Day trader army loses all the money it made in meme-stock era
bloomberg.com
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- The Fed juicing the market (and not stopping when it should have, dismissing inflation concerns as transitory, etc.)
- Covid stimulus going to people who didn't need it
- People spending that stimulus money to invest (often for the first time) on zero-fee platforms like Robin Hood
- Meme stock investors intentionally manipulating stock prices to cause them to diverge from the underlying value of the company
Despite all of that, people who bought and held a total market or S&P 500 index fund in 2020 have still made gains.
Could you please elaborate? I think the way the US did it's COVID stimulus was outstanding and very close to the ideal way to actually address people's potential needs.
> - People spending that stimulus money to invest (often for the first time) on zero-fee platforms like Robin Hood
What's exactly the problem? Aren't people free to spend their own money any way they feel like it? Or are we now held accountable by a righteous capitalism police to determine if an expense we make is kosher?
> - Meme stock investors intentionally manipulating stock prices to cause them to diverge from the underlying value of the company
What's exactly the problem? I mean, who are you to tell what's the "underlying value" of something, specially in a free market economy?
It seems to me that worst case scenario the people spending their money on stocks are only gambling their own money, and best case scenario they profit from their own investment.
A lot of people got swept up in the hype and got left holding the bag after the initial set of meme investors made their money and got out.
Whether it _should_ only have gone to those who needed it, or just to everyone, is another question.
I have a number of friends in the contracting/remodeling/construction industry. Demand for their services skyrocketed during COVID while they were all simultaneously working with their accountants to maximize their take from the COVID PPP program.
Huge quantities of COVID money were pumped into companies that absolutely did not need it, and that's not even counting the massive volume of fraudulent claims. The COVID Paycheck Protection Program was supposed to shore up companies that would otherwise have to fire employees, but AFAICT nothing really stopped highly profitable companies from also collecting the money.
Since when is revenue and profit dictated by anyone's sense of fairness? That's an awfully moralistic and judgemental take on everyone else's needs and desires.
Sadly this blend of judgemental view of everyone's money already hit small things like buying groceries. Damn the have-nots for generating inflation by actually stocking on the decent food that the well-to-do used to buy.
Do you see any problem in anyone spending their own money in any way they'd like?
These were supposed to keep at-risk companies from failing when the economy crashed, but then the economy didn't crash and instead it was just a huge government handout of free money to most companies.
These people who bought homes and shit with ppp are going to go to prison. I hope at least.
"We want to prevent the economy from crashing hard and long" is how I'd phrase motivations. Certain sectors did crash immediately, and yet the overall blast radius wasn't very large and a lot of stuff bounced back immediately.
That seems like a great success.
Loans being forgiven to generously even for companies that did NOT see a sustained dip in demand, on the other hand, is a more targeted specific problem, and a lesson to learn. But if you learn too broad a lesson like "stimulus is dumb" then you just drive yourself back off a difference cliff next time something exceptional happens.
This is naive and ignores the real sequence of events.
Things like conferences were getting canceled before the first official government actions in the US. Groceries were being hoarded. People were paying attention to events. The government sticking its head in the sand or just repeating "everything is fine, stay calm" messages wouldn't have prevented any impact.
Uncertainty is an economic killer. And if you remember early on, that uncertainty also led to a lot less controversy over the canceled events and restrictions than arose later. (Though in retrospect, even many "paranoid" estimates back then were far less than a million US deaths...)
Some level of stimulus was almost certain to be necessary regardless of official Covid actions in March 2020 unless you wanted to just let those companies and workers drown as people chose to change their behavior.
(The "restrictions should've been loosened earlier" argument is a much more reasonable one, but IMO still ignores how much of this was already local by winter of 2020, and also that at that point the initial economic damage was done.)
(That's before getting into the recklessness of assuming future severe novel diseases won't be even more deadly on limited early data...)
> Do you see any problem in anyone spending their own money in any way they'd like?
"How dare you tell the bank robber to return the money he stole. Who are you to tell him how to spend his own money? That's awfully moralistic and judgmental of you."
And this was by design. The administration at the the time explicilty pushed for there to be no oversight at all on this. The opposition party at the time said it's just setting things up for fraud and corruption, but it was desired to have no oversight. Not even after the funds had been released (if you wanted to make an argument that upfront oversight would have slowed down the distribution).
The administration both fired the inspectors general that would oversee the program, and passed laws to prevent transparency into the program. It was fairly controversial at the time, but now mostly lost in the haze of 2020 lockdowns.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/15/inspector...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/06/16/taxpayers-...
Still give it out right away. Just put a checkbox on the form. And then follow up with the details on forgiveness later.
If a company jumps the gun, they think things look black, but in a month it turns around and they are fine allow them to return it or keep it at a low (but not crazy low) interest rate.
For foreignness prove the loss/necessity.
So can go after egregious abusers. Because it wasn't abuse if you took it and didn't need it. So long as used for payroll, rent, etc. Because why wouldn't you take free money. We did.
