everybody on ilx complains about reddit

Otoh I sure wish I downloaded robinhood a week ago

― ✖, Wednesday, January 27, 2021 10:52 AM (fourteen minutes ago

I literally did it last night and I've made 75 bucks!

since online poker was brought up I can definitely see some similarities. back in 2005 a bunch of online kids crashed onto the poker scene and the common wisdom was that they were way too aggressive and had nothing on the real pros. by 2009 it was clear that these kids were able to pack an entire poker career into 3 months and were miles ahead of virtually all the poker "legends", outside of those who actually adapted to the online game (such as Phil Ivey), allowing them to basically take it over completely

I know a lot more about poker than I do stox but idk about that analogy, seems like what's going on now is pretty unsustainable whereas being better than other people at poker actually is a long-term recipe for success

otoh if it's gonna turn into a regular thing where the poors decide on a stock every week or so to pump up and drain hedge fund money maybe that'll be the new paradigm, again I know nothing about trading. I assume the rich people will change the rules somehow

I'm still figuring out how the call option thing works but the current share price is double the strike price I set, which as I understand it is good for me

you're probably right about that, this Gamestop thing is something I can see Congress intervening in to urgently fix so they can protect their donors

and yeah I don't know anything about trading either, I suspect this is unsustainable too, but the way some of the old guard talks about it definitely reminds me of poker circa '06 or whatever - I have a buddy constantly who for a year now has been sending me Jim Cramer clips where he's freaking out and dismissing all this movement as the work of online trolls just doing shit at random, which reminds me a lot of those episodes of WPT where someone pulls a weird (but correct) bluff and Mike Sexton goes "He's blowing up, Vince!" and VVP says something like "He just clicked all his chips away"

Congress will absolutely take action on this, even before they manage to pass any further COVID relief, which is, of course, depressingly predictable.

Another thing that reminds me of the crypto boom - WSB is currently flooded with new members trying to push the next big stock that will become a meme

Honestly things are so hot right now you could probably put some money in AMC, Nokia, bed bath and beyond and blockbuster(???) and make a little bit of profit

xpost

really really general: you pay a premium for ability to buy those shares (for buying calls) 100 shares per contract at that strike price on or before the expiration date only if it hits that price or above- being in the money. The premium price decays the closer to the expiration date and based on the stocks movement or lack of movement. There are a lot of other things involved with volatility, "the greeks". You should read a lot about it first. Options go to $0 by expiration if it doesn't move the way you want it to by that date or people just trade options without intent to exercise.

Another thing that reminds me of the crypto boom - WSB is currently flooded with new members trying to push the next big stock that will become a meme

Honestly things are so hot right now you could probably put some money in AMC, Nokia, bed bath and beyond and blockbuster(???) and make a little bit of profit

― ✖, Wednesday, January 27, 2021 11:28 AM (six minutes ago)

yeah there was a twitter thread where one of the tweets showed the most shorted stocks and AMC was one of them. others were BBB, tootsie roll, some others. I did the call option thing on AMC but the prices for the other ones were higher than I was comfortable with for just messing around

Huh, I didn't know Tootsie Roll was its own company.

I bought shares of Nintendo to hold indefinitely on Monday because I like Nintendo

I’m not messing around with this other stuff though I’m too dumb for anything other than index investing for the most part

Would buy shares of YERAC tho

Seriously, if there were a YERAC fund, I'd be all in. I know she does not want to be prescriptive with trading advice, but I absolutely trust her insights.

feel like congress will pass a law outlawing coordinated market activity with the expressed purpose of bankrupting a financial institution and stop short of cracking down on day-trading altogether (because many financial institutions do plenty of day-trading)

lmao

prophetic......we should have listened to him pic.twitter.com/SOCOq1cShI

— Megh Wright (@megh_wright) January 27, 2021

people just like a stock, if there are any additional bonuses well... funds shouldn't be taking excessive risk with their clients' money and breaching their fiduciary duty. someone should talk to these funds' risk management and compliance about lack of oversight.

The Robinhood app updates constantly so you can watch ‘line go up’ like a rat hitting the sugar water button. That seems psychologically exhausting for someone buying stock for the first time.

Yes, I know people who do this and wish they were able to step away a bit

i mean i don't recommend anyone getting into anything during a really volatile day unless you have your own firm plan.

funds shouldn't be taking excessive risk with their clients' money and breaching their fiduciary duty. someone should talk to these funds' risk management and compliance about lack of oversight.

― Yerac, Wednesday, January 27, 2021 11:57 AM (seventeen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is 100% true, and hedge funds should not be allowed to over-leverage a stock to the point that over 130% (?!) of the outstanding shares are short-sold

they can't talk about needing to protect the poor retail investor when they allow these funds to short companies into the ground hoping to push them into bankruptcy and making shares worthless.

^^ otm and seems like a reasonable outcome from this, if anything, should be more pressure/oversight on hedge funds to prevent them from shorting companies into the ground. Which of course means that the Congressional response will instead be to, like, ban investment subreddits or something.

congress should start with banning themselves from single name stocks and sector based funds. There is so much front-running going on there (their trades are public). They are raking it in.

