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WallStreetBets vs WallStreet: It's not about the money anymore

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Re: WallStreetBets vs WallStreet: It's not about the money anymore

#311

Post by ketamine__ »

bidirectional wrote: post #19

Once again, this insistence on viewing 'Wall Street' as a monolothic entity. The largest asset management firm on Earth holds over 9 million Gamestop stock, none of the big banks that received bailouts in 08 are affected by this, 99.9% of hedge funds are not affected by this, high frequency traders are probably making a bundle. Institutional money was long Gamestop before this story entered the public consciousness.…

> Ultimately, a few medium-sized hedge funds were caught doing something stupid

Shorting a company that sells a physical product in malls during a pandemic is stupid? It seems their intuition is correct but there was a black swan event.

Re: WallStreetBets vs WallStreet: It's not about the money anymore

#312

Post by monadic3 »

astrea wrote: post #240
totalZero wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but Gabe Plotkin is the uber-wallstreeter. All the rich-but-average Chosen Ones who get internships because of mommy and daddy look at what guys like him accomplish and think, "someday that too can be mine." This is like that scene in 300 where Leonidas makes Xerxes bleed. The point isn't that Wall Street has fallen. It's that, for once, Wall Street is fallible.

While I enjoy the esprit de corp of this particular discussion, the recurring allusions to "David vs Goliath"-esque tales are rather cringe-inducing and really speak to the maturity level of those involved (if that wasn't already clear by their "tendies").

How do you figure?

Re: WallStreetBets vs WallStreet: It's not about the money anymore

#313

Post by crocodiletears »

fairity wrote: post #212
mancerayder wrote: post #55

They are blocking buying, and only allowing selling GME, BB and others. How is this not evidence of a corrupted free market system? A CEO of one company can call up his connections in retail trading platform firms, CNBC, and Nasdaq and protect his profits? Why is Reddit the scandal and not that? Reddit is full of rocket emojis and YOLO jokes. But what we see here, especially with the moralizing about gambling, is an…

> They are blocking buying, and only allowing selling GME, BB and others. How is this not evidence of a corrupted free market system? I can almost guarantee you that this decision was made to protect retail clients -- not as part of some conspiracy against them. It's very clear that retail is going to lose their shirts in the end of all of this, and by blocking new buy orders, the brokerage is effectively protecting…

I sincerely doubt that many retail investors expect to make money on this. I have a couple buddies who made robinhood after seeing this on the news just for the opportunity to make a hedgefund bleed. I was in the same boat, but I already had an account.

No matter how paternalistic the intent may have been on Robinhood's end, the message is all the same to us on the outside: the game only has rules when we get to win it

Re: WallStreetBets vs WallStreet: It's not about the money anymore

#314

Post by chollida1 »

dcolkitt wrote: post #51
bidirectional wrote: post #19

Once again, this insistence on viewing 'Wall Street' as a monolothic entity. The largest asset management firm on Earth holds over 9 million Gamestop stock, none of the big banks that received bailouts in 08 are affected by this, 99.9% of hedge funds are not affected by this, high frequency traders are probably making a bundle. Institutional money was long Gamestop before this story entered the public consciousness.…

> high frequency traders are probably making a bundle. I've heard from a former colleague at a major HFT firm, that they hit their entire revenue target for the year, just in the past week.

Then one of two thing is true.

1) they are lying to you. Look at how much the stock has traded, Its alot but its nothing compared to how much SPY trades in a year. There just wasn't' anywhere near enough trading volume to make an entire year in one week even if they participated in every trade that Gamestop had this past week.

2) they lost money last year so any profit beats last year's pnl?

Re: WallStreetBets vs WallStreet: It's not about the money anymore

#315

Post by PeterisP »

fileeditview wrote: post #98
leetcrew wrote: post #54

> With their heads in cloud nine, hedge funds tried to kill GameStop ($GME). They tried to squeeze it so much that it would suffocate and die. They didn't care about the people who will be out of jobs, unable to pay their bills, or even survive. Blinded by greed, all they care about was money. this is a bit much. shorting != trying to kill a business. it can certainly depress the stock price, but so can closing a lon…

Does not seem far fetched. Killing the business means maximum profit for the shorters. Having a short interest of about 140% is also a good indicator that they would have loved to see GME bankrupt. In the end a short means a future buy and 140% of shares bought in the future means the price will go up eventually..

