Fraud Is In Plain Sight

bloomberg.com

17 points·greatwave1··4 comments

Over the last few weeks there have been several stocks like Hertz that were pumped up by retail investors for seemingly no reason.

I've been working on a dashboard to track trends among Robinhood users at https://www.quiverquant.com/sources/robinhood, and https://www.robintrack.net is a great resource as well.

> A popular application of Ethereum, for a long while, was building pyramid schemes with names like “Ethereum Pyramid Scheme.” Is it a fraud, if you tell everyone up front that it’s a fraud?

> Similarly, here, Hertz was trying to trick retail shareholders into buying worthless stock by the simple expedient of offering the stock and saying, loudly and publicly and in official SEC disclosure documents, that it was worthless and no one should buy it. It’s a weird strategy! It almost worked.

So is everything reverse psychology now?

No. Wait... yes?

I don't think it's as simple as that. The disclosure, as I recall, was along the lines of "the stock might be worthless", while not laying out any scenario where it was not, to give people a chance to estimate the probability.

It seemed to me like they were wilfully encouraging people to overestimate the value of the stock by a large amount, even while saying it was risky. If you ask for volunteers to jump out of a plane without a parachute, and disclose that it might be hazardous to your health, and some might even not survive, well, the implication that you might survive it is not technically wrong. There is historical precedent. But is it honest if people are going to interpret it as a substantial chance?

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