A year on, GameStop champion Roaring Kitty is quiet, yet much richer
reuters.com
reuters.com
>The stock, which peaked at $482.95 a share when hedge funds that had shorted GameStop were forced to buy at any price, has come back to earth. But it is still at about $112 a share, compared to less than $20 on Jan. 1, 2021.
This is a pretty basic error to make when the SEC investigated and even put out a report showing that the majority of that price movement was from non-short sellers (e.g. retail) and that as a proportion of volume, barely any of it was due to short sellers closing their positions.
The article also completely glossed over the fact that DFV was made fun of and derrided for taking such a large risk in GME. Especially when it was down (for a majority of the time since he started posting that position, if I recall corrected). It instead portrays him as making "consistent returns" and starting a movement to influence the price.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/files/staff-report-equity-options-market... Page 28 if you want a nice graph to take a glance at.
Now, he usually does proper analysis and did have reasons for stock to run up, it was fun to see his tweets about the mess of trying to track down the shares he bought - https://i.redd.it/utr5k9banpe81.jpg
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/big-short-in...
[0] https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/big-short-trader-micha...
I would agree that Roaring Kitty wasn't much of a catalyst (prior to the price exploding), but was an early proponent of GME.
I do distinctly remember deciding to invest in GME around December 22nd of 2020, based on what I was reading on the Wall Street Bets forum (unfortunately only like 50 shares.) It was a major daily topic on there from mid December (or earlier) on. Michael Burry was rarely mentioned as a holder, he had bought into GME a lot earlier. The conversation mostly centered on short interest, fundamentals and future moves GME would do.
So I would argue it was 'the collective' on WSB that was perhaps one of the larger catalysts.
Collective participation in the stock market is a good thing for the elite, though they may not all see it that way.
If reporting is becoming irrelevant and shallow, we (collectively) have only ourselves to blame by not supporting (with money) deep investigative journalism.
Spending your own money on quality news papers is not the only way to support good journalism. You could also ask your national government to spend more tax money towards your national media company (if you have one) or towards subsidizing independent ones. Or you could champion pro-consumer legislation which might prevent ad monopolies like google from swallowing most of the ad revenue.
Asking consumers to spend their money correctly is probably the least effective way of increasing the quality of production.
Between authors, podcasts, youtubers, and the sheer amount of raw data out there, I think we can do away with the whole concept of “news”
It was apparently also very dangerous to retail investors.
The people that are holding and directly registering their shares know differently.
There is no final reckoning, where GMR is going to shoot to 10 thousand dollars a share, and cause the world economy to crash.
There was a large initial spike, in retail investment, initially, and then when the hype went down, so did the price.
And that's that. The prophecy of the short squeeze isn't coming.
As in give me a date. On that exact day, I can come back to you when the prophecy did not come true, and see if you are willing to admit that you were wrong, or if you will just come up with another excuse for why the prophecy is delayed.
Do you see the problem here? No matter what you say, if you give me a day for when the prophecy is going to happen, you can just make up an excuse later.
That's the issue with conspiracy theories. They are not falsifiable.
No one said this would take a day or a month. The expression is "diamond hands"; being patient is not easy. No one know when it will happen. But what we do know is that there continues to be a steady flow of investors whom are directly registering their shares every day.
On the other hand, your position cannot be falsified because you dismiss all of the available data as manipulated without proof.
Smells desperate.
But with the prophecy predictors, the same is not the case. No matter how long goes on, with the doomsday not happening, a doomsday predictor can just make up an excuse for why the doomsday was delayed.
So once again, give me a date. Surely there must be a day, where if this goes on long enough, with no doomsday, that you will admit that you got duped, and this is all nonsense.
because I am happy to come back to you, on that day, to see if you are willing to take in new information, or if you will just come up with some excuse for why doomsday got delayed.
See the difference between your's , and my position? With me, if the doomsday happens, then that is when I am proven wrong. For you, if the doomsday doesn't happen, for however long, you can just make up a reason for why it got delayed.
Or, in other words, the doomsday is not falsifiable.
> /you/ the conspiracy nut
You are the one predicting a doomsday, supposedly right? Every day that the doomsday does not happen, is more evidence that I am right. Just give a date. Give me a day, when you will say "Well I guess the doomsday isn't coming". I will mark it on my calendar.
If you do not give a date, then you are literally admitting that your position cannot be falsified, because you are saying that no matter how long goes by, with the million dollar short squeeze, you will not be convinced.
I can be convinced. If price hits a million dollars, I was wrong. You can't be convinced, if you are unwilling to give a day when you'd admit that you got duped.
Institutional investors that got caught naked short selling can manipulate the price and stall but they can't stall forever -- and every single day it gets harder and harder.
Will it go to $10,000? Who knows. There's a price not much above that which would crush world markets to the point where it would usher in the apocalypse. There would be intervention before that happened.
Very few of these GME investors are solely trying to make some money. They see a corrupt market place and they want to take it down. The SEC could have just done its job but it didn't. They could have stopped the naked shorting. They could have curbed the corruption. They didn't. Instead an army (make no mistake) of small retail investors are buying and holding and registering their shares. You may not understand it, but this is war.
