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Reddit’s profane, greedy traders are shaking up the stock market

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Re: Reddit’s profane, greedy traders are shaking up the stock market

#191
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good choice. Just to elaborate: double opt-in is expected behavior from customer-centric companies, and expected behavior from good actors in the email ecosystem. It's not necessarily required by law in the US, but it's a good practice nonetheless: always make sure you have permission from a recipient to send an email. Anyone can pass anyone else's email address as input to a form, so simply receiving an address as i…

> I consider single-opt-in use of email addresses to be a dark pattern or anti-pattern This is wrong. I want to be able to enter an email address and get a newsletter. This is good UI/UX blah There is nothing dark about helping a user using single opt in. Single opt in is great and preferred. But because of the world we live in, as you explain well, we have to make everyone's lives a PiTA by securing it. It might be…

Single opt in is great and preferred when people (other than me) don't put in my email address.

I don't want to be single opt-ined to random crap, but apparently lots of people want me to be.

Re: Reddit’s profane, greedy traders are shaking up the stock market

#192

Back in the early 2000's I worked for a company that was was hired (via intermediary law firms) by publicly listed companies to investigate pump and dump schemes on Yahoo message boards (you might call that the "Reddit of the early 2000's"). It involved a lot of web scraping Yahoo with Perl (specifically LWP) and then lots of analysis by humans with some help from automated tools. For example, if you plotted a histog…

Hah... The guys on the scox message board automated this pretty well; there was a user named warmcat who even opened sourced some of it.

The Reddit comments usually aren't long enough to be meaningful, and I think that there are now organised p&d teams, so that level of investigation isn't very useful anymore

Re: Reddit’s profane, greedy traders are shaking up the stock market

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's no where near enough volume there to move anything I was imagining that some big money quant fund had written bots and scrapers to use r/wsb as an algorithmic amplifier since over time they can make money on tiny shifts. Or maybe that would just make a good movie plot.

You're definitely not the first to think of this. I know of a couple of people have done sentiment analysis on r/wsb over the years. I've thought about doing it myself. But, doubt it'd be worth much other than a fun exercise.

Sweet summer child.

It is precisely because so few feel it is worth the effort, that the effort is worthwhile.

Re: Reddit’s profane, greedy traders are shaking up the stock market

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But was P&D happening?

P&D happens with penny stocks, where a small amount of interest can yield very real change. You can't P&D with any big cap. And the best part with P&D is that most everyone involved knew what was happening, but they played along hoping to get out before it peaks. And it was very real. You could get the emails pimping whatever the OTC stock was and watch as it pumped up, pumped up, pumped up, and then crashed to nothi…

I had a lovely strategy of signing up with the stock promoters of Vancouver and South Florida and trying to short all of it. Worked nicely until someone published a paper on returns of spam stocks, at which point it died instantly.

Re: Reddit’s profane, greedy traders are shaking up the stock market

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ever visit any of Asian country, you're in for a bit of a culture shock if you're expecting to see the kind of political correctness that you edited out from this comment earlier. The top 5 Asian countries by size are Russia, China, India, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia. None of them have correctness, in fact all of them are anti-PC and see it as a weakness, especially in China and Russia where westerners are viewed…

I think he might have meant "political correctness" less in the sense of "extreme sensitivity about denigrating homosexuals" and more in the sense of "arbitrary rules of social etiquette that people get extremely upset at you for violating".

He actually reiterates the definition he had in the GP comment but then edited out:

"Political correctness is a right-wing term used when they want to call somebody X, but may face social consequences for doing so."

He thinks terms like 'political correctness' and 'victim culture' are some sort of right-wing slurs for virtuous attributes. He doesn't seem to be aware that this notion doesn't exist for 90%+ of the world's population.

Re: Reddit’s profane, greedy traders are shaking up the stock market

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to explain?

