# News & Current Events > Economy & Markets >  Reddit Trolls Wall St. Hedge Funds, Buying Up GameStop Stock

## dannno

GameStop (GME) was expected to go bankrupt, so some Wall St. hedge funds (notably Melvin Capital) put down some serious short sells on their stock. 

Reddit took notice, and coordinated an attack and have driven the price of Gamestop (GME) up from about $40 a week ago to $209 currently.

Some of the firms, notably Melvin Capital, have doubled down and gone to investors for billions in financial backing to cover their margin calls. 

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article...t-stock-shares

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## Brian4Liberty

Just started following this today. Quite the story. The revenge of Kekistan...

https://paranoidenough.com/2021/01/2...-Gamestop.html

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## Gaius Marius

What I gather from this morning's financial porn is that the Hedge Funds folded on their short positions on Gamestop this morning, so essentially Reddit's WallStreetBets crowd beat the Hedge Funds.  Back of the envelope math is that Melvin Capitol took over $3 billion in losses over Monday and Tuesday, which exceeds the infusion of capital they received from two other Hedge Funds.

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## Invisible Man

I wonder at what point short selling now would be a pretty smart move.

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## Brian4Liberty

And as could be expected, when the hedge funds lose money, screams of regulation, policing and bailouts start. Shorting and destroying by the establishment hedge funds is perfectly acceptable.

Watch out for silver. Notoriously shorted by the establishment...

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## Gaius Marius

> I wonder at what point short selling now would be a pretty smart move.


I forgot who said that the "market can remain irrational longer than the investor can remain solvent," but many smart investors have tried to time the market and failed.

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## Gaius Marius

> And as could be expected, when the hedge funds lose money, screams of regulation, policing and bailouts start. Shorting and destroying by the establishment hedge funds is perfectly acceptable.
> 
> Watch out for silver. Notoriously shorted by the establishment...


The rumors are that the SEC is going to seek criminal charges against Reddit's WallStreetBets crowd.  I don't know what basis they could do so unless there were individual members who were using the forum to "pump and dump" their shares in GameStop.

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## Invisible Man

> I forgot who said that the "market can remain irrational longer than the investor can remain solvent," but many smart investors have tried to time the market and failed.



That's true. And honestly, it's not for me. But many have also succeeded. And those are sometimes the ones who, often just because they were lucky, get remembered as legendary great investors, and then write books on how they did it that prescribe methods that end up not working when others try them after that.

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## wizardwatson

HankHeIl
 @HankHeil
·
18h
*The mass elation caused by GamestopGate should seriously concern the elites. Basically everyone under 40 is now oriented toward enjoying any victory over the elites more than any circus the elites can put in front of them.*
HankHeIl
 @HankHeil
·
18h
*Lobbing the Trump grenade into DC was fun. Eventually they shut that down by taking away the ability to participate in elections.

Blowing up a bunch of Cohen's bank accounts is fun. Eventually they will shut this down by taking away the ability to participate in markets.*
HankHeIl(wiz:  They did this today!  Ameritrade has suspended the plebes from trading GME and AMC)
 @HankHeil
·
18h
*Their problem is that it's impossible to maintain a society that doesn't require the participation of those below them. They can never eliminate every vector the other classes have to strike back against them and now there is sense, albeit small, of class solidarity against them.*
HankHeIl
 @HankHeil
·
18h
*Eventually these sentiments flare up and they overreact in tamping them down over and over again. Eventually everyone is so disenfranchised and disengaged that no one sees inherent value in maintaining systems they have no relation to.*

Twitter thread link
(couldn't embed the whole thread or I don't know how)

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## Krugminator2

> I wonder at what point short selling now would be a pretty smart move.


Melvin Capital was the hedge fund in trouble being short. They covered their position yesterday. Whatever the high of today is will be the high water mark for as long as the company trades publicly going forward. 

Not advice because you can lose your ass on these kinds of trades but better than 50-50 it trades below 200 today. At 322 right now. And roughly 100% chance trades down to the mid 100s by close of monday.

Shorting Blackberry which is a sister stock to this move is a lot safer

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## Brian4Liberty

> The rumors are that the SEC is going to seek criminal charges against Reddit's WallStreetBets crowd.  I don't know what basis they could do so unless there were individual members who were using the forum to "pump and dump" their shares in GameStop.


Of course. Go after the Robinhood gamblers who threw in $1000 bucks each. Such big criminals.

Meanwhile the crooks on Wall St can naked short all they want.

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## Brian4Liberty

> best use i could find to put that laughable stimulus into
> ...
> https://www.twitter.com/ilovecueayy/...65370794860546


Lol. More stimulus!

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## Brian4Liberty

> Top 5 richest people:
> -Elon Musk
> -Jeff Bezos
> -Bill Gates
> -Bernard Arnault
> -Retard6969
> ...
> https://www.twitter.com/richassvc/st...21103003885570

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## CaptUSA

> *Their problem is that it's impossible to maintain a society that doesn't require the participation of those below them. They can never eliminate every vector the other classes have to strike back against them and now there is sense, albeit small, of class solidarity against them.*

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## wizardwatson

This is a moment.  As Syrian Girl said, it's what Occupy Wall Street should have been.

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## Brian4Liberty

> I have not ruled out this is planned.  
> 
> The origin of the "inside info" so to speak of Gamestop being 140% shorted was convenient.  Also, there's people commenting that the million dollar investors in WBS are suspect (Portnoy being one).
> ...


It was my impression that it was not inside info. It was just some Reddit guy looking at public statements and doing some math. I could be wrong. I am just catching up on what has happened myself.

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## Brian4Liberty

> Been following this. If they try to short squeeze silver I might get in and ride it as high as I dare.


Seeing as silver is under valued, it is not overly risky to buy right now, at today’s price. It would always go up and down, but there is far more upside right now, simply looking at money printing and monetary inflation.

On the other hand, Reddit will probably be forced to ban or remove that sub-Reddit before they can go after silver. The current silver price is the tolerable price to the powers that be. Will we see all of the social media companies playing whack-a-mole to ban any stock market talk? We saw them do it to many conservatives and libertarians already. 

I’d wager that trading in silver related ETFs will be halted almost immediately if the investor mob goes after silver.

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## jkr

how th fk did i miss this ?

what do i buy, i want to be rich and shape people!

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## jkr

its lehman all over agian!

they are doing it for real this time and we all locked up n sh it

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## 69360

> Seeing as silver is under valued, it is not overly risky to buy right now, at today’s price. It would always go up and down, but there is far more upside right now, simply looking at money printing and monetary inflation.
> 
> On the other hand, Reddit will probably be forced to ban or remove that sub-Reddit before they can go after silver. The current silver price is the tolerable price to the powers that be. Will we see all of the social media companies playing whack-a-mole to ban any stock market talk? We saw them do it to many conservatives and libertarians already. 
> 
> I’d wager that trading in silver related ETFs will be halted almost immediately if the investor mob goes after silver.


Yeah I think either the exchanges or SEC will put a halt to it. I am following the subreddit tonight and will see what happens in the morning. They haven't decided which ETF to go after yet. SLV seems to be most likely. Some are buying PSLV and others are buying physical.  It's not quite organized yet like the GME thing.

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## devil21

I didn't read the thread but I've been a reader of WSB for months and knew this was coming.  Trolls?  Come on, man.  Buzzfeed?  Since when does dannno post buzzfeed links?  Is your mask slipping dannno?  

Any way, GME was illegally naked shorted to 140% of TOTAL GME STOCK ISSUE and the hedgies were caught by some smooth-brained autistic retards with a few dollars to blow who realized that an unorganized crowd-sourced short squeeze would break those hedge funds.  Hilarity, chaos and debauchery has ensued.  And Wall St and the media has once again shown who they work for...since Wall St has literally been at war with Americans for a long time (see: Trading With The Enemy Act.....1933 and everything that came with it....who's the enemy?)

Every financial news article since this started has framed it like it's teh scary internets ganging up on poor little Wall St hedgies, when in reality it was those hedge funds, once again, engaging in illegal trading that the average person would have been thrown under the prison for, but that's NEVER mentioned in the articles, including OP's and they were caught on it and are being hoisted by their own petard.  As usual, the SEC ignores almost everything illegal Wall St does.  Now, Wall St is in a tizzy and collectively engaging in their own doubling down on illegal behavior to protect the crooks, including locking out trading accounts and 100% fake news releases to cover for the crooks that have been looting this country for a long time.  My bet is Tesla eventually acquires Gamestop for in-car gaming and entertainment.  Gotta have something to do while the self driving robot car isn't trying to run you into a concrete barrier at 90mph...





> I wonder at what point short selling now would be a pretty smart move.


You go ahead and do that.  It's a very savvy move.

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## Gaius Marius

> It was my impression that it was not inside info. It was just some Reddit guy looking at public statements and doing some math. I could be wrong. I am just catching up on what has happened myself.


Yeah, there was no trading on insider info.  When an investor starts taking positions in a company beyond certain thresholds, then the investor has file certain disclosures with the SEC (usually at the end of the quarter).  This is all public information.  In fact, other investors sometimes scrutinize the disclosures filed by successful investors like Warren Buffett or Dr. Michael Burry to see what companies they have taken positions in for the purpose deciding whether to invest in those same companies.

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## wizardwatson

> It was my impression that it was not inside info. It was just some Reddit guy looking at public statements and doing some math. I could be wrong. I am just catching up on what has happened myself.





> I didn't read the thread but I've been a reader of WSB for months and knew this was coming.  Trolls?  Come on, man.  Buzzfeed?  Since when does dannno post buzzfeed links?  Is your mask slipping dannno?  
> 
> Any way, GME was illegally naked shorted to 140% of TOTAL GME STOCK ISSUE and the hedgies were caught by some smooth-brained autistic retards with a few dollars to blow who realized that an unorganized crowd-sourced short squeeze would break those hedge funds.  Hilarity, chaos and debauchery has ensued.  And Wall St and the media has once again shown who they work for...since Wall St has literally been at war with Americans for a long time (see: Trading With The Enemy Act.....1933 and everything that came with it....who's the enemy?)
> 
> *Every financial news article since this started has framed it like it's teh scary internets ganging up on poor little Wall St hedgies*, when _in reality_ it was those hedge funds, once again, engaging in illegal trading that the average person would have been thrown under the prison for, but that's NEVER mentioned in the articles, including OP's and they were caught on it and are being hoisted by their own petard.  As usual, the SEC ignores almost everything illegal Wall St does.  Now, Wall St is in a tizzy and collectively engaging in their own doubling down on illegal behavior to protect the crooks, including locking out trading accounts and 100% fake news releases to cover for the crooks that have been looting this country for a long time.  My bet is Tesla eventually acquires Gamestop for in-car gaming and entertainment.  Gotta have something to do while the self driving robot car isn't trying to run you into a concrete barrier at 90mph...
> 
> You go ahead and do that.  It's a very savvy move.





> *Yeah, there was no trading on insider info.*  When an investor starts taking positions in a company beyond certain thresholds, then the investor has file certain disclosures with the SEC (usually at the end of the quarter).  This is all public information.  In fact, other investors sometimes scrutinize the disclosures filed by successful investors like Warren Buffett or Dr. Michael Burry to see what companies they have taken positions in for the purpose deciding whether to invest in those same companies.


I put "inside info" in quotes for a reason.  I will spell it out.

The underdog narrative is "they were gonna short it anyway, we beat them to it."  The MSM narrative is "mob of angry kids who aren't having enough sex are taking down hedge funds".

What do "WE" do?  "WE", the supposed resistance, in knee-jerk fashion, side with underdog.  Good for them, throwing rocks at the tanks.

The implication is we believe the movement of WSB is "organic".  Always we believe this.  January 6th was oh-so organic, until it goes wrong and we then say, "well, there was some bad actors".

How many things have to NOT go our way, before we assume the bad actors are among us from the start.  WBS could be 99.9% legitimate small time investors.  Those 99.9% could all decide to sell out and leave it at that today.  But if this supposedly organic event is compromised and what THEY really want to do is create an event that pops the derivatives bubble, then does this "organic" mob have the power to stop it?  Are there not "click farms" and contractors who can keep buying all day long pretending to be WSB even when organic WSB has sold out?

When are we going to learn that anonymous internet crap is our primary weakness?

We already know for a fact these military intelligence programs exist.  But every time we see an underdog narrative play out, whether it's pizzagate, QAnon, Stop the Steal, or whatever, we assume it's organic.  

Anyway, the 2008 crisis is directly related to what these underdog heroes of the day are doing.  2008 was caused by the BANKING SYSTEM being overexposed in the derivatives market, and after a few key derivatives companies went bankrupt, it caused a systemic event which required the bailing out of the banks.

We paid THE BANKS for the actions of "greedy wall street" (underdog narrative) but the MSM narrative was "lack of regulartion" which didn't change much.  Things are worse now because the Fed never stopped doing what it has been doing.

If it collapses this time, whose to blame?  Wall Street or angry kids?  Right now it seems like fun.  It's hilarious.  What happens when all the pensioners and people on fixed income are informed that angry kids collapsed the economy?  

Will they say "good for them", or will they say "well, can't you shut off their internet"?

We need to wise up.


*EDIT:  SHORTER:  The underdog narrative is-more often than not-also the MSM narrative.*

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## 69360

The fun might be over. Robinhood restricted trading for GME and AMC. Went from about 460 to 120 in less than 2 hours.

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## Gaius Marius

> The fun might be over. Robinhood restricted trading for GME and AMC. Went from about 460 to 120 in less than 2 hours.


Now if that isn't prohibited market manipulation, then I don't know what is.  Especially since I read somewhere that Robinhood is backed by one of the hedge funds that bailed out Melvin Capital.

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## Occam's Banana

https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/sta...87878249885696

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## tommyrp12



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## Invisible Man

Am I right that the thing that instigated this was hedge funds short selling the stock, and maybe more specifically that they engaged in naked short selling it, up to the point of selling an amount of shares that exceeded the amount in existence?

And somehow these little guy investors saw some kind of injustice in that, which it was up to all of them to stop?

Is that basically the gist of it? Or was there something more that made the alleged bad guys here especially morally repugnant?

I'm not asking about the subsequent actions on the parts of Robinhood and others to stifle this. I'm just asking about the initial instigation.

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## wizardwatson

> Am I right that the thing that instigated this was hedge funds short selling the stock, and maybe more specifically that they engaged in naked short selling it, up to the point of selling an amount of shares that exceeded the amount in existence?
> 
> And somehow these little guy investors saw some kind of injustice in that, which it was up to all of them to stop?
> 
> Is that basically the gist of it? Or was there something more that made the alleged bad guys here especially morally repugnant?
> 
> I'm not asking about the subsequent actions on the parts of Robinhood and others to stifle this. I'm just asking about the initial instigation.


It's a short squeeze, the enemy of the short sellers.

These can occur from "natural market forces".  

The "grown up" position is that "shorting" is natural price mechanism, while this particular short squeeze (the enemy of short sellers) is a bunch of angry bubblegummers who need to get a life (aka 'not natural market force')

The underdog WSB position is that "shorting" in and of itself is wall street greed, and that someone else could have done this same squeezing tactic within wall street and it would've been ok, but since it was the unwashed masses, they're being attacked.

Essentially, you've got the kids screaming "double standard" and you've got the educated market savvy adults crying vandalism, and gatekeepers like Shapiro saying "wall street provides a service".

But I don't think there's deep moral repugnancy.  It's business as usual on wall street, and revenge fantasy as usual with the plebes.  Question is what will end result be, and who will benefit.

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## 69360

> Am I right that the thing that instigated this was hedge funds short selling the stock, and maybe more specifically that they engaged in naked short selling it, up to the point of selling an amount of shares that exceeded the amount in existence?
> 
> And somehow these little guy investors saw some kind of injustice in that, which it was up to all of them to stop?
> 
> Is that basically the gist of it? Or was there something more that made the alleged bad guys here especially morally repugnant?
> 
> I'm not asking about the subsequent actions on the parts of Robinhood and others to stifle this. I'm just asking about the initial instigation.


That is about right. It seems like some of them are willing to lose all their money to prove some point?

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## Invisible Man

> It's a short squeeze, the enemy of the short sellers.
> 
> These can occur from "natural market forces".  
> 
> The "grown up" position is that "shorting" is natural price mechanism, while this particular short squeeze (the enemy of short sellers) is a bunch of angry bubblegummers who need to get a life (aka 'not natural market force')
> 
> The underdog WSB position is that "shorting" in and of itself is wall street greed, and that someone else could have done this same squeezing tactic within wall street and it would've been ok, but since it was the unwashed masses, they're being attacked.
> 
> Essentially, you've got the kids screaming "double standard" and you've got the educated market savvy adults crying vandalism, and gatekeepers like Shapiro saying "wall street provides a service".
> ...


So do you perceive the short squeeze here was done (whether by bubble gummers or anyone else) with the intent of profiting financially?

I mean, yeah that's generally the point. But it seems like something more going on here about trying to punish the ones who shorted it in the first place.

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## wizardwatson

> So do you perceive the short squeeze here was done (whether by bubble gummers or anyone else) with the intent of profiting financially?
> 
> I mean, yeah that's generally the point. But it seems like something more going on here about trying to punish the ones who shorted it in the first place.


People are profiting financially, but the WSB mantra was always, "we can stay rutarded longer than you can stay solvent".  So certainly there's a populist theme that wants to punish the shorters.

So yeah, the "someone could have squeezed them anyway" is the defense I guess, whereas the impetus is "beating them".  It's understood, that given that the stock would inevitably come down, many who helped pump would lose money.  It was a very kamikaze plan from beginning.

You have a lot of memes and comments to that effect.

One of my favorites I read today was:

"If wall street had ever bothered to look at our Steam accounts, they'd realize we have no problem dropping $40 on something and never touching it again."