I have 0 or negative AGI while sometimes having gross income/earnings/gains in the millions I got auto-sent several stimulus checks of the max size, because Congress wrote it based on having an “AGI of $75000 and lower” or similar number. AGI is after most tax deductions
Back to the by design part, the primary goal was to keep velocity in the economy high, and that means getting it to people with a high spend
Fairness is not a factor at all
Our economy works from velocity not whether one has money. Hoarding is worse than spending, not saying that poorer people would hoard just how its not a factor. It was designed to make maximum spending
Someone prewrote it for congress they knew what they were doing while congress was just scared
I have multiple friends in tech who switched to remote and literally used the extra stimulus cash to trade with Robinhood and crypto.
I doubt this is representative. But people making $100k who ended up saving money from no longer needing to commute did not need thousands of dollars in stimulus. Of course, it was neat getting the money, but it resulted in a lot of extra cash.
Comically, I also have friends who just paid down debt and didn’t buy anything.
But my anecdotes are lucky in that I didn’t know anyone who lost their job or got seriously ill.
It was not sold as a stimulus, it was to allow businesss to pay furloughed employees (in a bizarre ill-thought-out privately-run unemployment insurance scheme) to continue to pay ongoing expenses.
What didn't make sense, of course, is what those people were supposed to be buying, since the reason they were furloughed was because.... people weren't buying things, because of lockdowns and such. Hence, inflation when aggregate $ exceeded stuff worth buying.
> It was not sold as a stimulus, it was to allow businesss to pay furloughed employees (in a bizarre ill-thought-out privately-run unemployment insurance scheme) to continue to pay ongoing expenses.
Can you clarify what's your rationale for believing that a program designed to "allow businesss to pay furloughed employees (...) to continue to pay ongoing expenses" does not correspond to an economic stimulus program?
Source: I was furloughed April 2020 while my employer at the time received over $2m in PPP. Furloughed employees were explicitly told to collect UI.
I think the criticism is that the stimulus worked too well and we’re suffering inflation and whatnot now.
Yet, at the same time, they were forcing parts of the economy to shut down. Nothing like hitting the gas and the brake at the same time.
And what's wrong with that? Aren't we talking about an economic stimulus program? What do you think is the whole point of an economic stimulus program, other than stimulating the economy?
1) there could have been more money for people who actually needed it and were negatively impacted by losing their job or getting sick or whatnot
2) buying lots of “luxury” items drove up inflation. This is bad for a whole slew of reasons we are seeing now.
If we wanted to stimulate the economy, we could have done it in more effective ways that didn’t hose us.
But we could have put rules in place that were enforced retroactively. Something like “you get $600 if you lost your job. Everyone who asks gets it. But when you file your taxes if you didn’t lose your job and you took the money, you have to pay it back.” Stuff like that.
I worked for a consulting company that had a pretty smart expense approval process. They approved everything and audited you severely when you went up for partner. It wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty close as people were really nervous and conservative even though they wouldn’t be audited until years later.
There was also a lot of stuff where unemployment paid more than working so there were perverse incentives to not work and make more money. I had a family member who normally made about$2k/month. He got $600/week in unemployment so took a long time to go back while making an extra $500 per month. Stupidly, he bought a car with the extra money (but he’s been able to keep making the payments).
Just having some cap that paid 80% of your salary in unemployment would have been super simple to implement.
Or some programs ran for over a year. So the emergency stuff could have phased out after 3 months or 6 months.
There’s lots of ways they could have designed interventions much better.
On an instinctive level I prefer hearing a story like this to the kind of story that would have been more common/worse without the very broad aid that was given, but perhaps this sort of event is quite damaging as well. I'm not sure it's possible, but it would be interesting to see attempts at quantifying the difference.
> Just having some cap that paid 80% of your salary in unemployment would have been super simple to implement.
There is nothing super simple about government unemployment insurance programs, especially in recent years. What about Uber drivers, per diem nurses, people whose employer was dependent on events in Wuhan so their pay was cut?
Even if there are easy answers to these questions, UI is administered by the states so there are going to be more than 50 versions of each answer.
How is that close to perfect? I assure you that some people who would need and actually deserve that payout wouldn't apply for it just out of the irrational fear that it will cause them problems later.
How so? buying stuff cures inflation. Are you referring to supply chain shortages making non-luxury stuff not get produced?
Someone who did want the money (enough that they were willing to sell some GME stock to get to) got the money instead.
And now the person who didn’t need the money hasn’t got any money.
Justice served?
College students who weren't planning to have any income anyway before Covid hit. And that's at least still a relatively "legitimate" payout compared to the screw-ups like sending money to prisoners [0].
But really both cases are massively massively dwarfed by anyone who could fog a mirror starting an LLC and getting $40k to $250k of PPP money. I personally know a couple people who should go to jail for this (but probably won't even have to repay the money, let alone repay with interest, let alone get in trouble).
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2022/04/05/gover...
Inappropriate QE >> PPP Grants >> Stimulus Check for undeserving person
Stimulus Check for undeserving person >> PPP Grants >> Inappropriate QE
PPP was a fraudster's paradise, though. The idea was good, the implementation was not so good.
