize on hedge fund short favorites and it has been surprisingly easy to cause an absolute catastrophy in the order of billion losses for them. I heard Melvin Capital may even have gone bankrupt? And how to do it? You get people to invest in a stock that is expected by the industry to go belly up. Seriously. It's that eas…

I'd argue that the last year or so of Tesla was the first major incarnation of this gamma squeeze + memes to burn short sellers but yeah GME is a while other level.

It's not just Tesla, either. There are a number of stocks that are grossly overvalued right now when you look at fundamentals. Lots of people have been talking here & everywhere else for the better part of the past year about how the Fed is printing money and it's all going into a stock bubble. Oh yeah, and cryptocurrencies.

This GME thing is just one little piece of an overall new zeitgeist. I'm not about to even try to predict the next crash/bubble-pop, though. I just don't have the stomach for this kind of market. When a change comes, it may not happen in a predictable way. I think there's at least a chance we could somewhat be in uncharted territory here.

Re: Discord bans r/WallStreetBets server, subreddit went private for a while

#927
post #832

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And how to do it? You get people to invest in a stock that is expected by the industry to go belly up. A lot of the people involved aren't just buying and holding. They're specifically buying/selling short dated out of the money options in order to move the price. Some understand the market microstructure and the various levers they have to make the price move using what is effectively leverage. > Seriously. It's t…

> Ideally finance is meant to be about allocation of capital. If a market is allocating capital to a dying company just because meme, then the market isn't serving its purpose. Do you believe in it's right to give power to somebody, whether it will be a government, private party, or a class to rule over allocation of capital, and decide whose capital allocation is good, and whose capital allocation is bad? There is a…

An internet community is "somebody" with a selfish interest that might go against the interest of the wider public.

Re: Discord bans r/WallStreetBets server, subreddit went private for a while

#928
post #832

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And how to do it? You get people to invest in a stock that is expected by the industry to go belly up. A lot of the people involved aren't just buying and holding. They're specifically buying/selling short dated out of the money options in order to move the price. Some understand the market microstructure and the various levers they have to make the price move using what is effectively leverage. > Seriously. It's t…

> And there will be more laws made targeting individuals engaging in this sort of activity (basically coordinating with groups of people). These laws will not be legal under US law, because US congress is not permitted to make a law abridging an act of speaking, or expressing an idea, or opinion. > Finance is highly regulated and arbitrarily so. The level of arbitrariness of legal process in legal systems of ex-UK co…

> These laws will not be legal under US law, because US congress is not permitted to make a law abridging an act of speaking, or expressing an idea, or opinion.

It can probably be written in such a way that this style of speech can be argued through the new law to fall under some of the exceptions, perhaps incitement or fraud.

Re: Discord bans r/WallStreetBets server, subreddit went private for a while

#929

This is really exciting, feels like open standards, independent internet is going to continue getting extreme motivation to expand and establish, with private "freedom of speech" censorship by for-profit platforms. We're going to see more fragmentation, and growth of closed platforms perceived by users as "slightly less evil" such as telegram vs watsapp. This may also motivate the return to truly open internet ideals…

I don't know where you even come up with these outdated ideas. Very few people care about what you are talking about. The subset of people who care are: tech savvy, young, mostly male, and vaguely misanthropic. This demographic is already served in numerous places, and everyone else is rather glad to see these people chased off of platforms they use for sharing videos of dancing and food.

I think anyone that has spent even a second on YouTube recognizes that this crowd is much large and diverse than this.

Re: Discord bans r/WallStreetBets server, subreddit went private for a while

#930
post #832

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And how to do it? You get people to invest in a stock that is expected by the industry to go belly up. A lot of the people involved aren't just buying and holding. They're specifically buying/selling short dated out of the money options in order to move the price. Some understand the market microstructure and the various levers they have to make the price move using what is effectively leverage. > Seriously. It's t…

> Ideally finance is meant to be about allocation of capital What does it matter what it is "ideally", if it was never that in practice? Ideally communism is a stateless moneyless classless society, let's get working on dissolving the state then?

That means the market works to that end to some degree. "Not ideal" is very different from "let's allocate capital randomly"
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