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Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

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Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#591
post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yesterday premarket when Robinhood announced the cessation of trading in these ultra volatile stocks, was there a deep analysis of what led them to that decision? A measured consideration of why they might do that? Of course not. Immediately a false narrative was created that citadel forced them to do it under threat that they would stop their order flow. Had any politician or public figure merely suggested we let th…

Maybe if Robinhood had done literally anything to not appear like they were colluding with their customer Citadel people wouldn't have constructed "false narratives". Its some impressive mental gymnastics to see a broker lock out all of their retail investors (remember, you were completely free to liquidate your position) and offer almost no explanation, and blame the investors for being hasty and jumping to conclusi…

> Its some impressive mental gymnastics to see a broker lock out all of their retail investors (remember, you were completely free to liquidate your position) and offer almost no explanation, and blame the investors for being hasty and jumping to conclusions.

People don’t seem to realize that brokerages do this all the time to limit their risk. If you have less than $25k in a trading account for example, a brokerage is mandated by law to not allow day trading (that is entering and exiting the same position on the same day). Do you know what happens if you do? You are labeled a pattern day trader and you can only exit positions. Actually the fact that they were letting people exit trades was a big clue to me that this was risk mitigation while this collusion with citadel narrative was making the rounds.

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Abusive or manipulative trading activity that is prohibited by the federal securities laws." Is that aimed at "professional hedge funds" or self-proclaimed "autists" in an internet forum?

It is aimed at the people who shut down buying GME, then tried to create a downward trend at unusual low volumes to try to scare the wallstreet bets crowed into abandoning their positions in GME to allow short positions to recoup their gigantic losses. It failed mind you. The shorts are still bleeding and the GME hold is continuing though just at a slightly reduced price. Retail investors who have bought GME can affo…

This is QAnon/Kraken/Dominion level crankery. The MAGA types are happy to believe in voter fraud conspiracy theories with no evidence because they hate the Democratic party, and here you are doing literally the exact same thing here except replacing "Deep State" with "hedgefond managers".

People like you make fun of the QAnon-types but you're just as willing to indulge in deranged evidence-free conspiracy theorizing as long as it accommodates your ideological priors.

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am so sick of this 'stay in your lane' attitude. Time and time again, experts have been shown to have consensus opinions which are wildly off from reality. You can almost set your watch to how often an outsider will analyse a situation from first principles and make money off the 'experts', especially in the stock market. You're welcome to your opinion but this appeal to authority is seriously wearing thin. Pretty…

> I remember the smugness with which Stephen Wolfram is routinely dismissed from having non-consensus views of physics The guy is disliked for taking too much credit for things, not for "having non-consensus views" - which is sort of the opposite problem.

He is disliked for different things by different people.

See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-critic... for scientists dismissing his theories of physics.

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Time and time again, experts have been shown to have consensus opinions which are wildly off from reality No, it's just that it's not interesting when an expert is right about their domain expertise so we don't talk about it. The issue is people getting skewed by this and then inferring that it must mean, on average, that their outsider opinion is as valid as experts, but really, it's not.

If a physicists tells me something about how the solar system works, they don't have much reason to lie to me. If RobinHood tells me how clearing houses work, they have a huge reason to lie to me. Given what we say in cases like Enron, Bear Stearns, I am shocked and dismayed at the eagerness of Hacker News contributors to so readily accept whatever Robinhood tells them as 100% gospel. Where were all these experts on…

I don't think anyone is saying "we don't need to investigate". They're saying "let's find evidence before we assume malintent".

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#596

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"…

I am so sick of this 'stay in your lane' attitude. Time and time again, experts have been shown to have consensus opinions which are wildly off from reality. You can almost set your watch to how often an outsider will analyse a situation from first principles and make money off the 'experts', especially in the stock market. You're welcome to your opinion but this appeal to authority is seriously wearing thin. Pretty…

> I am so sick of this 'stay in your lane' attitude.

Is that you, Michael Gove.

> You're welcome to your opinion but this appeal to authority is seriously wearing thin.

It is you, Michael Gove.

> Progress almost always comes from non-consensus outsiders.

Certainly the spread of COVID19 in the UK and US is evidence that something can spread with the encouragement of "non-consensus outsiders".

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#597

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"…

I am so sick of this 'stay in your lane' attitude. Time and time again, experts have been shown to have consensus opinions which are wildly off from reality. You can almost set your watch to how often an outsider will analyse a situation from first principles and make money off the 'experts', especially in the stock market. You're welcome to your opinion but this appeal to authority is seriously wearing thin. Pretty…

There's an important difference between "stay in your lane" and "keep your mouth shut until you know what you're talking about".

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#598

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"…

This is absolutely perfect.

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#599

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…

> Why do market makers buy stock for delta hedging? How do they figure out how much stock to buy?

From https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-25/the-ga...:

The market maker has sold you an option that goes up in value as the stock goes up. The more the stock goes up, the more the market maker owes you. It hedges this by buying something else that goes up in value as the stock goes up—specifically, stock. Its option pricing model—the Black-Scholes formula or a related model—tellsit how much stock to buy; that output is a number called “delta” and ordinarily expressed as a percentage. Delta is the sensitivity of the option price to the stock price; the higher the delta, the more the option behaves like stock. The more in-the-money the option—for a call option, the higher the stock price is relative to the strike price—the higher the delta will be. A loose, nontechnical, incorrect but still sometimes helpful way to think about delta is as “the probability that an option will end up in the money.” A 100-delta option is so far in the money that it is sure to convert into stock, so it's just stock. A 0-delta option is so far out of the money that it can’t possibly convert into stock, so it’s just worthless. A 50-delta option is roughly at-the-money—a $50-strike call when the stock is trading at $50—and could go either way. The more stock-like an option is, the more stock the market maker will buy to hedge it. Here,Bloomberg’s OV page computes a 37.57% delta for the Jan. 29 $50 call as of last Tuesday; I rounded up for ease of use.

If you are remotely interested in these kinds of things I can heartily recommend reading Matt Levine (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...). He's at the same time educating and entertaining and what is more leaves out all the bile and negativity that is connected to these topics in other places. Gamestop is covered in recent issues.

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#600
post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pandora's box. My recollection of the events is this: around March 2020, there were some links to somewhat shoddy studies of effectiveness of masks in case of other diseases, but the official statement was that masks were not proven to be effective - but that's because there was no randomized control trial performed to check mask effectiveness against SARS variants, and how could there be ? This spins off i…

> but that's because there was no randomized control trial performed to check mask effectiveness against SARS variants, and how could there be? The argument was not "we can't do tests because this is new", the argument was "we've got dozens of studies across a range of settings and respiratory diseases (which we expect to act similarly to covid) and we struggle to see any benefit, until we drop the quality of the res…

IIRC the argument was "we can't say it works because we have no relevant tests at all". That's what I remember from March, but I may be misremembering.
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