Where exactly do you see a problem with that? To put it differently, do you feel it's better to arbitrarily discriminate against elements of your society with a program intended to actually help everyone everywhere?
More importantly, what leads you to believe that the goal of the COVID stimulus was to help individuals instead of society as a whole? Think about it for a second. In a moment in time where circumstances were leading to an unprecedented economic crunch, wouldn't a bottom-up consumer side stimulus help economy stay afloat?
But, as I said, my bigger issue is the massive PPP fraud. And my issue with massive fraud on the scale of hundreds of billions of dollars is that the US is already deeply in debt.
And my issue with the nation being deeply in debt is that future generations will have to pay for the profligate spending of this one, which I find immoral.
it should have been a program to minimize the shock to the economy.
it should never have been a program to help everyone everywhere, because this type of program triggers inflation and is often followed by recession.
It wasn’t a stimulus. It wasn’t COVID related either. It was income redistribution. I might respect it to some extent if people called it what it was.
And in the end it was redistribution from the lower to the upper class. The last two years were the biggest wealth transfer in history. And "wealth" is so much more than just money... we absolutely screwed our kids in a way that will impact them for quite some time.
It has led to an unprecedented sticky-inflation that can only be brought down by inducing a recession.
It's not that there were warned by prominent economists https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/11/inflation-larry-summ...
Many of the people who got the stimulus checks didn't need them. Same with the advanced child tax credits (increases spending when it looks like you have more money). This was true for myself and many coworkers. There were others who needed it. It was far from perfect though.
"What's exactly the problem? Aren't people free to spend their own money any way they feel like it?"
Yes they are free to do that. It causes problems when there's a disconnect between value and price. Many of the activities were trading or gambling, which are not beneficial. That gambling affects prices and the market, thus affecting others.
Think about what happens when's there's a rush on a bank. A bunch of people acting stupidly in large numbers can create a negative environment for everyone else.
that's not people acting stupidly - a bank run happens when trust in the banking system drops to below a critical threshold. This trust might be eroded by some external event, and mishandling by the governing authority etc.
it is rational then, as an individual who cannot change the authority's handling, to take action to protect one's own interest.
> Yes they are free to do that. It causes problems when there's a disconnect between value and price. Many of the activities were trading or gambling, which are not beneficial.
they are beneficial from the point of view of the person doing it.
It isn't the activity that causes the problem - it's that those activity is funded by taxpayer money, not their own!
Something can be rational and unreasonable at the same time. It seems you answered your own question from your previous comment - it creates a problem for others based on them acting on their own self interest.
"they are beneficial from the point of view of the person doing it."
Just because it's beneficial for one person doesn't mean it can't be a problem for others.
"It isn't the activity that causes the problem - it's that those activity is funded by taxpayer money, not their own!"
Even if it were their own money, it would still cause problems. Although it's questionable if they would have participated in that behavior without the extra money.
Yes, they are free to spend their own money that way…evidenced by the fact that they weren’t prevented from spending their money that way. Other people are also free to call their choices stupid.
"I know you took this job because there wasn't really an interview, you don't have a real boss, you work whenever you feel like it, you don't have to do anything you don't already do every day and it's just so hard to find a job in the Great Resignation, but now you want to cry foul because there's no job security due to people not having enough money to stuff their faces full of shit for a few weeks, so here's some extra cash. 'Murika!" "Oh! It wasn't enough that we paused student loans for all of 2020 and 2021, so we're going to keep extending that, even knowing many of you will just bedmaking minimum payments until the remaining balance falls off (I know doctors making six figures who have been doing this since before the most recent pandemic)."
Full disclosure: I was unemployed for about half of 2020, didn't ever take unemployment and survived on my VA disability while actively pursuing employment. I have also currently paid 80% of my student loans after graduating in 2016. We should be teaching the next generation how to survive in this increasingly dysfunctional world, not letting them believe that some person/organisation will always be there to bail us out after every stupid decision. Apparently, you haven't noticed, but the US brand of capitalism and the stupid idea that we'll just keep throwing money at every problem is literally destroying the planet.
I think you have the relationship inversely related. The stimulus was -because- people were not working, which was because there was a global pandemic that was also incredibly mishandled by the gov
> "are we now held accountable by a righteous capitalism police"
I would argue that yes, if you are getting free money from the government to help sustain you during trying times it is reasonable to say it shouldn't be used for gambling. I don't think we are impinging on anyones freedom to say they can't spend their food stamps at a casino.
The "geniuses" in GME, Stonks, WSB, etc telegraph to the entire world what they're going to do via their subreddit, then give the trading house even more data showing how many people follow through on particular "talk", allowing the trading house to accurately predict what sort of activity a post will generate.
They think they're incredibly smart when really all they did was fuel the world's largest pump-and-dump scam. /r/GME was deeply depressing during some of the crashes, with people sharing poverty-food recipes not just to help people get by who had lost more than their disposable income, but to help people buy even more stock.