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## A Son of Liberty

@Brian4Liberty This should be in the US Politics subforum.  It's clearly a topic beyond economy and markets, and it certainly deserves that kind of traffic.

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## Invisible Man

> People are profiting financially, but the WSB mantra was always, "we can stay rutarded longer than you can stay solvent".  So certainly there's a populist theme that wants to punish the shorters.


Some are bound to profit. But for those who bought and held, the current gains are unrealized. For them to be realized, they have to sell the stock, and once that happens en masse (which it must at some point, unless this somehow turns into making a charity case out of poor little GameStop), the price will fall like a rock, and a lot of people will lose money, which I get they seem to be fine with. So for the short squeezers, whether they win or lose will come down to timing and luck for the individual investors, with I expect a lot more losers than winners.

Which keeps bringing me back to the question of what was their real motivation in the first place. I can't tell if it's mainly rooted in believing that the ultra-rich are their enemies or what.

I mean, it's not like short selling stocks was some controversial thing that hoards of common people were itching to fight against a week ago. Unless it was and I never noticed.

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## wizardwatson

> Some are bound to profit. But for those who bought and held, the current gains are unrealized. For them to be realized, they have to sell the stock, and once that happens en masse (which it must at some point, unless this somehow turns into making a charity case out of poor little GameStop), the price will fall like a rock, and a lot of people will lose money, which I get they seem to be fine with. So for the short squeezers, whether they win or lose will come down to timing and luck for the individual investors, with I expect a lot more losers than winners.
> 
> Which keeps bringing me back to the question of what was their real motivation in the first place. I can't tell if it's mainly rooted in believing that the ultra-rich are their enemies or what.
> 
> I mean, it's not like short selling stocks was some controversial thing that hoards of common people were itching to fight against a week ago. Unless it was and I never noticed.


Yes, why out of the blue, why now?

Sure there's lots of contributing factors: Covid, stimmy checks, slow news cycle now that Trump's gone...

But there are numerous "bubblegummers" making money on the squeeze who are former hedge fund people.  Portnoy-for instance-the most vocal front man I've seen is supposedly millions in on the underdog side.  Another guy used to work for a hedge fund, then there's people like Chamath and probably many like him we don't see.

But who knows the ultimate history?  

We can only speculate-without hard evidence and investigation-so we wait and see who benefits.

Is it legit organic, and like a palestinian boy throwing rocks at a tank, bound to be run over, ignored and forgotten?

Or is it a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton:

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## wizardwatson

My other point, someone mentioned in a ZH comment, this could be a coordinated effort to soften up the short seller position in preparation for the Big Dump.


I'm not even sure what that means, but short sellers are a dymanic in the market that I assume dampens downward momentum.  So the cynical perspective is this is a pre-crash ploy to make future crash more severe.

Hence, Terminator.

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## Occam's Banana

*From GameStop to Robinhood Class Action Lawsuit? Lawyer Explains - Viva Frei Vlawg*
_A breakdown of the GameStop situation and how it lead to a class action lawsuit against Robinhood trading._
https://rumble.com/vde6qd-gamestop-r...rei-vlawg.html

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## Brian4Liberty

> The best thing about this whole episode is that it's so new that the public doesn't know where to stand on it.  Meaning, they haven't gotten their team's talking points yet.
> 
> I love when that happens.   
> 
> You've got AOC and Tucker lining up on the same side.  The public is confused on what the "right" answer is for their tribe.
> 
> 
> TELL ME WHAT TO THINK, DAMMIT!!!


Considering they have accused the Reddit guys social media forums of sex trafficking and racism, the left should know who to hate any time now.




> Am I right that the thing that instigated this was hedge funds short selling the stock, and maybe more specifically that they engaged in naked short selling it, up to the point of selling an amount of shares that exceeded the amount in existence?
> 
> And somehow these little guy investors saw some kind of injustice in that, which it was up to all of them to stop?
> 
> Is that basically the gist of it? Or was there something more that made the alleged bad guys here especially morally repugnant?
> 
> I'm not asking about the subsequent actions on the parts of Robinhood and others to stifle this. I'm just asking about the initial instigation.


I can't post a specific article or video, as I have watched a lot of them at this point. It is more than just one motivating factor. It's not as simple as it sounds. As best as I can tell, here's my understanding of the history:

- COVID shuts down malls, stocks get hammered, especially brick and mortar shops like Gamestop.

- Some of these young people who just started investing invest in Gamestop, because they grew up going there, and want to help it through the shutdowns.

- Some Wall Street people on TV try to talk the stock down. (Probably shorting behind the scenes).

- Chewy.com founder Ryan Cohen, a newly minted billionaire invests in Gamestop, and starts publicly giving advise to Gamestop management, talking up a whole new online business model.

- Gamestop puts Cohen on the Board and hires a couple of his best developers to pursue new business plan.

- More back and forth between long investors and Wall St. shorters, most vocally Gabe Plotkin of Melvin Capital starts online battles with the pro-Gamestop investors.

- All of the long investors get pissed about Plotkin and others shorting Gamestop to drive it down. Some of them discover that Gamestop is way over shorted, over 100%. (Charles Payne has reported on that fact for a while).

- The Reddit crowd finds out what a short squeeze is, and the possibility of driving the price of the stock through the roof, while hammering loud mouth hedge fund managers at the same time.

- Other people get involved on both sides, and the stock starts to take off.

- The controversy ensues.

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## Brian4Liberty

> ...
> Portnoy-for instance-the most vocal front man I've seen is supposedly millions in on the underdog side.
> ...


Methinks that Portnoy's loud mouth may buy him a jail cell before too long.

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## 69360

> Some are bound to profit. But for those who bought and held, the current gains are unrealized. For them to be realized, they have to sell the stock, and once that happens en masse (which it must at some point, unless this somehow turns into making a charity case out of poor little GameStop), the price will fall like a rock, and a lot of people will lose money, which I get they seem to be fine with. So for the short squeezers, whether they win or lose will come down to timing and luck for the individual investors, with I expect a lot more losers than winners.
> 
> Which keeps bringing me back to the question of what was their real motivation in the first place. I can't tell if it's mainly rooted in believing that the ultra-rich are their enemies or what.
> 
> I mean, it's not like short selling stocks was some controversial thing that hoards of common people were itching to fight against a week ago. Unless it was and I never noticed.


I think they got really pissed off when robinhood conspired with the hedge funds and restricted trading. That seemed to be the turning point where they really wanted to $#@! over wall street. 

Personally if I had been able to buy the stock early enough I would have sold at $400+ and laughed at everyone.

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## Occam's Banana

"Because Trump ..."

From CNN: *How Trumpism explains the GameStop stock surge*

And then there's this:

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/statu...52902684372995

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## jct74

I saw #silversqueeze trending on twitter earlier today.

https://twitter.com/search?q=silvers...d_query&f=live

I don't think anything will come of any silver squeeze effort though.  This was already tried a decade ago during the "Crash JP Morgan, Buy Silver" campaign and it failed.

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## oyarde

> I saw #silversqueeze trending on twitter earlier today.
> 
> https://twitter.com/search?q=silvers...d_query&f=live
> 
> I don't think anything will come of any silver squeeze effort though.  This was already tried a decade ago during the "Crash JP Morgan, Buy Silver" campaign and it failed.


I would be happy with a small bump , say 28 - 29 from 27 .Generates more interest when it goes up a bit .

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## 69360

> I saw #silversqueeze trending on twitter earlier today.
> 
> https://twitter.com/search?q=silvers...d_query&f=live
> 
> I don't think anything will come of any silver squeeze effort though.  This was already tried a decade ago during the "Crash JP Morgan, Buy Silver" campaign and it failed.


I'm watching for it as well. It's less risky than gamestop stock.

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## devil21

> Question the MSM narrative on RPF is "tinfoil"?
> 
> The ghost of Christopher A. Brown is my spirit animal, bro.
> 
> If we were real activists doing real things, I would be happy to oblige notions of "staying with the group" and "putting away my tinfoil hat".


Research has revealed that the originator of this via WSB is a low level trader at Mass Mutual, who appears to have broken some trader regulations in an attempt to hit a jackpot.  Could he have been put up to it by higher powers?  Possible.  But no, questioning the MSM isn't tinfoil but automatically suggesting that this has been engineered to occur by people much further up the Wall St food chain is, at least to some extent.  Traders do go rouge occasionally and cause problems but rarely to this level of effect.  It looks to me, even outside of MSM narratives, that there's scrambling going on to contain this and then seize it to further banker agendas.  




> But as long as we are stuck in the Matrix, surrounded by phantoms and hallucinations exacerbated by constantly hitting our MSM feeder bars for our next dopamine pellet, you can count on wiz to pop those balloons...time permitting.


If you're suggesting I'm a wholesale buyer of MSM narratives then I assume you don't read many of my posts.  I'm probably the biggest tinfoiler on RPF lol.  I just think the truth of this GME thing lies somewhere in the middle.  Maybe something a kin to 9/11 where it was known about beforehand and was allowed to happen but not directly engineered to happen.  

Either way, we'll see what happens. I fully expect Robinhood declares bankruptcy very soon.  Taking billion dollar lines of credit, severely limiting share purchases, forced liquidation of contracts, etc, on top of alienating most of their customer base only leads to that outcome.  (Btw, the fact that Robinhood only very recently abandoned its IPO plans is a clue, to me at least, that this wasn't engineered but was allowed to occur)  

The question will be what happens to the GME shares they do have custody of?  Will they illegally force sell everything out of all accounts so the shorts can cover (since the account holders aren't the legal owners of the GME shares) just prior to a bankruptcy filing?  Or will they make it really interesting and declare bankruptcy _while still in custody of the shares_, thus throwing the entire system into jeopardy since the shorts have no way to cover while the shares are locked up in a bankruptcy proceeding?  That is the question imo.  Knowing the answer to it would allow someone to quite literally get rich overnight.

----------


## jkr

we all  know the NEXT song...

----------


## wizardwatson

> Research has revealed that the originator of this via WSB is a low level trader at Mass Mutual, who appears to have broken some trader regulations in an attempt to hit a jackpot.  *Could he have been put up to it by higher powers?  Possible.  But no, questioning the MSM isn't tinfoil but automatically suggesting that this has been engineered to occur by people much further up the Wall St food chain is, at least to some extent.  Traders do go rouge occasionally and cause problems but rarely to this level of effect.*  It looks to me, even outside of MSM narratives, that there's scrambling going on to contain this and then seize it to further banker agendas.  
> 
> 
> 
> If you're suggesting I'm a wholesale buyer of MSM narratives then I assume you don't read many of my posts.  I'm probably the biggest tinfoiler on RPF lol.  I just think the truth of this GME thing lies somewhere in the middle.  Maybe something a kin to 9/11 where it was known about beforehand and was allowed to happen but not directly engineered to happen.  
> 
> Either way, we'll see what happens. I fully expect Robinhood declares bankruptcy very soon.  Taking billion dollar lines of credit, severely limiting share purchases, forced liquidation of contracts, etc, on top of alienating most of their customer base only leads to that outcome.  (Btw, the fact that Robinhood only very recently abandoned its IPO plans is a clue, to me at least, that this wasn't engineered but was allowed to occur)  
> 
> The question will be what happens to the GME shares they do have custody of?  Will they illegally force sell everything out of all accounts so the shorts can cover (since the account holders aren't the legal owners of the GME shares) just prior to a bankruptcy filing?  Or will they make it really interesting and declare bankruptcy _while still in custody of the shares_, thus throwing the entire system into jeopardy since the shorts have no way to cover while the shares are locked up in a bankruptcy proceeding?  That is the question imo.  Knowing the answer to it would allow someone to quite literally get rich overnight.


Well, I disagree.

Why do they still get the benefit of the doubt? 

Why do I have to prove it's coordinated, but no one has to prove it's organic?

Oh yeah, because people say "maybe it's the Russians".  That's right.  Since underdog has the right enemies, must be authentic.  If Hillary, some lefist senator, and Jimmy Kimmel say "maybe its the Russians" 100% it's definitely organic, because we hate these people.  

There's no possiblity social engineering psyops ran by retired military intelligence are clever enough to exploit that sophisticated dynamic of the "revolution".

That's a whacked out conspiracy theory.

----------


## A Son of Liberty

> we all  know the NEXT song...


+ rep.  Been years since I've seen this video.

----------


## devil21

> Well, I disagree.
> 
> Why do they still get the benefit of the doubt? 
> 
> Why do I have to prove it's coordinated, but no one has to prove it's organic?
> 
> Oh yeah, because people say "maybe it's the Russians".  That's right.  Since underdog has the right enemies, must be authentic.  If Hillary, some lefist senator, and Jimmy Kimmel say "maybe its the Russians" 100% it's definitely organic, because we hate these people.  
> 
> There's no possiblity social engineering psyops ran by retired military intelligence are clever enough to exploit that sophisticated dynamic of the "revolution".
> ...


Like I said, I'm as quick as any one to call something engineered but I also rarely do it until I have some evidence, whether relevant to me or public info, to present to back it up if anyone calls me out on it.  Maybe your standards are different.  I just think, based on the evidence I've seen so far, that the truth lies somewhere in the middle on this one.  

*I think we can both agree that this could quickly get very out-of-hand (especially for folks with 401k/IRA/etc and large dollar holdings) and protecting ourselves should be top priority*, instead of arguing about who did what when.  Since it's being directed toward silver now (which I do think is being engineered 100% as a cover to bring metals back to their real market prices), I think it's a great idea to grab more physical PMs while they're still available at reasonable prices and reposition stock portfolios toward miners and other PM related issues like PSLV.  Any time spent arguing about who, what, when is time wasted that should be applied toward strategizing how to protect oneself as the monetary hurricane we've all been expecting for years starts to come ashore.  The wind is picking up and I think I felt some raindrops...

----------


## wizardwatson

> Like I said, *I'm as quick as any one to call something engineered but I also rarely do it until I have some evidence*, whether relevant to me or public info, to present to back it up if anyone calls me out on it.  Maybe your standards are different.  I just think, based on the evidence I've seen so far, that the truth lies somewhere in the middle on this one.  
> 
> *I think we can both agree that this could quickly get very out-of-hand (especially for folks with 401k/IRA/etc and large dollar holdings) and protecting ourselves should be top priority*, instead of arguing about who did what when.  Since it's being directed toward silver now (which I do think is being engineered 100% as a cover to bring metals back to their real market prices), I think it's a great idea to grab more physical PMs while they're still available at reasonable prices and reposition stock portfolios toward miners and other PM related issues like PSLV.  Any time spent arguing about who, what, when is time wasted that should be applied toward strategizing how to protect oneself as the monetary hurricane we've all been expecting for years starts to come ashore.  The wind is picking up and I think I felt some raindrops...


Your own signature:




> *The entire internet is the domain of paid shills and bots*. If you don't know this by now....
> 
> Israel, under control of the Crown and, ultimately, the Vatican, own the USA. If you don't know this by now....


How does this jive with your "I need evidence" statement?

Is it the "entire internet" except this one situation you need evidence for?

----------


## Okie RP fan

I think I'm hopping out of the market this week. Not retirement accts., just my investing money directly in the stock market. This stuff is crazy town and I think it's going to get ugly at some point. I'll sacrifice some potential gains and just wait until the "next" correction/bear market.

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## dannno



----------


## Invisible Man

> I would call the willful decision to drive a valid business enterprise into the toilet fairly malicious.


You're just talking about short selling their stock right?

Or was there something else that they did to "drive a valid enterprise into the toilet"?

----------


## Invisible Man

> That's interesting. I would call driving up the price of a piece of $#@! company hanging on by a thread through a pump and dump fairly malicious.



I wouldn't call either thing malicious. Short selling isn't malicious, and neither is pumping and dumping.

In either case the people who would ostensibly be victims are other investors who chose to take on the risk they did and just took the opposite side of the given bet. Nobody is entitled to have a stock price be one thing versus another.

----------


## Brian4Liberty

It seems like this Gamestop episode has prompted money to come in from the sidelines all across the market. That would be in addition to the massive stock buybacks many companies are doing right now.

----------


## dannno

> Show's over. No one is scared. Back below 100  over coming months with mini spikes along the way. Pattern happens all the time penny stock land. This is no different.


Already down to $111

----------


## Krugminator2

> Already down to $111



Closed around 91. Everyone probably margined out so likely bounce

----------


## devil21

> Short interest has gone from 140% to between 30% and 50%. Every spike is and opportunity to reshort.  Back side of the move now. Show's over. No one is scared. Back below 100  over coming months with mini spikes along the way. Pattern happens all the time penny stock land. This is no different.


Do you have any direct metrics/reports that show the short has gone down that far?  AFAIK there's been no new direct metrics released yet.  CNBC jawboning from known liars doesn't count.

Ya know, even if this thing is "done", it definitely exposed Wall Street, much of the banking sector and the entire media to a lot of young people as the corrupt criminals that they are, instead of the fake story of existing to protect people and the fruits of their labor:

"Oh yeah short squeeze is over.  Fail.  We Wall Street criminals win again.  Never mind that we locked people's accounts for days, shut down buying across multiple brokers then claimed people stopped buying while we wash traded the price down, and threw every propaganda piece of $#@! we could muster out to the world.  But yes, please come back again soon.  We promise we'll play by our own rules next time."




> That's interesting. I would call driving up the price of a piece of $#@! company hanging on by a thread through a pump and dump fairly malicious.  Since we disagree, it is best to let the market sort things out and let people make bets whichever way they want to fairly determine a price.


Posts like these are when you expose yourself as nothing but a Wall St apologist.  Illegally shorting a company to the brink of bankruptcy is fine but catching them in a short squeeze because of it is a "pump and dump"?  