And look at the vitriol. Flat-earthers? Conspiracy nut? It's funny because if I buy Netflix because I think the price will go up, no one tells me that. There are no articles saying, "Netflix's growth is over! Everyone sell! Please, God, sell!" Can you imagine the buy button (but not sell button) being turned off for Netflix for a day during a price run-up? Don't be confused. This is war.
If you want a date, let's give it two years. Who knows and frankly the investors don't care.
Total nonsense, but entertaining in a car-crash kind of way.
The reality is that hedge funds engaged in illegal naked short selling, confident that they would never get caught because the SEC has essentially abandoned its role. And a group of retail investors decided simply to buy and hold registered shares of that firm, knowing that simply by doing that, they could bleed those SHFs out or force them to close their position at a much higher price. There's a lot of due diligence out there that backs that position up if you want to look -- but you don't.
Here's the thing, you can like it or not like it. No one cares. However, it's worth noting that it's the only position you'll see be called names and screamed at. "Don't hold! Oh God it's been a year why are you still holding?! God! Stop! Please, stop!"
What people do care about is telling you that no, there isn’t some shadowy cabal of hedge funds with your name pinned to a wall under the heading “number one risk to the financial system”.
Continue to hold, but please do understand you’re quite deep in a self-reinforcing grandiose doomsday conspiracy that makes you feel special. None of which have ever historically bore fruit, not for lack of waiting and money invested.
> some shadowy cabal of hedge funds
You keep diving into hyperbole. It's just hedge funds that bought naked short positions and got caught by the market. It's pretty simple.
> Instead an army (make no mistake) of small retail investors…
> You may not understand it, but this is war.
> Don't be confused. This is war.
I keep diving into hyperbole? I think this conversation has run its course.
What's new here is that this is the first time in history that retail has simply used collective buying power to catch them out at it. By simply en masse buying and holding directly registered shares, it puts them over a barrel.
The statements that it's war or what could happen aren't hyperbole -- and I find that fascinating. We'll see...
The vitrol is due to the fact that no matter how long the conspiracy doomsday fails to happen, you will come up with an excuse for why the doomsday got delayed.
> If you want a date, let's give it two years.
So then, if in 2 years, the financial doomsday doesn't happen, you will admit "yep, I got totally tricked by an internet conspiracy, and have no idea what I was thinking, and I will try not be convinced by conspiracy theories anymore, and nobody should listen to what I had to say about any of this stuff previously"?
Or will you just make up another reason why the doomsday didn't happen?
> I think the price will go up
Its not about price going up by a couple percentage points. Instead, the issue is this unfalsifiable conspiracy, of financial collapse and doomsday that people are predicting, and will accept no amount of evidence to the contrary, no matter how long this doomsday fails to materialize.
You're not angry at hedge funds for naked short selling? You're not mad at the front running? Did you or did you not see that the buy option was turned off for one stock on a critical day last year during a run-up in price and no one went to jail? You're not furious that the SEC has abandoned its job?
The retail investors doing this are all holding long-term. The motto is, "We just like the stock." Maybe they're sanguine because they think time is on their side or maybe they like the stock. What's the problem? The only one trying to put a date on it and losing their mind and name-calling is you.
Your righteousness feels false here.
Or will you just make up another excuse?
That is what I mean by falsifiability. If you do not say that you will admit that you were wrong, if this mythical doomsday does not happen, then by definition you are saying that you cannot be convinced out of your position, no matter how long goes by, without the doomsday happening.
That would be falsifiability, if you agree that yes you will agree that you fell for a conspiracy theory, in that situation.
If you make up an excuse, then by definition, your opinion is unfalsifiable.
And being prepared to hold for a long time is key. Here's why: let's say it's true. Let's say that hedge funds did engage in naked shorting of a company seemingly headed for the dust bin. If this buy, register and hold strategy was for only x months, then the hedge funds can wait to close out their position. Right? Is that confusing? By saying, "There's no end," it puts tremendous pressure on these hedge funds.
I've listed several places where the markets have been shown to be corrupt and rigged. People still go to jail for insider trading but not for any of these other, much worse, market manipulations? And you ignored it. What has incurred your wrath, instead, is that a large group of people would buy, register and hold a stock they like and not state unequivocally when they were going to sell. That's what has made you mad.
The math of all of this is that either don't understand what I'm saying or you do, which means you're either a little fool or a giant asshole.
If you do not have a timeline for your predictions of financial doomsday, then that by definition means that your predictions are unfalsifiable. Which is the problem there I have trying to bring up this entire time.
It is a big problem, if you are literally saying that no matter how long goes on, without the doomsday happening, then you will just make up an excuse for why the doomsday got delayed.
That is a problem, because then the belief is not falsifiable.
The markets have been corrupt for quite a while. This may be its Bastille moment.
There's no global conspiracy to hide shorts of GameStop. It's flat-earth level nonsense. The SEC report spelled everything out, I suggest reading it.
