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The full comment, should it be edited or removed later: "I don't work on the trading floor, but I'm an attorney who services a variety of financial institution
by throwaway5752 6y ago
The full comment, should it be edited or removed later:
"I don't work on the trading floor, but I'm an attorney who services a variety of financial institutions, including broker/dealers.
This isn't the exciting, hilarious answer you want, but a lot of people had no idea it was even happening until the past 48 hours, and even now, it's mostly just a funny news article about some internet trolls making a bubble.
This is a big deal to the shorting community, but to the other 99% of the financial world, nobody gives a shit.
As much as young people on the internet like to imagine this as an epic, David vs Goliath, Wall Street vs Main Street showdown for the history books, from a bird's eye view it's actually just a brief dumpster fire where a couple hedge funds lost their shirts betting on one little small cap stock. It has happened before, and it will happen again.
In 6 months, nobody will remember or care, except that (maybe) it will become more difficult for retail investors to trade options.
And not because the greedy hedge fund oligarchs forced the SEC to crack down on retail investors. But rather because, when this is all said and done, there is going to be a black hole where most of these retail investors' brokerage accounts used to be, and the SEC and brokerage community will be lambasted for failing to protect unsophisticated investors from a bubble.
I have been monitoring the WSB threads, and while the WSB veterans know that they're making a suicide charge for the memes, they have brought thousands of naive, new investors with them - who predominantly think that they're going to somehow come out on top, not realizing that they're cannon fodder for the more savvy WSB users to exit with gains.
Redditors never seem to stop and think about why the WSB guys know so much about derivatives trading. Or how they seem to know how to access and read from a Bloomberg terminal. Or why there are so many users there that can seemingly drop tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on complicated meme plays.
How do you think that WSB knew that GME was open to a short squeeze and a gamma squeeze play?
WSB's power users are younger finance bros. It's 30-something investment bankers and portfolio managers memeing with each other and cosplaying as "autists."
If you didn't know what a gamma squeeze was 48 hours ago, you are their exit strategy and the down payment on their next Porsche."
- thatguy0900 6y agoIn the beginning everyone on wsb was saying they would hold the stock until it went 0 just to mess with the hedges. Then it got over 100$ and the narrative changed to holding until it hit 10k$. Quite the difference
- medium_burrito 6y agoWhat kind of peasant finances a porsche?
- gruez 6y agowith 0% financing offers, why wouldn't you? Especially when you can get more % returns in the stock market.
- tejtm 6y agoAll of them, just not their own.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- blackearl 6y agoBack in 2008 it was VW shorts
- bluGill 6y agoIt wasn't shorts, it was options. The effect is similar, but just different enough that you can't call it shorts.
- me_me_me 6y agoThat is well put. I saw a meme on WSB - photo of a main guy and quote 'What is an exit strategy?' u/deepfuckingvalue' Ie the main guy behind the squeeze. He already took profit of $13M but somehow he is made into this hodl till 0 martyr?! WTF are those people on? This really is starting to have all the halmarks of crypto bull rush with hypemen trying to get their exit as high as possible before it all starts to loose momentum and tumble off a cliff. Its fun to watch though. A lot of fun. Plus more people are becoming aware of how rigged the whole financial system is, how its a boys club that will attack any outsider at sight.
- notahacker 6y ago> Plus more people are becoming aware of how rigged the whole financial system is, how its a boys club that will attack any outsider at sight. Are they though? I mean the idea that hedge funds are rigging the system is so well established in the public psyche it drove the meme stocks in the first place. If people's conclusions from all this are that Melvin Capital lied about unwinding their shorts and Robinhood rigged it for them but those nice people saying BUY AND HOLD YOLO on reddit were fighting their corner, has the state of their knowledge advanced?
- me_me_me 6y agoI am not saying that everyone understands what is happening, but there are a lot of people who took interest and educated themselves on how the stock market works and what is happening. Two of my friends got into trading because of this (and not in fuck the system way).
- notahacker 6y agoOh, I don't doubt some people will inform themselves and some people will make some good decisions as a result. Just unconvinced that it'll be a net improvement in the state of public knowledge
- me_me_me 6y ago
- curtis3389 6y agoReminds me of the Goonswarm in Eve Online. They'd recruit a bunch of newbies from the Something Awful forums and use them as shock troops in giant battles. The new recruits had no hope of actually establishing themselves in the game. They were just cannon fodder in someones strategy.
- ajross 6y agoThe difference, of course, is that one population was just playing a game in a novel way. Doing this by fibbing to real people who bet real money is fraud.
- the_only_law 6y agoThe more I hear about this game the more dumbfounded and kinda curious I am.
- curtis3389 6y agoIt's a really interesting game, and really cool things happen in it, but I wouldn't play it unless you find space-sims inherently interesting. Your character gets better the more time you invest in playing the game, so you gotta be dedicated. Also, traveling is ridiculously dangerous because 1 wrong jump, and BOOM!, you're dead and your ship is gone. That's about where I stopped because I lost my ship, its upgrades, and they also destroyed my escape pod, so IIRC, I had to start my character from scratch? Idk, really cool game but also really frustrating.
- yongjik 6y ago> If you didn't know what a gamma squeeze was 48 hours ago, you are their exit strategy Someone should make this a meme.
- jadams5 6y agoThat was posted 4 days ago, long before the ladder attacks and disinformation campaigns desperately trying to shift attention away from GME. People need to understand the risks involved and not sink their life savings, but there is definitely more going on here than what you'd see in a crypto pump and dump. When a hedge fund shorts 120% of available stock, then retail investors don't sell, and aren't swayed by every trick in the book... something is going to give.
- tayo42 6y agoYeah I think if your going to make a cynical post calling everyone idiots you should address some of what happened like the low volume trading, curve ball from brokers preventing trades etc.. There was a lot of chaos in the last few days idk if you can just write it all off as suckers getting played
- tedunangst 6y agoCuriously nobody was looking for ladders when the price was going up...
- ll931110 6y agoSo, ultimately, if you make the wrong trading decisions, it's your fault. WSB or not it's irrelevant.
- totalZero 6y agoColor me cynical, but I don't think most traders on a trading floor would particularly care about the opinion of the attorney who "services" their institutions lol. And if he doesn't work on the floor, then he hasn't seen the day-to-day and the culture in its natural state.