Stop talking like there's actually a market here.  There's NOT and that should be wildly obvious to everyone now.  When brokers lock out accounts for days (mine was completely locked Wed and Thurs), restrict trading actions that go against them (sorry, no more buying until we say so), and other unhanded, if not outright illegal, actions, when can we drop the charade that it's anything resembling a market?  Like I've said before....there is no market.  There is only the Fed, Treasury, Blackrock and Citadel and they're one little colluding group with one mission.  That's it.  To steal everything they can, as fast as they can.  They'll break their own rules any time it suits them if they're ever in danger of being on the losing side of a trade.  But they'll throw you under the prison for breaking any rules.  They are pirates and nothing more.  "Skull and Bones" ain't just for decoration.  It's their flag.  Note that Monday's GME high price, before the precipitous drop started was _322_.

----------


## Krugminator2

> Posts like these are when you expose yourself as nothing but a Wall St apologist.  Illegally shorting a company to the brink of bankruptcy is fine but catching them in a short squeeze because of it is a "pump and dump"?


1. I was illustrating the absurd by being absurd. I don't care if stocks squeeze or stocks dump. People should be able to trade their money however they see fit. I view the world in principles not like a progressive where it is the little guy vs the big guy.

2 There were likely no illegal actions by anyone on any part of this

3. Companies don't go bankrupt from shorting. Companies are not their stock. How is it possible to not know this?

4. It has never been easier (and it isn't close) for the retail investor. If you are retail investor you have MAJOR built in advantages over institutions.  The idea the little guy is screwed by Wall Street is wrong. Low commissions, tight spreads, free instant access to all relevant company information, low cost screeners, etc. You can get in and out of trades instantly instead of a few weeks for institutions.  And the last year in particular has been tech bubble easy.

Here is my message to you. Stop the made up nonsense. No one is conspiring against you. Money's out there laying on the ground.  If you don't pick it up I have no sympathy for you. It will never be easier than it is right now.

----------


## Invisible Man

> Posts like these are when you expose yourself as nothing but a Wall St apologist.  Illegally shorting a company to the brink of bankruptcy is fine but catching them in a short squeeze because of it is a "pump and dump"?



I like how you added in that qualifier "illegally." Is that what this comes down to? The fact that some politicians made up a law about it, so now it's "illegal"? You're a big law and order guy I take it?

That law is where the focus should be. Rather than complaining about somebody breaking it (and whether they actually did break it or not is beside the point as far as I'm concerned), we should be complaining about the politicians who made up the law in the first place. The politicians should stay out of the way and let buyers and sellers mutually and voluntarily agree to exchange stock shares for money, taking on risks that they accept based on a cost benefit analysis that's rooted in their own valuations of possible outcomes, which no bureaucrat could make for them.

Here are a couple articles about it for those who want to consider this from a libertarian point of view:
https://mises.org/library/short-sale...se-naked-power
https://mises.org/library/sec-short-sells-us-down-river

----------


## oyarde

Still over 90 ron zeplin bux this afternoon

----------


## osan

> Because all the new games are now downloaded, there is no more disc or for us 80's kids, cartridge  to buy.



SO you're saying GME hasn't evolved to net.based gaming?  Huh...  Well, that doesn't justify the attempt to wreck them with intent.  The market will do that in its good time.

----------


## osan

> You're just talking about short selling their stock right?


I've read only one article on the matter and it was very well put together.  That said, it is my only source of information on the issue.  My understanding is that the short sell tactic was aimed at driving GME out of business and, I'm assuming, raking in the $$ and possibly profits from the sale of the corporate assets, once they are dead and buried.  What made no sense about the whole thing was the article by the Melvin employee, encouraging the market to follow suit.  The raw stupidity of this can barely be overstated, the net result to date serving as proof of my assessment's validity.  That was some spectacular stupid.  I cannot imagine that that employee has retained his position at Melvin, or that he will ever again secure employment in that sector.  It will be interesting to see how "government" responds to this and whether said employee will face legal consequences for his sheer stupidity.




> Or was there something else that they did to "drive a valid enterprise into the toilet"?


It wasn't so much what they did, but why.  Besides, a key element to shorting is to NOT tell anyone else about it.  If you have good reason to believe a stock will take a hit, the smart move is to appropriate as much stock and sell at current market.  When it drops, you buy it all back and pocket the difference.  You don't go telling your friends about it, much less the whole world.  We see where that leads.  WSB may be a raft of dumbshits - or not, since I'm not really familiar with them - but they had a sense of propriety - perhaps even honor - and the Melvin article offended them enough to drive the price of GME through the roof.  How in this day and age can anyone be so clued out as to think they could get away with the scheme in question, broadcasting it to the world?

----------


## Krugminator2

> IMy understanding is that the short sell tactic was aimed at driving GME out of business and, I?



Number of non-fraudulent companies driven out of business in the history of the world by short sellers- ZERO. 




> Besides, a key element to shorting is to NOT tell anyone else about it.



Why? We have a First Amendment in a America. They can say whatever they want. Shorts have very good reason to publish research. Shorting is often prohibitively expense. There are fees to borrow the stock. There are loan fees that can run the hundreds of percent annually. So publishing research that the market will recognize overvaluation can act as a catalyst for the stock to drop.

----------


## Invisible Man

> My understanding is that the short sell tactic was aimed at driving GME out of business


I'm not anywhere close to knowledgeable enough about investing to give lessons to hedge fund managers. I'm sure they have tricks up their sleeves that are beyond me. But if GME is a profitable company that's viable in the long term, then how does that work? If some investors drive their share prices down by short selling them, then others will just be able to buy them at bargain prices. The price will reach a floor where it's so low that it attracts buyers faster than the short seller can keep up with if they want to keep short selling, and they'll end up having to buy back the shares anyway and either take whatever gains they could garner before it got to that point or cut their losses, or ride it out and lose even more money. On the other hand, if GME was not a profitable company that was viable for the long term, then it wouldn't be the short sellers that drove them out of business, but their own failings as judged by the whole market.

In any case, without knowing what was going on in the hedge fund manager's mind, it's hard for me to believe that they just wanted to bankrupt GME out of malice. Unless maybe they had some personal feelings about GME and its owners that had nothing to do with the profitability of the company and they let those personal prejudices drive their decision. And if that was the case, I would be in no position to take sides on a personal feud anyway. But I assume those kinds of investing decisions are usually made by hedge fund managers without such personal motives, and based instead on a dispassionate analysis of each stock. Most likely certain features of GME convinced this hedge fund manager that it was a stock to sell at its current price. Whether his analysis was smart or stupid is really beside the point ethically. That's the way the stock market works. Every stock is the price that it is right now because there are people equally on both sides putting their money where their mouth is, some who think it's a good price to sell it at and others who think its a good price to buy it at.

Capitalism is a system where winning companies come and go as a result of preferences that people communicate to the market by spending their own money based on their personal values. The world this takes place in is ever changing, and many of yesterday's winning companies will lose tomorrow. When those winners become losers there's no virtue in trying to prop them up out of charity, and no malice in trying to shift one's investments away from them and into the winners of today (whether done with success or failure). There's pain for those who own and work for and like to do business with the companies that fail. But on the whole, this ability of capitalism to adjust by casting them off is more good than bad.

----------


## dannno

$53.50

----------


## osan

> Number of non-fraudulent companies driven out of business in the history of the world by short sellers- ZERO.


GME is fraudulent?  Bold statement that could end you up on the wrong end of libel action.  On what do you base your assertion?

That aside, how does that lend just cause to drive them out of business, particularly without benefit of a trial pursuant to charges?  "Hey, Krugminator Inc. is fraudulent because I say so.  Come one everyone, let's drive them out of business via shorting action.  Yeah, that's the ticket."

If a company is fraudulent, and here "fraud" has a VERY specific _legal_ meaning, you go to a prosecutor with your evidence and see to it that they bring charges.  Otherwise, you either STFU and eat the bitter (sorry, but justice is not guaranteed), or engage in action that is at least as morally bereft as that against which you hold complaint.  This is called "rule of Law".  When we walk away from that, we walk into mayhem.  Do take a look around you.  If you have eyes to see, you will indeed witness mayhem in America, what with crazy-stupid people burning several of our cities, others allowing people to poo on the sidewalk, and so forth.  We as a gestalt have turned our backs to peaceable living among our neighbors, the divisions deepening by the hour.  My point is that your unsupported allegation of fraud feeds the flames.  You have damning evidence?  Show it.  Otherwise, you've got nothing, are advocating behavior (at least through implication) that is morally reprehensible at the least and possibly felonious, and embarrass yourself in the eyes of decent and intelligent people.




> Why? We have a First Amendment in a America. They can say whatever they want.


First Amendment rights is not the issue.  Sure they can, but why would they want to?  Open your yap and you invite the sort of response that is precisely what they got.  This is what would be colloquially labeled as "stupid".  "Hey everybody, we're looking to make a killing by shorting GME."  Dumber than a bag of hammers.




> Shorts have very good reason to publish research. Shorting is often prohibitively expense. There are fees to borrow the stock. There are loan fees that can run the hundreds of percent annually. So publishing research that the market will recognize overvaluation can act as a catalyst for the stock to drop.


All that is wholly beside the point, which apparently flew past you at supersonic velocity.  The result we all witness is the proof of my assertion.  Melvin advertised the always risky move of shorting and WSB said "oh no you _don't_".   _HERRO???_

----------


## Invisible Man

> GME is fraudulent?  Bold statement that could end you up on the wrong end of libel action.  On what do you base your assertion?


He didn't assert that they were fraudulent, or even imply that.

His point was that if they are not fraudulent, then they won't get driven out of business by short selling. Note that, as a matter of fact, the recent short selling of GME did not drive it out of business.

----------


## Invisible Man

> First Amendment rights is not the issue.  Sure they can, but why would they want to?  Open your yap and you invite the sort of response that is precisely what they got.  This is what would be colloquially labeled as "stupid".  "Hey everybody, we're looking to make a killing by shorting GME."  Dumber than a bag of hammers.
> 
> 
> 
> All that is wholly beside the point, which apparently flew past you at supersonic velocity.  The result we all witness is the proof of my assertion.  Melvin advertised the always risky move of shorting and WSB said "oh no you _don't_".   _HERRO???_


Melvin made a risky move and lost big. It's easier to call it stupid in hindsight than it was before anyone had the benefit of seeing what ended up happening. But the publication of articles explaining why someone short sold it and trying to convince others that this is a company on the way to bankruptcy, such that its shares should be sold and not bought at its current price, is not self-evidently stupid. If your article succeeds in convincing others to sell more than buy, then you will benefit from the resulting drop in the share price.

----------


## Krugminator2

> GME is fraudulent?  Bold statement that could end you up on the wrong end of libel action.


I never remotely implied GME is fraudulent.

Here is a an example of a fraudulent company that went into bankruptcy because of  research from a  short seller. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Forest_Corporation

Note it is the research that drives a fraud into bankruptcy not the falling stock price. Companies are not their stock.

----------


## Invisible Man

> Note it is the research that drives a fraud into bankruptcy not the falling stock price. Companies are not their stock.


Yeah, I was wondering about that. I didn't get the connection of how short selling a stock could force the company to go bankrupt under any circumstances.

I thought that if a company kept making money enough to cover its debts, it wouldn't go bankrupt no matter what happened to its stock price. And if it didn't, then it would, no matter what happened to its stock price.

----------


## osan

> I'm not anywhere close to knowledgeable enough about investing to give lessons to hedge fund managers. I'm sure they have tricks up their sleeves that are beyond me. But if GME is a profitable company that's viable in the long term, then how does that work?


What, the shorting strategy?  Likely it doesn't, which is almost certainly why Melvin published that moronic clarion call to short GME, which apparently is not doing so well.  Melvin wanted the world to follow suit to they could make a free buck on human stupidity and greed.  Well, WSB took exception - and rightly so IMO - and yanked the rug out in a really big way.  Almost shockingly so, I would add.  I know nothing of WSB, but they must have some serious horsepower behind them in order to be able to jack a stock price from $40 to $320, however briefly.




> If some investors drive their share prices down by short selling them, then others will just be able to buy them at bargain prices.


You assume too much here, i.e., perfect knowledge.  If I _KNOW_ what is going on and I beat the shorters to the punch, then what you say is true and the shorters take it in the neck in a big way, which is yet another reason to hold your tongue about such a move.  This is sneaky $#@!, mind you, and because you're playing with one hand under the table, you have to keep everything on the downlow.  There could be any number of reasons one would not want to advertise this.  How about the target company doesn't want their prices driven down, so they begin to buy back treasury stock.  They might even borrow $$ to do it.  And there we see the other side of the coin - target repatriates a $#@! ton of stock to treasury, the price jacks way up, and they slowly resell so as not to cause a precipitous drop, make they payments for the loans, and pocket the difference.  This would be the mirror-complement to shorting.




> In any case, without knowing what was going on in the hedge fund manager's mind, it's hard for me to believe that they just wanted to bankrupt GME out of malice.


As I previously pointed out, I am working on limited knowledge of a single article that asserted the deliberate bankrupting of GME as one of the goals.  That said, you r point is wholly valid.  We don't know for certain what was in the minds of the manager.  We DO know, however, that they'd employed one stupid mofo who single-handedly damaged or even destroyed the company and, I must assume, the portfolios of a large number of people.  This is the brand of stupid that gets people shrieking for more government.  Someone at Melvin should probably go to prison for an extended stay.




> Unless maybe they had some personal feelings about GME and its owners that had nothing to do with the profitability of the company and they let those personal prejudices drive their decision. And if that was the case, I would be in no position to take sides on a personal feud anyway. But I assume those kinds of investing decisions are usually made by hedge fund managers without such personal motives, and based instead on a dispassionate analysis of each stock. Most likely certain features of GME convinced this hedge fund manager that it was a stock to sell at its current price. Whether his analysis was smart or stupid is really beside the point ethically. That's the way the stock market works. Every stock is the price that it is right now because there are people equally on both sides putting their money where their mouth is, some who think it's a good price to sell it at and others who think its a good price to buy it at.


The reasons are irrelevant to the outcome, which appears to be the wholesale destruction of Melvin.  The only relevant issue is their blabbering, which included a solicitation to the market to join the fray.  It blew up in their faces in a big way and IMO they deserve the fate that is hopefully coming to them.  Let the lesson be learned.  Bail them out and you will have effectively rewarded them for their stupidity and horrifically bad judgment, not to mention their moral turpitude, not to mention their having proven themselves unworthy of so much as a shred of human trust.

That all said, shorting is a strategy that requires one of three things: either super human analytical prowess, stupidly good luck, or inside information.  You are predicting the future, and in any case that is always risky business.  Shorting is always a gamble - inside information has proven wrong in more cases than we can count, so even that is no guarantee you won't lose your ass.  Hell, the target could be putting out false signals to encourage a drop in price pursuant to an objective of mass repatriation.  You just never know for sure.  So IMO shorting is stupid $#@! on its face.  It's a shortcut, the honesty and ethics of which are questionable on its best days, and it is the path of people whose morals I would assess as loose in the similarly best case.  That's just my opinion.  Righteous investors - REAL investors I will daresay - don't waste their time with this sort of penny ante bull$#@! move precisely because it is risky, morally ambiguous at best, and not a good way to advertise one's character to the world <-- that last being yet another reason not to telegraph one's intentions in such matters.  Then there is the good old notion of "fiduciary responsibility", which gets precious little nod these days.

I once lived in Denver and worked for Rhythms Net Connections as a subcontractor to Pricewaterhouse Coopers.  One day I was in a morning meeting and the PWC lead manager went on about how they knew the client was doomed and how we were going to take their last $30 million because we could.  I was disgusted by his attitude, which is perhaps why I am no longer wealthy.  They took the money and about five or seven months later Rhythms when tits-up.  My point here is that just because you _CAN_ do something, it does not follow that you _OUGHT_ to.  There was nothing illegal in what PWC did, but had they properly discharged what I saw as their fiduciary responsibility to the client, they would have advised them to not develop the computer system and to hold on to the cash because the business was too far ahead of its time and that they would need the cash to weather the lean time to come.  But no - they slaughtered the cow and laughed all the way to the bank.  Disgusting.  That was in 2000.

A contrariwise example: in '96 I was called into XYZ Securities.  "We need a SYSTEM!" was the panicked cry from the board.  OK, let me take care of this.  I asked for two weeks, only needed eight days, but waited for dramatic effect.  I interviewed nearly the entire company, gathered the data, did the analysis, and came back to the CEO with the recommendation NOT to proceed.  When asked why, I told him that at this time the cost will be around $35 million (it was a popular figure for such endeavors in those days) at a time where the technologies were in their infancy (CRM, ERT, etc.) and that regardless of the platform chosen, the vendor might be out of business in six months, suggesting they wait a few years until the weak were weeded out and the tech converged.  By the time I was done the CEO looked like he was about to let me come to his house and $#@! his teenage daughter.  I could have easily walked away with half a million dollars and conceivably a full million, had I played it - and it was tempting.  That was real money in those days.  I was not going to do that to those folks - people's lives were literally on the line and I was not going to be responsible for over 100 people being no longer able to feed their kids.

I sent the CEO an invoice for $14K.  I received a check for $35K.  When I called to let them know of the error, CEO told me that I probably just saved them from dissolution and that the check was his way of thanking me for being honest, recognizing the nature and extent of the ride on which I could have taken them.  I did the right thing because it was the right thing to do, and while the bigger money would have been nice, I have no regret there whatsoever.




> Capitalism is a system where winning companies come and go as a result of preferences that people communicate to the market by spending their own money based on their personal values.


Not quite.  Firstly, "capitalism" isn't a "system".  It is simply a tool.  What you probably mean is "the free market".  China is a capitalist nation, as was soviet Russia, their flailing denials notwithstanding.  They are not, however, free markets, though China is far closer to it than the Soviet Onion ever was, which is why China is preeminent and the Onion was long ago diced and sautéed into oblivion.