>No one will know until all shares are registered
So we'll never know, because it's obviously not going to happen. Retail doesn't even own half the shares, if redditors manage to hit 10M shares registered I'll be impressed. I really didn't expect to read this drivel on Hacker News frankly.
What is a "SHF"? What data do you base this on? Last I checked, short interest is around 20%.
It's not.
The elite are largely shielded from the volatility of the masses.
It's the "middle class" whose retirement, pensions and life savings are tied up in the market that end up getting hit the most.
What does this mean?
Basically: buy a few index funds, don’t sweat trying to beat the market, you’ll come out alright.
EDIT TO ADD: Sincerely, thank you for your comment (and the replies providing additional context). It's given me some much needed information to go research (ala Boglehead investing).
Can anyone update me on what the guy is doing now and how much money he made, when he sold, does he still hold any, etc.? The actual interesting part of the story.
Each month he'd post an update which said he bought the shares instead.
Obviously he could have faked the screenshots, but he also swore to congress when the price was c. $40 (after the initial $400 spike) that he would still buy Gamestop at $40. A few days later he posted another screenshot showing not only did he exercise his final options, but he bought even more at around $40.
Now he could have sold most of his shares at any point in the last 9 months, which mostly bounced between $150 and $250, or he could have kept them just like the Gamestop board did (indeed I believe some of the board actually bought more shares at those overinflated (imo) prices. Nobody knows.
I believe one way of making money without selling is to sell options -- you tell someone "I will guarantee to sell 100 shares for $150 a share on May 1st" for example. They will pay you $3 a share for that guarantee, and when the price on May 1st is $140 you just laugh. If the price is $160, you have to sell your shares for less than market price (but still more than you paid), and eat the loss.
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
That's talking about the longer lasting effects (i.e. the reason GME stayed at $100+)
but from p26:
> particularly during the earlier rise from January 22 to 27 the price of GME rose as the short interest decreased. Staff also observed discrete periods of sharp price increases during which accounts held by firms known to the staff to be covering short interest in GME were actively buying large volumes of GME shares, in some cases accounting for very significant portions of the net buying pressure during a period
The run up to $500 was almost certainly a short squeeze
This is a deceptive way of putting it. Yes, if you fiddle with the window you are looking at, it is possible for the short sellers's volume to make a majority of volume (e.g. for a given 5 minute window). But a reasonable person would look at the graph in the report and come to a completely different conclusion [1].
If you look at that cumulative volume of short seller volume, it is not possible to close out the reported 122.97% short interest. Let alone the "unofficial" short interest of >200% that came out of the RobinHood hearings.
The controversy surrounding the stock stems from this disconnect of short volume and retail volume, and an article that ignores this (especially when talking about the figure who rose to fame off the back figuring this out), speaks to how little research was actually done. Especially when they spin it as a clear cut "short squeeze" when it appears to be anything but.
A. Initiate a short squeeze in heavily shorted stocks by having retail traders pile into them by buying shares and..
B. Strike back at market manipulators like Andrew Left and Melvin Capitol by forcing them to buy back their short positions due to skyrocketing share prices of their shorted assets.
On the wallstreetbets forum point B was touted as the reason to buy into these stock positions due to all the issues these wall street short sellers cause with traders and society in general. DFV was just lucky in that his trade was picked up by the crowd due to it being heavily shorted and eligible for point A.
The sad part is that we could actually solve some real problems by coordinating collective action on, say, starting a new city that's designed around non-motorized transit within the city limits. But we don't. We get Snoop Dogg crypto instead.
It's all so depressing.
Curious what you mean here, and how it relates to collective action?
But it doesn't have to be this way. People could put all this energy they're burning on crypto and apply the same principles into getting everyone to agree to some sort of better city with sustainability and low-cost-of-maintenance built in by default. That way we could have affordable housing spring up. It would take work to vet; escrows, webs-of-trust, etc. But it's totally doable in the new work from anywhere future.
People don't want affordable housing. They want affordable housing in the existing cities where they (and everyone else) want to be.
From op: > But it's totally doable in the new work from anywhere future
They're talking about creating a new city, not reusing the existing empty housing.
Even if you can work from anywhere (which ignores many industries), this only satisfies that one requirement. Some people might see the snow and cold as a deal breaker. Others might not want to move there because it's far from family. A typical theme on related posts of relocating for remote work is that they want some combination of educated population, technology culture/groups, and some sort of specific government/community resource. The list goes on.
The nature of the housing problem is that people want to live in very specific areas and then it snowballs. Remote work today should allow a considerable number of people to move out of SV, Toronto, etc. Yet most are staying. There are cheaper and better (depending on specific desires) options, yet they are not often explored. It's basically group-think. I don't see a new city solving that, since once it becomes popular, it too will suffer from demand effects.
But nobody in Canada is offering this to me because even though this is better for the world, this takes real work. Instead they want to pump crypto and stock market scams because the payoff is short term and because they're naturally cynical.
