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Comment by rytill | Hacker News Reader

I got the impression that the author doesn't quite know the volume of people holding ~100k in TSLA options that could easily be 5x that with a well-crafted tweet.

Given that he said "buy the stock" and "short the stock", options leverage may be the missing puzzle piece for the author.

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> I got the impression that the author doesn't quite know the volume of people holding ~100k in TSLA options that could easily be 5x that with a well-crafted tweet.

When communications are hacked, the market typical figures it out in a matter of minutes. Anyone wishing to capitalize on a Twitter hack would have to have perfect timing to exit their trade.

If someone was trading options of a similar volume all day every day before and after the hack, they might be able to blend in. However, once you filter down on the number of people who caught windfalls in the narrow window of time between the hack and when the market reversed and then filter further for people who invested atypically large amounts on that particular trade, it's not as short of a list as you suggest.

s/short of a list/long of a list/

Could you set up a standing sell order at some price break, though? You'd have plausible deniability if you'd had it for a while and it just happens to get automatically exercised during a market panic.

But timing is essential when taking advantage of an event like this. Lots of people are trading TSLA but few are taking positions immediately before and getting out immediately after this event, as would be required to make a consistent profit from it. And unless you have an extensive history of similar risky trades (which would probably cost a lot of money to produce by itself) your data is going to stand out like a sore thumb given that timing, even among the sea of TSLA traders.

You, as the attacker, don't have to do it immediately before either. You could make your trades, wait a week, then do the scam and plausibly say you sold when the stock jumped.

This isn't really true. Especially with the volatility in the market and TSLA specifically right now, you would be taking a huge risk holding a position like that for a week. Natural moves in the stock could easily be much larger than the move your hack causes. You could even be margin called before the hack happens.

You buy OTM calls on Hertz and execute that scam from the OP. No worries about margin calls.

How many people are trading Hertz securities for large sums compared to Tesla?

Bizarrely, a lot. Just a couple weeks ago Hertz was the most traded stock on the NYSE and is still up there with incredibly high volume. People in this thread are really underestimating how easy it would be blend into the crowd of millions of traders.

As of today, Hertz trading volume is around 5 million, while Tesla volume is around 13 million.

But a better measure would be dollar volume. HTZ is trading at $1.40 and TSLA at $1500, so it's really $19.5 billion vs $7 million.

Waiting a week being an insider threat seems unlikely.

Tons of people would cash out their options immediately after a major event like this. And you don't have to get in immediately before. You can buy a week or even a month ahead of time and make a profit.

I still think the OP is underestimating the risk of getting caught though.

Lots of people must be selling immediately after the event because that's the mechanism by which the price decreases.

To make money on a short, you aren't selling. You're the one buying back what you've already sold, just a lower price and pocketing the difference as profit. You stand out in the middle of a sell-off.

Not really, every sell has the equal and opposite buy, so a "sell-off" is also a "buy-in"

The time between something being posted on twitter significant enough to move the market and the market finding out that thing is not true would be small enough that the number of people who had been able to take advantage of such a price movement would be extremely small—and your trade timing would need to be perfect as well, because your cash out would need to occur prior to an event you cannot control which is it becoming apparent that the posts had been hacks or at the very least untrue. You should plan to move very quickly. Remember there are many alternative means of communication.

- Any head of state is communicating directly with the press at all times through their comms department and/or they themselves commanding the focus of the press.

- Any specific company targeted, as soon as the movement in their valuation occurred, would be able to blast out the truth via PR Newswire that the specific claims were untrue and the result of a hack.

I think in this case since the correction would occur so quickly the number of trades executed made by retail would be pretty easy to sift through, and you’d undergo heavy scrutiny, even if you had an established trading history that explained your position taking.

A retail investor would be very easy to catch, basically. On something like this, I’d imagine enforcement would be a federal priority. The data available to law enforcement on matters like this is voluminous and it would only be a matter of time. Lack of enforcement is usually just a resource constraint or low prioritization. You’d have to have a much more complex plan than just taking and exiting a market position.

The only conceptual framework I can fit the idea of getting away with hacking twitter accounts to move the market and successfully exiting would be an institution with billions of positions moving fluidly in a predetermined way to align with the information seeded by the twitter posts for a short period of time. But why would anyone do that right now when all the investment banks have close to record revenue? Just 5 months ago, investment banks were in a rough spot. Now they are raking in this market recovery with little effort. I don’t know why you’d expose yourself to prison for a one time gain that would be limited because the institution needs to it make it obvious this occurred so you cannot extract maximum return.

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