> The world this takes place in is ever changing, and many of yesterday's winning companies will lose tomorrow. When those winners become losers there's no virtue in trying to prop them up out of charity, and no malice in trying to shift one's investments away from them and into the winners of today (whether done with success or failure). There's pain for those who own and work for and like to do business with the companies that fail. But on the whole, this ability of capitalism to adjust by casting them off is more good than bad.


The ability of FREEDOM.  Capitalism is a hammer... a screwdriver.  Freedom is the purifier and the keeper of virtue.

----------


## Invisible Man

> As I previously pointed out, I am working on limited knowledge of a single article that asserted the deliberate bankrupting of GME as one of the goals.


Can you share that article?

I still don't get how bankrupting a company by short selling its stock is supposed to work under any circumstances.

----------


## osan

> Can you share that article?
> 
> I still don't get how bankrupting a company by short selling its stock is supposed to work under any circumstances.


Wish I could.  Wifey tossed it at me and it's now gone.  Sorry.  It was well written and pretty entertaining.  How accurate, well - let us just say I took its contents on some faith, so don't sue me if my understanding of the situation turns out to be flawed.

Was written by a woman, though.

----------


## osan

> I never remotely implied GME is fraudulent.
> 
> Here is a an example of a fraudulent company that went into bankruptcy because of  research from a  short seller. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Forest_Corporation
> 
> Note it is the research that drives a fraud into bankruptcy not the falling stock price. Companies are not their stock.


Your wording can be very easily taken as implying fraudulence.  Not saying you meant it that way, but will say that your choice of wording might have been a little narrower.

----------


## osan

> Melvin made a risky move and lost big. It's easier to call it stupid in hindsight than it was before anyone had the benefit of seeing what ended up happening. But the publication of articles explaining why someone short sold it and trying to convince others that this is a company on the way to bankruptcy, such that its shares should be sold and not bought at its current price, is not self-evidently stupid. If your article succeeds in convincing others to sell more than buy, then you will benefit from the resulting drop in the share price.


Au contraire, mon ami.  The move was blatantly stupid, _a priori_.  Given the nature of shorting and the fact that the article was a virtual invitation to come take a poke at Melvin, my assessment is a no-brainer.  And once again, ignore my self-flattery and look at the result.  Nothing can be taken for granted these days; not even the tempting assumption that all men are corrupt scumbags.  The folks at WSB apparently took great exception to the blatant corruption of Melvin and decided to act.  To that I say bravo.  The market has spoken and Melvin has been reduced to wrack.  They deserve it.  Some probably deserve some jail time, too, but I will settle for the ends of their careers.  Getting new jobs stands to be a tough row to hoe for those people.  I say good.  Let them feel the fright of what their choices might yield.  Hell, some of them have no business in that business.  That the innocent suffer alongside the guilty should serve as all the more the lesson of how not to behave oneself.  Naturally, it will not.

C'est la guerre.

----------


## osan

> He didn't assert that they were fraudulent, or even imply that.
> 
> His point was that if they are not fraudulent, then they won't get driven out of business by short selling. Note that, as a matter of fact, the recent short selling of GME did not drive it out of business.


He wrote:




> Number of non-fraudulent companies driven out of business in the history of the world by short sellers- ZERO.


Given the context of the exchange, the semantics of the statement is loosely-goosey at the very best and leans toward innuendo.  Not saying it was intentional, but his wording could have been a little tighter in that respect.

I would also call the veracity of that assertion into question.  I'd almost bet money I don't have that it is untrue.  I cut my teeth on Wall Street.  The $#@! I witnessed there was simply amazing and in some cases staggering.

----------


## Krugminator2

> Can you share that article?
> 
> I still don't get how bankrupting a company by short selling its stock is supposed to work under any circumstances.


You can't. It doesn't even make sense. It literally can't happen for a legitimate company that has a product and an actual business like Gamestop. The only thing it could potentially do is make it harder to raise capital if the stock price drops. If there were a theoretical world where you could short infinite shares and drive a stock to zero, the business would still not be bankrupt. It would have no iimmediate mpact on the company's balance sheet and its ability to service debt. 

He keeps talking about the hedge fund Melvin Capital. I can't find a research paper they published. I am pretty sure he is confusing them with Andrew Left at Citron Research, who is just an independent trader who makes his money short selling.

----------


## oyarde

Personally I dont consider shorting stocks any form of legitimate investing . Why I see no need for it to be illegal I also see no need for the individual stock markets to allow it . If one didnt I'd be more inclined to pick a few stocks off of it . If you believe a company will be profitable buy it if you do not think so just do not buy it.

----------


## GlennwaldSnowdenAssanged

> Personally I dont consider shorting stocks any form of legitimate investing . Why I see no need for it to be illegal I also see no need for the individual stock markets to allow it . If one didnt I'd be more inclined to pick a few stocks off of it . If you believe a company will be profitable buy it if you do not think so just do not buy it.


I find a stock I like and wait for it to go down to a price that I want to buy it.

----------


## devil21

2 days until the heads of Citadel, Melvin, Robinhood, and other pirates show up in front of Congress.

It has the potential to reveal some very interesting and somewhat "secret" information about how Wall Street really functions.  I sent some info to a few select Financial Services members, especially the gentleman from WV, that details how brokers route many trades to their own internal dark pools where the broker itself takes the other side of the trade and never sends the order to the exchange.  This practice creates fake securities (shares, options contracts, etc) that only exist as book entries on broker's books and do not represent real shares or contracts issued by the corporation or a designated market maker.  That, along with naked shorting (which appears to be illegal now) creates a massive higher number of claims on shares than actual shares.  THIS is why GME and other tickers were shut down, accounts locked, and buying restricted.  The smoke and mirrors of the "stock markets" would have collapsed as there were nowhere near as many real shares being traded on the exchanges to fulfill demand and the illegal shorters like Melvin would have been completely bankrupted practically overnight as the -real- supply and demand principle drove the price of -real- shares through the roof.  Melvin would never have been able to actually cover their shorts because the shares they need simply aren't available for repurchase except at infinite valuation!  If the squeeze had carried through it would have exposed the massive fraud and collapsed the entire system as the dominoes started falling.  If the hedgie can't cover, then their broker must, if broker can't then market maker must, etc etc.  What would happen if it became widely known that many of the "shares" people think they hold in various accounts turned out to be NON-EXISTENT and merely book entries internally managed by the brokerages?  The entire value of the markets exposed as smoke and mirrors?  It certainly explains how the "markets" could easily be manipulated daily by a handful of computers run by the Fed, Treasury (ESF), Citadel and Blackrock and how the market "values" could have ramped through the roof after the covid sell-off, defying all logic, even as the economy completely disconnected from "markets".  It was all ESF money handed to the Treasury by Congress, with wash trading back and forth by Citadel and Blackrock, to restore confidence and get people to feel safe enough to send their money back into the smoke and mirrors.  This is how they were able to literally contain the covid crash to exactly their favorite Skull and Bones (Mnuchin is SnB) date range.....2/23 to 3/22.  Monday 2/24 is when the crash started and Monday 3/23 was the bottom.

This link documents below how there are nowhere near as many actual available shares as have been "sold" and/or "shorted" for GME.  Returning shares to those with claims on them has led to a huge amount of Fail-To-Deliver, meaning the shares can't be obtained for return!  Because they don't exist on the exchanges and have been rehypothecated many times over!  We see this same scheme in metals markets also, with 100paper-to-1physical clams on an ounce of silver, for example.  I think it's safe to assume that this same fraud has been extended to all markets.  We even see it in the currency itself with fractional reserve "lending" and what happens during a bank run, when it becomes clear that obligations on the bank are not supported by actual assets of that bank.

Where are the shares?
https://wherearetheshares.com/

Don't get me started on Citadel's illegal front-running of orders that do get sent to the exchanges.  

Will any of this be brought up during the hearing?  

Or will it be a steady parade of "Oh Mr. Melvin, we are so sorry.  Please show us on this Hamptons map where the dirty commoners touched you?"

(sidenote:  It's been reported that PSLV has been quietly restricted from buying by some brokers.  Think about why that would be, in the context of this "fake shares" scam?  PSLV allows actual redemption for physical silver.  That's a big problem when there are a lot of fake shares on the books out there.  Potentially millions of redemption demands that far exceed the real shares issued by Sprott....)

----------


## dannno

> 2 days until the heads of Citadel, Melvin, Robinhood, and other pirates show up in front of Congress.
> 
> It has the potential to reveal some very interesting and somewhat "secret" information about how Wall Street really functions.  I sent some info to a few select Financial Services members, especially the gentleman from WV, that details how brokers route many trades to their own internal dark pools where the broker itself takes the other side of the trade and never sends the order to the exchange.  This practice creates fake securities (shares, options contracts, etc) that only exist as book entries on broker's books and do not represent real shares or contracts issued by the corporation or a designated market maker.  That, along with naked shorting (which appears to be illegal now) creates a massive higher number of claims on shares than actual shares.  THIS is why GME and other tickers were shut down, accounts locked, and buying restricted.  The smoke and mirrors of the "stock markets" would have collapsed as there were nowhere near as many real shares being traded on the exchanges to fulfill demand and the illegal shorters like Melvin would have been completely bankrupted practically overnight as the -real- supply and demand principle drove the price of -real- shares through the roof.  Melvin would never have been able to actually cover their shorts because the shares they need simply aren't available for repurchase except at infinite valuation!  If the squeeze had carried through it would have exposed the massive fraud and collapsed the entire system as the dominoes started falling.  If the hedgie can't cover, then their broker must, if broker can't then market maker must, etc etc.  What would happen if it became widely known that many of the "shares" people think they hold in various accounts turned out to be NON-EXISTENT and merely book entries internally managed by the brokerages?  The entire value of the markets exposed as smoke and mirrors?  It certainly explains how the "markets" could easily be manipulated daily by a handful of computers run by the Fed, Treasury (ESF), Citadel and Blackrock and how the market "values" could have ramped through the roof after the covid sell-off, defying all logic, even as the economy completely disconnected from "markets".  It was all ESF money handed to the Treasury by Congress, with wash trading back and forth by Citadel and Blackrock, to restore confidence and get people to feel safe enough to send their money back into the smoke and mirrors.  This is how they were able to literally contain the covid crash to exactly their favorite Skull and Bones (Mnuchin is SnB) date range.....2/23 to 3/22.  Monday 2/24 is when the crash started and Monday 3/23 was the bottom.
> 
> This link documents below how there are nowhere near as many actual available shares as have been "sold" and/or "shorted" for GME.  Returning shares to those with claims on them has led to a huge amount of Fail-To-Deliver, meaning the shares can't be obtained for return!  Because they don't exist on the exchanges and have been rehypothecated many times over!  We see this same scheme in metals markets also, with 100paper-to-1physical clams on an ounce of silver, for example.  I think it's safe to assume that this same fraud has been extended to all markets.  We even see it in the currency itself with fractional reserve "lending" and what happens during a bank run, when it becomes clear that obligations on the bank are not supported by actual assets of that bank.
> 
> Where are the shares?
> https://wherearetheshares.com/
> 
> ...


Are you really anti-Robinhood? You do realize that didn't have any choice in the matter when it came to halting trading of those stocks that morning, right?

I thought most of the stuff about "dark pools" and "fake securities" was fairly widely known, not by the general population, but by people who understand finance somewhat. I don't know if it's right, but it is currently legal. Crypto exchanges work similarly, which is why people with a decent amount of crypto tend to keep most of it in cold storage until they actually want to exchange it.

I'm ok with the feds targeting everybody else and questioning all that stuff, I guess, although the feds are on their side so I'm not sure what they will actually do. But not a fan of them targeting Robinhood.

----------


## devil21

> Are you really anti-Robinhood? You do realize that didn't have any choice in the matter when it came to halting trading of those stocks that morning, right?


I'm pretty anti-piracy, yes, and that's all Wall Street is.  You support thievery, dannno?




> I thought most of the stuff about "dark pools" and "fake securities" was fairly widely known, not by the general population, but by people who understand finance somewhat. I don't know if it's right, but it is currently legal.


It's not widely known to most people that believe they have a "retirement account" full of "stocks", no.  Is it known to those of us who take the time to pop the hood to understand how this giant scam works?  Yep.  I'm not convinced that creating fake shares is legal, seeing how naked shorting is illegal, which is the creation of fake shares to sell.  Do you have a link to share describing how the creation of fake shares is legal?  Someone asked earlier in the thread if I'm a law and order type.  I am, if different standards are applied to each counterparty in a contract!  The SEC will throw the little guy under the prison for breaking securities law.  Wall Street gets bonuses, promotions and bail-outs.  It is the worst of imbalances possible.




> Crypto exchanges work similarly, which is why people with a decent amount of crypto tend to keep most of it in cold storage until they actually want to exchange it.


I know they work similarly and that is one reason I know the crypto market is just another banker creation of smoke and mirrors and a money laundering operation.  It runs the exact same playbook as the stock markets.  Wash trading by a few whales, fake "shares" to raise prices (tether), futures markets, etc.  This thread isn't about cryptos though.




> I'm ok with the feds targeting everybody else and questioning all that stuff, I guess, although the feds are on their side so I'm not sure what they will actually do. But not a fan of them targeting Robinhood.


Robinhood is somewhat of a sacrificial lamb, yes, though the narrative around Robinhood's mission has obviously been exposed as a complete load of horse$#@!.  My own account with a different broker was locked for 2 FULL DAYS from doing ANYTHING (my other tiny positions were locked out not just the one little GME share in the account), at the direction of APEX Clearing, who followed the order from the Fed's subsidiary DTCC.  They didn't just turn off ability to buy any more GME.  Entire account was locked.  This is what people can expect when this whole thing crashes.  Locked out while the insiders liquidate and wipe their books clean of years of fraud.  Robinhood is just the sacrificial lamb since it was the most public of brokers that rigged the system against retail to save Wall Street's piracy operation.

One brokerage head, Thomas Peterffy of Interactive Brokers, admitted on CNBC that buying was restricted to protect the brokerages and the clearinghouse.  "We restricted to protect ourselves....uh to protect customers but most of all to protect the marketplace, to protect the clearinghouse."  It's on video here:
https://twitter.com/ohmytvconefive/s...85351496683522

What he's saying is that they shut down buying because if it continued, the dominoes would have started falling as the hedge fund collapses, then the brokerage collapses, then their clearinghouse collapses, etc.  There simply were too many claims on shares on the books than what actually exists.  The rampant fraud would have been exposed.  THE BROKERAGES, CLEARINGHOUSES, DTCC, FED ALL KNOW THIS.

----------


## dannno

> I'm pretty anti-piracy, yes, and that's all Wall Street is.  You support thievery, dannno?


Robinhood is not Wall St., they are a brokerage firm that allows people to invest in the stock market. The problem with Wall St. is the Federal Reserve, which lends to large investment institutions at artificially low rates so that they can manipulate the markets using, at best, questionably fraudulent methods. Robinhood is not the enemy..





> It's not widely known to most people that believe they have a "retirement account" full of "stocks", no.  Is it known to those of us who take the time to pop the hood to understand how this giant scam works?  Yep.  I'm not convinced that creating fake shares is legal, seeing how naked shorting is illegal, which is the creation of fake shares to sell.  Do you have a link to share describing how the creation of fake shares is legal?  Someone asked earlier in the thread if I'm a law and order type.  I am, if different standards are applied to each counterparty in a contract!  The SEC will throw the little guy under the prison for breaking securities law.  Wall Street gets bonuses, promotions and bail-outs.  It is the worst of imbalances possible.


You are right, most people with retirement accounts have no idea. I could see how it could be potentially fraudulent, however I can also see how if done correctly and transparently it helps make people making smaller market transactions be able to do so more cheaply and efficiently. In other words, Robinhood doesn't have to make 1,000 trades of ten shares of a specific company, they can buy 10,000 shares at once and let the people trade at will.





> Robinhood is somewhat of a sacrificial lamb, yes, though the narrative around Robinhood's mission has obviously been exposed as a complete load of horse$#@!.  My own account with a different broker was locked for 2 FULL DAYS from doing ANYTHING (my other tiny positions were locked out not just the one little GME share in the account), at the direction of APEX Clearing, who followed the order from the Fed's subsidiary DTCC.  They didn't just turn off ability to buy any more GME.  Entire account was locked.  This is what people can expect when this whole thing crashes.  Locked out while the insiders liquidate and wipe their books clean of years of fraud.  Robinhood is just the sacrificial lamb since it was the most public of brokers that rigged the system against retail to save Wall Street's piracy operation.


Robinhood didn't rig anything, it was the clearing house like you said. They didn't give them any choice. I don't know why your brokerage locked all accounts, my Robinhood account was fine, I could trade anything, just couldn't buy GME and a few other volatile stocks.

----------


## devil21

> Robinhood is not Wall St., they are a brokerage firm that allows people to invest in the stock market. The problem with Wall St. is the Federal Reserve, which lends to large investment institutions at artificially low rates so that they can manipulate the markets using, at best, questionably fraudulent methods. Robinhood is not the enemy..


About half of Robinhood's revenue comes from Citadel in exchange for their order flow.  ZH has confirmed this.  This makes Robinhood little more than a front for Citadel, who is a front for the DTC, who is a front for the Fed.  You can't isolate one in the chain (especially the most front facing of the collusive group) and say they are not part of Wall Street and therefore blameless.  They are the "Joe Biden" to the "City of the London" (Biden->CFR->RIIA->City of London).  Would you say the same about Joe as you do about Robinhood?  Doubt it. 




> You are right, most people with retirement accounts have no idea. I could see how it could be potentially fraudulent, however I can also see how if done correctly and transparently it helps make people making smaller market transactions be able to do so more cheaply and efficiently. In other words, Robinhood doesn't have to make 1,000 trades of ten shares of a specific company, they can buy 10,000 shares at once and let the people trade at will.


