On the one hand this is outrageous. On the other, if you don't pay for the product (Robinhood) then you are the product. How many times do we have to be reminded of this.
Robinhood is limiting purchases of stocks: AMC, Blackberry, Nokia, and GameStop
361–370 of 1001 posts
Re: Robinhood is limiting purchases of stocks: AMC, Blackberry, Nokia, and GameStop
#362This sort of stuff will put people more and more on edge, there is the deplatforming going on, people asserted their power financially, and now getting that removed too, the powers that rule USA don't realize that soon the only tool left to common people is violence? Even more with some irresponsible newspapers blaming the whole thing on GamerGate and Alt-Right, effectively pushing away people that previously could b…
No, this is the market defending itself from unwanted shenanigans. Listed companies want nothing to do with this. Restaurants like customers, but imagine a stampede of 1000 people rushing through the doors, it's not what they want. The populism here is getting ridiculous, I don't think most people have any understanding of what's going on.
It seems more like big fish stuck in a losing set of trades are pulling whatever strings they can to save themselves.
Re: Robinhood is limiting purchases of stocks: AMC, Blackberry, Nokia, and GameStop
#363I’m fuming, and about as angry as I’ve been in years because of this. Robinhood opened up a bunch of levered trading to amateurs, that was fine! Allowing folks to buy stocks that are making their business partners lose cash: we’re protecting the little guy. If you work at Robinhood and you continue working at Robinhood I don’t know how you’ll continue to sleep at night.
Their paychecks can buy some very nice mattresses.
RH has been a scam since day one, the very principle of it is virtue signaling to the common man to sell his data to front run his trades.
I'm sure none of these people will lose a wink of sleep.
Re: Robinhood is limiting purchases of stocks: AMC, Blackberry, Nokia, and GameStop
#364This is identical to my experience of casino gambling.
If you have a system that is beating the house (or appears to be), the house will immediately shut you down.
You can't win. Not only because the bets are stacked against you (here in favour of the wealthy), but also because the system only exists in the first place to benefit the powerful.
Re: Robinhood is limiting purchases of stocks: AMC, Blackberry, Nokia, and GameStop
#365Sure. Robinhood got a call from someone very powerful in their circle, politely asking them to stop the amateur plebes from interfering with their professional market manipulation. We are taking about people commanding titanic amounts of capital and (indirect) regulatory power. Robinhood then had the choice, do we make enemies out of these people or do we just screw, er, I mean protect, our customers? Unburdened by a…
This is so true. It's all connected. It's probable that Reddit, Discord, RobinHood have all received calls to disrupt retail traders from political players or financial backers. There's no evidence of this, the truth is we'll never know, but how its most obvious reason. If only RobinHood would live up to its namesake. It is alarming that "soft" circuit breakers are being used to target retail traders on exchanges.
I rarely emote but this stinks to high heaven, corporates and politicians doing anything to keep necks under boots.As upsetting as it is to see folk fighting back capped at their knees, the broader issue is that of censorship, of the soft or hard variety, and coordination across firms to limit movements.
Re: Robinhood is limiting purchases of stocks: AMC, Blackberry, Nokia, and GameStop
#366Brokers are worried about their legal exposure at this point. They could face lawsuits from investors in Melvin and other hedge funds, who will allege that the brokers knew they were facilitating intentional financial harm. It doesn’t matter if these are likely to fail; they are expensive lawsuits to defend against and therefore may result in settlements. And they could face class action litigation from trial lawyers…
> They could face lawsuits from investors in Melvin and other hedge funds Wait until Robinhood sees the class action lawsuit
Wouldn’t forced arbitration in the TOS prevent that?
Re: Robinhood is limiting purchases of stocks: AMC, Blackberry, Nokia, and GameStop
#367This sort of stuff will put people more and more on edge, there is the deplatforming going on, people asserted their power financially, and now getting that removed too, the powers that rule USA don't realize that soon the only tool left to common people is violence? Even more with some irresponsible newspapers blaming the whole thing on GamerGate and Alt-Right, effectively pushing away people that previously could b…
Honestly, I don't see where the attempt to equate the WSB people out to make a quick buck by gambling and hope they win out over the hedge funds as being that connected to the deplatforming of right wing people - I'm sure given "the right" and "wall street bets" are large groups that there is some overlap, but in Europe I know plenty of people following along the stock market with no connection to current US issues.…
Yeah, there isn't necessarily a ton of overlap. I'm pretty liberal but I follow this stuff, not so much WSB (and no skin in the game for this GME craziness) but crypto, and put money I'm willing to lose into these things periodically. I've lost some money, sure, but I'm significantly up overall.