Because the ante is low. Throw a few hundred or thousand at a chance to be rich is way easier than to uproot your life to move to a fledgling city that nobody knows how it will work out, and you still have to work.
"But nobody in Canada is offering this to me because even though this is better for the world, this takes real work."
Maybe this is an opportunity for you to offer it to yourself and others. Start the movement! If you wait for others to do it, it might not happen. If not you, then who?
In general it would seem that human beings don't actually want to make the world a better place, but if you can find a way to sell it as a get rich quick scheme it might actually work.
Related to this theory, a lot of them believe the ease of closing short positions is facilitated by shady phantom shares and are trying to stamp that out by directly registering shares with the broker Computershare.
Disclaimer: I own GME stock.
Current price is, in part, driven by asymmetrical risk/reward - there's a small potential loss (size of one's position in GME) and subjectively high chance of having a real stock squeeze (and having a 10/100/1000x reward) assuming that original 120%+ short interest was not closed and is still held in the form of various derivatives.
The assumption hasn't been disproved so far, partly because current regulatory environment is very lax on reporting (which makes it very hard to disprove the thesis using public data) and partly due to other indicators (like retail owning over 10% of float as of last earnings report).
Uhh, what?
I guess one man's price stabilization is another man's market manipulation.
Every trade has to be marked correctly, whether it's short with a physical locate or short on a riskless principal basis. Equity swaps trade and are marked as riskless principal trades (ie. they're fully hedged positions and the short position is the market maker's aggregate short position). That information gets aggregated at client level and reported to regulators.
After Dodd Frank equity swaps and rehypo became even more heavily restricted. Swaps go through a clearing house and rehypothication was basically dead the last time I worked in the industry (though that might have changed).
I'm 99% sure that the speculation about the "elites" and their sinister role in GME's trading activity is simply caused by booking errors and/or aggregation mistakes.
If you're taking liquidity (i.e. "I want to sell right now"), you're directly applying downward price pressure to the market, by removing shares from the buy side.
If you're adding liquidity ("I'm selling, but I'm waiting for a buyer"), that's likely to have much less (if any) effect on the price.
The idea that MMs would somehow use their privilege to actively sell massive amounts of non-existent shares into the market in order to manipulate the price downwards is preposterous. That is literally the opposite of their business model and such activity would certainly be flagged by regulators.
Honestly it feels like a lot of the conspiracy theories around these meme stocks are based on reading a lot into a very narrow slice of regulatory text without any real understand of the whole.
It's literally called the "madoff rule" and the "madoff exemption" because he's the one that pushed the SEC to allow it.
This assumption is disproved every day by publicly available short interest data. If you operate on the assumption that all official data is false you can make all the wild claims you want, but you're not being serious and your theory is unfalsifiable.
This is a strawman. It is possible to believe (and there is motive and opportunity in this case) that one "official" statistic is manipulated or does not show the whole picture without being a raving conspiracy theorist who trusts no official.
I will also say: you can read SEC sources about RegSHO limitations about how short interest can be manipulated and masked through "Failures to Deliver" (FTD). So this is not exactly an assumption, more of a preposition about magnitude.
Actually, it's the other way round: you can only have accurate price discovery if people can take both long (buy) and short positions (short sell). If shorting is restricted, price discovery is much less likely, since only current owners of the shares can sell them. That's like only allowing current owners of the shares to buy more of them.
The more opaque information discovery is in general, the less accurate markets are in the short term.
Acme Corp has exactly 1 share of float, owned by Alice.
Bob borrows the share from Alice and sells to Charlie.
Diana borrows the share from Charlie and sells it to Eve.
Bob and Diana are each short 1 share for a total of 2. Total short position is 200% of float.
The better indicator of sketchy activity is FTDs, which may indicate that people are selling short without a locate.
> subjectively high chance of having a real stock squeeze
Ha, that explains a lot. The only way to believe the stock will go up, is the fairy-tale short squeeze. The current valuation is extremely generous based on reality.
Gamestop stock value represents a lottery ticket that they will ever make some money again. It's not worth much.
A business is at least worth it's liquidation value at any time. And $GME was trading near liquidation value. Feel free to read up on Cigar Butt Investing if interested.
Only if majority shareholders will actually liquidate. If they are set on a futile attempt to light the money on fire, you don't have that $100 you lent your cousin Johnny to start his door-to-door knife selling business anymore...
It is actually astonishing how much GME/WSB'ers have continuously gotten wrong from this saga and keep trucking along in cognitive dissonance: alleged Robinhood + Citadel collusion, not understanding DTCC collateral requirements spike, short sellers / "wall street" covering and going bankrupt anyday now... First QAnon, then most of these WSB'ers probably derided QAnon'ers imaginary conspiracy world, only to jump on board the same flavor a months later?? Internet is doing some damage.
The incentives are different. The people trying to get rich quick are not likely to do hard work to make/grow a city. Hell, it's hard enough to get people to do the simple act of voting (especially in primaries) or going to municipal or school board meetings.
