If this is true, you need to work on expressing yourself better.

I mean, brokers shut down the ability for (some) users to buy shares of gme and they could only sell, driving the price down and allowing some users (who do you think the counterparty was in these trades?) to buy at favorable prices. I don’t know if they did this by “pushing a button” or not though. Probably a few keystrokes to make changes to their software settings for some users (and apparently not others, as someone was clearly buying).

I guess you missed it but I’m not sure how given you’re involved in the current discussion lmao.


I’m not trying to solve anything. I’m not involved in securities regulation. I feel like there should at the minimum be the appearance of fair play in the markets, however. That would be nice.

If shorting were more limited (as an example, this specific case we are talking about), there would not have been a gamma nor short squeeze and we wouldn’t be having this discussion right now. If hedge funds take on excessive risk and get burnt, they should take the full brunt of that risk and not coincidentally have buying halted at the most convenient time for them. And if said behavior caused excessive volatility so the brokers HAD to do this (has this ever happened before in the history of all highly volatile high volume market days? Or just when these funds were 140% short gme?) then that risky behavior needs to be regulated if it can cause the market to blow up.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by this?

https://twitter.com/compound248/stat...351248898?s=19

Anyone post this? Good read

With every post you make you expose yourself more and more as someone who has the inability to see injustice. It's like a concept you can't grasp on an emotional level--> hence, you are likely a psychopath, candypants. I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, but I reckon you entirely don't care that you are one.

This Gamestop situation is a clear example of a non-level playing field; an injustice. In the context of a level playing field, I stand by every word I wrote. But the playing field has to be level for what I wrote to apply. And in this case it isn't. Having the ability to make up new rules when you're losing isn't playing fair. No one should have that power, let alone be able to profit off that power. You are arguing that the opposite is true, which proves you are amoral.

how many cuepee/tooth threads to we need on BFI

i mean the correct answer is 0 but can we keep the slap-fight contained to 1 pls

First of all, we already went over what happened - DTCC required more deposit for the type of trading that was happening, so Robinhood had to raise more money before they could allow more trades. And they did raise more money and they are allowing trades now. This didn't materially impact the short squeeze. Anyone who wants in still can get in. Temporary disruptions on that scale don't have a big impact on stock prices.

Let's flip this and say it was a collection of hedge funds that manipulated the stock to create a short squeeze while coordinating on bloomberg terminals and talking about ****ing up pension funds and on the short side were a bunch of pension funds and as a result of this, a whole bunch of pensioners would have to settle for reduced benefits. Is that good? No, SEC would be up in arms.

And we don't even know that this isn't currently what's going on - why do we think there wasn't a lot of institutional money on the long side and why do we think the investors in some of the hedge funds that went short are all rich Wall Street people as opposed to pools of money designed to benefit ordinary people?

This is the opposite of what's going on. If it was obvious to everyone that some hedge funds were manufacturing and benefitting from this short squeeze, then we would've seen a coordinated attempt to shut it down - you can make a career out of things like this as a prosecutor and SEC would be all over this. And if a bunch of brokerage firms tried to stop the hedge funds from putting more pressure or whatever and got the retail firms on board as well, there would be no outcry, let along congresspeople tweeting about how this appears shady and millionaire/billionaires tweeting about how people should be in jail for not letting retail pile on more. It's because this appears to be coming from a loose collection of internet edgelords that SEC has been extremely reluctant to even intervene, while anything that gets in the way of the short squeeze, quite ironically, is being labeled market manipulation by the mob.

I'm not convinced of this - I'd have to think about this more but I think you may trigger a different type of short squeeze earlier near the limit. And this will have a huge impact on the options market.

Sure whatever but I don't see how this is something to be outraged. If your theory is correct, in a perfect world, the bad hedge funds would not have lost money and retails wouldn't have a meme stock to trade. Anyone can essentially choose to live in that world by just not trading meme stocks - why would anyone be upset that this rule wasn't in place? You could always live as though this rule exists.

Be sure to read to the end. Here's the key bit:

Once this is clarified we'll have our answer. The size of the margin requirements as indicated by the number of brokers affected (well capitalized brokers at that like IB) makes me think it's quite likely this was a discretionary choice rather than formulaic. Someone decided to yank the margin requirements far beyond regulation or normal formulas to kill the trading. It's the obvious spot to apply the choke as it impacts all brokers. If the size of the massive hike that happened is that large, and it seems to be, it's clearly Wall Street corruption and wagon circling as he alludes to in the last sentence, rather than an independent reasonable choice by the clearing house.

It's all Cuepee. I'm not even responding to the obsessed idiot.

Companies issuing stocks / bonds is making up new rules?

Internet meme lords buying GME up: OMG shorts are in trouble
GME reaches $300
GameStop executives: hey our stock is doing really well, we could do a capital raise on favorable terms
Shorts: sounds good to us, tell us what you need
Wittgenheiny: YOUR CHANGING THE RULES INJUSTICE BRRRR

It caused the price to drop from $465 to $125 in one day. Pretty big impact.

