Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility • Hacker News Board

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#401

Post by adriancr » Fri, Jan 29, 2021, 4:46 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #361

adriancr wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you suggesting that pump and dumps legal because "free speech"? Where's the pump and dump?, This is a short squeeze due to Melvin Capitals 140% short and people buying due to initially Cohen joining. Same as for VW a long time ago. Now it's just because people want to buy... Hell I did so as well at recent prices as I think with a nice stock offering GME can get to a 500 fair market value easily. Que in some pa…

>Where's the pump and dump? Whether this specific instance counts as a pump and dump is irrelevant. The point is that it's illegal and "free speech" isn't a valid defense. Furthermore, comments elsewhere in this thread have mentioned that intentionally causing a short squeeze is also illegal. >Look it up under market manipulation. A oversized hedge fund overselling a stock will certainly be able to set the price wher…

> And the same isn't true of the people in WSB gobbling up GME?

If people like the stock and buy it what can you do about it?, prevent them from buying same as robinhood?

These individual investors are not putting in market moving ammounts.

This is different from a hedge fund dumping a stock, driving price down then bankrupting a company.

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#402

Post by adriancr » Fri, Jan 29, 2021, 4:47 PM UTC

robocat wrote: post #279

adriancr wrote: post #139

A few rants that i tried answering to someone before him removing post. Free speech is allowed. Prosecuting people for free speech is impossible. A bunch of imbeciles posting on forums is similar to a bunch of imbeciles on CNBC arguing that price is too high. A hedge fund with 12 billion dollars shorting 140% of a stock and then using media to drive price to 0 is illegal. Also more then idiotic since they caused the…

> A hedge fund with 12 billion dollars shorting 140% of a stock I am fairly sure that one fund shorting 140% would have the SEC on your back (that would count as market manipulation). A comment somewhere mentioned that Melvin had shorted 14%. Does anyone have some facts here?

> A comment somewhere mentioned that Melvin had shorted 14%.

How did they lose 3 billion at 65$ with just 14%?

I call bullshit on that :)

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#403

Post by snowwrestler » Fri, Jan 29, 2021, 4:47 PM UTC

SirSavary wrote: post #287

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"…

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?

How dare you call me, specifically, a narcissist with this comment!

(But to be serious, I think it’s easy to accidentally take forum comments personally because the physical act of reading HN comments, social media DMs, and text messages are all basically the same. So maybe it’s easy for our emotions to get mixed up.)

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#404

Post by compiler-guy » Fri, Jan 29, 2021, 4:47 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #296

DanBC wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you link to the papers that were available in March 2020 that showed that masks are effective? Use any definition of "mask" and "effective" you want, but preferably effective should include some concept of "prevents spread of respiratory disease". Covid is a serious illness. Far too many people have been told, and believe, that they can continue their normal day to day life so long as they put mask on. This is un…

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…

My favorite example:

“Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials“

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC300808/

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#405

Post by thesteamboat » Fri, Jan 29, 2021, 4:47 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

> Progress almost always comes from non-consensus outsiders. This whole website is supposed to be a testament to that!

Even granting that these statements are accurate (which plenty of sibling comments are willing to dispute) I don't think these statements suggest that "Stay in your lane" is bad advice.

Why? It's a question of distributions. For any given task/field there are a lot more laypeople than experts. Consider the following simple model where we quantify some arbitrary ability score. If lay people's scores are normally distributed with a low mean and expert's scores are normally distributed with a high mean we can still see the best lay person beating all the experts simply because there are so many more of them.

"You don't know more than the 'experts'" is good advice for almost everyone even if there are counterexamples.

There's a separate problem I think you're trying to point at where in some fields credentials don't correlate as well with expertise as one would hope. But even if credentials are an imperfect proxy for expertise, they are probably better than just trusting your gut in the absence of any expertise of your own.

> Pretty much the only field which hasn't been embarrassed by an outsider of late is physics, [...]

This seems an idiosyncratic take on the current state of science to me. I've seen plenty of examples of a field being embarrassed by insiders (e.g. the replication crisis of psychology) or seen great results from experts who were not particularly recognized by the system as set up (see Yitang Zhang's work on the twin prime conjecture). What I don't think I've seen is a field's dogma being overthrown by a complete outsider. For the sake of my own calibration, I'd welcome any examples of this.

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#406

Post by kmeisthax » Fri, Jan 29, 2021, 4:48 PM UTC

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…

The existence of outsiders disproving consensus opinion with a more-correct contrarian one does not mean every outsider with a contrarian opinion is right.

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#407

Post by hatsunearu » Fri, Jan 29, 2021, 4:48 PM UTC

listless wrote: post #396

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.

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

The comment isn't without substance but yeah, could have had better delivery

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#408

Post by oramit » Fri, Jan 29, 2021, 4:48 PM UTC

sanderjd wrote: post #379

oramit wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Facebook feed is filled with people talking about this. These are friends I have know for years who have never mentioned stocks before but now are talking about "holding the line". It is FOMO for sure, but the real emotions I get from talking with people are outrage and revenge. Everyone feels like the system (economic and political) is rigged against the public. The dopamine hit from sticking it to the man is pal…

That would be useful if they were actually sticking it to the man. But that isn't what's happening here. What's happening is a big bubble where most of these regular people are gonna lose lots of money while the hedge funds end up closing out their position for a manageable loss and come out just fine.

For sure. This is a terrible way to "stick it to the man" and i've encouraged everyone i've talked to about this to stay far away. Unfortunately emotions have really taken hold. Greed is a hard one to talk people down from but doable. Anger and outrage pretty much impossible.

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#409

Post by throwaway-571 » Fri, Jan 29, 2021, 4:49 PM UTC

xapata wrote: post #364

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).…

Live long enough and there'll be plenty more. I'll have more regret over that girl I never spoke to.

Yeah, but (don't) think about where your life would be today if you had done those thing earlier. It's like you knew the winning numbers to the Powerball and just didn't tick the numbers at the shop. It just sometimes when life gets you down these thoughts just poke at you.

Same thing with the girl one never talked to.

Re: Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility

#410

Post by remolacha » Fri, Jan 29, 2021, 4:49 PM UTC

robntheh00d wrote: post #224

dkrich wrote: post #75

There’s a long history of similar occurrences that follow along a common line: whatever appears to support individual investors will be the path taken by politicians and regulatory bodies. Right now it appears that the public wants to be able to trade on their terms because there is this narrative that the little guy is finally sticking it to the big bad hedge funds. In reality there is probably very little truth to…

End all speculative finance. That’s where we ended up after 1929, until the current billionaire class removed all the guard rails. Nobody deep on SV stocks and unicorn chasing wants to admit they’re in the bubble too. Why does society owe floating a coder bros data science project? Anything not science is a meme. That billionaires should exist is a meme. This is social philosophy, not truth. And it’s gamed. America i…

Bad take. We need capital markets to effectively value and fund different business efforts (unless you want to do things Soviet-style). And no matter how much fundamental analysis you do, some things remain unknown; all finance is in some way speculative. There are rough patches, but you need to take the bad to get the good.