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

641–650 of 906 posts

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#641

Post by jancsika »

tompccs wrote: post #212
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"…

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.

To my mind, I'm doing the equivalent of chiding front-end beginners for not spending a few minutes reading the part of the ecmascript spec that describes the language's primitive values. (Or at least a primer that covers the names of those types.) That spec is free, and I can probably find the relevant section faster than I can type this sentence.

Actually, it took me a minute and a half-- it's in section 6.1.6: "ECMAScript Language Types" of the ECMAScript 2020 spec.

It doesn't take much longer to skim that section and start a mental model with at least the name for each primitive type.

Armed even with that superficial knowledge, a beginner is less likely to make mistakes in communication with others. E.g., they are less likely to read a tutorial on symbols, confuse it with a tutorial on strings, and/or waste the author's time asking a question about strings.

Someone who hasn't read the spec (or at least a primer) might assume that those words are synonyms, or perhaps that "symbol" refers to the content, or has something to do with unicode code points, or has the same relationship and single and double quotes in ecmascript.

I have no doubt such a beginner can concoct all kinds of interesting definitions for "symbol" from first principles. Perhaps in some cases their own idiosyncratic misunderstanding describes some "alternate ecmascript" language that has superior features to the real ecmascript. That we can so easily construct these alternate realities is cool in and of itself and is an obvious part of the learning process.

What isn't cool is when a critical mass of commenters who don't know and won't learn the basic terminology pretend to have a discussion about a topic which in reality each comment is in it's on parallel universe of idiosyncratic terminology. Especially on this topic, it's extremely likely that one's idiosyncratic, uneducated take is going to be immensely more boring and fruitless when compared to accurate and well-informed takes on what played out in the stock market over the past week.

I look forward to posting something like this the next time the topics of macroeconomics or unions come up.

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#642

Post by my_usernam3 »

fartzzz wrote: post #91

"Our core market infrastructure has proven resilient under the weight of this week’s extraordinary trading volumes" Most of the retail investors couldn't buy specific stocks on most exchanges for some time (tastytrade, ib, rh etc). I wouldn't call that "resilient".

We have 5 nines uptime on all our non crashed systems!

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#643

Post by pas »

avs733 wrote: post #606
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.

> an outsider can't simply declare something to be true by dint of being an outsider. you must be new to the internet.

So ... an outsider who just declared something as true. It's tautologies all the way down! :)

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#644

Post by robntheh00d »

remolacha wrote: post #486
robntheh00d wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we don’t. We need to let people build their communities without tethering agency to outsiders who control the flow of imaginary capital. Pretending a value in a database is real ownership of something is insane and continues to lead humanity towards fascism to protect the oligopoly at the top of the meme pyramid. You’re selling an appeal to authority that is a complete mirage, only existing in your head because o…

People can seek capital from whomever they want. But it’s also true that outside capital is useful. If my community has lots of resources and no ideas about how to use them, then the world is better off if I take my resources and find an under-resourced entrepreneur in a less wealthy part of the world to invest in. That’s what capital represents.

Please stop believing you are telling me something that I do not already know.

I’ve been following finance for decades.

American communities are under financed because of capital extraction to improve margins. It’s a mathematical fact which carries far more weight than your hand wavy generalizations.

The extraction has decimated US communities, empowered slave labor across the globe, and entrenched power in hedge funds.

Do the actual research instead of parroting cable news sound bites.

The same pattern happened when manufacturing was pulled from cities to rural areas 100 years ago. This time the capital was pulled from rural areas and sent overseas simply to improve profit. We can decimate the planet on any continent. We do it in Asia to externalize real costs and boost financial margins.

You’re talking in a pure emotional abstract.

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#645

Post by shakezula »

snarf21 wrote: post #566
sanderjd wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And what about all the people who watch MSNBC and CNBC and Cramer, do they need to stop pushing stops as good or bad too? They tell lots of people "who don't care about hedge funds or any of that, but just got the impression from the news that hey this stock is going way up and that must mean it is a way to make a quick buck" too. None of this could have happened if they weren't shorting GME at 143%+ of float. They w…

They were greedy, they over leveraged their positions, and when the market called them out on it exactly like it’s supposed to, they just turned the market off. Im almost surprised someone hasn’t been arrested for that move yet.

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#646

Post by avs733 »

pas wrote: post #643
avs733 wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an outsider can't simply declare something to be true by dint of being an outsider. you must be new to the internet.

So ... an outsider who just declared something as true. It's tautologies all the way down! :)

a tautologie is a form of turtle, I don't understand why the herpetologists haven't read my medium to understand that.

