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Comment by TameAntelope | Hacker News Reader

I cannot stress this strongly enough -- the fact that buying was limited yesterday is not evidence that the little guy is actually winning.

As has been explained in multiple other places, the limitations were as a result of Robinhood et. al. being unable to cover the risks involved in providing instant trading capabilities for a stock as volatile as the ones that got restricted. That has nothing to do with "the little guy is winning" whatsoever, and in fact may indicate that "the little guy" is about to lose his shirt, due to lack of predictability.

Trading was not stopped "to save the hedge funds". This is an outright lie that needs to be squashed. Stop saying this. I don't mean to be rude, but the narrative you're spreading is actively dangerous and not supported by any of the facts we have available to us.

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> limitations were as a result of Robinhood et. al. being unable to cover the risks involved in providing instant trading capabilities for a stock as volatile as the ones that got restricted.

Yes RH had to cover more, because the clearinghouse was also starting to be stretched by the risk from the violatility. If the hedge funds go down, the clearinghouse wouldn't have been able to front their cash, and they would've gone down as well.

You're also missing the point that the clearinghouse firms didn't just ask for more money from brokers. In many cases they told brokers to step selling these securities.

There's increased risk on both sides, but the long side is at least finite (and probably there's not much margin). The short side is not. The unknown risk the clearinghouse needs to worry about is the short (hedge fund) side.

> short (hedge fund) side.

The claim that "the hedge funds" operate in unison and/or are all short is probably the largest misconception about this whole situation. Very "us vs. them" and also very wrong.

Here's the thing, though - and please correct me if I'm wrong: it's not just Robin Hood. Many other trading apps blocked GME buys yesterday and today, and some of them are blaming this on banks and brokerages upstream of the apps.

That to me looks like the clearing houses themselves are worried, which means the whole thing poses a risk (even if easily mitigated) to the greater market.

What you're saying may be true. But then I don't know why Robinhood wouldn't say that in their first statement addressing why they disabled buying [1].

[1]: https://blog.robinhood.com/news/2021/1/28/keeping-customers-...

They’re poor communicators, or thought saying nothing would be better than saying they’d run out of money to cover counterparty risk.

If you broaden your understanding of WSB's definition of winning beyond "making a profit" or "maintaining value" to "taking a loss but having an entertaining ride along the way" then they're winning and have no way to "lose." Now the SEC or Professional Capitalists making easy money may not want WSB to turn corners of the market into a volatile form of entertainment but it's completely legal AFAIK and illustrates the disparity between what is claimed about the stock market by the wealthy and powerful and what the stock market actually is. If a Wall Street clique-member replaced WSB and behaved the same way it would be fine, at least from a hyperventilating "we have to think of the children/retail investors" standpoint.

Your "facts" are basically corporate PR statements from corporations that have a huge entrenched reason to distort the truth and have changed stories multiple times. I'd say your eagerness to accept RH's version of the truth as 100% credible is far more actively dangerous than what you responded to.

Some variation of "If you owe a bank thousands, you have a problem, but if you owe a bank millions, the bank has a problem" probably applies here.

If crazy retail investors can bankrupt Robinhood or other over-leveraged brokerage firms, that's also a win for the little guys.

I don't think many HN posters with their stable, extremely well-paid technology careers can truly empathize with the strain of aggressive nihilism on display at WSB.

"I'm only gambling with my future, so nothing to lose."

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