When a hedge fund tells a journo to write an article it's business as usual.
To be clear: I think both are worthy of the same scrutiny. The double standard is what bothers me.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...
>When a hedge fund tells a journo to write an article it's business as usual.
Did the hedge funds also secretly accumulated positions in assets, deceptively promoted the assets through media as valuable long-term investments, then sold their holdings as prices rose sharply following the deceptive endorsements? Because that's what macfee is being indicted for, not because he "tweets something and makes a ton of money".
https://www.cfainstitute.org/en/research/cfa-digest/2013/11/...
Hedge funds routinely refuse to disclose their abnormal holdings and sell to realize profits.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43303849?seq=1
Former manager Jim Cramer admits as much:
https://seekingalpha.com/instablog/2918951-g-hudson/1026551-...
Sure I don't have some gotcha smoking gun that links some third string financial columnist to a hedge funds actions, but if I did I wouldn't be blabbering about it here. I'd report it up SEC, retain a lawyer and collect my reward.
>https://www.cfainstitute.org/en/research/cfa-digest/2013/11/...
A quick skim of the article suggests that they're doing it to make their own funds look better, rather than as some sort of pump&dump scheme that you suggest.
>Hedge funds routinely refuse to disclose their abnormal holdings and sell to realize profits.
>https://www.jstor.org/stable/43303849?seq=1
the first paragraph of the introduction says why they're confidential in the first place: to avoid getting front-runned and to avoid free-riding. I don't see anything nefarious here, unless they're also simultaneously deceiving people into investing.
>Former manager Jim Cramer admits as much:
>https://seekingalpha.com/instablog/2918951-g-hudson/1026551-...
>First information is widely distributed to make investors wonder about the company and to put fear into those longs that hold the stock. Next, high volume shorting takes place to drive the company's share price down.
Again, there's nothing wrong with holding a position in a company and spreading news about it, as long as your holdings are disclosed. Short-sellers do this all the time when they publish short reports.
That is literally what Melvin Capital was doing with GME originally, and that is what sparked the GME short squeeze back in January.
Legalize insider trading, legalize pump and dumps, let the chips fall where they may. It's happening either way, so lets just be honest about it.
As a kind of silly example, I posit that muggings closer to police stations are more likely to result in an arrest. Now we have bias in enforcement based on police station location. Do we need to build floating police stations equidistant from every place a mugging could take place? And this is generously assuming muggings in police stations are discounted from this analysis. If you don't, perhaps muggings in police stations are legal?
I strongly suspect you're somehow only applying this particular standard to (potential) white collar crime, which seems absurd.
I'm a baseball fan. Everyone knows that everyone cheats in the game of baseball. Whether its hiding small things like pine tar, or like the Astros using electronic devices relaying signals. When there's marginal enforcement, and marginal discipline, then its not really a law, and its only used against the current regime's enemies so to speak. So, why keep it as a law? Further, if we make all electronic communication devices legal, then pitchers and catchers can have an ear piece, and this concept of signs and sign stealing is moot.
The same applies to all governance. If you can't apply the same laws uniformly, then they become the tool of the state to suppress its enemies, i.e. choosing winners and losers.
[1] - https://www.sportingnews.com/us/mlb/news/astros-scandal-time...
Of course it would be nice with bias free laws in some abstract sense. But I’ve never heard anyone say it was an absolute precondition. Then we’d have no laws.
When, where, has there ever been a law that is not enforced with bias?
Warren Buffet saying that he's confident in Coca Cola's business model while holding a stake in Coca Cola is fine.
Warren Buffer saying he's going to buy a lot of Coca Cola stock because he loves it (driving the price up) but then secretly unloading his Coca Cola position amid the resulting price bump would be a fraudulent pump and dump scheme.
Let's be clear here: The accused perpetrators were using their platforms to endorse coins for the purpose of selling those coins to unsuspecting victims.
A big difference.
So long as influential people exist, and opportunities exist to profit off that influence then there will be a need for state agencies to police them (the influential people). As Elon Musk found when he was investigated following his promise to take Tesla private at $4.20 a share (I hope my memory has got that right). He had all sorts of sanctions made against him, and it was just stoned tweeting.
One of the justifications for a state is to protect the weak from the strong. It is imaginable that it could be done away with (the rule of law protecting the ignorant from the insiders) but if you are going to imagine, imagine what that world would look like.
Fuck that. That kind of thing will give us another Great Depression faster than we can blink.
The reason not to legalize this specifically is that the more people perceive a market as rigged, the less they'll invest. Our capital markets, for all their flaws, make it much easier for people to create economic value. If you legalize scams, etc, not only do you harm honest participants, you harm the economy as a whole.
The powers that be in finances are nervous, the things that gave them advantage and the edge, some legit, some not, are all becoming increasingly available to retail.
Mean while we allow stock shorts.. and failures to deliver to constantly roll over or be hidden in sneak behind closed door actions.
An FTD should have an automatic fine and liquidation event to allow immediate delivery.
When I don't pay my bills my services get cut off and I get fined. Favourably treating company failures differently than consumers is about as anti-capitalist as things can get. This dichotomy is prima facie evidence that the stock market has been designed to be in favor of whoever has the biggest bag of cash/deepest rolodex and against the American people who despite our massive exposure to the markets have virtually no say in their operations nor the individual companies therein.