The Robinhood app updates constantly so you can watch ‘line go up’ like a rat hitting the sugar water button. That seems psychologically exhausting for someone buying stock for the first time.

― Joe Biden Stan Account (milo z), Wednesday, January 27, 2021 12:03 PM (forty-one minutes ago)

yeah it's totally deranged

my brother is (er...was) the CTO of a crypto-investment app which allowed really funky leverage things to happen & he has indeed confirmed that "line go up, line go down" is 80% of the appeal of these things

wonder if bitcoin dropping $7k in the past week (had been holding steady at 37k for a while, now it's down to 30k) is from a million crypto dudes pulling money out to get into stocks

t/s: reddit disrupting the stock market vs. barstool sports disrupting the stock market

I’m up right now damn GameStop let’s go ⬆️

— Soulja Boy (Drako) (@souljaboy) January 27, 2021

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EstI_tsW8AA10Tk?format=jpg&name=medium

If this can kill bitcoin then I'm all for it I guess

bitcoin was going to dump anyway with the tether issue and double spend scare.

they can't talk about needing to protect the poor retail investor when they allow these funds to short companies into the ground hoping to push them into bankruptcy and making shares worthless.

― Yerac, Wednesday, January 27, 2021 12:20 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Is it really possible to short a company into bankruptcy? How would that even work?

he has indeed confirmed that "line go up, line go down" is 80% of the appeal of these things

I only discovered this whole wsb thing a couple of days ago, but the one comment that makes me giggle every single time it's rolled out, is how any excessive talk of fundamentals and dividends and such are firmly countered with the great truth: "Sir, this is a casino".

Very generally, they walk down the share price so low, that even if the company tries to do an offering to raise money they just further dilute themselves, it becomes a death spiral.

yeah the Telsa run up pretty much dispelled any illusion that stock prices were tied to real-world factors at all

tesla was also partly fueled by people who kept trying to short and then other people who just really liked tesla buying out of the money short dated calls and squeezing the price in an endless loop.

feel like a positive feedback loop might be a problem in the long run?

Good way to get more people to cheer on redditors:

Game spot is kind of like a late millennial’s toys-r-us, and watching a bunch of day-trading Reddit bros toy with it like orca play with a seal’s corpse is kinda grotesque and violating.

— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) January 27, 2021

GameStop stores generally look like a garbage truck full of sub-Funko Pop grade nonsense tipped its load into a storefront and the 0.8 employees in there at a time generally seem like they would rather have jobs picking up broken glass in the park with their hands, I wouldn’t call them “toys r us” exactly

^^^ ilx posts with vivid imagery

I'm not sure what the future holds for companies like Gamestop but I suspect in 20 years there will still be a big market for used Nintendo shit

I never set foot in a Gamestop until about three years ago when we bought our Switch and I actually found it to be a way better experience than I expected. The guy that worked there was always super friendly and patient with my kid's questions about games he was curious about. It was also always fairly busy, seemed like a lot of their traffic was people buying the big new release day games that had some sort of tie-in physical, deluxe version package. Not sure how omnipresent stuff like that will be in five years tho, but like frogbs I can def see a future in used Nintendo stuff.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EswtSUZUUAEqSQY?format=jpg&name=medium

I'm not sure what the future holds for companies like Gamestop but I suspect in 20 years there will still be a big market for used Nintendo shit

― frogbs, Wednesday, January 27, 2021 1:05 PM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

there was a time when they were trying to save space, we told them don't throw away those fuckin NES boxes and instruction booklets, don't get rid of the saturn stuff, etc etc but they tossed a lot of boxes, cases etc because it was easier to warehouse, so dumb, they could have basically started their own bidding auction site on old shit like those sneaker apps and shit

I think I'm like a lot of people, late to the party (invested in AMC today), but I took it like hey let's pretend I'm in Vegas, invested $200 of my stimulus and let's see what happens

Very generally, they walk down the share price so low, that even if the company tries to do an offering to raise money they just further dilute themselves, it becomes a death spiral.

― Yerac, Wednesday, January 27, 2021 1:32 PM (forty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

But this would have to be a company that was already financially precarious and desperate for cash, right? You can just like bear run a healthy company into the ground?

GameStop's financials have never been close to as bad as people think

They buy things and sell them for more than they bought them for. That's not what Wall Street cares about.

on the outside now, but from what i hear i think the management is way better now then it's been in a long time and they've already gone through some of the painful stuff like shuttering underperforming locations, and the e-commerce has done a lot better than people thought

i mean i can totally believe there's a bullish case for gamestop once malls reopen, but a market cap of $22bn seems a bit of a stretch tbh.

I mean all companies always need cash, a lot of companies they ipo have never made a profit. Let's just put all of these struggling companies out of their misery by enriching hedge funds and their uber wealthy clients. red dildo emoji.