While it is sad that we can't get civic engagement higher I don't think you can equate these problems at all.
That's my entire point - you're not going to get engagement from the vast majority of the GameStop people if it doesn't involve a get rich quick value proposition.
Is it perhaps possible that what's been solved is not collective action in a general sense, but transparently self-interested collective action for a narrow easy-engagement rapid-payoff set of problems?
Revamping city design, or setting up a new one, doesn't meet any of those criteria. It's not easy to engage with. It doesn't pay off quickly. It's not immediately obvious why a random person would want to jump on.
So, go ahead. Lament that the teeming masses have collectively made a decision that's not the one we would like them to. It is a modern tragedy. For my own part, I think there are lessons to be learned in why one decision was collectively made and acted on and not another.
This is why it is so depressing.
Someone has solved a particular kind of collective action problem. Now we have a playbook for addressing a specific type of situation. It doesn't seem to be a general solution or readily adaptable to a general solution.
Perhaps we could be happy that we have gained a useful tool. Even if it's not quite the tool we might have wished for. Otherwise we're essentially lamenting that all the money and effort that goes into, say, consumer goods R&D (or another unworthy cause) isn't instead used for medical research (or another worthy cause).
For what it's worth, Roaring Kitty's original video streams where he analyzes GameStop's stock should still be up on YouTube and probably cross-posted on other sites. He has hours and hours of commentary on the topic so if he said anything urging collective action or pumping the stock in an illegal way, somebody should be able to find it. As far as I remember, he was just doing a fundamental business analysis of GameStop and just pointed out that the stock was drastically underpriced given the upcoming new console cycle and his opinion that the actual business of selling physical games was not yet on the way out. Should commenting on a security that you like be illegal in a free society?
As far as your commentary about the increase of "pump and dump" schemes, I think the technology is more useful than you seem to recognize and that we're in the very early stages of blockchain tech and better uses for it will be found, but that's a separate issue I'd rather not go into here.
But as far as the pumps/dumps go, I think you're more closely looking at the symptom and not the cause. What's closer to the root cause of all of these financial schemes is the mental health crisis impacting young people. Many young people are feeling hopeless about the future for many, many reasons, and feel that financially making it through extreme risk taking is the only way to have a good life. Many are just dropping out of society. You can see this being impacted in some widely popularized stats like the number of young men not having sex, suicide rates, college attendance dropping, and many more things. What's going on with the mental health of the young is much more important to the future of humanity than the fixation society is currently stuck on.
However, the sums of money and level of commitment involved in starting a new city are radically different to that in buying a bit of GameStop or Bitcoin or whatever.
Even if you chucked in ten grand your friends might think you're crazy.
By contrast that's not even getting you half of the materials of a house. Or an apartment. Even if it's a prefab with no interior. And we haven't even started talking about making a city yet, what with all of the roads and power lines and decision makers and those juicy bits.
It's actually just a far harder problem to solve.
Collective action, or rather, any effective form of organisation is (arguably) the limiting factor on human progress. Corporation, country, tribe, union... all forms of organisation.
These are all very different, have very different strengths, weaknesses and abilities. Tribal chiefs are not very likely to be effective at the same things, in the same way as a CEO or a prime minister. Linux, GNU, WWW, Wikipedia and such are another form. Rare, relatively. But novel and productive. What these organisations produced is again, qualitatively different from what commercial entities produce. There's a medium-message dynamic between form and product.
A lot of things are clearly doable, but our forms of organisation don't produce them. We're basically limited to the things that are forms of organisation can produce. Organisational methods are a limiting factor to the same extent that resources, science and such are limiting factors.
This starts (according to YNH) at the start of history, or rather, we might define "human history" as the point at which our methods of organisation develop past biological determinants. IE, chimps operate in troops. Gorillas in harems. Geladas in a complex herd structure. Modern humans are (again, according to YNH) the homo subspecies with the ability to switch. That said, we're not that good at it.
For the most part, human cooperation of this epoch is defined by working tirelessly against each other in such a way that sometimes produces emergent benefits. Within
^In a literal sense.
Our species is very clearly lacking a crucial ingredient for our continued evolution: the ability to align our actions (and motivations, and rewards), on a societal scale. If we're still here in a hundred thousand years, I think the anthropologists of the future will look back to today as falling before some critical phase transition in the way our collective consciousness operates. Whether that's a hive mind, or some technological approach to consensus (which I'm almost loathe to say out loud given the Baby's First Computer approaches we're coming up with these days), or just us all waking up and realizing that we should be living life in service to one another, who knows. Our contemporary penchant for individualism, while producing many interesting emergent artifacts, is causing us to eat ourselves alive.
I don't think these are contradictory statements. Our society is both defined and limited by the quality of our "collective consciousness," ability to operate cooperatively and such. It's not zero, and it's not unlimited either.
Personally, I don't see this as a purely ideological or philosophical limitation. Our ideologies and philosophies tend to trail culture, IMO, not the other way around. Neither do I think that individualism vs collectivism is a defining dichotomy. Both individualism and collectivism are, likely, inevitable. Also both individualism and (especially) collectivism compete within themselves as much as they do with each other.
