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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

Reading Reddit's WallStreetBets has been unintentionally hilarious.

https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/

Folks were leveraging up all last week and buying puts, thinking the market was tanking to zero and we're all going to die of "beer virus" as they call it -- and are getting a harsh lesson about timing the market today.

They’ve been giving so much leverage to broke young people, I wouldn’t even be surprised to read that they’re insolvent someday after a big, unexpected move.

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There’s nothing unintentional about the hilarity. That community is totally self-aware and rife with in-jokes and satire.

The folks that post there see their gambling for what it is.

I think there's a mix of in-on-the-joke and not.

I've read some sad stories about, for example, a student betting student loan money in the market and losing it instantly, lured to make risky bets from the other stories of dumb luck success.

Here's someone I don't think is in on the joke: https://i.redd.it/at7gloeb5ck41.jpg ... oops

It’s a obnoxious to know nothing about the culture of wallstreetbets and then to make declarations as if you know after reading a few posts.

Posts like that are par for the course. Its called “Loss Porn”. The subreddit is absolutely geared towards stock/options trading as gambling and if you think otherwise then you’re wrong. They are very self-aware and do it for fun. And yes some may lose a lot of money but they know exactly what they are getting themselves involved in.

Marjory if what happens in that sub is humorous. And its pretty clear that there is a lot of satire and it's not the place you go to for in depth analysis 99% of the time.

Loss and gain porn are a normal part of the culture as are the slurs used.

The gains and losses are often real but this is the community you go to the laugh about such things

The person posting it in the subreddit clearly understands the theme of the subreddit. Whoever took the screenshot and shared it somewhere likely doesn't even know what WSB is.

There are people making and losing fortunes every day in the market. These kind of crazy bets aren't new, just more visible.

I remember being in college in 2005 and seeing people going wild with Forex and penny stocks. WSB is just a small subset of traders who like to discuss it on social media.

They didn't actually lose that much money, since they bought options. By my mental math they lost about $9000 (give or take a few hundred). Still bad, but better than losing hundreds of thousands.

Edit: I stand corrected, see below.

How are you calculating this? You wouldn't have a total return of -$722k if you only lost $9k.

They could easily have 1M worth of options that have now decreased in value, which is what it looks like since AMZN went up Friday and today.

Edit: see below. My math was a bit off.

no... it’s 140 option contracts which provides the option for 14000 shares. they were bought for $66 x 100 x 140 = $924,000 and are now worth $14.43 x 100 x 140 = $202,000.

Risk / reward is proportional. You could have easily made a killing if the markets moved the right way. In fact, anything could happen by Friday. He only needs and 10% move up be in the black

The robinhood thread has made me laugh all day:

> 5QxjKb7SI2j1d9Zs3jcs · 809 points · 11 hours ago

> As a proud cuck, not gonna lie I get off on being locked out of my account while it gets pummeled and I can do nothing but watch.

> BippityBoppityZop · 156 points · 10 hours ago

> Don’t stop I’m almost there

> SensualKoala · 47 points · 9 hours ago

> "Oh yeah FUCK my savings harder"

> TRAIN_WRECK_0 · 84 points · 9 hours ago

> Anyone feel like barfing? It's almost like my wife's boyfriend stopped fucking her and starting fucking me, and there is nothing I can do to stop it.

@nostromo can't have read very much of that thread. It's one big in-joke.

Almost all satirical communities eventually lose the satire as new members cannot distinguish between satire and genuine content.

It's probably one of the most suspenseful market opens in history. The tug of war between bulls and bears across the entire sub has been incredibly entertaining.

Regarding leverage: buying options is a fixed loss against the cash in your account. RH also only allows selling secured options. There's no way to lose more than you started with (at least with the current app, they had problems before).

Retail investors using standard accounts can't buy options on margin, it's only used for faster settlement.

Haha, you clearly weren't around for bear Stern's and lehman

I watched all that live and saw my own holdings tumble. There wasn't that much suspense though, nobody thought the market would suddenly go up.

I bought Bear Sterns calls thinking it would blow over. The idea that Bear Sterns could just disappear like that was unfathomable at the time.

You thought the market would go up? Specifically a bank? Sure the bankruptcy was a surprise but I really don't know of anyone back then who was expecting a recovery or even a minor bounce at all that year. Hopefully your options were LEAPs.

Many people thought either their situation was overstated or they would be rescued in some way that preserved more of the market value.

Bear closing at 50 and opening the next day at 2, everyone thought the world was ending. That was insane suspsense, today was nothing

Were people really expecting the markets to go up today? Futures were mixed pre-market. Bloomberg, at least, was framing the optimism as due to people expecting central banks to intervene but central banks can only do so much when your supply chain evaporates.

I was certainly caught off guard but still managed to make a bit of money (~6%) off of one of those idiotic volatility ETNs today.

Yes, lots of people were. The market closed down 6 days in a row which almost never happens. There's no major collapse like 2008, just a powerful catalyst that led to a fast correction of 10% from all-time highs and released a lot of downward pressure.

Yeah the market is near all-time highs all the more reason there's going to be significant downward pressure. There's been no major economic collapse but China's industrial output is near record lows as evidenced by the air quality.

None of this changed on Monday.

You win some you lose some. I exit most of my put positions last week after getting up 13x.

The position I kept, I got fucked hard by this Robinhood downtime. Ended up losing all of it, (4x of my original 13x profit), whereas I was trying to exit it early Monday. If I lose money on the market and it's my fault… fine. But when my broker causes the loss, I'm pissed

That might be Robinhood's intention but their incompetence has led to plenty of bugs in the past that allow you to rack up losses exceeding your balance.

I see a bunch of comments of people saying I lost $x amount because of the outage, however I wonder if that's actually true. It's much easier to say I was going to do x when doing x was unavailable.

It might be some of that, but folks on that subreddit tend to take super risky positions that can go south on them very fast. It’s possible a few made some really stupid bets during the crash and they couldn’t get out today.

It's impossible to know since the entire platform was down and both current positions and order entry were unavailable. I'm sure there's a lot of exaggeration but today was also the single best day of the DOW right after a 10% decline last week. That volatility can have massive changes in option pricing, especially short-dated expirations (like SPY options expiring today).

Sprinkled in there are people who blew threw their student loans and margin gambling on options

Been following this for the longest time. Unreal.

>Folks were leveraging up all last week and buying puts, thinking the market was tanking to zero and we're all going to die of "beer virus" as they call it -- and are getting a harsh lesson about timing the market today.

This aged terribly. Anyone who did that received a massive windfall.

All of us learn the hard way sooner or later. The key is never playing for more than we can afford to lose.

Some of us had puts from last month which were well in profit. I personally have lost over $5k from this outage even though I'm technically not negative on my position. Painting all RH users as gamblers is pretty arrogant.

I am pretty sure he was talking about the community of r/wallstreetbets, not RH users.

Buying short-dated options to bet on which direction the market is going to move is 100% gambling.

Long term puts (at least 2 weeks out) on the market are the safest investment that you could possibly make. The market recovery today is a dead cat bounce. Mark my words I guarantee you that I will be right about this

Yes, always double down on a loss, that's the WSB way!

Or, you know, buy for the long term and ignore today's news.

How much money are you putting on this? Any screenshots for proof?

I think you’re right that we’ll retest lows but I’m not sure that’s it’s elevator down time. However, we have been on a long run, and the machines are selling to lock in profits. Maybe we do keep going. Guess we’ll find out soon enough!

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