Exactly and that's a pretty good sign that the demand isn't real and a lot of people aren't acting in good faith.

Incorrect. RH started Friday by limiting buys of GME to 5 shares, and that limit went down to 1 fairly quickly.

Yeah wtf is candy talking about with RH getting financing and reopening buys? I guess he wasn't around on Friday afternoon. Do you even trade, bro? 1 share limit isn't reopening trade, it's a joke. I tried a trade on Interactive Brokers late Friday on GME and got a notice that it was simply unavailable for opening.
Or you know, the fact that people can't buy means there's no bid amidst normal selling. So the price just craters. If you dried up all the buyers on any stock (with no defined end period) you'd see a shitshow pretty fast.

I find it a little weird that you find the concept of equal access to markets not a reasonable principle of natural justice. Especially when the one causing this is a monopolistic clearing house owned/effectively controlled by these same parties getting spanked that no one can opt out of.

Robinhood is not a monopoly.

The clearing house is a monopoly and other brokers were restricted too on Friday.

People are obviously able to buy - otherwise there would be no volume. And no, restrictions of this type having this large an impact is definitely a sign of something being wrong. No one expects any of these restrictions to be in place forever and if you were happily in GME at $400, why are you selling at $150? Because people recognize instinctively that they are in a ponzi scheme and the restrictions created this fear that their access to greater fools may be limited. If Robinhood limited establishing new positions in a normal stock, people would barely notice and it wouldn't move the market. They are a tiny source of demand overall.

If people are buying with cash, I doubt many were actually buying with margin at $150, is it really an issue at all? I know redditors weren’t dumb enough to be buying on margin once this was past even $30-40.

isnt the takeaway: if GME go way up, everything go way down

?

you can already see the impacts in the indexes

im by no means an expert in fiscal/monetary policy or what circumstances need to arise for something to get acted on, but it seems to me that a trade would be long some type of "QE" that reinstates liquidity back into the big caps

Right but the clearing house isn't stopping trades - their demand for deposit is just higher and this only affects unsettled trades and disproportionately affects brokerage firms with very online demographics. Clearly lots of trades are happening. I don't think Fidelity for instance ever restricted buying.

Yeah it might have been corrupt monopolistic behavior but the longs got what was coming to them since they weren't acting in good faith is quite a hottake.

I'm from the school that decentralized individuals can make the choices they want about what to do with their own money, while centralized monopolies running the system don't have that same level of freedom. And that centralized monopolies bending norms for their own ends is not at all morally equivalent to decentralized individuals doing what they think is best.

Well, if you were happily buying at $400, why are you selling at $150, with no fundamental change? If some sources of demand were cut off, assuming it was the real demand that pushed the price up, that wouldn't move the price down too much - why not just hold till the restrictions are lifted? It's important to separate real demand (I want this thing at a certain price) and purely speculative demand (I think the greater fool will take this off my hand at an even higher price).

I don't think there's much evidence for the "corrupt monopolistic behavior" theory other than a lot of people wanting it to be true.

Sure but liquidity isn't free. You're not entitled to these services. You're not entitled to Robinhood's customers' demand. That's a pretty important part of capitalism. Financial institutions turn down customers all the time too. A lot of people are far too entitled about every little thing working all the time - these are real businesses that can choose which services to provide and which customers to do business with.

Sure if DTCC was acting with corrupt intentions, I'm all for making sure that responsible individuals are held accountable. But we're only sure at this point that one of the "sides" is acting in bad faith. The other side may have been - well we're not talking about the most ethical group of people here in this industry - but there's no real evidence, it's just motivated reasoning so far.

1. Because it was literally the only action they could take. Restrictions are a fundamental change. They were told they couldn't buy, only that they could sell. They weren't told that it was due to clearinghouse margins, they were lied to that it was being done to protect them.

2. They weren't told when the restrictions would be lifted. I believe there are, or were on Friday, restrictions still in place. Will there be restrictions on Monday? How long do you expect people to have trust in the system while being restricted? It's not unreasonable for people to assume they're going to get cheated out of the rest of their position.

The other thing that's important to understand about the DTCC thing is that the deposit isn't for the stocks you own, it's just for unsettled trades. So as the trades settle, especially if the WSB crowd generally holds their position and there's a bit of net new demand, this doesn't change the trajectory of the short squeeze. It's basically a religious myth at this point that, from hurting them, but rather helps fuel this faith-based narrative around the ponzi scheme. MLMs are like this too - there's a very cultish vibe at the core with the idea that it's about a group of hardworking individuals vs these mega corporations.

Imagine you're playing HU in poker and because your opponent thinks you're just getting lucky and because you are clearly the worse, dumb player he says for the next 1k hands you're not allowed to raise.

Somehow there are people that seem to think this is fine in the context of the stock market.