Comment by swagonomixxx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swagonomixxx | Hacker News Reader

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I just love how this whole sequence of events is being touted as the "underdog sticking it to the man".

What I see is a bunch of internet trolls getting together and trolling Wall Street.

Is that a bad thing? It depends. If you're just dicking around and you put in an amount you can afford to lose, it's all fun and games. But when you convince newbies to trading and investing to put loads of their hard-earned money, on leverage, to a meme stock, it's not so fun and games anymore, is it?

I'm all for teaching hedge funds a lesson by squeezing them, but it would've been nice if folks come out _mostly_ unharmed financially. Instead, you have lots of these r/WallStreetBets folks in the red on leveraged trades. Good luck making back that money as quickly as you lost it.

One point to note is that the debt you'd get from buying GME on leverage is way better than the debt you incurred from that higher education you couldn't afford and didn't pay off.

If 1/10th of the users on r/WSB would put $1000 fun money in and HODL while focusing all their energy on a select few stocks that would be a billion dollar war chest pointed right at the heart of wall street.

Unfortunately, the mob couldn't hold it together. A bunch of them got caught up in it and decided to dump their life savings at the high water mark and Robinhood really took the wind out of the rally. Robinhood stopping trades seems to be the catalyst that popped the balloon. Now you have 10 million people on Reddit who can't get organized and some are really hurting, even though they should have known better.

The swell was amazing, but it was a rogue wave. I'm sure it will happen again, but harnessing and controlling that energy is going to be like trying to control the ocean.

This is wrong! "Holding" does nothing. The very nature of short trading (remember, the thing that was supposed to have been exploited?) means that even if YOU hold, and everyone else does, your brokerage can loan that share to someone else who will sell it (because they think it will go down, of course).

>your brokerage can loan that share to someone else who will sell

There were instructions going all around WSB with "put in a limit sell order at $10000000 to prevent them from loaning your shares" as well as directions on how to go into your trading account and disable "stock yield enhancement" or whatever it's called on the platform.

(And I hate that I'm in the position of defending WSB, a group of degenerate gamblers dragging in new victims every day. But it just so happens that they were on top of this one particular angle.)

I don't think that works. I'm not an SEC regulator, but I don't believe there's any requirement that the brokerage hold real shares for the full total of all outstanding sell orders[1], or to logically segregate the holdings of different customers.

If someone comes by and tries to buy that million dollar share, the brokerage is merely required to honor the trade with a share they have from anywhere, including one purchased from the market or held by a different customer.

Again, this whole notion of "Hold the Line" is just not how trading works.

[1] I mean, that's just trivially violated by a perfectly normal short sale by definition.

I mean I feel like it was really “hold what you buy until the funds are forced out of all their short positions”, which (and maybe I’m wrong) means that the price would have kept climbing with no sells to bring it down.

Again though, that does not work. Because "holding" that stock does not prevent the very same share from being sold by someone else in a short trade. To maintain a price in a market you need to continue to buy the security.

Again, this is just fundamental "Trading 101" stuff, and it's just amazing the extent to which the WSB community straight up refuses to believe it.

Yes, that was the impetus for holding. Of course reality got messy really quick.

I'm sure given enough time even if WSB were able to hold Wall Street would have figured out some way to exploit it. The other driver was the hope that the SEC would step in and do something to even the playing field, but that's unfortunately even less likely in my opinion.

I was surprised that there wasn’t much coverage of the fact that the funds shorted again just at the peak ($480 or something) right as the buys were being halted for retail. That 100% smells like an exploit to me.

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