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GameStop: Anger as trading in GameStop shares is restricted
- gchokov 6y agoOK, we've got this. Can we now stop sharing this every 5 minutes? Amateur investors lose money in the end.
- newfeatureok 6y agohide/flag the post and move on
- system2 6y agoI agree with the comment above yours, HN turned into Reddit for the last week.
- newfeatureok 6y agosure, but what's the point of complaining about it? if enough people flag it will go away. so just flag and move on.
- calvinmorrison 6y agoyou might enjoy reading n-gate - a weekly satirical review of hacker news. They'll surely have a nice post about GME, AMC and others. I strongly predict it will end with: "And no technology was discussed"
- lisper 6y agoThe high/low so far today is $514.50/$112.25. As I write this it's down 65%. What a surprise.
- nubb 6y agoPlatforms are banning buys for retail, ofc it's going down. If rh and td didnt ban it I bet it would be even higher.
- gruez 6y agoBut what's the endgame? That the stock will go up forever, so that the existing investors are perpetually being paid by future investors?
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoshort squeeze could kick off tomorrow. the days to close has fallen to 1.4 right now.
- jMyles 6y agoThe endgame isn't about this specific instrument, but the pattern of market manipulation (hell, economy manipulation) which it represents in the context of leveraged short selling alongside a 'too big to fail' regulatory regime. The endgame is to use collaborative economic force to push rent-seekers out.
- secondcoming 6y agoExisting investors only get paid when they sell. As soon as they sell they're out of the game. There is no 'perpetually' in this scenario. Where it can continue to rise is where there are those holding short positions that need to buy shares to cover those positions. They can only buy at a price the seller agrees, and in a short squeeze situation the seller can demand pretty much any price they want (in theory)
- latch 6y agoI think the endgame is that it isn't perpetual: the final "investor" is the original short-seller.
- gruez 6y agoI guess that while this is theoretically possible (that the retail investors walk away with a healthy profit, at least in aggregate), this is complicated by existing shareholders cashing out (which basically is a transfer of money to them). It also supposes that all the retail investors can act in unison and won't break rank (which will cause the prices to tank).
- beervirus 6y agoMatt Levine: "It seems meaningless to talk about the price of GameStop stock, as though a single number could represent such an elusive concept. GameStop stock has all the prices at once."
- cbozeman 6y agoIts easy for a stock to decrease in value when most of the American trading platforms don't allow Americans to buy it.
- gruez 6y agoWhile the title might be true for the "amateur investors" that got in early, I strongly believe that most of them are not outwitting anyone and will be bagholders. As of this post basically everyone who bought yesterday are underwater by 50%.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agodepends on when the positions are liquidated. everyone who bought yesterday is fighting exchanges whose only option for GME is "sell" because buying is restricted. I don't know how some of these shorts will find 20 million shares by tomorrow.
- gruez 6y ago>I don't know how some of these shorts will find 20 million shares by tomorrow. you're confusing shorts with options. shorts don't expire. They can be held indefinitely as long as you have the margin to keep up with the losses.
- benmanns 6y agoIf you short more stock than exists, eventually you need to find it. Prime brokers will allow you to naked short but you have to locate shares or buy back in pretty quickly.
- jacksnipe 6y agoShorts have delivery dates.
- gruez 6y agoThey do? >There are no set rules regarding how long a short sale can last before being closed out. >The lender of the shorted shares can request that the shares be returned by the investor at any time, with minimal notice, but this rarely happens in practice so long as the short seller keeps paying its margin interest. https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/shortsaleclosed.asp https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/shortsaleclosed....
- chadash 6y agoOutwit certain parts of wall street, maybe. Any hedge fund making money off of deal flow is gonna make a huge profit when there's a big spread between buy/sell prices.
- betterunix2 6y agoNot to mention any speculators who took short positions yesterday.
- ButterWashed 6y agoNot being in the US I don't know this but can Robinhood be sued, like a lot of people seem to be calling for, just for refusing to handle trades on a stock?
- multjoy 6y agoThe T&Cs will almost certainly allow them a huge amount of latitude in what they will let people do with their platform. Although if a decent amount of retail investors lose money as a result of not being able to sell stock they already own then the blood is in the water for a class action. Saul Goodman is waiting for your call!
