Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Seppia wrote: ↑

Thu Jan 28, 2021 6:40 pm

It’s less than that actually.
You can open with HSBC as a non-resident if you have a premier account.

Nice. Thanks for the tip.

Anyone know who invests in the hedge fund? Dancing on the graves of hedge fund managers is one thing, but I’d feel pretty bummed if we found out they held teacher pension funds or something.

jacob wrote: ↑

Thu Jan 28, 2021 2:16 pm

This will ultimately be followed by lamentations of "wah-wah, the interwebs put me in a position where I felt compelled to stop thinking and go along because ... in any case, it's not my fault that I stupidly ruined my own life, really."

I'm not so sure they will see it this way. We've talked a lot here about people with zero-sum win/lose mentality and how some look for win/win solutions.

Super heroes have become the American version of Campbell's archetypal heroes and in the last dozen years or so we've seen many who practice a self-sacrificing / self-harming lose-lose strategy where damage to oneself is virtuous as long as it does damage to the villain. In fact, even a villain can become heroic by trying and failing to harm the villainous system that created them as long as they harm themselves in the process.

The psychology of cutting at a societal level.

In other words, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are important.

Here is a video posted on the WSB youtube channel. https://youtu.be/AsTCB0ud2zM

I think desperate individuals do this kind of thing to reshuffle, so that the possibility that people similar to them will have better prospect in the future. This gives them meaning. What you describe as a lose/lose is a win/win if you look at it from a different perspective.

CEO of Webull discusses the problem brokers are facing with their counterparties (which is why GME can't be traded on some brokers).

$390 pre-market right now.
No clue what will happen today...
But I might sell 1-2 shares to cover my initial investment. After that, I'M NOT SELLING YET. Waiting and wondering whether/how much it might go up

Can't speak to the veracity, but I've heard it asserted that RH makes a lot of money selling the trading data of it's users to the hedge funds for them to exploit. They are selling it to Wall St players connected to hedgies at least (https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/robinhoo ... tomer.html) Not hard to speculate the other platforms that helped the hedge funds cut their losses yesterday could have similar arrangements.

The real "problem" is that a cohort of the unwashed masses on the wrong side of the castle walls outsmarted the sophisticated nobility rather than meekly playing the assigned role of greater fool from whom wealth is systematically extracted. I suppose we'll soon see new government intervention to protect the unwashed masses from themselves that will coincidentally allow the hedgies to go back to business as usual with additional armor.

I wonder if the fact that the hedgies apparently targeted Gamestop wasn't their undoing in this incident. Reddit is supposed to be popular among Millennials and adjacent cohorts. People like me who are parents of Millennials remember Gamestop very well as it was sort of iconic as the popularity of computer games soared. I wonder if feeling like they were 'saving' an old childhood friend while at the same time sticking it to the man didn't contribute to the groundswell.

Either way, today will start the 'nothing to see here' phase. The story that it was just trumpian insurrectionist delinquency has already been floated although it hasn't caught on yet. Some new crisis will hit the news today. My lesson learned from observing this is that my aversion to derivatives is the right position for me.

Jean wrote: ↑

Thu Jan 28, 2021 10:51 pm

I think desperate individuals do this kind of thing to reshuffle, so that the possibility that people similar to them will have better prospect in the future. This gives them meaning. What you describe as a lose/lose is a win/win if you look at it from a different perspective.

I don't think these people are desperate, they at least have some money to throw away on stocks. It's like the insurrectionists who turned out to be police officers, former military personnel, company directors, etc. One of them even flew in on a private jet.

Short interest is still at 95-100% of float for GME. I think the squeeze will continue today once markets open. After all this unwinds I suspect there will be new regulations to try to prevent this sort of thing from happening again.

@ducknald_don

It’s very difficult to generalize the demographics of who is in on this trade at the moment. Sure it probably started with annoyed millennials on WSB, but as we enter the 3rd day of front page news coverage I think a lot of people have hopped on the bandwagon. Even with the WSB Reddit posts, you’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg since anyone can view the page. However, the narrative seems to be that this is all average Joe individuals vs Wall St funds (narratives are important).

Many american lost their trust in the election after the fraud allegation got completly ignored by the institutions, now they are losing trust in the stock market after feeling that the same rule don't apply to everyone. I don't know which trust is still holding americans loyal to their institutions. In addition, discussion about it are getting Ghettoised, which in the end is a Stupid(tm) behavior, because it gets people angryer at the system, while not addressing any of their issues. I started mining BTC at night because it's cold and i use an electric heater anyway.

Ego wrote: ↑

Thu Jan 28, 2021 9:54 pm

Here is a video posted on the WSB youtube channel. https://youtu.be/AsTCB0ud2zM

Because of work, I have seen what real misery looks like in the 21st century.

If someone is a white heterosexual male born in a western democracy, it equates (in terms of genetic lottery) to sitting at the poker table and being served a poker of aces.
Complaining about someone else getting served a royal flush and screaming that the world is unfair because of that will not get my sympathies.

