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Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

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Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#391

Post by kgwgk »

FabHK wrote: post #381
kgwgk wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could stipulate whatever you wanted, but there is nothing special about that threshold in particular. I fully agree that derivatives can create all sort of problems in many cases, including when the nominal amount of the positions is much higher than the actual amount of the underlying.

Agreed fully. The 2x long, -1 short limit is just a neat, natural limit that one could discuss, and might be easier to enforce than other (similarly arbitrary) limits.

I'm not against that, but it's not trivial to implement either.

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#392

Post by nemo44x »

Tenoke wrote: post #215
kodah wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I think smart people just do this. When I got sick with COVID I cannot begin to describe the number of people who became doctors during this unprecedented time , only to send me outdated comments, articles, and speculation. All of these people thought they were smarter than the instruction I received from a real doctor, nurse practitioner, and the CDC. These were smart people, though, and mostly (but not…

I saw plenty of smart people ahead of institutions and real doctors on masks and to some extents other aspects of the pandemic. Yes, in general if you don't know much on a topic you'd on average do best if you listen to the experts but you can outperform that if you can identify the right kind of smart people with a good track record.

"Right kind of people" have no accountability to their advice. A doctor can't really just hazard a guess without actual facts to base them in or risk losing their ability to practice and/or reputation. "Right kind of people" can be and are often plenty wrong about things but it fades into obscurity and they are never held accountable.

Of course they are right sometimes but on many issues with a binary choice (should or shouldn't wear masks) that's a 50% chance.

In the long run you want to be able to discern hearsay, opinion, and rumors from facts and accountability to them.

You see it today when inquiring if a pregnant woman should get the vaccine. Doctors won't really advise you because although they maybe feel it's totally safe if you're far enough along, they would be held accountable if something happened. They can be "pretty sure" about things, but that isn't enough. Meanwhile, "very smart person" on Twitter can reference a bunch of content from unaccountable people that says it's safe and come off as an expert when they aren't. It's easy to be "right" when you don't have skin in the game and especially so when no one is going to hold you to account for all the times you were wrong or misinformed.

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#393

Post by ericmay »

hogFeast wrote: post #383
ericmay wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm more of a "spirit of the thing" than "this is what the text says" kind of guy. I'd argue that those things aren't fundamentally different than anything going on via WSB (assuming no bot accounts saying buy buy buy or something similar). I think the difference is that for these other items there's nobody around to measure the impact.

No. If you do any of those things wrong then you will get charged. There aren't bot accounts. There are people telling other people to buy who are probably selling (there is a reason why DFV isn't posting anything but account updates). No conpsiracy theory around bots, the people manipulating the market are there, they are posting on a public forum. It doesn't get more cut and dry.

I just don't see a difference in manipulating the markets through official channels versus unofficial channels. If CNBC wants to have me or reddit user r/deepfuckingvalue (Keith Gill) on their platform instead of WSB sure I'll give them some stock picks too.

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#394

Post by whatshisface »

sanderjd wrote: post #368
NoOneNew wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything on WSB states this is a bad investment plan and is more to bankrupt Melvin because they tried to bankrupt Gamestop. Short sellers have been using the down turned economy to collapse struggling companies that hire everyday people. What's funny is how the HN community tries to defend the firms they've whined about for years. Is what's going on irrational? Yup. But it pulls back the curtain of what the financ…

Here's what oh-so-many people are missing: the gigantic volume in these stocks is no longer coming from the WSB YOLO bros who know they'll lose money but think that's worth it to stick it to hedge funds. That may well be who was getting into the stock on Monday and Tuesday. But now it is people who saw the story on Good Morning America, having never previously heard of WSB or Robinhood, who don't care about hedge fun…

That's quite plausible, but where could we look to see if that was true?

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#395

Post by beaconstudios »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #320
SirSavary wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like you struck a nerve. I'm impressed by how many people are replying to this, quoting your points, and then talking about those points as if they were addressed directly at them. When did HN become overrun by narcissists?

You say "narcissists", I say I'm tired of seeing people shutting down anyone who uses their brain to try and comprehend the facts - and god forbid they know some math and are capable of formal reasoning. This approach is just teaching people to repeat memes after pundits and not use their brain - instead of teaching them to work on better reasoning skills, and applying these skills to the problems they face, while ac…

I totally agree that merit of arguments should be earned by the argument, but on HN there's an awful lot of bad arguments posited in terms of "I think it probably works THIS way based on how I imagined up the entire industry in my head" that then go on to try to make a "hoho those stupid industry insiders, they didn't see solution X" point on said completely imaginary model. IE, not very rigorous models being used overconfidently.

Closely related XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1831/

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#396

Post by listless »

hatsunearu wrote: post #171
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"…

And then there's another guy writing smug 8-point steps! Truly the pinnacle of hacker news culture.

Honestly disappointing that trolling is the top comment here. This is the kind of thing that we should hold each other above doing.

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#397

Post by TeMPOraL »

notahacker wrote: post #309
hatsunearu wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then there's another guy writing smug 8-point steps! Truly the pinnacle of hacker news culture.

tbh I thought I'd have to go to n-gate to get this take on recent discussions...

You're fined for violating the Prime Directive!

That said, when I saw that top comment I thought for a second I've confused the domains, this sounded like something taken straight from there.

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#398

Post by jeffbee »

vorpalhex wrote: post #331
jeffbee wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These aren’t large positions and that is the point. If a short position that was 2% of your account suddenly becomes 10% of it, now you have a problem, and the problem wasn’t caused by a wrong investment thesis, it was caused by a mob of kids online.

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#399

Post by throwaway-571 »

dleslie wrote: post #336
throwaway-571 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You can still make money of a joke if you are quick enough! Just @-mention Elon and here you go.

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#400

Post by AnthonyMouse »

kd0amg wrote: post #328
tompccs wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, an outsider can't simply declare something to be true by dint of being an outsider. You need to reason it. Or, in the market, bet on it, and you'll see who wins out. But experts should be held to the same standard.

> Or, in the market, bet on it, and you'll see who wins out. This is a fine way to settle debates about the health/viability of a publicly traded company, but it doesn't help much when the point of contention is a question of law.

The other issue is that it tends to be underspecified whether a discussion is about law or policy.

Someone comes in and describes from first principles what a reasonable system would look like, and then someone else haughtily chastises them because that isn't how the existing system works. But if you read it as they intended it, i.e. as a policy proposal rather than a legal opinion, then the fact that it isn't the existing system is the point. The intention is to change the system to make it that way and the desired response is either support or a criticism of the mechanics of the proposal rather than its basis in existing law.

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