And yes, the ways that we cooperate are clunky, maybe immoral, and not really designed. Money is a cultural construct, for example, that creates cooperation. So is religion, tribalism, legal systems, etc. Is money a collectivist artefact? I think it's very hard to argue otherwise. Money is useless if you are alone, and requires a collective consciousness to even exist. Equality and collectivism aren't synonyms.
Just curious, do you believe there is some greater organism or what have you with the ability to integrate human consciousnesses (something like Gaia theory)?
If so, what do you believe that organism/being (or whatever it is) would feel or think about what humans are doing now, acting in the world?
Haven't seen any evidence for it.
You have confused a short-term low-effort collective action not much more different than a Tweeetstorm with some kind of long-term civilizational megaproject, and all over your very own pet issue. Come on.
Right. And if only we could all just band together, we could create world peace and end hunger! It's so easy you guys! Just everyone cooperate!
You honestly think starting a meme cryptocoin is equivalent to the effort required to build a new city!? How are these things even remotely related?
I mean, that does sound like a true proposition. So why is it that we can't band together?
We can escape the fatalism of Dunbar's number and in/out-groups through leadership and recursively hierarchical structures. See any large (>~200 persons) company, collective action (civil rights, wars, social movements), nations, etc.
I was asking a rhetorical question tbh.
Well... hosing a bunch of hedge funds is at least going to give you a good laugh as a return for your money, not to mention that the entire GME saga showed once again what a house of cards the financial system is and how incompetent hedge fund managers, regulatory agencies and politicians are - while NTFs are just a plain scam.
By contrast, NFTs are refreshingly honest, even if their long term value is questionable. An NFT is the direct digital equivalent of a numbered print of an artwork, signed by the artist. There is no pretension of political righteousness, and mainstream media is inundated with messaging that they are a scam. Everyone involved knows exactly what they are getting, and has been endlessly warned of every possible downside.
(Mind you, a lot of high profile VC deals look like that as well! Remember Wework?)
I have been dreaming of doing something like this lately! The issue is where would we do it? How would we get people to move there? Who will fund it?
Buses and trains have engines and motors. You probably mean designing around public transit rather than personally owned vehicles.
The “mother of all short squeezes” theory has been debunked over and over again, but the initial price action due to the media frenzy has convinced a lot of people that there’s something else going on. Any information that contradicts the theory is not welcome in their Reddit bubbles, but any “DD” that supports the theory is upvoted rapidly. It was interesting to watch at first, but it’s becoming increasingly depressing as it becomes clear how many people have put too much of their own money into this pump scheme turned conspiracy theory.
Admittedly I am not sure that's directly related to the theory being referenced by you and OP as I am hazy on all the historical discussions.
[0]https://www.marketbeat.com/stocks/NYSE/GME/short-interest/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Unfalsi...
tldr - It's possible to say a lot of rubbish that can't be directly disproven. It's actually one of the hallmarks of conspiracy theories.
There is growing pressure as more and more investors DRS their shares to push back, so we'll see more articles like the one above, convincing us that the short squeeze is over, trying to convince people to sell. Because once 100% of shares are registered, it's all over.
IF you can extrapolate the rising trend all the way to 100%, then shorting would be quite a bit more difficult for most market participants. But the fact that some investor have DRSed their shares does not mean all the rest will, too. You might equally ask that if it would be so beneficial for shareholders to do this, why haven't all shareholders done it already?
As someone without any direct interest in the whole saga (neither short nor long), it sure looks like the whole thing has been over for at least six months.
I think for passive spectators it may feel that way. For those people in it (and I was in WSB from before this started), it's absolutely right in the middle of the action. They has a steady march of registering shares for months and it's not letting up.
The more that directly register their shares, the smaller the pool to manage the price. It doesn't have to hit 100% for there to be an effect. But if it ever does hit 100%, wow.
The first version of the theory WAS disproved, so the theory evolved to account for that. You see that same pattern over and over with everything the preach right now. If they correctly predict something it's proof that they're on the right track. If they make an incorrect prediction, they just didn't have the right data and they "discover" something new that will make their theory right.
That being said, if you stalk their sub (its my guilty pleasure), there's plenty of small things they get wrong that are easily disproven. They love to talk about GME's price movement being unique (GME went up 11% today on no news), but it tends to move in tandem with plenty of other speculative stocks, which they ignore. They love to talk about how the reverse repo update that gets posted every day is a sign that they're on the right track even when the first post that brought that data to their sub claimed it wasn't definitive proof of anything, just a weird thing that was happening.
I think the icing on the cake is the one guy from Florida who is a member of their sub who sued GameStop in an effort to get more information. When they held a stockholder vote sometime in 2021 there were 8 different items to vote on and the total number of shares added up differently in one of the votes. In the last vote, if you add up all the yes and no votes, there was one additional vote. GameStop claimed that the difference was because of rounding fractional share votes, but the guy claimed it was proof of naked shorting, so he sued. GameStop's own lawyers said the guy said there was no proof of naked shorting and that the lawsuit was frivolous and are asking the judge to dismiss the case with prejudice and have the guy pay their legal fees.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/rdk08p/defendan...