I'm going to guess, based on what I know about diversity and inclusion. It's the fact that people are called retards, autists, and homophobic slurs. To some it's about "having thick skin". To others it's about normalizing "hate speech". It really depends on what your life experience is to determine which camp you fall in. If you've been on the receiving end of hate speech or discrimination, you tend to be in the seco…

People can get offended at one term or terms and be blind to the fact that they use others that are offensive to different people.

It happens all the time that you use a slur casually and don't realize it applies to someone next to you. If a person is conscious of that happening daily where it's not socially acceptable to say anything, then they may internalize that this is normal and expect others to also have a "thick skin".

Re: Reddit’s profane, greedy traders are shaking up the stock market

#197

As someone who was a very early member of /r/wallstreetbets: 1) /r/wallstreetbets and /r/wsb are two different subreddits. /r/wsb are for those that got banned from wallstreetbets 2) When wallstreetbets first started it wasn’t as crazy as it was today. There were some aggressive gamblers but there was opportunity for real due diligence and decent conversation. I contributed more than a few posts back in the early day…

3) You don’t need to have complete data to report what you think is a market manipulation scheme to the SEC for investigation: > Tips - Report a potential violation of the securities laws directly to enforcement@sec.gov. Please do not use this email box for general comments or questions.

Just remember that reporting things to the SEC makes you the enemy.

The SEC exists to protect the people exchanging securities.

Re: Reddit’s profane, greedy traders are shaking up the stock market

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love finding comments like this where I understand very little. (I am not being sarcastic). Excellent for learning.

It's a bunch of mumbo jumbo from someone that takes the academic side of finance too seriously (LTCM anyone?). In plain English: Options are basically a contract, with a time limit, that states the holder can buy a certain amount of stock at a certain price. "Options dealers" are the people who wrote the contract and sold it to another party. They are on the "hook" for fulfilling the terms, if the buying party wishes…

I am one of the best options traders in the world.

Options dealers don't necessarily sell options. They can also buy them. And "writing" an option means to sell it, so "wrote the contract and sold it" is redundant.

Options dealers are not automatically short all of the contracts that they sell. They may already have a long position in that option contract, in which case their sale is a closing sale. Also, I think you may be a bit confused...a short sale of options is not determined based on one's position in the underlying; you can be short an option and long the stock at the same time (for example, an overwrite is a sale of upside calls by someone who is already long the stock).

Delta is the first-order change of the option contract value, with respect to a unit change in the underlying price. I wouldn't refer to it at "velocity" because while I understand what you are intending to communicate (it is a rate), there is another options Greek called "speed," which is the change in gamma with respect to the underlying price. Wikipedia has a really nice description of the various options Greeks. For the truly curious, Sheldon Natenberg wrote a nice book called "Options Volatility and Pricing" that explains the Greeks better than I or Wikipedia can.

Options dealers who are short gamma will hedge by buying stock as it goes up, and selling stock as it goes down. Their demand for (or supply of) the underlying stock will impact the underlying price in a way that pushes the price in whatever direction it has already started to move.

In defense of my word choice: theory and practice are not mutually exclusive. If you want to be excellent at something, you should aim to learn both. BTW I have never taken an academic course on options or finance.

Re: Reddit’s profane, greedy traders are shaking up the stock market

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what he said.

It's absolutely what he said. Political correctness is a right-wing term used when they want to call somebody X, but may face social consequences for doing so. It's not a wealthy western phenomena. It's global and it's as old as the hills.

How does that narrative apply to the example we are discussing in this thread - r/wallstreetbets?

All the objectionable language used there is self-applied. The members of that community call themselves gay, autist, etc. Are they trying to persecute themselves, and evading social standards by calling it comedy?

Re: Reddit’s profane, greedy traders are shaking up the stock market

#200

Never underestimate the survivorship bias in public stock picking forums. Reddit is no exception. There are a few honest stories of losses and failure in WSB, but the majority of loss stories or bad picks quickly fade into obscurity or are deleted by their original posters. What remains are the highly-upvoted success stories.

1 million in losses makes you a mod.

If anything wallstreetbets loves massive loses more than massive gains.

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