That's the issue here though.  It appears they (and other brokers) are not buying 10,000 shares for internal trading. They are buying 1,000 but "selling" 10,000 (keeping an unknown amount of transactions in their internal dark pools, where the existence of 10,000 shares doesn't matter and is only a book entry, iow fractional reserve equity markets) then screaming OH $#@! SHUT IT DOWN when the 1,000, not the 10,000 sold, are actually available for repurchase by the shorter.  There's still 10,000 claims on shares though.  This is exactly what I, and many others, think happened and caused the coordinated buying shutdown.  




> Robinhood didn't rig anything, it was the clearing house like you said. They didn't give them any choice. I don't know why your brokerage locked all accounts, my Robinhood account was fine, I could trade anything, just couldn't buy GME and a few other volatile stocks.


Again, Robinhood is clearly beholden to whoever provides the bulk of its earnings and if/when Robinhood went down, the next up the chain is responsible for paying out the claims that Robinhood can not.  They were caught by their own long-running fraud and decided to close the doors when it became clear that the chain was in danger of losing large amounts of cash, if not collapsing entirely.  If we lose everything, that's a-ok though.

----------


## Invisible Man

> II'm not convinced that creating fake shares is legal, seeing how naked shorting is illegal, which is the creation of fake shares to sell.



There you go again with this legal vs. illegal stuff.

If you have to defer to manmade laws as the arbiter of right and wrong because you're not able to explain why something's wrong on the basis of actual justice, then all that does is undermine the legitimacy of those manmade laws.

We don't need the government acting like we're too stupid to decide for ourselves what exchanges with one another are right for us and interfering to stop us from doing so.

----------


## devil21

> There you go again with this legal vs. illegal stuff.
> 
> If you have to defer to manmade laws as the arbiter of right and wrong because you're not able to explain why something's wrong on the basis of actual justice, then all that does is undermine the legitimacy of those manmade laws.


Oh, are you a mason?  I've read that masonic argument that (subjective) "actual justice" is the goal, regardless of whether it comports with existing law or not.  Machiavellian 'End Justifies The Means'.  If you just "know" someone is guilty, throw them in prison for justice, even if the evidence and/or applicable law doesn't support it.  Because you just know they did it.  

For me, justice is an equal application of standards of conduct against two parties that agree to interact, not changing the established rules of the game in the middle of the game, especially when the one that holds the power in the game is in danger of losing the game.  If the little guy can lose everything, so then should the big guy.  This is known as "live by the sword, die by the sword."  That is justice and maintains natural balance.  Increasing imbalances always eventually lead to ever more violent reversions back to balance.  This GME episode is a microcosm example of that in action.  There's a lot more people now that see how the system is rigged against them from all angles.




> We don't need the government acting like we're too stupid to decide for ourselves what exchanges with one another are right for us and interfering to stop us from doing so.


I'm not an anarchist so I don't believe there is no role for government.  Good government (which we do not have with the current crop of criminals, hence the increasing imbalance) does have a role in ensuring imbalances do not become so large as to guarantee an eventual violent reversion back to balance.

----------


## Invisible Man

> Oh, are you a mason?  I've read that masonic argument that (subjective) "actual justice" is the goal, regardless of whether it comports with existing law or not.


No, I'm not a Mason, and I don't approve of Free Masonry. And "actual justice" since it's actual, is by definition not subjective. It is the Creator's law.

"Actual justice" that is not subject to the make-believe laws that change with the whims of rulers is a classic libertarian concept. In fact, it is one of the hallmarks of libertarianism. I understand it in a Christian light. Augustine famously claimed that an unjust law is no law at all. But the idea has been known in other terms, especially natural law. The Declaration of Independence acknowledges it when it refers to the Law of Nature and Nature's God, and unalienable rights endowed to people by the Creator. Lysander Spooner explained the concept very eloquently in the opening paragraphs of his Letter to Grover Cleveland. Lord Acton also argued in favor of natural law over governmental laws. Murray Rothbard extolled natural law repeatedly in his works.

In fact, when justice is subjugated to any old law that human politicians can just make up, it's then that it is subjective.

----------


## devil21

> No, I'm not a Mason, and I don't approve of Free Masonry. And "actual justice" since it's actual, is by definition not subjective. It is the Creator's law.
> 
> "Actual justice" that is not subject to the make-believe laws that change with the whims of rulers is a classic libertarian concept. In fact, it is one of the hallmarks of libertarianism. I understand it in a Christian light. Augustine famously claimed that an unjust law is no law at all. But the idea has been known in other terms, especially natural law. The Declaration of Independence acknowledges it when it refers to the Law of Nature and Nature's God, and unalienable rights endowed to people by the Creator. Lysander Spooner explained the concept very eloquently in the opening paragraphs of his Letter to Grover Cleveland. Lord Acton also argued in favor of natural law over governmental laws. Murray Rothbard extolled natural law repeatedly in his works.
> 
> In fact, when justice is subjugated to any old law that human politicians can just make up, it's then that it is subjective.


Is there no room for governmental law to reflect natural law?  That is the point I'm trying to make.  Nature enjoys balance and when some aspect becomes increasingly out of balance, it inevitably is placed back into balance, and usually by increasingly more violent means.  See: earthquakes and volcanoes, for example.  Laws among men can be applied that reflect this need for balance, thus avoiding the violent reversions.  I don't think natural law and man's law must be mutually exclusive.  

In the context of this GME topic, allowing TBTF to actually fail is how balance can start to be restored.  Everything economic has become so far out of balance that the reversion will be increasingly violent.

(eta: if Rep. Hill and Sherman's comments I'm watching right now on CNBC are any indication, it'll be a whitewash of the collusive behavior of all Wall Street parties to prevent them from taking a loss.  Focusing on Robinhood's capitalization and "gamification" of trading, etc.  Wall Street owns Congress so it's no surprise.)

----------


## Invisible Man

> Is there no room for governmental law to reflect natural law?


Sure it can, and it often does. When it does, then the government law is redundant. When it doesn't, it's unjust.

But in either case, if there's a case to be made against the practices you mentioned on the basis of justice, then you should be able to do that, without needing to defer to laws that corrupt politicians made up as though they decided the matter.

----------


## devil21

> Sure it can, and it often does. When it does, then the government law is redundant. When it doesn't, it's unjust.
> 
> But in either case, if there's a case to be made against the practices you mentioned on the basis of justice, then you should be able to do that, without needing to defer to laws that corrupt politicians made up as though they decided the matter.


I don't think we're as far apart on this as you may think.  

The result invariably ends up being ever more laws that not only maintain the imbalance but actually increase it!  "How were the dirty commoners able to threaten our pirate looting operation under our British admiralty war flag?  We must act immediately!"

----------


## devil21

I'll front run the lies from the pirates tomorrow and post Thomas Peterffy of Interactive Brokers admitting on CNBC that the coordinated lockdowns of accounts and suspension of buying was to protect the brokerages and the clearinghouses.

"We restricted to protect ourselves....uh to protect customers, but most of all to protect the marketplace, to protect the clearinghouse."  It's on video here:
https://twitter.com/ohmytvconefive/s...85351496683522

What he doesn't specify is that retail traders are not the "customers".  Retail traders are their product, not their customers.

What he's saying is that they shut down buying because if it continued, the dominoes would have started falling as the hedge fund collapses, then the brokerage collapses, then their clearinghouse collapses, etc, because the price of GME would keep rising and the short could never be covered.  There already were way too many claims on shares on the books, with more coming in by the moment, than what actually exists.  They've allowed this internal fraud for many years but were about to get caught on it.  The rampant fraud would have been exposed as the house of smoke and mirrors started collapsing.  THE BROKERAGES, CLEARINGHOUSES, DTCC, TREASURY, FED ALL KNOW THAT THIS FRAUD IS BUSINESS AS USUAL.  It is part and parcel of the pirate looting operation.

----------


## tommyrp12



----------


## devil21

I congratulate Congress on the masterful job they did during the hearing today.  At a time when there is a major effort to convince people, especially doe-eyed younger people, that the government is their friend and wants to help them and fix problems and provide for them, Congress today did a masterful job of displaying to that large swath of younger people that the government is not only not their friend but is, in fact, the friend of the corporation and the banks.  Well done Rep Waters and the rest of your committee!  Perhaps some people may wonder why, for example, Rep. Loudermilk spent his 5 minutes telling Wall Street how amazing and truthful they are, and go see on opensecrets.org that Loudermilk's top 3 campaign donor sectors are Insurance, Banks and Investment Firms.  Even the self proclaimed Woman of the People, Ocasio-Cortez, who many young people eagerly awaited her questioning, asked the exact same questions as the rest of the Committee.  How many times did they need to hear about Citadel's front-running?  People watched Congress ask question after question that were, by and large, irrelevant to what people wanted answers about.  People watched as the few reasonably tough questions that were asked were entirely avoided by Wall Street with little to no resistance.  The younger people have received a valuable lesson during this whole thing.  No, the government is not your friend.  No, Wall Street does not play by their own rules and they are not interested in anything except their own accumulation of the people's wealth.  No, no one is going to help you, no one is going to provide for you unless it benefits the provider much more greatly than the recipient, and the pledges of working for the people's benefit is a giant lie they tell you while they steal everything possible from you.

Well done, Congress.  Well done indeed.  Your hearing today did more to shed light on truth more than anything we could have done.

----------


## dannno

> 


The best part was when one of the Republicans finally explained to everybody that the reason they were not able to allow trading of the shares was due to existing government regulations with regards to capital requirements. 




> I congratulate Congress on the masterful job they did during the hearing today.  At a time when there is a major effort to convince people, especially doe-eyed younger people, that the government is their friend and wants to help them and fix problems and provide for them, Congress today did a masterful job of displaying to that large swath of younger people that the government is not only not their friend but is, in fact, the friend of the corporation and the banks.  Well done Rep Waters and the rest of your committee!  Perhaps some people may wonder why, for example, Rep. Loudermilk spent his 5 minutes telling Wall Street how amazing and truthful they are, and go see on opensecrets.org that Loudermilk's top 3 campaign donor sectors are Insurance, Banks and Investment Firms.  Even the self proclaimed Woman of the People, Ocasio-Cortez, who many young people eagerly awaited her questioning, asked the exact same questions as the rest of the Committee.  How many times did they need to hear about Citadel's front-running?  People watched Congress ask question after question that were, by and large, irrelevant to what people wanted answers about.  People watched as the few reasonably tough questions that were asked were entirely avoided by Wall Street with little to no resistance.  The younger people have received a valuable lesson during this whole thing.  No, the government is not your friend.  No, Wall Street does not play by their own rules and they are not interested in anything except their own accumulation of the people's wealth.  No, no one is going to help you, no one is going to provide for you unless it benefits the provider much more greatly than the recipient, and the pledges of working for the people's benefit is a giant lie they tell you while they steal everything possible from you.
> 
> Well done, Congress.  Well done indeed.  Your hearing today did more to shed light on truth more than anything we could have done.

----------


## Krugminator2

> The best part was when one of the Republicans finally explained to everybody that the reason they were not able to allow trading of the shares was due to existing government regulations with regards to capital requirements.


Capital requirements (and a few pollution rules) are pretty much the only regulation in any industry that makes sense. 

It is really hard for depositors to go bust with capital requirements. It is a very simple regulation that works. Lehman Brothers doesn't fail with adequate capital requirements. You can eliminate all the other BS rules that prevent start up firms just by focusing on capital requirements.

----------


## Krugminator2

Wall Street has never been more fair for the average trader than today. Brokerage costs are low. High frequency trading has dramatically reduced the costs for small traders. Twitter, free websites like Finviz and Yahoo Finance, and the SEC have democratized access to information. 

Wall Street isn't screwing the little guy. Wall Street allow participation in business and makes it so a person with a little starting capital the ability to make millions and it has never been easier.

I couldn't even imagine how hard it was 30 years ago. No one is screwing you. 

https://mobile.twitter.com/markminer...48855015890954

----------


## oyarde

> Wall Street has never been more fair for the average trader than today. Brokerage costs are low. High frequency trading has dramatically reduced the costs for small traders. Twitter, free websites like Finviz and Yahoo Finance, and the SEC have democratized access to information. 
> 
> Wall Street isn't screwing the little guy. Wall Street allow participation in business and makes it so a person with a little starting capital the ability to make millions and it has never been easier.
> 
> I couldn't even imagine how hard it was 30 years ago. No one is screwing you. 
> 
> https://mobile.twitter.com/markminer...48855015890954


Thirty or 40 years ago if I wanted to sell some stock I'd have to open an account at a broker , provide an original birth certificate and pay them 50.00 cash to unload 2k in stocks.

----------


## dannno

> Thirty or 40 years ago if I wanted to sell some stock I'd have to open an account at a broker , provide an original birth certificate and pay them 50.00 cash to unload 2k in stocks.


Ya, when I first started trading in high school it was really frustrating.. Didn't have a ton of cash, so the only way to diversify in stocks without paying ridiculous trading fees was to buy into a fund. Also very expensive to day trade without margin or lots of cash.. 

Now pretty much anybody can day trade for free, or diversify as much as they want. They can even buy fractional shares, so if a stock price is very expensive you can buy as much of a single share as you want. 

There is a cost - which is that, as explained in the hearing, the brokerages that charge fees tend to get first crack and thus get a slightly better price on the stock. The Democrats were complaining and saying that it isn't fair.. which is BS.. if you are an average investor trading smaller amounts, you save a lot more by buying the share at a slightly higher price than you would if you were paying the trading fees.

----------


## devil21

> Wall Street has never been more fair for the average trader than today. Brokerage costs are low. High frequency trading has dramatically reduced the costs for small traders. Twitter, free websites like Finviz and Yahoo Finance, and the SEC have democratized access to information. 
> 
> Wall Street isn't screwing the little guy. Wall Street allow participation in business and makes it so a person with a little starting capital the ability to make millions and it has never been easier.
> 
> I couldn't even imagine how hard it was 30 years ago. No one is screwing you. 
> 
> https://mobile.twitter.com/markminer...48855015890954






Yes, so fair that trading is halted or restricted in only one direction on tickers when one side of the trade is in danger of losing large naked bets.  What's more fair than that?  I could easily dissect your post but why bother?  Everything that has been made easier has only made it easier for the little guy to lose more and lose quicker.  This is a casino, sir.





> Now pretty much anybody can day trade for free, or diversify as much as they want. They can even buy fractional shares, so if a stock price is very expensive you can buy as much of a single share as you want.


Arrrrgggh, Captain, I sees some very small dingys port side we haven't pillaged yet!  Hard to port and prepare to board!

----------


## Working Poor

> Yes, so fair that trading is halted or restricted in only one direction on tickers when one side of the trade is in danger of losing large naked bets.  What's more fair than that?  I could easily dissect your post but why bother?  Everything that has been made easier has only made it easier for the little guy to lose more and lose quicker.  This is a casino, sir.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Arrrrgggh, Captain, I sees some very small dingys port side we haven't pillaged yet!  Hard to port and prepare to board!


LOL arrrggg indeed.....

----------


## devil21

GME shooting up again.  I'm gonna make a bold prediction that they're about to use GME to start a major correction.  I've been wrong before so no, this isn't advice.


"News" item released by banker controlled Reuters yesterday (2-23...322 reversed) and pushed across all major media today:

https://www.reuters.com/news/picture...l-idUSRTX9PYH4






> Reuters / Tuesday, February 23, 2021
> Baarack the sheep is seen before his thick wool was shorn in Lancefield, Victoria, Australia February 5, 2021. The wild and ailing sheep found in a forest in Australia, named Baarack by rescuers, has yielded a fleece nearly half the weight of an adult kangaroo after being shorn for the first time in many a year. Edgar's Mission Inc/Handout via REUTERS


A signal maybe?  An article today pushed out to major media about shearing a sheep named Baarack (who the market bubble started under) of 75-78 pounds of wool...

----------


## devil21

GME:  $335 high so far today.  Wait till stimulus money hits...

eta:  347 to 183 in minutes then back up to 255 minutes later.  Several million shares dumped in a few minutes sounds totally legit and definitely not more naked shorting to crash the price, trigger stop losses and buy back at the low.

----------


## Krugminator2

> Several million shares dumped in a few minutes sounds totally legit and definitely not more naked shorting to crash the price, trigger stop losses and buy back at the low.


The world isn't conspiring against you. 

There is no naked shorting in it right now. The stock is easy to borrow at every broker I have. Don't even need to pay for a locate. Overnight lending fee is almost as low as an S&P 500 stock.  It turns out when stocks go from 50 to 360 in a short time they have aggressive selloffs. Hope that helps.

----------


## Invisible Man

> GME:  $335 high so far today.  Wait till stimulus money hits...
> 
> eta:  347 to 183 in minutes then back up to 255 minutes later.  Several million shares dumped in a few minutes sounds totally legit and definitely not more naked shorting to crash the price, trigger stop losses and buy back at the low.





> The world isn't conspiring against you. 
> 
> There is no naked shorting in it right now. The stock is easy to borrow at every broker I have. Don't even need to pay for a locate. Overnight lending fee is almost as low as an S&P 500 stock.  It turns out when stocks go from 50 to 360 in a short time they have aggressive selloffs. Hope that helps.



And what if there was naked shorting right now with hopes of crashing prices and then buying back at the low anyway?

If people were attempting that, whether successfully or not, would that be a problem?

----------


## devil21

> The world isn't conspiring against you.


Nope not the world, just pirates on Wall St whose job is to engage in legalized theft under false pretenses day-after-day. 




> There is no naked shorting in it right now. The stock is easy to borrow at every broker I have. Don't even need to pay for a locate. Overnight lending fee is almost as low as an S&P 500 stock.  It turns out when stocks go from 50 to 360 in a short time they have aggressive selloffs. Hope that helps.