That's not just boilerplate, it's also 1000% true. If you lose money because you listened to them, the only person you can blame is yourself.
Could you post a link to a good piece that debunks?
It is honestly baffling how many GME conspiracists are apparently illiterate and unable to understand that "X didn't have as much of an effect as Y" doesn't mean "X did not happen". Especially when it is surrounded by multiple paragraphs explicitly talking about the X that was happening.
Note: I was never a member of WSB. I have researched GME years before this whole saga and hold a position in my portfolio because I saw the value in the turnaround prior to the squeeze saga. That said, as an investor the mechanics of the market need to change.
From for the report:
* Figure 6 shows that the run-up in GME stock price coincided with buying by those with short positions. However, it also shows that such buying was a small fraction of overall buy volume, and that GME share prices continued to be high after the direct effects of covering short positions would have waned.
The SI was 140% of the float. Small fraction of the volume was the short (without counting short volume), you think it was enough volume for both? There's no way to know how much was that. Gabe Plotkin in his testimony even says that short have plenty of time to cover but it didn't seem that was the case. If you look at the SI chart it seems the shorts got closed right away, but the stock manage to have couple of wild runs to 300 and a few to 250. With no retail nor volume to back it up. Why is that? you don't see that with any other company. Maybe some fraud behind?I really don't know.
Anyway, I am not saying there's a 140% short position (nor crazy 1000% like reddit speculate), but the SI is not 10% nor 20%. The price action nor the options market backs those numbers, I may be wrong but I believe there's more to it. It is hard to be sure obviously, but I don't mind to have a few hundred shares and see how it unfolds, long term it is going to be worth more and I am not counting on any squeeze for that. This is not financial advice, it is just my opinion on something I ended up finding fascinating, from the investment side and the human behavior side.
AMC generated a bunch of cash and shed a bunch of debt off their temporary high valuation... good for them I say.
He did get very lucky with the way Gamestop played out for him but overall I think he is a person deserving of his luck and he did his work beforehand. This is not some crazy NFT opportunist, he seems like a decent guy and he even has a CFA so he put in the hours in that as well. There was luck involved but also skill and hard work.
I have been in WSB for ages and there is a very very niche, handful of people who might be the smaetest people I have ever interacted on the internet.
You shouldn't even really attempt reasoning with them. Do everything that makes the hearing boring tv. Dramatizing anything would result in focusing light on your activity. Don't hear the context of the questions tackle keywords with organizational policy response answers.
You can never win. You might think you are the smartest person in the room but smartness won't work when you don't have the right to speak freely and people can form interpretations of whatever you are saying.
Play a fun game. First listen to a question. Pause the video. Think of an answer yourself. Then unpause and see if you could have answered the question better, more calmly and more empathetically than DFV. I always play this game whenever I watch a senate hearing.
If a year of nothing is not enough to convince them that nothing is going to happen I don't know what will. Hopefully in 5 years from now they will realize it was nothing but a retail fueled crazed pump and dump and the vast majority of players lost money.
It isn't weird at all. It's probably one of the hallmark symptoms of being in a cult. Everyone in your outgroup are the ones who are misguided, being misled by lies, etc.
(this is a joke)
- Market Makers don't fall under the same requirements as other market participants (e.g. broker dealers) and can create artificial short positions without having shares to borrow, and are allowed extra time to deliver them
- Synthetic short positions (e.g. by the means of options) do not have to be reported and FINRA is only now 'considering' asking to report it [1]
- Short positions by the means of shorting ETFs containing GME are reported as ETF SI (and XRT, by the way, has 700% SI)
There are many indicators that suggest the opposite (that short positions were not closed):
- Retail directly registered over 10% of available float (excl. insider shares) as of 3 months ago [2]
- GME still had spikes of failure-to-deliver in August, similar to original FTD & price spike [3]
- GME is IBKR's hottest short by value as of 1/27 [4]
This is not a financial advice, everyone does their own due diligence. Disclosure: I own directly registered shares of GME.
1 - https://www.finra.org/sites/default/files/2021-06/Regulatory...
2 - https://investor.gamestop.com/node/19571/html "As of October 30, 2021, 5.2 million shares of our Class A common stock were directly registered with our transfer agent, ComputerShare"
3 - https://stocksera.pythonanywhere.com/ticker/failure_to_deliv...
4 - https://www.tradersinsight.news/traders-insight/securities/s...
If there is hidden short interest in GME, there is also short interest in countless other companies, including those liquidated like Sears, Blockbuster and Toys R Us.
Although saying that it could be the end of financial markets doesn't help our cult like status.