- Semaphor 6y agofrom what I've read, selling gme is the one thing they are allowed to do with it
- randmeerkat 6y agoThat’s a great question, can they unilaterally shutdown trading?
- otaconjh 6y agoWhich can be viewed as market manipulation. I'm not in US either but it looks pretty dodgy on their part. A key message of all these new trading platforms is that your capital is at risk. Their users know this, so why are they restricting trades?
- betterunix2 6y agoThey are restricting trades because this looks like a possible crime, and they do not want to be known as crime-friendly brokerages. "Your capital is at risk" is not the same as "it's a free for all."
- lldbg 6y agoRobinhood is a private company, and are allowed to decide what types of people they want to let trade on their platform.
- jonatron 6y agoMore than 10 Trading Halts in just a couple of hours. https://www.nyse.com/trade-halt-current https://www.nyse.com/trade-halt-current
- marcus_holmes 6y ago> "This isn't investing, this is gambling" Yep. Agreed. Spot-on. That's what Wall St does. If you don't like it, try and stop it. But for everyone, including the hedge funds. Treating the derivatives markets like a casino (and taxing appropriately) sounds like a great idea.
- parhamn 6y agoI get this knee jerk reaction but there is something to be said about the risk analysis, sophistication, etc of said hedge funds. They’re not gambling in the same sense, but sure in some sense they are. Even having an entry level “risk model” is more sophistication than most home traders. You can’t just dismiss all that as nothing.
- Splendor 6y agoYet somehow they've been outwitted by a bunch of Redittors. Maybe you're giving them to much credit.
- betterunix2 6y agoA handful of speculators were hurt. Now the WSB crowd is facing a large loss -- and guess who they are losing all that money to? You can bet that hedge funds with "dry powder" jumped on the opportunity to take short positions on GME as they watched the price and implied volatility balloon. All the people buying options and buying the underlying stock -- who do you think they were buying from?
- WorldMaker 6y agoWhich is why the squeeze will be fascinating if a high percentage of the WSB crowd really are going long.
- EpicEng 6y agoThese clowns shorted 170% of float. If that's not pure gambling teetering on market manipulation, I don't know what is.
- zaroth 6y agoThe problem with GME starts with the funds that managed to accumulate a 140% short interest in the stock. Send those people to jail for illegally issuing unregistered shares of a security, or counterfeiting shares of a security, because everything that happened after that point is entirely their fault. Alternatively, fine them $10B and issue it as a dividend to the shareholders that bought and held after Jan 1.
- jpxw 6y agoNobody is “outwitting” Wall Street here. That will become particularly apparent in the coming days. I’ve read posts on /r/WSB where people talk about having put all of their savings into this. I only hope that they’re just teenagers with little savings.
- system2 6y agoWe will be reading "I lost all my savings" posts in a few days on reddit. It is for sure GME will hit 30, and those bought it at high will be sharing their real life pain instead of memes.
- throwaway5752 6y agoA stock actually has a calculable estimate of value, you know. It's the sum of future cash flows. Gamestop has been losing money for years and their outlook as a brick and mortar retailer for items that are now sold online is poor. The short sellers are correct. The business of Gamestop is bad and it's equity will be worth nothing. A short squeeze isn't going to change that in the long term.
- vannevar 6y agoHow sure are we that this is really being driven by "amateurs" and not by scammers running a pump and dump scheme under cover of a grassroots phenomenon?
- not2b 6y agoI liked Ars Technica's analysis of what happened. The TL,DR is that if a company's stock is so heavily shorted, so much so that the number of "borrowed" shares exceeds the number of liquid shared available, and it is not on the verge of going bankrupt, this kind of short squeeze is possible and you can get a feedback mechanism going to make the price soar, at least in the short term. If Wall Street wants to address this, they could put limits on the number of shares that can be shorted. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/01/the-complete-morons-guide-to-gamestops-stock-roller-coaster/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/01/the-complete-morons-g...
- dang 6y agoThe submitted title was "GameStop: Amateur investors continue to outwit Wall Street" but the BBC changed theirs. For pointers into the massive graph of submissions on this topic, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25933543 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25933543.