The way the US tax system works meant that non-residents got the cheque as well (because they have to file taxes). Non-residents are usually able to reduce their tax liability to zero, so a US citizen earning over 200k but not living in the US would get a cheque mailed to them.
You mean people gambling and trading. Very few people engaging in these activities are really investing.
Stimulus to people who need it (to spend) is inflationary. Stimulus to those who don't need it inflates stock prices.
From the stimulus the worst of the offenses by far happend in the PPP for small business. It was absoutely shameful.
While there was of course waste in the direct treasury payments to citizens, they get way overrepresented compared to what happened in the PPP. It's the same human nature of: If a big company gets 100M of our taxes for no reason, people grumble a bit, but if their next door neighboor gets an extra $100 and they don't, you never hear the end of it.
The PPP was rife with waste, but by design you'll hear way more media and people complain about the co-worker they know of or cousin that spent $1000 on trading cards.
Edit: And skipping my rant that it was by design that the PPP had no transparency and the adminstration fired the inspectors general that would oversee the program for waste to avoid transparency.
Edit: And to be clear it's fine to have untargeted stimulus for people to cover day to day expenses, and also fine to have loans to businesses to keep things afloat. But to intentionally do so with blocking transparency, and removing oversite officials is just creating a cesspool for waste.
The money was supposed to be given to those who could spend it, to help keep all our small/medium/large businesses as healthy as possible.
Agreed, and providing direct payments to people who are working to put together food or pay their rent makes perfect sense to me. The potential disasters we would have seen if we hadn't done that would've been horrible.
And providing loans to small businesses so they can keep functioning also makes sense. But firing the inspectors who are supposed to oversee the small business loans (as they always have done), blocking pushes for basic transparency of even what businesses receive the loans, and then "forgiving" 97% of all loans as a gift from the govt is beyond wildly irresponsible.
Not really directed at you, I'm just sick of the idea that if we all get together and declare things good or bad, that's some sort of accomplishment. People who do well do well through ignoring the irrelevant and immaterial comments of busybodies and bikeshedders.
Overall I think my suffering-footprint is tiny compared to most so maybe I'm okay with being a bit more unethical in some areas of my life. But I'm unsure.
The comment is much more as a counterpoint to the existing dogma of valuing an individual's contribution to society primarily based on ability to amass capital (i.e. splashy magazine covers based on net worth - which often translates to percentage ownership of a company valued on the price paid by the last marginal buyer).
I can't speak for everyone, but I have simply decided to opt-out wherever possible; I'm not going to fight against a system that has moated itself out of obsolescence. If startup culture has taught me anything it's been to learn when to expend your energy matters more than you may think as it compounds over time. If you're constantly deluding yourself there is reform in a system that is designed to be this way, you'll be in incapable of creating viable alternatives.
I had qualms about how poor the US education system--I went to both private and public schools--when I was student, I couldn't fathom just how much we spent and how poor the results were in almost all facets until I realized that this was exactly what it was intended to be: a bloated bureaucratic system designed to siphon funds from the pubic coffers into private hands and enrich an administrative class who seem content with throwing out what they feel impedes them meeting their easily manipulated metrics.
With that said, I still think the airline bailout was the real takeaway of how this whole debacle was managed [0] in the US. It's the typical Socialism for the rich, ruthless Capitalism for the poor playing out all over again as we saw in 2008. Failing up happened, and the stock market and housing market rallied in the midst of mass unemployment and re-opening problems for small businesses etc... this is all make-believe, and it has been for most of my Life, too. It would be almost laughable, in a jaded George Carlin way, if it didn't have such dire consequences: homelessness, and over-dose death due to substance abuse is a pandemic itself.
Personally speaking, after having done sales for my fintech startup, I learned to do the same: but I'm realizing just how internally jaded it has made me about most things in Life. It has a spill-over effect that didn't really dawn me until much later in Life long after I left tech for a while, and returned to culinary whose work force is mainly the 'working poor' who constantly get screwed over. I've helped several of my friends get over the worst situation, and I'm glad they are mostly doing better, but it isn't by much after inflation and perpetual rent hikes.
The extent to which it happened to help out people in need or "the economy" was secondary.
This concern could have been allayed by keeping the funds in a bank account until certain of forgiveness. Absent said forgiveness one repays the loan using the retained funds.
But not all lenders were banks. My company got its two PPP loans through ReadyCapital. My company had zero previous relationship with them.
> still seem to be staring at the beginning...
Isn't that the whole point of preventative measures?
"not nothing": could have used less money.
Relatedly, getting a recession now does not at all mean these measures were not successful or that this recession is at all similar to the one that was prevented.
The PPP was much different than the other forms of stimulus. It either went to employees, or it had to be paid back. The interest on the loan was low though.
I doubt much of PPP funds were being used in the meme trading game.
To have the loan forgiven, you had to submit documents at tax time to verify it or it became a low interest loan that had to be paid back.
PPP was one of the best ideas that came out of locking down the entire country because otherwise a tooooon of people would have been laid off immediately. Instead, even people who couldn’t do any work at all due to lack of child care were able to be paid, maintain insurance and benefits. They had to act so quickly.