XRT only holds 0.71% GME shares, so seems like an extremely inefficient way of shorting it. The entire XRT short position is around 170k GME shares, or about 0.4% of the float
> Synthetic short positions (e.g. by the means of options) do not have to be reported and FINRA is only now 'considering' asking to report it
But put options don't get squeezed (call options may cause a gamma squeeze)
> Retail directly registered over 10% of available float (excl. insider shares) as of 3 months ago
What relevance does that have? There's still 90% of the float available to be lent with a short interest of just 15%
I still hold some GME shares leftover from last year but fully believe the short squeeze has happened and there's nothing but a collective delusion left
No, actually it's quite efficient. You short XRT and simultaneously go long all other components except GME. Now you are net short GME without having to report a short position on it or borrow shares in the first place.
The thing is, buying ITM put options usually due to delta hedging causes the counter-party (market maker) to sell shares short. If done directly (OTC) and with prior agreement, this 1) lets the parties create short positions owned by market maker, 2) hide these short positions, since market maker has 6 days to settle the trade (deliver the stock), but can fail to deliver and has in total 21 days for delivery.
The only short positions that need to be reported are "those short positions resulting from short sales that have settled or reached settlement date by the close of the reporting settlement date" [1], so as I understand market makers can hold a large non-delivered not settled 'limbo' position and not report it since it's not settled by the reporting date, and just reset the cycle every 6-21 days.
Oh, and short interest is self-reported and not enforced, so any self-clearing market making firm could make 'mistakes', sometimes even for 6 years straight [2], and go away with a small fine.
1 - https://www.finra.org/rules-guidance/rulebooks/finra-rules/4...
2- https://www.finra.org/media-center/news-releases/2015/finra-...
I've watched this guy singlehandedly pump a penny stock to 10x its value in days before dumping. Not sure how he doesn't get arrested or investigated by the SEC, but its common place for him and his "crew" Atlas Trading.
If actually can pump stocks and make millions, why does he need to sell early access subscription?
Diversification? :)
Might as well make an additional million a month on a few thousand suckers, on top of the other couple million a month from pumping schemes.
Because he starts selling before he tells this group.
People who spend $250/month are going to be convinced that the “buy” and “sell” recommendations are now valuable because they literally spent money on them, and therefore will follow them more closely.
He just made the case for a stock which he had an investment in, laying out his reasons, and being upfront about his interest in it.
It was the meme brigade that sent it to $400 which obviously DFV made quite a lot on, but I don't see any evidence that this was planned on his behalf or incited illegally. I think he would have been quite happy if his projections of the PS5/XSX generation had given him the returns he predicted in a 5 year timeframe.
Ultimately, the sentiment is to protect the financial sector while punishing retail. Business as usual.
If anyone wants to learn more about the situation should head to https://fliphtml5.com/bookcase/kosyg
The best is MSM telling retail investors to forget GameStop and sell every single day. Why do they care? Who's interest do they have?
Anyways, it's been a real eye opener.
My opinion is the market is a giant slow Ponzi scheme built over time to fleece retail investors.
Now its just teenagers with $600 trading accounts calling each other "apes".
Reddit really, really cant let a joke die.
Can you provide some recent links?
For those who were not involved before this all happened.
It was perfect
You can take a look at mention trends [0] and see that most people are talking about stocks that have no "squeeze" story behind them.
You can also take a look at the rules [1] to see that market manipulation (like 95% of the GME discussion that goes on) is not allowed.
Finally you can take a look at the daily thread [2] and note that within the top 1,500 comments, only two mention the word "squeeze".
[0]: https://www.quiverquant.com/wallstreetbets/
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/about/rules
[2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/silx0h/dail...
Still, the people complaining make it seem like the sub today looks the same as it did on January 28th, 2021.
I took a very cursory look at the front page just now and don't see a single post advocating a short squeeze. Maybe there's one or two mentions within the threads, but it's far from everywhere.
If he had not gotten injured he probably wouldn't have had enough time on his hands to research the investments, would be training for marathons, etc.
The strong EMH has never been taken seriously anywhere outside of academia, precisely because everyone can find abundant counterexamples just by looking around on the trading floor. The weak EMH works on much longer timescales than a few years and will be absolutely fine.
I do give a damn about 9-12 digit old money on Wall Street and elsewhere profiting from rigged systems and trying to deflect the mobs anger from them onto the aforementioned single upper-middle class guy.
I think in any case that guy deserves his gains. Everything he did was out in the open, and most people had heard about it before the end game.
Closed vs covered are also very different. This hit pieces like to swap them like they're interchangeable too.
And that yes, this has been going on a long time and is in fact costing the hedge funds a lot of money. And buying to cover is way too expensive at current market prices, so the hedge funds are bleeding money in hopes that something will change the situation.
Oh, and the belief is also that there are more short sales that need to cover than there are shares of the stock. Hence the squeeze potential.
It's the best of both worlds to me, I don't have to pick stocks or worry about the markets because the models tell me when it's time to hedge. My strongest model (https://grizzlybulls.com/models/vix-ta-macro-mp-extreme) has returned > 70% ROI since April 2020, and 60% ROI longer term in the backtest with much lower volatility than the market as a whole.