Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

sec.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 906 posts

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#331

Post by vorpalhex »

jeffbee wrote: post #283
vorpalhex wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also not as if hedge funds are employing thousands of welders or craftsmen. These are high risk financial strategies by people who qualify as professional traders - "I didn't know" isn't an excuse anymore. If they lose the game, they get to eat their losses. We will probably see a few retail traders get burned, and I suspect anyone wanting to do trading in the future is going to have to fill out more disclaimers…

Maybe not hedge funds but I estimate that the majority of what laypeople call "hedge funds" are not hedge funds. There are tons of firms that just run money for ordinary people. At my old firm they have shorted blackberry in thousands of individual margin accounts, and those accounts are losing money on paper and might have to realize losses in order to rebalance their risk.

I'd have some questions if my low risk or medium risk investment firm was making large shorts. Shorts are very risky for a whole bunch of reasons - which is also why they can be high value. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure every high risk fund can find at least one pensioner invested in them, but if your firm is well known for shorting then you can't pretend to be anything but high risk/high reward.

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#332

Post by [deleted] »

jancsika wrote: post #121

A Moment in the Life of an HN Genius: 1. Reads a technical document outside their domain. 2. Feels dumb because they don't have a grasp on any of the concepts. 3. Too busy to use the very internet which some of them probably helped build to magically render learning materials to the screen in front of them at zero marginal cost. 4. Sees the word "manipulation" 5. Substitutes the laymen's definition of "manipulation"…

[deleted]

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#333

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

blackearl wrote: post #129
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a general, all-purpose opposition to financial trading that’s about exploiting weird market structure tricks to screw people over rather than expressing beliefs about the value of the underlying things being traded. Institutional traders too often get away with doing that kind of thing, and I’m hardly losing sleep over the particular targets of this campaign, but we can’t let the takeaway here be “it’s fine as…

The issue with that argument is that it's really not “it’s fine as long as retail investors get to play too," it's “it’s fine until retail investors get to play too”

The point is that it's not fine. The institutional investors who have historically said it was fine were wrong. If the average retail investor comes away thinking scummy tactics are cool now that you and I can use them, it'll be a disaster for the cause of real financial reform.

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#334

Post by Anon1096 »

markbnj wrote: post #193
ycombigator wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many just want to screw the hedge funds, finally it's their blood in the water.

I don't get this. I can't imagine the professional investor class is still blindly following their shorts. They're all out by now, aren't they? If the "little guys" are making money I tend to think it's coming from other little guys.

The truth of the matter is that hedge funds and institutions are quietly the ones actually pumping these stocks. Reddit likes to paint a narrative that they are in control, but when their messiah has 50MM max of securities and options, meanwhile single trades are going through worth over 700MM, the narrative just doesn't make sense. This is a battle of Wall Street vs Wall Street with some retailers playing along as pawns. Most likely, starry eyed retailers are going to be the ones holding the bag when it all comes down because they're playing a game without even knowing who they're up against.

As for the shorts, Melvin and Citron are out but new shorters get in every day. The higher the price goes the more incentive there is to short. Most will probably lose money as the bubble inflates. But a few will make out like kings when it pops.

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#335

Post by kristopolous »

kasey_junk wrote: post #289
FartyMcFarter wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is this narrative that the little guy is finally sticking it to the big bad hedge funds. In reality there is probably very little truth to this. Which part has little truth to it? The big hedge funds are apparently losing money (billions!) on Gamestop, unless that's being mis-reported. Some of the "little guys" (reddit people) definitely were a part of the reason for that.

Hedge funds are not homogeneous and the majority of them had no position whatsoever in any of the meme stocks. Some were long meme stocks. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/l... A Korean fund made a billion dollars on a 12 million dollar GmE investment and they were only the 7th largest holder of GME shares. The wsb narrative of this sticking it to Wall Street is just false. I personally thin…

It's this false dynamic, as if the people working at funds don't browse the internet.

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#336

Post by dleslie »

throwaway-571 wrote: post #302
sosuke wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When hindsight points out the opportunities that you overlooked which would have giving you that comfortable life it infects all future decision making.

Is there a spoiler tag on HN ? These ones still hurt: There is a lot of thing one could have done "for the LULz" but decided to browse HN, Imgur or Reddit instead. - Bitcoin. I heard about it when it was still possible to mint it on CPU, but chose to run SETI@Home instead. - Bitcoin when it was at merely $9000. - Ethereum when it was going under $1. - Dogecoin like anytime before yesterday (up 6x or something today).…

Dogecoin is ... Just _why_?

There's no limit on the number of coins. Mining is designed to be forever-easy. The coin is _designed_ for rapid deflation.

Why are people treating it as anything other than the joke it was intended to be?

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#337

Post by wj »

klodolph wrote: post #245
jancsika wrote: post #121

A Moment in the Life of an HN Genius: 1. Reads a technical document outside their domain. 2. Feels dumb because they don't have a grasp on any of the concepts. 3. Too busy to use the very internet which some of them probably helped build to magically render learning materials to the screen in front of them at zero marginal cost. 4. Sees the word "manipulation" 5. Substitutes the laymen's definition of "manipulation"…

> 3. Too busy to use the very internet which some of them probably helped build to magically render learning materials to the screen in front of them at zero marginal cost. I will say that I’m not too busy for this at the moment, and getting to my very basic level of understanding has required me to sort through, at the very least, a fairly decent chunk of reference material and reading interpretations and explanatio…

Two books that I might recommend for others that are interested are:

Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners (cost of this on Amazon seems to have more than doubled since I bought it 11 years ago)

Algorithmic Trading and DMA: An introduction to direct access trading strategies

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#338

Post by sendtown_expwy »

It seems like Robinhood, when it stopped trading on GME, decided to literally transfer money from the WSB retail traders to the funds who were short on the stock. But if Robinhood needed to halt trading in order to just survive as a brokerage, (and could demonstrate so), would that justify its behavior? Does anyone know more about laws and regulations concerning brokerages here?

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#339

Post by [deleted] »

jancsika wrote: post #121

A Moment in the Life of an HN Genius: 1. Reads a technical document outside their domain. 2. Feels dumb because they don't have a grasp on any of the concepts. 3. Too busy to use the very internet which some of them probably helped build to magically render learning materials to the screen in front of them at zero marginal cost. 4. Sees the word "manipulation" 5. Substitutes the laymen's definition of "manipulation"…

[deleted]

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#340

Post by gowld »

iso1631 wrote: post #278
teeray wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. Many view this as a donation to a political cause that has tangible outcomes. The ROI is watching hedge funds implode.

I bunged in $50 into GME this morning because why the hell not. If pubs ever reopen I can spend another $50 on a round of drinks with mates and legitimately say "we took on the wall street parasites". The truth doesn't matter, the end doesn't matter, the tale is the reward.

I can do that for half the price by skipping the first $50 and starting with tall tales in the pub.
Post reply on HN