The OP comment didn't mention the PPP specifically as stimulus.
The context of the article, is individuals investing money in meme stocks.
The PPP went to business owners (with the assumption they would pay employees rather than laying them off) and likely wasn't being used for meme stocks.
I was reading through the WSB Reddit sub at the time. There was a lot of chatter there about people using their personal stimulus payments for investing in meme stocks.
I also spent a lot of time on Reddit subs checking chatter on PPP and EIDL. Of the two, my guess is there was a lot more widespread fraud (more people involved, but with smaller disbursements) with the EIDL. The EIDL was giving out 1K per employee (up to 10K) for anyone who claimed they were business owners. That didn't have to be paid back.
No really explain that logic as when we give tax credits to business we do not then again use the same screwed up logic
the biggest example, the Trump org tax credit check from early 2000s. in fact now that the IRs know it was base don fraud there still asking for it back.
Of course there were problems with the wrong people getting their hands on the money. If you actually put up a ton of filters to make sure the wrong people didn't get the money, it would have delayed the actual people needing money from getting it. The right thing to do is to hand out the money fast and go after the abusers later.
These comments are the reason why the small guys always gets the short end of the stick. The big companies have their army of people to solve problems. The small guys are the ones who need it fast without the bureaucracy. Comments like "too much waste" and "shameful" do not hurt the big companies one bit. They just put up another road block for the small guys.
Chicago used 60% (300million) of relief funds on police personnel costs, it's not just the business aspect that was fucked: https://blockclubchicago.org/2021/02/18/chicago-used-60-of-d...
So can arms dealers. We’re worsening inflation by flooding military contractors with money too.
In my opinion, this is not a winning strategy. It takes magnitudes more efforts to go after criminals and recover misappropriated money than to prevent the crime in the first place.
P.S.; I'm not an American, so I don't think I have much say in judging how you guys spend your taxes, anyway.
Honestly who cares if a bunch of gambling addicts and dumb kids lost money on GME or Luna? The real economy is safe for now.
I don't think we are in the clear already. Just take a look at the markets right now.
Was it poor record keeping or was it fraud? Companies sprang up just in time to receive loans, including a bunch in California named things like "88 Cloud Computing". All of the names in this case had 88 in them, which is often code for neo-nazi crap (88->HH->Heil Hitler).
It helped those who needed it, sure, but the deliberate sabotage of record keeping and oversight seems intentional.
Those four companies - 88 Cloud Computing LLC, 88 Enterprise Services LLC, 88 Investment Empire LLC and 88 Venture Capital LLC - each received between $350,000 and $1 million in loans within the span of a week in June 2020. The four companies purportedly provide cloud computing and investment services and two of them listed 24 employees each; however the address of all four businesses is a home in an affluent South Bay suburb.
I think the fear of a Depression was real, and the government was willing to pull the level on the most outrageous tool they had, which was drop money from the skies into the pockets of people who could spend it.
Of course I think that was wrong, but I know exactly where this came from, and it was a playbook that was broadcasted by Bernanke I believe decades ago to fight a Depression. At least we can all agree that it worked, although a little too well, which is why asset prices have skyrocketed and inflation has gone horribly wrong.
Well of course, the situation was vastly different. First, in most EU countries there were very few people losing their jobs due to various existing or expanded temporary/partial/etc. unemployment schemes which meant that people kept their jobs, but were paid by the local government instead of the business. Second, the ECB didn't have the required authority to do what needed to be done, and it required negotiations between the eurozone members to agree on how to proceed in regards to loans. And third, actions were taken locally at each government level.
The loans were meant to be used for payroll but the process was so opaque and full of loopholes that business owners could simply play a shell game and keep the funds, or some people even created businesses to receive it.
What irritates me is that this is another instance the heavily flawed "trickle down" concept. Companies time and time again act against the best interest of individuals. PPP only further enriched a small subset of business owners at the expense of individual taxpayers.
A clear wink-and-a-handshake "deal" to funnel huge amounts of government money into corporations with minimal oversight.
If the money had gone directly to people instead, it could have been spent as normal, and that would have done more to help local SMALL businesses stay afloat. Plus the business owners who had to close for lockdowns would have been receiving regular benefits too and rent/loans should have been suspended.
We saw the same thing with unemployment--the system got overwhelmed so they quit checking and the result was a lot of identity thieves collected unemployment for workers who weren't actually unemployed. (Of course the real problem is the unemployment system has been deliberately kept dysfunctional because that reduces the amount they have to pay out.)
This in my mind is the key reason we as a society did not solve the pandemic quickly. If the investor class felt the same pain everyone else did, they'd be throwing their resources towards moving forward rather than re-locating to Palm Beach and complaining about the Northeast.
Ignoring a lot of the specifics you make a good point. There was a lot of good effort thrown after bad mistakes, financially, medically and unfortunately sacrificing civil liberties.
This gamblers fallacy of 2020-2021 is starting to wear off and the hangover is setting in. 2023 is going to hurt :(
Are you serious?