Yeah you're probably right that it wasn't naked shorting, just amassing large borrowed shares for a giant coordinated dump.  That was a bit of a knee-jerk assertion on my part since naked shorting is what started this whole thing in the first place.  When it comes to professional criminals, it's hard not to assume they're again engaging in criminality.

----------


## oyarde

> No, I'm not a Mason, and I don't approve of Free Masonry. And "actual justice" since it's actual, is by definition not subjective. It is the Creator's law.
> 
> "Actual justice" that is not subject to the make-believe laws that change with the whims of rulers is a classic libertarian concept. In fact, it is one of the hallmarks of libertarianism. I understand it in a Christian light. Augustine famously claimed that an unjust law is no law at all. But the idea has been known in other terms, especially natural law. The Declaration of Independence acknowledges it when it refers to the Law of Nature and Nature's God, and unalienable rights endowed to people by the Creator. Lysander Spooner explained the concept very eloquently in the opening paragraphs of his Letter to Grover Cleveland. Lord Acton also argued in favor of natural law over governmental laws. Murray Rothbard extolled natural law repeatedly in his works.
> 
> In fact, when justice is subjugated to any old law that human politicians can just make up, it's then that it is subjective.


What is it about that you dont approve of free masonry ?

----------


## Invisible Man

> What is it about that you dont approve of free masonry ?


My first reason is its theological teachings. Second is that it's a secret society that seems to have a pretty clear interest in installing its members in political positions.

----------


## oyarde

> My first reason is its theological teachings. Second is that it's a secret society that seems to have a pretty clear interest in installing its members in political positions.


i really didnt know they have theological teachings , wasnt in my world religion class sophmore year.

----------


## devil21

The GME options chain at 4pm market close today demonstrates exactly that Citadel, other market makers and brokers collude and manipulate stock prices.  The price point that GME closed at was the exact price point that kept the most calls and puts out-of-the-money.  They landed the price exactly where it needed to be, right at 200.27.  Under 200 would have triggered a boatload of puts to be in-the-money.  Above 210 would have triggered a boatload of calls.  So it closed at 200.27.  Sorry, you lose.  Try again next week?  They literally make stocks close exactly where they want to screw the most options trades, while knowing the exact positions of all traders due to order flow front-running and interconnection.  

I've watched the GME options chains since this all started and it's clockwork every week that the Friday closing price just so happens to land exactly where it screws the most options holders.  Always, without fail.  Inexplicable moves up and down in price always precede this.  See today's GME ticker for evidence.  190 launched to 215 on no news then settled at 200.27.  That was Citadel.  There was also a ridiculous volume number displayed on the chart at the same time of literally 200 million shares moving.  I watched it happen.  Then the volume figure locked up and the huge number disappeared without a trace.  On a stock with 70 million shares total, CNBC's ticker showed 200 million volume!  

This is intentional because Citadel's hedge fund (and other entities also) takes the other side of any trades made through the market making arm (in their internal dark pools) that Citadel thinks (knows?) it can profit from by manipulation, instead of routing the trade to the exchange and fully allowing the market to price the stock.  This is also evidence of why the GME buy side was shut down in January.  They didn't have their algos programmed to control GME for that week under the heavy buying pressure and the closing price on that Friday would have blown up hedge funds caught on the wrong side of the short and the options.  The squeeze would have been triggered and Wall St would have lost massive amounts of money.  Can't have that, can we?  So they shut down the buy side to prevent it.

Pirates stealing under false pretenses is fraud.

----------


## devil21

Another US House hearing to be held on 5/6.  I don't anticipate any major news coming from it but the attendees list is much more meat n potatoes than previous.  DTCC, FINRA and SEC Chair.  If I were a daytrader, I could see a big down day on markets to demonstrate what happens when the pirate looting operation is threatened...

decent writeup
https://wallstreetonparade.com/2021/...tcc-and-finra/

----------


## Krugminator2

> Another US House hearing to be held on 5/6.  I don't anticipate any major news coming from it but the attendees list is much more meat n potatoes than previous.  DTCC, FINRA and SEC Chair.  If I were a daytrader, I could see a big down day on markets to demonstrate what happens when the pirate looting operation is threatened...
> 
> decent writeup
> https://wallstreetonparade.com/2021/...tcc-and-finra/



Gamestop is on right at a major inflection point. If it holds below 155 or so think below 100 is in the cards.    Wasn't aware of that Congress is talking about this tomorrow. Will be interesting to see if that moves the stock.

----------


## devil21

> Gamestop is on right at a major inflection point. If it holds below 155 or so think below 100 is in the cards.    Wasn't aware of that Congress is talking about this tomorrow. Will be interesting to see if that moves the stock.


(On GME: based on options chain as of right now, my educated guess of Friday closing price is 160.XX....but the pattern is still holding regarding my March post of closing price always landing where it ultimately keeps the most options worthless)


Media has been pretty quiet about the hearings for some reason.  It's at 12pm ET.  Link here, with yt stream embedded:  https://financialservices.house.gov/...EventID=407748

Interestingly, the link includes some bullet points on what appears to be proposed legislation in the works:
Legislation

    H.R. ____, the "Capital Markets Engagement and Transparency Act of 2021."

    H.R. ____, to amend the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 to limit the exemption provided for family offices from the definition of an investment adviser to those family offices with less than $750,000,000 in assets under management and for other purposes.

    H.R. ____, to require the Securities and Exchange Commission to carry out a study on the impact of the gamification of online trading platforms, and for other purposes.

    H.R. ____, to amend the Securities Act of 1934 to establish certain requirements with respect to retail investor options trading, and for other purposes.

    H.R. ____, to amend the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 to prohibit payment for order flow.

    H.R. ____, to amend the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 to prohibit trading ahead by market makers, and for other purposes.

----------


## Krugminator2

It looks like a long slow descent down might have started today.

----------


## devil21

> It looks like a long slow descent down might have started today.


Judging by overall appearances, that could apply to this whole shebang, not just GME...

----------


## Krugminator2

> It looks like a long slow descent down might have started today.


Not such a good trade. 

I think if tomorrow closes red then that will start the decline. If not then maybe another month or two before it starts to break down.

----------


## devil21

> Not such a good trade. 
> 
> I think if tomorrow closes red then that will start the decline. If not then maybe another month or two before it starts to break down.


Fwiw, there's still a huge contingent of GME holders who conclude (based on reasonable research) that the big squeeze is still imminent.  It is curious how a new set of SHTF rules for clearinghouses took effect today, with much more closely monitored systemic risk activity.  Overhauls to index futures options monitoring also, designed to project likely payouts on SPX, for example, in the instance of a major, sudden price move.  Those sorts of rule overhauls, in combination, _could_ indicate an anticipated scenario where GME skyrockets in a squeeze but indexes simultaneously crash as liquidations occur to cover GME short margin calls.  

I'm watching to see if the options chain tomorrow shows that the likely friday closing price range will result in a lot of options settling ITM.  If so, it could get very, very interesting very quickly.

(eta:  I assume moving the markets over to a blockchain based system is in the cards at some point.  Successfully doing that would require flushing the entire system of the millions or, market-wide, billions of fake shares of companies floating around, due to naked shorts and accounting fraud.  IMO, the only question is _when_ and _how_ does that happen.)

----------


## Krugminator2

> Fwiw, there's still a huge contingent of GME holders who conclude (based on reasonable research) that the big squeeze is still imminent.  It is curious how a new set of SHTF rules for clearinghouses took effect today, with much more closely monitored systemic risk activity.  Overhauls to index futures options monitoring also, designed to project likely payouts on SPX, for example, in the instance of a major, sudden price move.  Those sorts of rule overhauls, in combination, _could_ indicate an anticipated scenario where GME skyrockets in a squeeze but indexes simultaneously crash as liquidations occur to cover GME short margin calls.  
> 
> I'm watching to see if the options chain tomorrow shows that the likely friday closing price range will result in a lot of options settling ITM.  If so, it could get very, very interesting very quickly.



The ideal would be a big gap up a pull back and rally to blow out shorts and then 100 dollar move down in the afternoon.

----------


## devil21

Looks like Wall St's media sycophants are trying to build this narrative, as predicted.  Painting retail as some sort of organized collusion operation.  A ridiculous notion on its' face but truly despicable when it's obvious to anyone who has been paying attention who and where the organized collusion actually is.  The rest of June through July looks mighty shaky for markets and dates past that.  As we know, Wall St/bankers *never* accept blame for crashes.  It's always a scapegoat and/or the little guy that it is pinned on.  It's never the innocent pirates setting it all in motion while raking in the booty.  It's always _your_ fault....somehow.  And their tv stations will be happy to tell you why.





> GME shooting up again.  I'm gonna make a bold prediction that they're about to use GME to start a major correction.  I've been wrong before so no, this isn't advice.
> 
> 
> "News" item released by banker controlled Reuters yesterday (2-23...322 reversed) and pushed across all major media today:
> 
> https://www.reuters.com/news/picture...l-idUSRTX9PYH4
> 
> 
> 
> ...

----------


## devil21

A very good write-up on the GME shorting scam tactics here, but those tactics described can be extrapolated to the entire market to various extents:

https://prospect.org/power/how-the-g...hustle-worked/

One big house of smoke and mirrors designed to transfer regular investor's currency (retail traders, 401k, IRAs, etc) into Wall St's pockets.  A grand pirate looting operation.

----------


## Invisible Man

> One big house of smoke and mirrors designed to transfer regular investor's currency (retail traders, 401k, IRAs, etc) into Wall St's pockets.  A grand pirate looting operation.


Wall Street is not a person or a corporation. It's an abstraction. A boogey man people invoke as a proxy for every imaginary oligarch who puts profits before all else. It has no pockets. But it's named after the physical street where a couple large stock exchanges are where everybody, including regular investors, can short sell stocks.

----------


## Brian4Liberty

> A very good write-up on the GME shorting scam tactics here, but those tactics described can be extrapolated to the entire market to various extents:
> 
> https://prospect.org/power/how-the-g...hustle-worked/
> 
> One big house of smoke and mirrors designed to transfer regular investor's currency (retail traders, 401k, IRAs, etc) into Wall St's pockets.  A grand pirate looting operation.


It’s worse than most can imagine. The idiots on the left are misled and misdirected to believe that there is systemic racism, when in reality, there is systemic financial crime. Regulatory capture and kleptocracy. Crimes are no longer investigated or prosecuted.

----------


## Brian4Liberty

> Wall Street is not a person or a corporation. It's an abstraction. A boogey man people invoke as a proxy for every imaginary oligarch who puts profits before all else. It has no pockets. But it's named after the physical street where a couple large stock exchanges are where everybody, including regular investors, can short sell stocks.


Bull$#@!. You sound like Jerry Nadler. “There is no Anitifa”.

It’s systemic criminal behavior. There are real people and real businesses involved in these crimes.

----------


## Invisible Man

> Bull$#@!. You sound like Jerry Nadler. “There is no Anitifa”.
> 
> It’s systemic criminal behavior. There are real people and real businesses involved in these crimes.


"Systemic criminal behavior" and you're saying I sound like Jerry Nadler?

https://www.thedailybeast.com/rep-je...d-in-the-house

----------


## Brian4Liberty

> "Systemic criminal behavior" and you're saying I sound like Jerry Nadler?
> 
> https://www.thedailybeast.com/rep-je...d-in-the-house


Weak sauce. Nadler complaining in 2011 that his friends (many of whom would become Antifa members) were kicked out of a public park by Police.

Nadler is a prime example of the politicians that pretend to be opposed to high level financial crime, yet are really in their pockets and running a controlled "opposition" scam. Just like Pelosi and all of the other high level, connected insider politicians.

----------


## Invisible Man

> Weak sauce. Nadler complaining in 2011 that his friends (many of whom would become Antifa members)


Yes. The OWS=Antifa connection is interesting to note.

I found this other forum by the way. It looks like they're struggling over there. I bet they could use a good mod who shares their principles.

http://occupywallst.org/forum/

----------


## Brian4Liberty

> Yes. The OWS=Antifa connection is interesting to note.
> 
> I found this other forum by the way. It looks like they're struggling over there. I bet they could use a good mod who shares their principles.
> 
> http://occupywallst.org/forum/


Yeah, because pointing out crime, and things that should be criminal, is a terrible thing. 

Maybe there is a forum somewhere that supports fraud, deception, graft, cheating and theft that you might enjoy?

----------


## Invisible Man

> Yeah, because pointing out crime, and things that should be criminal, is a terrible thing. 
> 
> Maybe there is a forum somewhere that supports fraud, deception, graft, cheating and theft that you might enjoy?


I don't accept your premise that the gap in wealth between the 1% and the rest of us is because they got it by systemic criminal behavior.

It's interesting that you're not only concerned about "crime" but also "things that should be criminal," as if the politicians haven't burdened us with enough laws yet.

The reason the redditors and other small-time investors were able to profit from a short squeeze was because they were able to identify the conditions that made that possible in publicly available information. There was no whistle blower uncovering some secret fraudulent scheme in a hedge fund he worked for.

The hedge funds made a risky bet in short selling stocks they couldn't cover, and the little guys caught them on it. Kudos to both sides. And may the best man win.

Perhaps the big investors were incentivized to take risks by the easy money made available to them by Fed policies, risks that would otherwise be less attractive to them. But I can't fault them for acting within the incentives that were there in the market they were operating in. And I can't fault the redditors and their cohorts for taking advantage of the opportunity that presented to them to make some money themselves. It's a good case of the market itself punishing the mistake of the hedge funds without the need for additional anti-Wall-Street laws making criminals of the 1% in hopes that their decrease in wealth would lead to increases for the rest of us in a make-believe communist zero-sum game of an economy.

I have no dog in the GME fight. I'm too risk averse for that. But I doubt the last laugh has been had. My instinct tells me that the future isn't too bright for brick-and-mortar stores whose main product is physical video game cartridges. And I see an emotionless market that allows the market losers to lose, without being propped up by more laws based on sentimentality, nostalgia, and envy, as much more good than bad.

----------


## Brian4Liberty

> I don't accept your premise that the gap in wealth between the 1% and the rest of us is because they got it by systemic criminal behavior.


I never said that. Quit making things up.




> It's interesting that you're not only concerned about "crime" but also "things that should be criminal," as if the politicians haven't burdened us with enough laws yet.


Yes, there are plenty of ways to engage in theft and fraud which have either not been addressed, or inserted into the law as loopholes. It's not by accident.




> The reason the redditors and other small-time investors were able to profit from a short squeeze was because they were able to identify the conditions that made that possible in publicly available information. There was no whistle blower uncovering some secret fraudulent scheme in a hedge fund he worked for.
> 
> The hedge funds made a risky bet in short selling stocks they couldn't cover, and the little guys caught them on it. Kudos to both sides. And may the best man win.
> 
> Perhaps the big investors were incentivized to take risks by the easy money made available to them by Fed policies, risks that would otherwise be less attractive to them. But I can't fault them for acting within the incentives that were there in the market they were operating in. And I can't fault the redditors and their cohorts for taking advantage of the opportunity that presented to them to make some money themselves. It's a good case of the market itself punishing the mistake of the hedge funds without the need for additional anti-Wall-Street laws making criminals of the 1% in hopes that their decrease in wealth would lead to increases for the rest of us in a make-believe communist zero-sum game of an economy.
> 
> I have no dog in the GME fight. I'm too risk averse for that. But I doubt the last laugh has been had. My instinct tells me that the future isn't too bright for brick-and-mortar stores whose main product is physical video game cartridges. And I see an emotionless market that allows the market losers to lose, without being propped up by more laws based on sentimentality, nostalgia, and envy, as much more good than bad.


Did you read the article in question? Feel free to read it, and then get back to us with quotes from the article.




> A very good write-up on the GME shorting scam tactics here, but those tactics described can be extrapolated to the entire market to various extents:
> 
> https://prospect.org/power/how-the-g...hustle-worked/
> 
> One big house of smoke and mirrors designed to transfer regular investor's currency (retail traders, 401k, IRAs, etc) into Wall St's pockets. A grand pirate looting operation.

----------


## Invisible Man

> Yes, there are plenty of ways to engage in theft and fraud which have either not been addressed, or inserted into the law as loopholes. It's not by accident.


Such as?

----------


## Invisible Man

> Did you read the article in question? Feel free to read it, and then get back to us with quotes from the article.


You mean that article from American Prospect, which is "devoted to promoting informed discussion on public policy from a progressive perspective."

I read a good chunk of it, not all of it, but enough to give me the gist and allow me to conclude that it wasn't worth the time wading through in detail.

It's full of concern about "market manipulation" as though that phrase is interchangeable with the word "fraud," which is another word that the article very liberally (pun intended) sprinkles about without any definition of what exactly was fraudulent and who the victim was. It implicitly takes your view that we need more laws, saying things like, "The SEC allows traders to short a stock," as if the idea of not allowing that should be up for consideration. I can see why you liked it so much.

I did notice that the article conceded the claim that I made though, saying, among other examples:



> It’s important to note that only the SEC and the DTCC can get the trading documents that would show proof of any fraudulent scheme. But the Superstonk users, through publicly available data, detected patterns that make a strong case at least to investigate the matter.
> 
> For example, u/broccaaa, a Superstonk user, looked through SEC filings for funds with large GME positions. Big losers like Melvin and Maplelane had no shares in GME, and large puts, which are options to sell. According to u/broccaaa, this is a common characteristic in stocks with large unsettled trades, where the shares have not been transferred. He described it as “supportive evidence for naked short trades … around the end of December and early January short interest and fails to deliver were through the roof.”


What the article neglects to address though is why any investigation should be necessary. If the publicly available information was enough for Superstonk and company to recognize the conditions of a short squeeze, and the opportunity itself provided the financial incentive to take advantage of that, then why not just leave it at that, and let the market shake out the winners and losers, rather than the government?

