with my judgment I’m pretty sure I’m going to wind up losing money on it somehow
Can’t wait for the James Bond reboot where Le Chiffre is a crypto mining terrorist investor from reddit and 007 has to shore up her majesty’s powerup rewards card
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IMO Gamestop is still the play, considering that the recent rise has ONLY been due to the buying Reddit has done. The actual short squeeze hasn’t yet begun. The Big Positions (those with 6 figures or more in GME) on the reddit board are saying they fully expect it to get up to $1k per share once the squeeze begins, and many are saying they wouldn’t really be surprised to see it hit 5k.
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The finance industry tried so hard to pitch “socially conscious mutual funds”, but it turns out what actually gets Twitter leftists excited is buying stock options from Citadel LLC on a Silicon Valley startup’s brokerage app
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twitter loves the drama it will always love it
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All people love a story of killing evil with its own weapons
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I ended up spending 30 minutes this morning frantically trying to open a RobinHood account, and then once I finally got through I realized I don’t know how any of this shit works and I don’t need that kind of stress in my life, so I dropped it.
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i have been disillusioned about participating in the stock market ever since we did one of those activities in elementary school where you pretend to buy stocks and have to check the paper every day (did anyone else do this?). i wanted to buy Kraft because Kraft Parmesan Cheese on plain pasta was one of the only things I liked to eat, but the teacher told me that I couldn’t buy it because Kraft was owned by Philip Morris, and it was unethical to let children pretend to profit off of tobacco sales. Ever since then I have known that all money is stained with blood.
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Now that this forum is suddenly interested in capitalism and setting up brokerage accounts and then wisely reconsidering jumping onto Reddit’s harebrained schemes, may I be the one to suggest using your new account to buy a few shares of an index fund (VT is a good one).
In one sense index funds are the polar opposite of this in that it’s famously the most boring and responsible type of investment, but in another sense there’s an alignment here: most of the finance industry absolutely hates index funds because there’s no practical way for them to skim off the top of them or manipulate them.
A fundholder-owned company, Vanguard, invented the concept, and then conventional companies like Blackrock were forced to follow or face the possibility of Vanguard eating their entire lunch instead of 90% of the lunch. But they quietly still resent it. So they keep trying to distract away from them with other gimmicks that are more profitable to them instead (and Robinhood is a pioneer in such gimmicks).
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my best mate has a thing with vanguard and he is a very nice boy
I have 100% of my retirement money in a Vanguard target date fund but I do not profess to be very smart or even nice, really.
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so did my dad, and him not making it to retirement is why I’ve generally been able to avoid having to convert canadian money to american when I’m on this side of the border – it wasn’t much but it’s been enough for me to draw on from time to time without depleting it
kind of tired of that holding pattern though and while I make enough to support my regular lifestyle otherwise, I did just buy a bunch of AMC and hope for the best
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SUBREDDIT DOWN
all the meme stocks just plummeted and are already shooting back up, I suspect this will not end the saga
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plebs making money is hate speech
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screencap-of-googled-stock-chart-as-punchline is a positive development for 2021 in general
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/r/wallstreetbets just got set to private in the last 20 minutes.
Also some more coverage from naked capitalism:
Mr. Market: “Reddit Crowd Bludgeons Melvin Capital in Warning to Industry” [Bloomberg]. “The explosive growth in retail day-trading, powered by platforms like the Robinhood trading app and forums like wallstreetbets, has turned the old order on its head. Melvin Capital’s mistake, if it can be called that, was leaving footprints behind in the marketplace. Reddit users were able to identify stocks that Melvin was wagering against and then buy those en masse, unleashing a violent run-up in prices that turned Melvin’s winning bet into a loser…. The shorts that were listed in Melvin’s regulatory filing from the third quarter all rocketed in recent weeks. Names include Bed Bath & Beyond Inc., iRobot Corp. and GSX Techedu Inc. GameStop, the stock that seemed to set off the short squeeze, soared 634% in the month through Tuesday…. Melvin’s cash infusion was almost unheard of in hedge fund land. Griffin, his partners and the hedge funds he runs at Citadel threw in $2 billion and Cohen’s Point72 Capital Management, which already had about $1 billion invested in Melvin, ponied up another $750 million.” • That’s a damn shame.
Mr. Market: “In GameStop saga unfolding on Wall Street, 2 Goliaths fall” [Associated Press]. “The size of the losses taken by Citron and Melvin are unknown. The Wall Street frenzy over GameStop began when an army of smaller-pocketed investors on Reddit started throwing dollars and buy orders at the stock — in direct opposition to a group of wealthy investors who were counting on the stock price to plunge. There is no overriding reason why GameStop has attracted those smaller investors, but there is a distinct component of revenge against Wall Street in communications online. Over the past three months, shares of GameStop Corp., which has been buffeted by a shift in gaming technology, have spiked well over 1,000%. Shares are up another 100% at the opening bell Wednesday. That has created titanic losses for major Wall Street players who have “shorted” the stock, which means they borrowed shares and sold them, hoping to buy them back at a cheaper price and pocket the difference. As of Tuesday, the losses had already topped $5 billion in 2021, according to S3 Partners. And the phenomenon does not appear to be fading.”
Mr. Market: “GameStop Stock Drama Continues As Price Soars And Hedge Fund Blinks” [Kotaku]. “Meanwhile, the ensuing chaos caused GameStop stock trading to be temporarily halted yet again this morning and caused outages on the trading app Robinhood. Other companies like Blackberry and AMC are also seeing smaller, though still dramatic stock climbs, as Reddit traders attempt to go boost other companies massively shorted by big hedge funds. All of this is the culmination of a long game that’s been brewing on the WallStreetBets subreddit for a while now as amateur day traders decided to turn the misfortunes of a floundering brick-and-mortar game seller into their cause celebre for dunking on professional investment firms. In some ways it’s a very complicated story driven by the weird mechanics of Wall Street, but in other ways it’s a familiar tale of extremely online people trying to stick it to someone, in part to make a buck, but also for the ‘lulz’.” • Very good, especially on the Reddit action. Then again:
https://twitter.com/AliceFromQueens/status/1354427942827393028
Mr. Market: “How R/Wallstreetbets Gamed the Stock of Gamestop” [The Verge]. “Day traders, such as the ones on r/WallStreetBets, are typically held in contempt by professional traders, and they are acutely aware of this. The professional short-sellers who created the possibility of a short squeeze underestimated the day traders’ sophistication, and r/WallStreetBets pounced. Time to troll Wall Street out of a fuckload of money! The fine people of r/WallStreetBets decided GameStop was undervalued, and the stock would go up, so they put up a bunch of posts about how they were buying GameStop options. This drove up the stock price for GameStop, as their counterparties had to load up on stock to balance, and then more stock as more people bought options and so on. The soaring stock meant some shorts had to cover, sending the stock up further. As of January 26th, short-sellers have been trolled out of about $5 billion in 2021, just from their GameStop positions alone. What does Robinhood have to do with this? Well, it makes options trading much more accessible to retail investors — but there’s something else. Trades on Robinhood are free! But Robinhood isn’t offering free trades to be nice; the company gets paid by some big-time investors such as Citadel Securities to see what retail investors are doing. This phenomenon, which other brokerages are engaged in as well, is called payment for order flow. Citadel Securities makes its money on these orders by “automatically taking the other side of the order, then returning to the market to flip the trade. It pockets the difference between the price to buy and sell, known as the spread,” according to the Financial Times.” • So, perhaps not quite the David and Goliath story that everybody’s excited about…
I bought $10 of AMC and $10 of Blackberry this morning.
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