Maybe even the Pokemon cards as well
Ok, so this friend of yours wishes that they would have made 100x return on what you describe as a scam. You describe this as "wishing they were born retarded". How does that make sense to you? If you want to criticize the morality of making money of the backs of others in a scheme that resembles a Ponzi, do that. What you described was something else entirely.
You just keep the NFT that is still "worth" whatever you last paid for it, but it's basically free to you. So what do you do? Loan it to a celebrity and announce it as if it's a sale! This generates news articles about celebrity adoption, they get your bored ape that you couldn't sell, and suddenly a new wave of suckers floods into the market.
The fact that it's so simple to do this and scam people makes NFTs a great scam vehicle. Add in the fact that crypto tends to attract true believers (aka fantastic marks) and you elevate the grift from great to all-time.
If anyone from a VC fund is reading this, yes this is actually what's happening with your Web3/crypto investments lmao.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
I could buy a starter pack of pokemon cards for something like $20 USD. It's a game, I can find a friend and play it. I can play almost any normal video game for $10 to $60 USD.
To play Axies, you need to buy around $900 worth of "starter axie" NFTs.
People are buying ugly pictures of apes for prices like $11,000 USD.
NFTs produce artificial hierarchy and scarcity over functionally useless, objectively worthless, and materially non-existing assets. It is the claws of a dystopia reaching in to take away the free and open internet we've all learned to love.
Ponzi schemes and scams are so ubiquitous in the crypto space (presumably mostly NFTs) that they coined a new term "rugpull" for talking about it.
NFTs featuring unauthorized art is so common that Deviant art implemented a feature to help artists get notified when someone tries to mint and sell your art.
> I'm just pointing out that you wrote a very long answer to a question and your answer didn't even try to relate to the question that was asked.
This is the post that you're replying to. I find it ironic that you replied to this post with a run-of-the-mill crypto-is-bad rant that still doesn't answer the question that was asked.
Dunno about Pokemon, but Magic cards may hold their value. There's a very limited number of sought after, rare items (Power 9, sealed boxes of early sets etc.) and millions of people who really enjoy the game. Some of them are bound to be wealthy and crazy collectors, who create demand beyond just pure speculation.
You’re giving way too much credit to meme traders, their wallets, and their ability to move markets.
The meme stock crowd didn't create the value/price imbalance (it was created by the short sellers), they just saw that it was already off and took advantage of the situation, so then the value imbalance swung the other way. And in the end GameStop as a company survived and are now doing pretty well as far as I'm aware. GME is trading at about $100 a share, which is a lot better than about $4 a share a couple years ago. Maybe that's an artificially inflated price, but who cares? As far as I can tell that's just the normal market consequence of too many people shorting a stock and someone calling their bluff.
Its a lot of hard cash moving stock prices around without hedging, and that's before the secondary effect of algorithms amplification.
You couldn't talk about this when it was taking place. Speech was stifled completely and universally.
We need to really think about how to allow dissent. Without it, society will spiral out of control by people that want to control it.
It was overwhelmingly clear.
You may want to question your own objectivity on this subject.
Interest rates should've been raised much more aggressively in 2018 and they should not have been lowered in 2019.
I get what you’re saying but this point kind of implies that there was information symmetry, or even near-symmetry, between the market of investors and the underlying value of the company.
A few big players and the professionals maybe have their finger on this pulse. But they are still subject to many biases that amateurs are.
For now.
The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Two years is a fairly short time to estimate market performance and corrections. We very well may be telling a different story in 15 years.
Bit of a spicy opinion... (but perfectly accurate)
However, PPP didn't adequately cover some of the businesses that needed it the most.
Consider somebody who is bootstrapping a small business because they were packaged-out of their corporate job a year or two before the pandemic began. They couldn't afford to draw anything close to what they need to live on in the year prior to the pandemic. So the PPP payment formula didn't approximate their true needs.
People in that situation had no choice but to try for EIDL. But EIDL required income reported on a Schedule C or an 1120 / 1120S, and if you didn't have that because you were still finding the customers that could sustain the business, then in all likelihood your business either died an early death or came out of the deepest part of the crisis in much worse shape than when it began.
- Forcibly shuttering the world economy over a bad cold while yammering on about a v-shaped recovering that increasingly looks like just as much nonsense as everything else from the last two years.
That's the hang up. The USA is the only country in the world which lets the market naked short sell. It's not that the meme investors manipulated the system, it's the short sellers that manipulated it. All these funds figured gamestop was headed to the pinksheets during covid; a reasonable bet but too many fund managers got the same idea. They short sold more stock than exists. That's fraud, I wish I could sell nothing for money.
Other people noticed the disparity and simply started buying. Eventually these funds are basically forced to come to you to buy outside the market. They in person have to approach you unsolicited and offer to buy your stocks. It's going to be a blank cheque... but the SEC never punished them. These funds owe equivalently infinite money but aren't forced to pay.
They just let them be criminal. Wells fargo obviously saw where they were, basically infinite money in the negative so they bowed out in 2021. There are a bunch of others who are in the same position.