Edit: OK, now that you sucked me into this tripe, I'm starting to get into it. I love how the third paragraph ends with the sentence, "The financial media also ignores this systemic corruption." "Systematic corruption"--that's a familiar sounding phrase. I'm starting to see where you get your talking points. But notice how they use the demonstrative adjective "this." Demonstrative adjectives have antecedents, meaning that whatever they're calling "this systematic corruption" ought to be some systematic corruption that they just described prior to using that phrase. But when I look for what systematic corruption they called "this systematic corruption," I can't find any. They don't tell us. For them, it's just a given that the FEC should always be investigating the 1%, and their failure to do so must be corruption. So after referring to such, they can matter-of-factly call it "this systematic corruption" as if the mere mention of a hedge fund not being investigated demonstrated corruption. They already know the conclusion they need to reach. Now it's just a matter of finding the facts and framing them in such a way as to support that.

----------


## devil21

> Wall Street is not a person or a corporation. It's an abstraction. A boogey man people invoke as a proxy for every imaginary oligarch who puts profits before all else. It has no pockets. But it's named after the physical street where a couple large stock exchanges are where everybody, including regular investors, can short sell stocks.


Indeed, "Wall St" is a _mindset_, united under a false flag that represents british admiralty war based on the Roman law of sea theft and salvage....aka high seas piracy.  Though it is obvious the pyramid nature of the piracy when each level dictates down to the next level and many of those people have certain....hmm...commonalities that can't be ignored.  One of which is simple geographical close proximity which would make collusion exceedingly convenient.  No need to mention other commonalities....



(Pirates of the Caribbean is allegory for the economic system, though Capt Sparrow depicts a sovereign man operating within the piracy system)

----------


## Invisible Man

> No need to mention other commonalities....


Other commonalities deserve mention for the sake of honesty about what it is you (and Brian4Liberty?) are really talking about if nothing else.

----------


## oyarde

Well a common arrangement was a Captain was at 5 shares ,  Quartermaster and other senior positions  2 shares , common sailors 1 share , cabin boy 1/2 share .

----------


## Brian4Liberty

> You mean that article from American Prospect, which is "devoted to promoting informed discussion on public policy from a progressive perspective."
> 
> I read a good chunk of it, not all of it, but enough to give me the gist and allow me to conclude that it wasn't worth the time wading through in detail.
> 
> It's full of concern about "market manipulation" as though that phrase is interchangeable with the word "fraud," which is another word that the article very liberally (pun intended) sprinkles about without any definition of what exactly was fraudulent and who the victim was. It implicitly takes your view that we need more laws, saying things like, "The SEC allows traders to short a stock," as if the idea of not allowing that should be up for consideration. I can see why you liked it so much.
> ...


I had no idea the lean of that particular website. Take it up with @devil21, he posted it. I am skeptical of everything, especially left wing sources. That being said, if a left-leaning reporter had the audacity to actually do investigative (and thorough) journalism, I'll give them a chance. It's not like this is the only source for this info. It's been reported quite often on Fox Business Network, arguably the most "libertarian" of the mainstream media outlets (OK, maybe second tier MSM).

And if you can read some of that article and still not mention the illegal practice of _naked_ short selling, then you are being obtuse and engaging in misdirection. The article goes into great detail on all of the ways that naked shorting is achieved, and covered up. It is organized crime. Naked shorting is essentially counterfeiting and fraud. They are creating shares of a company stock out of thin air, and manipulating the market.

Yet, John McAfee is the financial criminal, for posting on Twitter about crypto-currency. 




> ...Edit: OK, now that you sucked me into this tripe, I'm starting to get into it. I love how the third paragraph ends with the sentence, "The financial media also ignores this systemic corruption." "Systematic corruption"--that's a familiar sounding phrase. I'm starting to see where you get your talking points. ...


LOL. Maybe I should take credit for inventing the phrase. I used it in a previous post, before really reading the article. My use was somewhat sarcastic, playing off of the term "systemic racism". It's not a hard phrase to come up with:




> It’s worse than most can imagine. The idiots on the left are misled and misdirected to believe that there is systemic racism, when in reality, there is systemic financial crime. Regulatory capture and kleptocracy. Crimes are no longer investigated or prosecuted.

----------


## Brian4Liberty

> Other commonalities deserve mention for the sake of honesty about what it is you (and Brian4Liberty?) are really talking about if nothing else.


I am really talking about financial white collar crimes.

What are you talking about? Certain stereotypes perhaps?

For the "sake of honesty", is it your mission to search out instances of such collectivism and defamation in order to counter it and call it out? Is that why you don't want to address financial crimes such as naked short selling?

----------


## devil21

nm

They really just need to pay up, let the chips fall where they will and begin to restore some karmic balance to this dumpster fire of a market that's been so overrun with corruption and greed to the extent that they can't even hide it anymore.

----------


## Krugminator2

Steve Bannon is a retard.  I can't even contain it to one example. He is the glue sniffiest sniffer in all of Cracktown.

----------


## Madison320

> I am really talking about financial white collar crimes.
> 
> What are you talking about? Certain stereotypes perhaps?
> 
> For the "sake of honesty", is it your mission to search out instances of such collectivism and defamation in order to counter it and call it out? Is that why you don't want to address financial crimes such as naked short selling?


The real question is how do you want to fix it? 

A. Add more government regulation to what is arguably the most regulated industry?

B. Move towards a more free market, first thing would be for the federal reserve to stop handing out trillions in free money. Second would be for the Fed and the US govt to stop bailing everyone out. Do those two things and 99% of the problems go away on their own.

----------


## dannno

> The real question is how do you want to fix it? 
> 
> A. Add more government regulation to what is arguably the most regulated industry?
> 
> B. Move towards a more free market, first thing would be for the federal reserve to stop handing out trillions in free money. Second would be for the Fed and the US govt to stop bailing everyone out. Do those two things and 99% of the problems go away on their own.


Are those the only two options? I would like the second one, but it's not in the cards.

----------


## Brian4Liberty

> The real question is how do you want to fix it? 
> 
> A. Add more government regulation to what is arguably the most regulated industry?
> 
> B. Move towards a more free market, first thing would be for the federal reserve to stop handing out trillions in free money. Second would be for the Fed and the US govt to stop bailing everyone out. Do those two things and 99% of the problems go away on their own.


Enforce existing laws against naked short selling. Stop the revolving door between Wall St. and regulators.




> Are those the only two options? I would like the second one, but it's not in the cards.


The second option is great, but it still wouldn't address naked short selling.

----------


## Invisible Man

> The second option is great, but it still wouldn't address naked short selling.


Sure it would. It would allow the market to address naked short selling in exactly the way that it's being addressed in the example that this whole thread is about. Those who engage in it (both the short sellers themselves and their brokerages) will be taking on a risk that they may lose large amounts of money, while also allowing and even enticing buyers to make that amount of money at their expense. There's a natural financial disincentive against brokerages issuing credit in the form of shares to short sell that they don't have in amounts that they can't afford to lose if the share prices rise too high. If anything, government regulation will be more likely to lessen that disincentive which the market itself would capably provide in ways that are similar to how it, as a lender of last resort, lessens the disincentive that the market would otherwise give banks engaging in reckless degrees of fractional reserve banking.

Naked short selling itself shouldn't be outright banned, just like fractional reserve banking shouldn't be outright banned. The determination of when either one of those practices constitutes fraud and when it doesn't should be determined by the language of contracts that the interested parties enter with each other allowing those things.

----------


## Brian4Liberty

> Sure it would. It would allow the market to address naked short selling in exactly the way that it's being addressed in the example that this whole thread is about. Those who engage in it (both the short sellers themselves and their brokerages) will be taking on a risk that they may lose large amounts of money, while also allowing and even enticing buyers to make that amount of money at their expense. There's a natural financial disincentive against brokerages issuing credit in the form of shares to short sell that they don't have in amounts that they can't afford to lose if the share prices rise too high. If anything, government regulation will be more likely to lessen that disincentive which the market itself would capably provide in ways that are similar to how it, as a lender of last resort, lessens the disincentive that the market would otherwise give banks engaging in reckless degrees of fractional reserve banking.
> 
> Naked short selling itself shouldn't be outright banned, just like fractional reserve banking shouldn't be outright banned. The determination of when either one of those practices constitutes fraud and when it doesn't should be determined by the language of contracts that the interested parties enter with each other allowing those things.


Shorting is different than naked short selling. I’ll go ahead and print up some stock certificates on my computer. How many would you like to buy? How about 100,000 shares of Tesla?

----------


## Krugminator2

> Enforce existing laws against naked short selling. Stop the revolving door between Wall St. and regulators.
> 
> 
> 
> The second option is great, but it still wouldn't address naked short selling.



I make multiple trades on the short side in hard to borrow stocks every day. 250 trading days a year. Have done it for a decade. Have seen exactly one example of naked shorting. Gamestop.  And I guess you could kind of say Overstock but not really. 

Naked shorting being a problem is a myth perpetuated by the dumbest people on the internet. I am not calling you dumb. I am calling people who trade actively and perpetuate this myth dumb so that someone like you thinks it actually exists. The people who whine about naked shorting are losers who are wasting their life. I have never seen even one successful trader complain about naked shorting.  There is no naked shorting problem.  I am a nobody with no connections and I can't remember the last time I couldn't get a locate on even the the hardest borrow stock. There are always shares available somewhere for a price. Presumably Goldman Sachs and Citadel have much greater access to locates than me. And I am not even sure market makers like Citadel have to find locates because they are market makers if the close out the position within a day.

----------


## Brian4Liberty

> I make multiple trades on the short side in hard to borrow stocks every day. 250 trading days a year. Have done it for a decade. Have seen exactly one example of naked shorting. Gamestop.  And I guess you could kind of say Overstock but not really. 
> 
> Naked shorting being a problem is a myth perpetuated by the dumbest people on the internet. I am not calling you dumb. I am calling people who trade actively and perpetuate this myth dumb so that someone like you thinks it actually exists. The people who whine about naked shorting are losers who are wasting their life. I have never seen even one successful trader complain about naked shorting.  There is no naked shorting problem.  I am a nobody with no connections and I can't remember the last time I couldn't get a locate on even the the hardest borrow stock. There are always shares available somewhere for a price. Presumably Goldman Sachs and Citadel have much greater access to locates than me. And I am not even sure market makers like Citadel have to find locates because they are market makers if the close out the position within a day.


I will certainly take your word that you don't engage in naked shorting, and have not witnessed naked short selling. But that is not evidence one way or another that it has occurred.

This is not a new hypothesis. Naked shorting has long been suspected in manipulation (and suppression) of paper precious metal prices.

Its not like naked shorting and other financial crimes don't exist at all. There have been many cases of illegal naked shorting (and other violations) which result in fines and penalties. Its written off as a cost of doing business.

----------


## Snowball

TRULY naked shorting isn't what it used to be. But I believe it happens for no more than 5 sessions at a time. It used to be that humans- real people- who worked for real hands-on, human-driven Market Makers naked shorted as a habit, both on the major exchanges and the pinksheets. (OTC Bulletin Board which no longer exists). Now that everything, even the OTC Market is run by computer, and the SEC rules (no idea if they are enforced, but the software is programmed to abide with the law) no longer allow naked shorting by right of seat, only to be "made good" within 30 days (or quarterly in some instances) , the only way truly naked shorting occurs is in the framework of settlements and as a mixture with retail shorting availability. 

It's just not possible to identify NSS anymore, and it was always a detective's game anyway. With quants and automated high-speed networks determining pricing now, there is a lack of human-coordinated activities, especially across brokerages, and there is no obvious collusion between underwriters, transfer agents, brokerages, market makers and hedge funds, although this could pop up again soon given the opportunity of a bubble in markets and the lessening of Covid protocols. It will only happen if the owners want it to. 

There is no resemblance between today's market and the market before decimalization, Federal Reserve oversight and software automation over high-speed networks. 

The so-called market is a top-down operation run by the New York Fed, Bank of London and its daughter organizations who operate it as a tool for plutocratic asset accumulation and societal transformation, sponsored by the host governments. The effort to encourage participation among the youth and dependent seniors and institutions is all part of their systemic societal transformation conspiracy. It really is a conspiracy. Literally. It is updated operationally every year but the working plans are formatted in 10-year increments. Our government is a captured beaurocracy of appointed middle-managers, like an H.R. department. They have no real power whatsoever.

----------


## Invisible Man

> Shorting is different than naked short selling. I’ll go ahead and print up some stock certificates on my computer. How many would you like to buy? How about 100,000 shares of Tesla?


I would buy none.

But that's not what naked short selling is. You've been reading too much prospect.org.

----------


## Invisible Man

Here's a recent article on naked short selling by Robert Murphy that I think strikes the right balance.
https://mises.org/wire/when-short-selling-fraudulent

These are the last few paragraphs:



> With “naked” short selling, the transactions are marked up “on paper” without first locating and obtaining actual shares of the stock. To adapt our scenario, if a speculator wants to short a hundred shares of XYZ when it’s selling for $50, perhaps his brokerage will allow him to do so even though it hasn’t gotten possession of a hundred shares. When the speculator closes out his position, the brokerage calculates what his profit/loss would have been _if he really had_ obtained the shares and credits/debits his account accordingly.The potential problem here occurs if something goes wrong and the speculator _can’t_ close out his original position because XYZ has gone _up_ in price too much. For example, suppose that after shorting the hundred shares at $50 (and thus temporarily earning $5,000), the speculator is horrified to see that XYZ shoots up to $1,000 per share! In order to close out his position, the speculator would need to spend $1,000 x 100 = $100,000 to obtain the hundred shares on the open market and return them to the brokerage. If the speculator doesn’t have that kind of money, he can’t do it.
> 
> The victims in this type of scenario are the people who thought they were buying those hundred shares of XYZ back when it was selling for $50. (After all, that’s where the original $5,000 came from.) For small enough dollar amounts, the brokerage itself would cover the speculator’s loss. But in principle, if a brokerage allowed many of its clients to engage in naked short selling, then a surprising spike in stock prices could cause such aggregate losses that even the brokerage itself couldn't afford to cover them. In that case, investors who thought they were buying shares of stock from the brokerage would discover that even though it had taken their money and told them the transaction went through, they in fact did _not_ own actual shares.
> 
> Readers will note the similarity between naked short selling and fractional reserve banking. It’s true in both cases that contracts could carefully spell out the details, and give the brokerage/bank the legal right to refuse redemption, but there is a line in Austrian economics (going from Mises through Rothbard to many of today’s Rothbardians) which argues that legal niceties don’t really matter, it’s commercial practice that does. If bank depositors treat demand deposits as immediately redeemable (and hence equivalent to money proper), then fractional reserve banking causes the boom-bust cycle. Likewise, one might argue as an Austrian that naked short selling is a dubious practice that could foster instability in the financial markets. (Note that my own position on this latter issue has evolved since I previously wrote on naked shorting for mises.org.)
> 
> *Conclusion*
> 
> In a free market, short selling is a healthy practice that allows farsighted speculators to push down overpriced stocks. There is nothing inherently dubious or fraudulent should the gross short position exceed the total number of shares. However, the practice of _naked_ short selling could be problematic, if it became large relative to overall trading.


Murphy doesn't get into any prescriptions for what should be done to prevent naked short selling from crossing that line between when it is and when it isn't "problematic" (note that he refrains from repeating the word "dubious or fraudulent" from his previous sentence). But note his analogy between naked short selling and fractional reserve banking. I suspect that his prescription for both would be not to ban them, but rather to let the market sort them out. And I further suspect that he would argue that government regulations will have a tendency to promote the exercise of these practices on a problematic scale, rather than to temper them. In the case of fractional reserve banking, if the government would passively allow bank runs to happen, then the potential for them would put pressure on banks to hold a high enough amount of money in reserve to keep themselves in business. They would still engage in fractional reserve banking, and it wouldn't be fraudulent to do so, but the market would temper it. Likewise with brokerages lending out shares they aren't able to borrow immediately (i.e. lending them out on credit, which they rely on buyers to trust them to be good for), they would need to mitigate their own risk and work to maintain a reputations with their business partners as firms that can be counted on to be able to buy back all the shares they allow people to naked short sell through them.

----------


## devil21

> I would buy none.
> 
> But that's not what naked short selling is. You've been reading too much prospect.org.


You and Brian are both correct, actually.  Brian is correct that 100,000 Tesla shares are just printed up by the shorter and sold.  What you're not addressing is that those 100k shares are then supposed to be located, borrowed and delivered to the buyer within 2 to 6 days (# of days depends on who is short selling) to complete the short sale.  The difference between shorting and naked shorting is that the naked shorter has no intention or ability to locate and deliver the borrowed stock they are selling short!  Keep in mind that retail can't even engage in naked shorting, btw.  A retail shorter must borrow the stock from the broker as part of the short sale process.  It's only hedgies, banks and market makers who can get away with naked shorting.  Naked shorting is when the seller has no intention or success of locating, borrowing and delivering the shares within the 2 to 6 day delivery window after the short sale, resulting in a Failure To Deliver (FTD) status on those shares.  The catch is that the buyer still has those shares listed as a holding in their account even after the seller FTD'd.  They don't disappear from the buyer's account ledger if the short seller FTD's.  (Obviously, if they did, no one would have any CONfidence in the market and stop giving the pirates their currency.)  The buyer is then just holding phantom shares in their account that don't actually exist as issued shares by the corporation.  The shares were never located, borrowed and delivered.  They're now merely book entries in the buyer's account evidencing a claim on a share that doesn't exist.  It's the same principle as how we got to 100 paper claims on COMEX for only one ounce of silver in the warehouse.  100 shares of GME showing up in account listings, due to phantom shares created via naked shorting, for every one share actually issued by the corporation and held in trust by the DTCC, in other words.  It's not rocket science.  Shorting is legal and technically the creation of a claim on a share _only meant to exist as a book entry for 2 to 6 days until the real share is delivered_.  Those shares not being delivered to the buyer within the 2-6 days is _naked_ shorting and creates claims on shares that do not exist as issued shares.