While the business dying means maximum profit for the shorters, the act of shorting isn't killing the business in any way; the price of shares does not affect the revenues of GME nor their workers jobs, it has some impact on the bonuses of the top managers and that's it.

The shorters are predicting that the business will fail (and hoping for their predictions to come true), but they aren't causing the failure, so it's misleading to say that they are trying to kill the business as long as the only thing they're doing is shorting the stock. There's a very big gap between hoping that a rich uncle dies because you'd get some inheritance and actually trying to kill him.

Re: WallStreetBets vs WallStreet: It's not about the money anymore

#316

Post by rjtavares »

philip1209 wrote: post #246
bidirectional wrote: post #19

Once again, this insistence on viewing 'Wall Street' as a monolothic entity. The largest asset management firm on Earth holds over 9 million Gamestop stock, none of the big banks that received bailouts in 08 are affected by this, 99.9% of hedge funds are not affected by this, high frequency traders are probably making a bundle. Institutional money was long Gamestop before this story entered the public consciousness.…

A lens to look at this through is - "why is short selling allowed?" Advocates cite increased "liquidity." But, does society really benefit? Short-selling really just lets trading firms extract value from the failure of others. In that sense - professional trading firms that participate in short-selling could be grouped into a monolithic "Wall Street" in the sense that they are extracting value without a benefit for s…

If stocks prices being close to their true value is beneficial to society, then traditional short selling is also beneficial.

Re: WallStreetBets vs WallStreet: It's not about the money anymore

#317

Post by meetups323 »

function_seven wrote: post #291
risyachka wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just RH. I am paying for Interactive Brokers, they also stopped buy transactions.

Oh wow. I've always thought IB to be the most "bare metal" trading platform available to regular people. If they're denying buy orders, then where does a plebe go to get direct access to the market?

Fidelity is free and has been giving me full reign over my own assets.

Re: WallStreetBets vs WallStreet: It's not about the money anymore

#318

Post by andrepd »

commandlinefan wrote: post #207
ignoramous wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What WSB crowd is doing is market manipulation. Shorting GME more than number stocks exist is not market manipulation? HFT isn't? Bailing out greed isn't? Why is this notion of market manipulation such a narrow one-way street?

> such a one way street? It's not, though - rich people get in trouble for this all the time. Bernie Madoff is going to die in prison for running a finance scam. Enough people were convicted of insider trading in the 80's that they made a movie about it - and the movie was just called "Wall Street". None of this is new.

> It's not, though - rich people get in trouble for this all the time.

This has to be a joke.

Re: WallStreetBets vs WallStreet: It's not about the money anymore

#319

Post by yanderekko »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #163

The endgame here is fascinating to me. The people who got in early will suffer least when GSE finally crashes and burns. But the poor suckers who bought it at $150 are going to be in big trouble. They're all trying to stay strong and hold long because that's the way to make the hedge funds suffer, but the smarter ones will figure out that their only chance to not lose their shirts is to be in the earliest 5% of scabs…

>But the poor suckers who bought it at $150 are going to be in big trouble.

These people could get out at this moment with a 100% return. The entire premise here is that as long as there's a ton of these short positions that need to be covered then you should have less worry about being the person who's left "holding the bag" than normal. Yes, if you hold long enough you'll regret it. And there will be plenty of people who will lose a lot of money by doing this. But you should have more confidence than normal that the floor is not going to fall out from under you in the next 24h or so.

Re: WallStreetBets vs WallStreet: It's not about the money anymore

#320

Post by beervirus »

paulddraper wrote: post #259
52-6F-62 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't see how that's the case. They aren't going to suffer for this, let alone personally. Even if the fund tanks, they can set up a new one, probably with sympathetic money or just cruise off into the sunset with their millions.

They're so disconnected that losing billions doesn't matter? The problem is bigger than originally conceived then.

It matters to the investors in the hedge fund. It matters a lot less to the people running it.
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