>Despite all of that, people who bought and held a total market or S&P 500 index fund in 2020 have still made gains.
I have a small position in S&P500 bought in late 2019 or so doing just fine. Im letting it ride, I expect it to drop another 50% or more.
However, something you missed in your list that nobody is talking about. Nobody owns S&P500. If you look at FTSE, TSX, various other indexes for other countries. They are healthy. Rich folks own their percentages of them all. Excluding obviously amazon or tesla which have their billionaires protecting.
AOS is a good example.
0.72% % of Shares Held by All Insider 98.87% % of Float Held by Institutions
If you check the S&P500, the supermajority of stocks are like this. Basically insiders dont want to touch the stock with a 10foot pole.
Basically the only people who own these stocks are suckers such as myself.
Mind you, every other country in the world is healthy right now. This is USA only.
There's no explanation. There's no 'I'm selling these stocks because of..."
So we have a broken stock market in the USA because some memers discovered the fraud.
We have some seriously bad economic health behind it as well as pretty major crash already happening.
Lets not forget the imminent civil war situation. Star Trek Strange New World literally said 2nd US civil war.
My recommendation? Dont be dealing with the USA stock markets at all; or accept the punishment. Ignore the meme stocks, ignore everything. Only buy stocks you see are of good value.
It could be the Army sold to more serious and/or institutional investors near the top who were chasing returns of their own.
What's been happening for some time is a desperate search for investment returns of any kind. When treasury yields dried up in 2020-1, money piled into stocks, fueled by government transfers such as the PPP giveaway and stimmie checks.
Those programs are long gone, as is a lot (most?) of the money.
At some point, long term yields will stop rising, and the juicy capital gains to be had as the inevitable return to earth commences will beckon to those who have been burned by stocks to try treasuries, fueling sector rotation and more stock declines.
Along the way the occasional explosive stock rally will captivate everyone's attention - for a while. By the time the dust settles, nobody will care about stocks and you'll get blank stares when you say that's what you just invested in.
At this point, we’re oversold, and I’m mostly in cash waiting for setups to show up again.
That said, there are many ways to trade, and some folks are more aggressive than others. I'm very conservative.
I'm still not sure if I even believe in swing trading or technical analysis. I've been a Boglehead most of my adult life, and only recently decided to dabble with swing trading, just to learn / see if there was anything to it.
So far this year, I'm flat, but I've also been less active due to a few life situations.
I'd like to do a statistical analysis once I've been at it long enough.
You do need some cash for a rainy day, emergency expenses, unexpected travel etc.
But that's not really the point: the question is, who performed better?
At this point, as the article shows, the meme and day traders have underperformed the boring buy-and-hold index investors.
That's because very few people actually outperform, on average, index investors. Memes or otherwise.
It's sort of impressive that GME is still holding out at around $100, however...
Just looking to invest in VTI, nothing else.
If you can successfully flip the colors, long green is sell, red is a sale, then you can beat the market in the only way small investors can. It is very difficult to do, because of that FOMO.
Some of the better stocks like Apple, Google, Amazon will be splitting in summer, that is a nice regular bump. Prices on some of these will never be this low again. Good time to start dipping buys into index funds (VOO, VTI, VOOG, VOE) etc if you can.
Dollar cost averaging works best if you aren't selling off every downturn and every so often banking some profits. If the only time you are selling is in downturns then that is a problem, selling should be as regular as buying.
A bit surprised this is so controversial. Taking gains regularly, even if you leave some gains on the table is better than only selling in downturns which is what happens in massive pullbacks. The massive pullback reds are when you should have some on the sideline to invest.
The base is sell high buy low, easier said than always done but if you have a regular sell strategy then you can bank some of those higher points just like DCA gets you into some of the lower points.
This doesn't mean you shouldn't dollar cost average or buy the dip, it means you have some cash to invest when there are pullbacks to get in lower. This allows you to continue doing other price target strategies and dollar cost averaging etc. You want some money in cash to be able to get into buying opportunities, like right now there is massive sale due to selling.
Basically have a regular buy strategy and a regular sell strategy.
meme stocks are just a segment of a market, more riskier one of course, but still a part of the market
if you were looking at DOW or S&500 for past couple months it’s nothing but losses
So? The article is about the past 2 years, not the past 2 days.
You could pick any short time period in the past few years that would make meme investors look good compared to the total market. But if you zoom out to a two year period, it's clear the meme investors underperformed.
TSLA is still up from 2 years ago by ~380% (May 8th 2020 - May 9th 2022). I know that exceptions tend to prove the rule, but here is at least one just off the top of my head.
If we are talking pure meme stocks without much substance (but much of cultism), GME definitely takes the cake, TSLA is indeed not even close.
They have bought into hype stocks into bad prices [1]. Roku, ZM, TDOC, CRISPR, SPOT, SHOP, DKNG, RBLX. All of these hype stocks. Very little reasoning behind valuation but they paid for it. ARKK is a terrible terrible metric for anything.
[0] https://www.buyupside.com/alphavantagelive/stockcorrelationc...
S&P500 is up 25% if you bought it before the meme frenzy and 33% if you bought in April, like I did.