@Seppia

We’ve discussed this in other threads, but it’s not so much absolute prosperity that matters but rather relative prosperity. Sure there are all sorts of privileges at play, but due to Kegan levels people can’t recognize them. The rise in populism globally has legitimate root causes, one of which is central bank policy exacerbating wealth inequality. This WSB phenomena is just another manifestation of the pent-up anger with stagnant real wages and debt.

The only things that matter is how many grand child you have, how many animal live on your land, and how tighten together is your tribe. If those three things are very low, and your perspective of bettering them are very low as well, then you are desperate. I don't disagree or agree in saying that heterosexual white male are geneticaly superior, nature will chose, but I think it's quite racist sexist and homophobic.

Maybe the "fix" to this melt up would be something similar to the uptick rule (which was implemented to save the longs in 2008/09), that is, a downtick rule. The uptick rule says that you can only short a stock at a price that is higher than the previous price.

E.g. last trade was 11, you can only short at 12 or higher (and the price can only be up there if someone wants to sell at that higher price). This prevents shorts from sending the price all the way down. In practice it would be a two steps forward and one step backward to ensure that there is matching pressure on each side.

A similar downtick rule would do the opposite. In order to keep push the price up, someone has to sell at a lower price. IOW, there has to be some down pressure as the price moves up.

The better fix would be for brokers to fix the counterparty issue by e.g. sending orders directly to the pools or exchanges. It would be like opening the overflow on a dam to save the turbines.

Ahh... I see what the problem is. Duh, should have thought about that.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... ll-street/

Technically, stocks settle at T+3, that is, when you buy a stock, the seller has 3 days to deliver it. This harks back to ancient times when certificates was delivered by donkey cart or some such. However, as you've noticed your account seems to carry this out in 3 seconds or less. This does not mean that T+3 has changed (you'll still see some restrictions on "unsettled funds") but rather that the broker is holding the bag while everything settles over the next three days. (It's the same magic that allows you to instantly fund an account in good standing with ACH (same problem) instead of an expensive wire transfer (which really is instant in reality).) So currently, brokers are sitting on a pile of yet-to-settle trades that are all over the place. The clearing house who is in charge of settling this are essentially telling the brokers to put up more collateral and until they do this they have to tamper down the cracra trading.

(This also explains why margin requirements were raised.)

(A similar situation happened in 2008/09 when there was briefly some doubt whether the futures exchange could actually cover the counterparty insofar they failed to put up margin.)

@jacob There is an extra "/" on the end of the URL that is breaking the link:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... all-street

IlliniDave wrote: ↑

Fri Jan 29, 2021 5:30 am

I wonder if the fact that the hedgies apparently targeted Gamestop wasn't their undoing in this incident. Reddit is supposed to be popular among Millennials and adjacent cohorts. People like me who are parents of Millennials remember Gamestop very well as it was sort of iconic as the popularity of computer games soared. I wonder if feeling like they were 'saving' an old childhood friend while at the same time sticking it to the man didn't contribute to the groundswell.

I read a bit about it and Gamestop is not a random choice, it is just a tool. They just noticed hedge funds shorted it waaay too much and jumped on that opportunity. I scrolled WSB reddit yesterday and many people feel there that "they are doing justice". Gamestop today is quite a shady company, and you will find tons of negative reviews about it, so I don't think people have a lot of nostalgia going on (in this specific case).

Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan: "Now's my chance!"
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/reddit-f ... 10263.html

Sold 24.56 million shares on Wednesday at an average price of $20.25 a share, according to details in an amended 13D.

Considering this was a pension fund, they probably just wanted to get their shares out of a stock that is showing up on meme lists....or maybe they had a limit order set up already. At least in the short-term, I'm the greater fool here as I bought all my shares at $20.22 (though my cost basis is $17.80 due to a $30 covered call).

Time will tell I guess but perhaps I should've made this a collar (bought a protective put with my premium instead of investing into my index). MAC beat quarterly expectations for 3 quarters in a row and I feel better about this choice after reading through the recent10-Q last night (okay I know I should've done that before I invested...). There is a long-term recovery narrative here (many of the tenants replaced with online retailers with no inventory, most loans re-financed at historically low interest rates (84% of the loans are non-recourse as well), a big Google Workspace project, a chance to eliminate struggling tenants anyhow, etc.).

The downside of course is problems with rent collection from tenants. MAC has insurance but is not confident they will be able to successfully claim due to COVID (not the business faults when the government performs lockdowns).

Edit: Blackrock upped its stake +/- 1 the same day the Canadian Pension Fund Sold....

Form 13G/A on March 9, 2020: Shows 13,403,369 owned shares
Form 13G/A on January 26, 2021: Shows 20,167,512 owned shares

+6,764,143 share increase...so it is not only retailers increasing their shares. Hedge funds are getting in too but I don't know what $ amount they purchased these shares.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data ... 030920.txt
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data ... 012621.txt

This of course did not make the airwaves but the dumping of shares did.....

Is there any way to see real time short interest percentage of float for GME? I'm assuming not without a Bloomberg terminal.