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Comment by pvarangot | Hacker News Reader

I'm usually a very negative person but another side of the coin here is that if you were good at this "speculative generation of statics to captivate" the best way to raise money was "gaming" big capital. With the risk profile of retail investors changing and more risky ways to trade on public markets becoming accepted comes a positive aspect of the naturalization of highly speculative single picks on the stock market, it's easier for more people to raise a lot of money for risky endeavors.

If it's going to be good or bad for society I don't know.

I personally have most of my money on low risk stuff, and when volatility spikes I sometimes sell options in the morning before starting my day.

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> it's easier for more people to raise a lot of money for risky endeavors.

Is it easier to raise money for risky endeavors or for "hot" endeavors. I'm not sure this no structure to how a lot of people are now allocating capital is actually contributing anything positive, just pure malinvestment.

AMC is a perfect example. It's a company that raised hundreds of millions at valuations 10x of what it had months ago. Is AMC a "risky investment" we should be allocating capital too? Box office receipts and still down 50% and may never fully recover. Why is AMC a good use of that capital rather than institutions that can replace it completely?

It sounds like your cult is Theta Gang then! Seriously though that seems to be what the quiet crowd is doing - taking advantage of the premiums caused by the general crazy that permeates the market. I don’t know enough to sell options but I keep meaning to read up.

When your RSU and ESPP vest, open your brokerage and try selling a single 20-30% out of the money call that expires in a month.

You can read about it, but actually doing it is not that hard. Although, given the inflated stock prices and US equity options being 100 sized lot - you do have to keep an eye to roll it out if market is getting really exuberant.

Warning that a lot of companies have a trading policy that forbids employees from investing in options or any kind of derivative on their own stock. You might be allowed to make options trades on other companies in the sector (not legal advice).

I've only ever heard of this in the financial sector (even then, they can create trading plans for trades in future).

But yeah sure, I am not a lawyer or a fiduciary and this is not legal or fiduciary financial advise.

My last few big tech employers have had a policy forbidding me from trading in options or derivatives on the stock, as a lowly software engineer.

Care to share? From my knowledge, Google and Microsoft have no such restrictions.

You are forbidden to trade derivatives of GOOG as an employee of Alphabet. Source is that I am one and I have read my insider trading policy.

Granted the internal policy might be more detailed but I've read https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/

It talks about not allowing "hedging Google stock".

To me it means "you can't short Google stock", which is reasonable. It would be really fishy for an employee to bet on failure of the company he works for.

It doesn't mean "you can't buy call options on Google stock", which would be unreasonable.

Here’s the quote from the document you linked:

> You should familiarize yourself with Google’s Insider Trading Policy. It describes company-wide policies that address the risks of insider trading, such as a prohibition on any Google employee hedging Google stock; and periodic blackout windows when no Google employee may trade Google stock.

The quotes gives hedging as an example of prohibited conduct and recommends reading the internal policy. The parent comment is from someone who read the internal policy. What more do you want, the internal policy to be leaked in full?

Employees of tech companies with a somewhat open culture can often make inferences about the company’s performance before financials are released. The SEC investigates when people make suspicious gains from options trades. Companies don’t want that kind of attention. Rather than try to define the exact parameters of what kind of trade is risky, it’s easier to just ban them as a rule. This may seem unreasonable to some, but it appears to be a common practice.

Check out TastyTrade for a plethora of free education on options in general, but especially selling options.

The problem is that one of the incentives to do hard things under capitalism is wealth, and if things get too scammy you can get wealthy without actually building the thing. So while it is remarkably easy to raise capital right now, you also need a set of people who have clear positive intentions and want to build things raising that money.

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