People who spotted it early are still well ahead of S&P500 — and honestly, I wouldn’t be mad at 20% vs 33% returns… because that meme frenzy saved AMC.
Of course, I sold when it was 5-6x what I paid… so that’s far and away my best performing stock of 2021.
for instance, on thursday I bought a put for a stock that I didn't think was going to make earnings on Friday open.
Before the day closed the put options were at 55%.
The next day, they made earning and my same put options were trading -30% (IV crush).
So in panic and afraid of theta decay, I sell to close on Friday.
On Monday, today, I see the stock has hit my OTM strike price and had I held on to those put options I would be looking at 720% ROI, or a 7-bagger.
It really hurts when this happens. I really do not recommend trading options.
Which is the point. Gambling isn’t bad per se. People enjoy it. But the system should reallocate from those buying AMC at 390 to those who aren’t.(Full disclosure: I got talked into buying some Wish. So you’re in company, albeit a regrettable one.
Quite a few people win in the casino.
Day traders, even of small, retail kind, could have wild drawdowns but they are usualy OK in longer horizon.
The times are getting interesting and we will see a lot of "smart", "long term" money managers humbled by the market.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/caa49a44-18a3-4e51-9dfb-aad61767f...
[2] https://www.ft.com/content/47694fa4-2a4d-489d-b87b-65a3a91d1...
This is not true.
Here are a few articles:
"Trading Is Hazardous to Your Wealth: The Common Stock Investment Performance of Individual Investors"
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56282f2ae4b06b50e93ef...
"The Dynamics of Institutional and Individual Trading"
https://www.jeffreyhharris.com/downloads/papers/JeffreyHHarr...
"Just How Much Do Individual Investors Lose by Trading?"
https://johanhombert.github.io/papers/Barber_et_al_RFS2009.p...
"Attention Induced Trading and Returns: Evidence from Robinhood Users" (Forthcoming in the Journal of Finance)
I get this in an infinite loop:
> We've detected unusual activity from your computer network
> To continue, please click the box below to let us know you're not a robot.
i'm assuming it could either be because they are blocking browsers with anti-fingerprinting or because they are blocking all international connections (I'm in Australia), if it's the latter, I wonder how long it will take before they realise they are losing readers LOL. (If it's the former, good riddance)
It feels like this is just telling a certain group of people what they want to hear to help them feel better about their portfolios getting demolished
Furthermore, I believe it helps to think of instruments in two terms: linear and convex. Linear instruments are like vanilla equities, index futures, bonds etc. Convex are various options, variance swaps etc. E.g. you may be still hanging on to some bets on energy going up by holding the futures, but you'd have bought some deep out of the money puts in April with the expectation that the current energy prices are what is termed "demand destroying". E.g. near term prices can further rise indefinitely on supply shock problems, but at some point the actual consumption will be destroyed and this can cause prices to crash down even if supply doesn't return. So you'd end up with a complex portfolio that has both linear and convex sensitivities and is difficult to characterize simply as "long energy, short equities" or similar.
Currently, there's a fair bit of convex exposure. This results in second and third order effects and feedback loops: if people hold too much convex exposure, then significant moves in the underlying price will trigger exponential moves in the convex instrument prices, which require people to do exponentially larger rebalances in the underlying - as counterparties need to hedge.
All these things currently combine into very unstable market conditions. What is different from the market instabilities between 2008 and 2020 is that now there are no policy tools to buttress this. Central banks have but two options: do nothing, or tighten conditions.
Most of the outlook is thus a mixture between recession or stagflation. My personal view is that things will eventually recover. That's what always happens. From a sufficiently long term perspective, the 1920s recession is just a blip. For my personal retirement savings, I'm just continuing with buying regular smaller amounts of equities across the globe. In this sense, I'm bullish on humankind (we'll prevail).
Now it's the time to be buying great businesses at good prices
There were certainly some serious winners over the past few years, but only if you got out and my guess is that most of those folks in meme stocks can't give up the ghost and over estimate their abilities.
You might be reading WallStreetBets too seriously and underestimating the financial literacy of people on there.
At the very least, most of the people still there know what IV Crush is.
Which one are you?
Greed and addiction are very powerful forces, and even people who recognize the faults in their actions or identify the time where enough is enough have a hard time leaving the game for good.
- Flava Flav
GME is still 200% higher then when the “short squeeze” began.
(I'm avoiding using excessively loaded terminology like "QAnon of finance" but I really can't think of a fairer way to describe it than a cult at this point.)
Why would a rational agent do that?
This article definitely isn't bias-free either but at least it's not picking stocks based on performance.
personally, i’m a little spooked
It is mildly annoying that this heuristic works so well..
On the side of this, I also have a couple of single-company bets I made many years ago and won't adjust further.
I expect to be underwater for a couple of years, anything better than that would be a pleasant surprise.
A good time to increase the contributions.
- flava flav
Is there any way to easily fix the link?
To continue, please click the box below to let us know you're not a robot.
lol.
and it doesn't even work, I'm in infinite loop