Re: Robinhood is limiting purchases of stocks: AMC, Blackberry, Nokia, and GameStop
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I were running a financial brokerage I'd totally do this, too. It's not a matter of "helping my hedge fund broker friends", it's a matter of "how do we keep the SEC off our backs". Remember: Robinhood is already being charged with securities law violation for giving their customers a raw deal on order execution. We usually don't see distributed market manipulation like this, but I wouldn't be surprised if a shitto…
I'm still shit at these things, but so far, I seriously cannot understand how hedge funds get away with "shorting", but people doing the same thing in reverse is market manipulation. From this (admittedly naive) POV, this sounds like double standards.
Holding a short position (selling before you buy) or a long position (buying before you sell) are both valid and legal trading decisions on their own. Market manipulation arises out of context. When you start tweeting about how you should totally sell a stock that you have a short position on, then you start stepping into illegal behavior.
In other words, the capital firm that got short-squeezed by the idiots at /r/WSB were also doing something illegal. It's not the case that the short is legal but the longs aren't. Alternatively, if the argument is that /r/WSB isn't market-manipulating, they just think the stock is undervalued, then the hedge fund can use the same argument. "We think this stock is overvalued so we shorted it" is how they'll explain it to the SEC.
And that's not an invalid position: GME has been suspiciously overvalued way before any of the parties involved started holding positions. It's a retail-heavy business in pandemic season with multiple year-over-year same-store sales cuts. What that means is that, for each one of their stores, on average, they sold 30% less product in Q3 2020 than they did in Q3 2019. And even if you think, "oh, that's just the COVID economy, they'll be back"; Q3 2019 sales were already 20% down from the year before. This is a company nobody wanted to buy games from even before a novel coronavirus decided to close a good chunk of their stores.
The fun fact about that above explanation is that it provides plausible deniability for someone trying to juice the market in a particular direction. Hell, if /r/WSB hadn't caught the hedge fund with their pants down, they probably would have gotten off scot-free. However, the financial vigilantes dumping fat stacks into GME don't have the same kind of excuse - they explicitly coordinated in public fora to manipulate stock price, so it's an easy target for an SEC that really doesn't get the budget necessary to prosecute the complex kinds of financial crimes they're tasked with.
So, from a legal perspective, both parties are in the wrong. From an enforcement perspective, /r/WSB is a soft target.
Re: Robinhood is limiting purchases of stocks: AMC, Blackberry, Nokia, and GameStop
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the powers that rule USA don't realize that soon the only tool left to common people is violence? What's even more concerning to me is that, to platforms looking for an excuse, your comment could be painted as trying to "incite" violence, and used as a justification to ban you.
There's not any real reason to be concerned about this. Not yet, at least. Furthermore, this comment is offensive. Let's please not pretend that Facebook and Twitter were "looking for an excuse" before deplatforming Trump. They were entirely justified and would have been justified in doing so many years before they eventually did so. Let's also not put the word "incite" in dick quotes barely three weeks after an insu…
Where was all of this offense concerning violence when we watched countless businesses being burned and looted throughout the summer? I'm not justifying what happened at the Capitol, but the shouts of righteous indignation ring more than a little hollow.
Re: Robinhood is limiting purchases of stocks: AMC, Blackberry, Nokia, and GameStop
#370I know some language nerds who like to debate about whether certain aspects of language should be descriptive (dictionaries document how real people use language) or prescriptive (very smart people know the correct way to spell/use words, and that should be imparted to the less knowledgeable).
In that light, I'd always seen the stock market as purely descriptive - the price of a stock can be completely detached from the valuation or profits of a company, it's purely the price that someone in the market is willing to pay.
This feels like an attempt to make the stock market prescriptive - "we know that these retail traders are wrong for trading at such lofty prices, we need to fix this".
Spoiler alert: Descriptivism always wins.