Saudi Arabia Quietly Pumps Up Its Stock Market | Hacker News Reader

Saudi Arabia Quietly Pumps Up Its Stock Market

wsj.com

80 pointsmudil60 comments

Good. Injustice should be really, really expensive in the 21st century. I hope the bill just keeps getting bigger for them.

Nah - They're only putting money into their own pockets by doing this. Look at it this way - you own 75% (a guess - but prob not far off) of a couple $trillion market. If you take some of your idle cash ($1billions) to pump the stock up - even if you "lose" that cash - but manage to stabilize the market - you're still doing pretty well for yourself...

> the Saudi government has placed huge buy orders, often in the closing minutes of negative trading days, to boost the market.

This sounds quite exploitable. Buy low before the end of the trading day, sell high at the end.

Interesting to ponder how this would actually be structured as puts and calls, i.e., what does the arb trade look like to exploit the fact that the KSA government will always shore up bad trading days. Paging Matt Levine....

https://outline.com/rCAanC

What is this?

Outline is a service which bypasses WSJ's paywall. I believe it does so by imitating a web crawler. The idea is that WSJ can't paywall a crawler otherwise its SEO will be destroyed. Thus it is a reliable way to capture the information.

Thanks. Rather than just post random links to unheard of sites, it would be great if those links had a short description of what the link is.

I agree, and FYI, if you click the 'web' link which is under the article title on the comments page, if you click the first result, you will have google effectively do what outline.com does for you.

I'm confused on why this works. I see the promoted version at the top of the SERPs opens up the full article, but the first actual SERP, which is the same article shows the paywall.

Do you know why google allows WSJ et al to serve one set of content to a crawler, but another to an actual user? I thought they punished that kind of behavior.

I don't have any information that isn't public, no. Just building off of previous discussions of outline.com in HN threads.

From their site:

> Outline is a free service for reading and annotating news articles. We remove the clutter so you can analyze and comment on the content. In today’s climate of widespread misinformation, Outline empowers readers to verify the facts.

A noble initiative, I think.

Perhaps, if the poster can be relied upon to follow the terms:

  You represent and warrant that you have all the rights to the Content and that none of the Content: (a) infringes, misappropriates or violates any Intellectual Property Rights;

Do you actually believe whoever posted the original link has the rights to the content? And is not infringing the Wall Street Journal's IP rights?

https://www.outline.com/terms.html

An alternative is to put the word full before wsj in the URL. It opens a redirect page from Facebook, and effectively bypasses the paywall.

https://www.fullwsj.com/articles/saudi-arabia-pumps-up-stock...

Wow, didn't know that. Thanks!

Thanks a lot for the trick.

Nothing new - if there was 1% of the oversight on the markets that there is in the US, 90% of traders on the Saudi market would be put in prison for some sort of insider trading.... Rampant pump & dump has been going on for years.

Its like political quantitative easing, seems like a scary house of cards assembled.

Buying on the dip is rational market actor.

Devious is shorting stocks or buying put options then creating mayhem to crash the market and really making $$$.

yes. 100% of the time when the price goes down you should buy. smart.

This makes me feel a little-bit conspirologist like if the stocks were dropped down intentionally to let them buy more.

> We need to highlight to the world that Saudi investment is good

That is, of course, if you're ok with some people being lured into an embassy and cut up into little pieces.

I cannot understand how US citizens tolerant such behavior, we should invade Saudi! (Pun intended)

I don't understand why Kashoggi is brought up so much more frequently compared to what Saudi Arabia is doing in Yemen.

In general people find it much easier to understand the story of one person than to understand the story of thousands.

Not to mention it feels more black and white. Killing a dissident journalist in your embassy in another country, coming from up top, directly contradicts the promises/suggestions made by the Prince that SA is modernizing and becoming more free/open. The coverup was amateur, in part aided by Ergodan mastery at slowly leaking intel that just kept poking holes in SA’s story.

Meanwhile fighting “terrorism” has lots of gray, and is notoriously messy.

"If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics." - Joseph Stalin

Also, Turkey has been dolling out new bits of information about the ambush regularly, keeping the negative stories rolling.

Which in turn is child's play compared to what the US has done in the middle east for the past decade or two

It's the personification of the brutality. You can put one face as opposed to the thousands in the crowd.

Yemen is a civil war that has turned into a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Things aren't black and white and its very hard distinguish between propaganda and facts.

Khashoggi is very black and white. A US journalist was killed after being lured into a Saudi embassy.