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#647

Post by cactus2093 »

mcguire wrote: post #528
hrktb wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree in principle. Then in real life example you will have real doctors and nurses giving conflicting advices and having wildly different viewpoints on the details. The easy to point to example is how a lot of doctors viewed masks at the beginning of the pandemic. Or how trickle down economics is also endorsed by experts. Or experts opinions on mental health drugs. And so many other subjects where it won’t be hard…

" how a lot of doctors viewed masks at the beginning of the pandemic " Ok, so I've looked into the history of this a little, and most of the mask mythology seems misunderstood. Prior to 2020, most medical professionals believed most viruses, and corona viruses particularly, could not be transported as aerosols. This was a subject of research where the data had not come in. About late March, it began to appear that th…

Do you have sources for your claims?

I've also looked into it a little and come to the opposite conclusion. Here is one study from Singapore in 2014 that showed surgical and n95 have about a 68% and 95% efficacy respectively at preventing SARS transmission https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4293989/ Masks have also been shown to provide protection against the common cold (many strains of which are also coronaviruses) and seasonal flus https://www.livescience.com/7661-masks-protect-colds-flu.htm...

In the absence of more specific information about SARS-COV-2 early in the pandemic, surely it would have made sense to default to using the preventative measures that were known to be effective at controlling SARS and other known respiratory diseases? Especially when these measures come with no real risks.

It's true that they didn't know with 100% certainty, and China's misinformation about human to human spread in the beginning and not allowing the CDC team in early to investigate certainly didn't help either. Maybe these experts, including Dr Fauci, the CDC, and WHO, just made what turned out to be very bad judgement calls and they honestly thought that masks wouldn't prevent the spread of the disease. But by far the likeliest explanation in my mind is that these institutions knowingly lied to the public in an attempt to manipulate people into not buying masks, and I still find that to be absolutely unconscionable.

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#648

Post by stonogo »

vegesm wrote: post #488
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…

Why would shorting Gamestop mean making it to go bankrupt? The falling stock price of a company doesn't cause a company to go bankrupt, the causality is in the other direction. Putting downward pressure on price is useful only if you want to do a hostile takeover.

Because Gamestop is a business that is in the process of adapting to changing market conditions, which generally requires capital, and when market analysts go big on shorting in public it depresses stock price, and issuing stock is a major common method by which businesses raise capital.

As another example, lots of people assume Elon Musk got mad at short sellers because he took it personally, when in fact they were fucking with his ability to raise money he needed to ramp up production and meet manufacturing goals.

These things don't happen in a vacuum. Large funds making public bets against a company have a material impact on that company's liquidity.

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#649

Post by mancerayder »

twblalock wrote: post #426
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"…

The flood of articles about this topic hitting the front page, and the flood of comments on those articles full of conspiratorial thinking, have been surprising. Even during the election, the controversy following the election, and the Capitol riot, the front page didn't get taken over by a flood of articles. Something is different this time. It was not good. I hope it won't happen again. The moderators on this site…

Your criteria for moderating/censorship is that the post suggests a conspiracy? Are you not worried the scope might be wider than intended and the net cast snag ideas tagged as conspiracies that aren't or are later discovered to not be?

Or is the criteria that it's a negative and implicates mainstream institutions?

I'm asking an honest question in good faith because I'm nervous at people conflating fringe ideas and extremist ideology with merely non mainstream ideas or suggestions.

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#650

Post by klodolph »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #612
klodolph wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know how you could possibly reason about options without understanding delta, and gamma makes sense to me too since it’s just the derivative of delta as the underlying value changes.

As a math person, I’ve never heard “gamma” to mean the derivative of a change (a delta). For example, I was always taught that speed is v=delta-x/delta-t (distance over time). I’ve never heard gamma to mean that.

Speaking as a math major, gamma means, like, a million different things. It’s just a letter. There are only 26 latin letters, 24 greek letters, the capitals, and then a few oddities like blackboard bold, fraktur, cursive, etc. You run out pretty quickly and end up reusing letters.

Just like pi means different things in different contexts. It might be a permutation, projection, a function which counts prime numbers, or it might be half the period of sin. I might write π(10) = 4, or π ≈ 3.14…, or for π in P, etc. I might say that π is the right inverse of ι, in other words π∘ι = id, and point to some digram with a bunch of arrows.

Delta is not just “a change” in this context. It is specifically the rate of change of an option’s value with respect to the value of the underlying security. Just like pi, delta and gamma mean different things in different contexts.

Post reply on HN