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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

#51
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI: Since you're in the US you can drop the double opt in on your news letter. I'd setup your page to feed to an Excel sheet or something and use that to feed into your email sending software.

No, please do _not_ drop a double opt-in on this or any situation where you're collecting email addresses. People mistype email addresses all the time. Always verify email addresses before using them. (This is a personal pet peeve since I have a short email address that tons of people sometimes think belongs to them, and get a huge amount of mail intended for other people.)

Thanks for the heads up. Reenabled!

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

#52
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.

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

#55
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, please do _not_ drop a double opt-in on this or any situation where you're collecting email addresses. People mistype email addresses all the time. Always verify email addresses before using them. (This is a personal pet peeve since I have a short email address that tons of people sometimes think belongs to them, and get a huge amount of mail intended for other people.)

Thanks for the heads up. Reenabled!

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 input is not actually permission. If a newsletter does not employ double opt-in, then it will eventually end up on a list of "single opt-in newsletters" which are used to harass people by subscribing their email to a ton (100s or 1000s) of newsletters that they don't want. People who are the victim of this will rightly mark those messages as spam, causing your email reputation to drop. Random Internet bots will also submit subscriptions using your form with weird addresses for who-knows-what reasons. It's a very good idea to have some data validation to make sure garbage doesn't end up in your list, and double opt-in is one of the best ways to achieve that.

Furthermore, competitors might maliciously attack you by subscribing random email addresses to your list. They can get these addresses from data dumps from compromises (like what haveibeenpwned is using). Sending to these addresses will harm your reputation because recipients will mark as spam, or will fail to interact with your messages which is also a spam signal. Smart malicious competitors will cause you to start sending to spamtraps.

The best defense against being manipulated in these ways is double opt-in. Lastly, your email list as such has more value overall if you know that every single entry was confirmed by double opt-in.

As a corollary, you should remove addresses from the list if messages to the address start bouncing, or if you receive a spam complaint from them; sometimes people are lazy and will mark spam instead of unsubscribing. Ideally, support the List-Unsubscribe feature so that people can unsubscribe from it directly in their email client. A good email platform will help with all of these things.

I consider single-opt-in use of email addresses to be a dark pattern or anti-pattern in most contexts, especially non-transactional contexts like newsletters. Any sort of recurring communication needs double opt-in.

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

#56
post #6

> You're in private mode. Subscribe to continue reading in private mode. I didn't realise that Bloomberg blocks private mode too. Messages like this assume that tracking is the default and make sure that we keep losing privacy. I really dislike this trend.

I think it's more apt to put it that monetizing is the default. You could subscribe, though of course that's exposing even more than just tracking.

I suspect that if somebody were to invent a good anonymous micropayment system they'd be happy to adopt that instead. They just want to get paid; your privacy just happens to be the currency that's easiest to come by.

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

#57

Hey! I'd like to shamelessly plug my new project here: https://topstonks.com We're writing about this speculative culture emanating from WSB and 4chan in a daily email. We send out a list of the most mentioned stocks, and do a longer form commentary, with quotes from those communities a few times a week. It's just an email now, but we're going to roll out options analysis and a few other goodies in the coming weeks :…

There's already a vehicle to invest on "buzz" actually. The BUZZ ETF is traded and invests based on how often particular stocks get mentioned in social media and new reporting. I'm sure they're monitoring r/WSB as well. http://buzzindexes.com/ Disclosure, do not hold or have any affiliation with Buzz Index products. Just heard about it before.

Seems like they are just an index now, with no ETF? All I can find for ETFs is "BUZ ceased trading on 03/01/19"[1].

[1] https://www.etf.com/BUZ

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

#58

I recall there's a way to sign up to an email subscription of Matt Levine's writing, without Bloomberg and their pop-ups. Anyone know how to do that?

Maybe this? [0] I had an issue where I was sub'd for a while, "lost" emails, then it shows up fine again.

[0] http://link.mail.bloombergbusiness.com/join/4wm/moneystuff-s...

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

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that behavior in agreement with GDPR? Don't they have to provide their information without people having to share private data?

It's not, but that's the one big problem (IMHO) with GDPR: that it doesn't allow individuals to sue. If I want to force them to either fall in line with the GDPR or get out of Europe, I need to find my local responsible agency, send them an email, and pray that they have the will and resources to act on it.

It does allow individuals to sue, and our right to justice is set out in article 79. It allows you to bring a suit to court in your (European) country of residence. You can sue for compensation for immaterial or material damages as set out in article 82. You should/might be able to sue for other things as well, such as forcing a company to delete data or provide you with a copy of data under processing. In Sweden there is case law where a claimant has received compensation for damages. So at least in Sweden court can be expected to award compensation when the case merits it.

I have myself brought two cases to court in Sweden, but settled before verdict. The reason I was able to settle is the verdict would probably have gone my way.

I agree with you that your local DPA is toothless. There are way to many cases for them to handle, that’s why we need to turn to the courts and not to our DPA to protect our rights.

Lastly, most claims will be small claims, that is, less than 1000 EUR. In small claims you’re only liable for a small portion of lawyers fee should you lose.

IANAL.

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