Exactly. The fact that 1) he has a face we can identify with, and 2) they lured him into an official establishment of their government and then killed him in cold blood. A place where you might otherwise expect the rule of law to prevail.

Saudi laws aren't even codified. There isn't really a rule of law there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_system_of_Saudi_Arabia

Yeah I understand that, what I mean is that from our perspective a person should be able to walk into a government office and be safe from extra-judicial sanctions. So a Saudi national may not feel that safe themselves, but it is harder for someone from a Western-style liberal democracy to intuitively understand and is therefore horrifying.

The press also hates when one of their own is killed (understandably). They have the power to keep it in the headlines, in this this case Turkey helped them out too.

A NY Times journalist explains why some wars are less covered in the US (by comparing Syria coverage to Yemen coverage in the US):

"Conflicts gain sustained American attention only when they provide a compelling story line that appeals to both the public and political actors, and for reasons beyond the human toll. That often requires some combination of immediate relevance to American interests, resonance with American political debates or cultural issues, and, perhaps most of all, an emotionally engaging frame of clearly identifiable good guys and bad guys."

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/world/why-some-wars-like-...

I also wonder why my lawmakers haven’t responded to my requests to respond to the Rohingya crisis.

You’re right that the crisis in Yemen is enormous in scale, and it absolutely should be addressed, but the murder of a journalist threatens freedom of information and global accountability and is therefore particularly frightening in that it’s an attack on infrastructure instead of just a person.

Well, one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

Should US companies refuse Chinese investment? Should we stop buying oil from Venezuela? Are you for the Cuban embargo (Cuban intelligence agencies have propped up repressive regimes, like Venezuela, throughout Latin America)? Should Apple stop doing business with Chinese suppliers?

What Saudi Arabia did is BAD. Very bad. But I don't understand the singular obsession with it as a call to action, compared to the above for example.

Because the difference is, US doesn't say that China and Cuba are it's allies, it gives active assistance to the Saudis to continue their regime

Um… Yes? Ever heard of sanctions and boycotts?

I'm almost certain that there's something about just every nation that I would find just as unacceptable.

Put another way, judging nations based on particular actions is iffy at best.

Thank you for this. I don't know why people keep posting links that are behind a paywall.

Because that is a secondary concern compared to the quality and value of the information.

If there are alternative sources or means of access, they will likely be found. Personally, I don't demand to be spoon-fed.

If there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the thread.

This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18677791 and marked it off-topic.

Or we could actually support journalists so we don’t end up in a dystopia where we have to get all our news from BuzzFeed and Mashable.

Murdoch you mean?

News Corp ( WSJ's owner ) is one of the largest companies in the world. It's founder is one of the wealthiest men in the world. I don't think anyone at the WSJ is starving. Besides, if you want to support journalism, find and support independent journalists doing real journalism rather than mega corporations. If anyone needs support, it's the independent journalists.

It's not up to you to decide from whom you're allowed to steal content. You can't steal money from Bill Gates's wallet just because "you don't think he's starving," even if you plan to give that money to a needy charity.

I take it you're not a fan of Robin Hood

Actually, only the law says I can't do that.

Oh come on. When does circumventing of paywall become stealing?

Reading proprietary content behind a paywall for free isn't stealing? What else could it possibly be?

How about "circumventing" the ticket window at your local movie theater by walking in the exit door. I mean, they are showing the movie anyway, and there are empty seats...

Little bit late to answer, but it's a bit different situation with this exact paywall. It's movie theater that give everyone access for free, but randomly decide not to provide these access based on where you come from.

So using 3rd-party website to access their content is not any different that accessing the site through Facebook redirect for instance since in both cases you get content for free.

Buzzfeed has broken many major stories this year? It is wrong to conflate the Buzzfeed News of today with the Buzzfeed of yesteryear.

So how are we supposed to discuss content if we can’t read it? Are you saying it is compulsory to buy a WSJ subscription to use HN?

There's a legit argument there, but it's tired and boring to rehearse this on every paywalled story, and that makes it off topic. HN's policy on paywalls has been the same for years. It's in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 and lots more at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18677791 and marked it off-topic.

I have no problem paying for good journalism, but it's the equivalent of posting a link to a book or a paywalled research article on HN. Useless to anyone that doesn't buy it or have a subscription.

Regarding downvotes for an opinion you disagree with: instead of taking the opportunity to present an argument that would change my mind on the issue, you’d rather that I continue flagging all WSJ articles and feel bad about being downvoted.

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