----------


## devil21

Things gonna get interesting starting the beginning of next week.... if I were holding a lot of equity positions I'd probably start selling hand over fist right now.  But I don't so I can't.  Holding a bit of GME and a few puts with kung fu grip, but that's it.

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## Invisible Man

> You and Brian are both correct, actually.  Brian is correct that 100,000 Tesla shares are just printed up by the shorter and sold.  What you're not addressing is that those 100k shares are then supposed to be located and delivered to the buyer within 2 to 6 days (depending on who is short selling) to complete the short sale.  The difference between shorting and naked shorting is that the naked shorter has no intention or ability to locate and deliver the stock they are selling short!


That's true, as far as I understand it. But that's still not the same thing as just any random individual printing up counterfeit shares and selling them. Nor is it necessarily fraudulent. I see no essential ethical difference between simple short selling and naked short selling. The naked short seller can buy back those same shares that they sold on credit while failing to locate shares to borrow, provided they can afford to, just as much as they can buy back shares that they did locate and borrow before selling, provided they can afford to, after 2 days, 6 days, or 1,000 days. The potential problem in both cases is that the short seller and their broker stand a risk that the price will rise so much that they won't be able to buy back the shares. If that doesn't happen, then I see no issue either with short selling in general or with naked short selling in particular. It's important that short selling be done in small enough amounts, and that it be covered by entities with enough money to buy the shares back under any reasonably possible scenario of increase in their prices. But this ability to cover the cost is the factor that matters, not the question of whether the shares were located before being short sold. And the market is capable of letting individual participants weigh their own tolerance for risk and deciding whom they can trust to be able to cover their potential losses better than the government.

----------


## devil21

> That's true, as far as I understand it. But that's still not the same thing as just any random individual printing up counterfeit shares and selling them. Nor is it necessarily fraudulent. I see no essential ethical difference between simple short selling and naked short selling. The naked short seller can buy back those same shares that they sold on credit while failing to locate shares to borrow, provided they can afford to, just as much as they can buy back shares that they did locate and borrow before selling, provided they can afford to, after 2 days, 6 days, or 1,000 days. The potential problem in both cases is that the short seller and their broker stand a risk that the price will rise so much that they won't be able to buy back the shares. If that doesn't happen, then I see no issue either with short selling in general or with naked short selling in particular. It's important that short selling be done in small enough amounts, and that it be covered by entities with enough money to buy the shares back under any reasonably possible scenario of increase in their prices. But this ability to cover the cost is the factor that matters, not the question of whether the shares were located before being short sold. And the market is capable of letting individual participants weigh their own tolerance for risk and deciding whom they can trust to be able to cover their potential losses better than the government.


Just FYI, I made some edits to my post for clarity and detail (mainly the borrowing step of short selling) so what you replied to may not be what my post ended up saying.

To your point:
The issue is that the buyer is not holding actual issued shares for that 1000 days.  What if that buyer decides to sell the shares before the shorter delivers?  Then you'd have one holder selling something that doesn't exist to another buyer.  Ad nausem.  Or if someone else wishes to short that same stock, does the broker then lend _their_ fake shares to "deliver" them to another short seller, compounding the fake share problem?  You may philosophically think that's ok, I dunno, but I don't.  Since markets always crash eventually (generally based on the observance of biblical harvest cycles and is the method used to periodically flush years of fraud like naked shorts out of the system but that's for another thread), shorting always takes place to various extents.  Failing to deliver short sold shares perpetually creates more and more phantom shares until the whole market becomes the house of smoke and mirrors I mentioned previously.  Holders trading non-existent shares back and forth until something breaks the system....like GME.  Or that periodic crash I mentioned.  But the cause of that crash is never attributed to Wall St fraud.  It's always scapegoated onto something and/or someone else...like GME and/or retail.

eta:  Imagine my neighbor is selling his Corvette.  I think his price is wrong and is opportunity to make money.  But instead of buying at his price, I create an ad for his Corvette at the price I think is good.  Someone sends me the cash for my price.  But then I go to buy neighbor's car and he already sold it to someone else.  But instead of returning the money I keep it and send the buyer a picture of the car!  (That sums up blockchain and NFT idiocy  but I digress)  What if you were the buyer?  You'd want your $#@!in' Corvette right?  Not me telling you how awesome your new Corvette is while also telling you I'll deliver your new Corvette in 2, 6 or 1000 days.)


Fwiw, my SO is a CFO/CPA and I asked her what she thought about such accounting methods.  You can guess what her reaction was....I didn't have the heart to complete the ouroborus circle for her and tell her that her 401k is based on it.

----------


## Krugminator2

GME and AMC getting a little heavy.  Small short in both. If GME breaks the 50 day could be start of 70 dollar plus drop.

----------


## devil21

> GME and AMC getting a little heavy.  Small short in both. If GME breaks the 50 day could be start of 70 dollar plus drop.


Coinciding with Burry's alleged comments?  It's interesting because Burry disappeared off Twitter not long after he said the SEC paid him a visit for his tweets about hyperinflation incoming.  Now he's publicly predicting a crash at some point?  He even says he doesn't know when.  Meh, sounds like he's trying to engineer one by scaring GME holders.  The only way it would crash is mass selling by retail being routed to the exchanges, instead of dark pools, and even more shorting games by Wall St.  Smells a bit.  *Or an engineered crash courtesy of WEF Cyber Polygon cyberattack July 9 partners NYSE and DTCC*.  Any way, I know some really idolize Burry and no doubt his comments are worth considering but I don't understand why anyone thinks Wall St types are _on their side_.  Burry, like the rest, is just interested in taking money, that's it.  If Burry is showing up now while being Twitter silent but talking to a Wall St rag, he probably is shorting, hoping to create a mass sale by his followers.  At the same time, the hedgies are up to their necks in ridiculous short positions heaped upon ridiculous short positions and need a crash in price to prolong the game before any margin calls start coming in and rule changes start to affect them.

Interesting times.  Many things lining up numerically pointing to 7-14-21.  7 77 777

----------


## Invisible Man

> J
> To your point:
> The issue is that the buyer is not holding actual issued shares for that 1000 days.  What if that buyer decides to sell the shares before the shorter delivers?  Then you'd have one holder selling something that doesn't exist to another buyer.  Ad nausem.


I see all of that as manageable. What that buyer holds is essentially a contract that is backed up by the faith and credit of whatever brokerage mediated the deal. This isn't something that doesn't exist. They can sell those shares just like any other shares. And the shares the short seller (naked or not) later buys back don't have to be bought from the same person who bought the shares they short sold. They're all interchangeable.

As long as the short sellers (naked or not) make good on their debts within the terms of their contracts, I don't see anything fraudulent about it.

----------


## Krugminator2

> Coinciding with Burry's alleged comments?  It's interesting because Burry disappeared off Twitter not long after he said the SEC paid him a visit for his tweets about hyperinflation incoming.  Now he's publicly predicting a crash at some point?  He even says he doesn't know when.  Meh, sounds like he's trying to engineer one by scaring GME holders.  The only way it would crash is mass selling by retail being routed to the exchanges, instead of dark pools, and even more shorting games by Wall St.  Smells a bit.  *Or an engineered crash courtesy of WEF Cyber Polygon cyberattack July 9 partners NYSE and DTCC*.  Any way, I know some really idolize Burry and no doubt his comments are worth considering but I don't understand why anyone thinks Wall St types are _on their side_.  Burry, like the rest, is just interested in taking money, that's it.  If Burry is showing up now while being Twitter silent but talking to a Wall St rag, he probably is shorting, hoping to create a mass sale by his followers.  At the same time, the hedgies are up to their necks in ridiculous short positions heaped upon ridiculous short positions and need a crash in price to prolong the game before any margin calls start coming in and rule changes start to affect them.
> 
> Interesting times.  Many things lining up numerically pointing to 7-14-21.  7 77 777



I think GME will probably drop back to the 50-60 bucks over time. Every bounce is getting sold. It is breaking a range to the downside so I got short. If it doesn't go down I will cover. Really nothing more to it.  I really have no idea what these random numbers and Michael Burry and engineered crash or any of that means and I don't want to know.

----------


## Madison320

> Sure it can, and it often does. When it does, then the government law is redundant. When it doesn't, it's unjust.
> 
> But in either case, if there's a case to be made against the practices you mentioned on the basis of justice, then you should be able to do that, without needing to defer to laws that corrupt politicians made up as though they decided the matter.


I would argue that the best case is when government law matches natural law. You're not an anarchist, are you?

----------


## Madison320

> Are those the only two options? I would like the second one, but it's not in the cards.


I think by far the biggest problem in this country is the size of government. I'd wouldn't rank naked short selling, if it's even a crime, in the top 1000. Does it makes sense for someone on a liberty oriented site to focus on making government bigger?

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## Invisible Man

> I would argue that the best case is when government law matches natural law. You're not an anarchist, are you?


Yes, I am.

I agree that the best case is government law matching natural law. But when that happens, the result will be statelessness, since the institution of the state necessarily violates natural law. And even taking the existence of the state as a given, as I said in the post you quoted, in those instances when the state's laws do reflect natural law, the state's laws are then redundant. For state based laws, redundancy is the best case scenario, and it goes downhill from there.

----------


## Madison320

> Yes, I am.
> 
> I agree that the best case is government law matching natural law. But when that happens, the result will be statelessness, since the institution of the state necessarily violates natural law. And even taking the existence of the state as a given, as I said in the post you quoted, in those instances when the state's laws do reflect natural law, the state's laws are then redundant. For state based laws, redundancy is the best case scenario, and it goes downhill from there.


Damn. You were pretty much batting 1000 until that 

I have the anarchist debate distilled down to one simple scenario:

You and bunch of other anarchists decide to start an anarchy on an island. How are you going to defend the island? (this was tried back in the 1970s by the way)

----------


## Invisible Man

> Damn. You were pretty much batting 1000 until that 
> 
> I have the anarchist debate distilled down to one simple scenario:
> 
> You and bunch of other anarchists decide to start an anarchy on an island. How are you going to defend the island? (this was tried back in the 1970s by the way)


I'm not sure what "start anarchy" means.

Anarchy is not something someone starts, it's what is, right here already. There does not exist any special subset of society that has the moral right to rule over others without their consent. There are people who do use force to rule over others (e.g. muggers in dark alleys, criminal gangs, states), but by doing that they violate the Creator's moral law. Their claim of a moral license to rule others is false. They are not archons, they are just people, no different than the people they victimize, and are subject to the same objective and universal moral law as everyone else. Such archons as they fancy themselves to be simply do not exist within the human race apart from Jesus Christ whose kingdom is not of this world. Being an anarchist means adhering to a moral law that permits me to point at the actions of those falsely called archons and call them wrong. Whether I am able to stop those actions, or even ought to try to stop them, is an entirely different matter.

If I lived on a stateless island and it was invaded by a conquering nation bent on establishing a regime there to subjugate us under its rule, then the same anarchy that tells me I am not permitted to subjugate my countrymen by force and rule them is what tells me that foreign invader is not permitted to either. If I weren't an anarchist, I couldn't even say those invaders were doing anything wrong, as I would concede that their might makes them right.

But there are a few points to consider about the scenario:

1. I don't believe that this island being stateless makes it a better target for invasion than an island with a centralized ruling regime would be. The scenario with the centralized ruling regime would have the infrastructure of statehood in place so that all an invading force would need to do is conquer that regime. But in the stateless island the invaders would have to conquer each sovereign individual. Now, I'm not sure what anarchist island in the 1970's you're referring to. But let me go out on a limb and take a guess that the invading force they were unable to repel was an existing nation-state that claimed sovereignty over that island and didn't accept the claim of its inhabitants to be outside of its rule. And if this is the case, then as a thought experiment, consider the hypothetical alternative of that very same island, with the only difference being that the new order there was not anarchist, but rather a state in which some subset of the people conquered and subjugated the rest under their rule, establishing a central ruling regime, and consider what that other already existing nation-state that claimed sovereignty over that island would have done in response. They would have still reclaimed it, and they would have still succeeded. The presence of a state there would have done nothing to prevent that, and in fact it would have made it easier, not harder.

2. Whatever measure of defense a state could muster, if the subjects of that ruling regime in large part support those measures, would still be possible without the presence of a state. And in fact, the demand for those measures would ensure that the market would provide them. I decline the gambit of trying to predict exactly what these free people would do. The beauty of the market, and one of its great advantages over central planners, is that it provides goods and services in unexpected and unplannable ways that no committee of even the best central planners would be able to come up with. The same rule would apply to defense as much as it does to pencils. We can imagine all sorts of voluntary contracts and defense companies and such, and I'm sure that anarcho-capitalists have written a fair bit teasing out some of the possibilities. But at the end of the day, what the market would provide would be better than anything we could predict. The market may not provide a solution that would be effective in defending this particular island. But however ineffective the free market would prove to be, a state-based alternative would be even less effective.

3. Statelessness, or something very close to it, was the norm for most human beings throughout most of humanity's existence. It isn't some modern fad that some extremists in the 70's decided to experiment with. The status quo that we now take for granted of a globe that's divided up among nation-states without an occupied acre to be found that's unclaimed by them, is a very recent development. The process by which the earliest states developed took millennia, and their attempts to conquer stateless people proved to be overall very ineffective. There was a tenacity to humanity's statelessness that led to greater costs than benefits to those who tried to replace it with states. And even after those earliest states developed, their rule only extended over what amounted to a minority of the human population for additional millennia. When successful empires (and even here success typically meant a lifespan of mere decades) did manage to expand, they did so more successfully by conquering existing states than they did by nitpicking at stateless peoples in their hinterlands whose numbers added up to a majority of the human race until not many centuries ago. This truth is sometimes hidden by the fact that ancient written history tends to present things as seen from the vantage points of those within the emerging states, and not those silent masses outside them.

Personally, I'm a follower of Jesus Christ, and the path that he leads me on is the one that leads to the cross. His victory over his enemies didn't come by his killing of them, but by their killing of him. They demanded his allegiance, and they expended every tool in their tool chest, the most powerful one being the taking of his life, and never attained that allegiance from him. He rose from the dead victorious over them and offers that same victory to all who follow him as their king, and not the powers and principalities of this dark world.

----------


## Brian4Liberty

> That's true, as far as I understand it. But that's still not the same thing as just any random individual printing up counterfeit shares and selling them.


It was an analogy.

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## Brian4Liberty

> Here's a recent article on naked short selling by Robert Murphy that I think strikes the right balance.
> https://mises.org/wire/when-short-selling-fraudulent
> 
> These are the last few paragraphs:
> 
> 
> Murphy doesn't get into any prescriptions for what should be done to prevent naked short selling from crossing that line between when it is and when it isn't "problematic" (note that he refrains from repeating the word "dubious or fraudulent" from his previous sentence). But note his analogy between naked short selling and fractional reserve banking. I suspect that his prescription for both would be not to ban them, but rather to let the market sort them out. And I further suspect that he would argue that government regulations will have a tendency to promote the exercise of these practices on a problematic scale, rather than to temper them. In the case of fractional reserve banking, if the government would passively allow bank runs to happen, then the potential for them would put pressure on banks to hold a high enough amount of money in reserve to keep themselves in business. They would still engage in fractional reserve banking, and it wouldn't be fraudulent to do so, but the market would temper it. Likewise with brokerages lending out shares they aren't able to borrow immediately (i.e. lending them out on credit, which they rely on buyers to trust them to be good for), they would need to mitigate their own risk and work to maintain a reputations with their business partners as firms that can be counted on to be able to buy back all the shares they allow people to naked short sell through them.


An article that says essentially what I have been saying all along.

And arguments that good business practices will prevent fraud and theft are fantasy. Saying Bernie Madoff would never engage in criminal fraud because his business reputation might be tarnished and he might lose money makes no sense at all.

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## Invisible Man

> An article that says essentially what I have been saying all along.


Really? Because it says what I have been saying all along and you seemed to be disagreeing with me.

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## Invisible Man

> And arguments that good business practices will prevent fraud and theft are fantasy. Saying Bernie Madoff would never engage in criminal fraud because his business reputation might be tarnished and he might lose money makes no sense at all.


Bernie Madoff did what he did in a heavily regulated marketplace. His story isn't a story about what happens when government gets out of the way. It's a story about how government was very much in the way and didn't do a lick of good.

Yes, the government jailed him. Big deal. That consequence is of no greater significance than the other losses he experienced both financially and to his reputation. If those factors didn't provide him with enough disincentive against defrauding people, then the government couldn't either. Free markets don't make the world a perfect place. But more government regulations over our abilities to enter agreements with one another with money that belongs to us, not the government, taking risks according to our levels of tolerance, not the government's, are no improvement over free markets.

As a matter of fact, I'll join Jeffrey Tucker in saying, "Free Bernie Madoff!"

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## oyarde

Is bernie still alive ? I was thinking he was deceased.

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## Invisible Man

> Is bernie still alive ? I was thinking he was deceased.


You're right. He is as of a few months ago. I must have missed that.

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## oyarde

Come to think of it I've only ever known one bernie who was a value added kind of guy . I knew him from Junior High.

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## Madison320

> 1. *I don't believe that this island being stateless makes it a better target for invasion than an island with a centralized ruling regime would be.* The scenario with the centralized ruling regime would have the infrastructure of statehood in place so that all an invading force would need to do is conquer that regime. But in the stateless island the invaders would have to conquer each sovereign individual. Now, I'm not sure what anarchist island in the 1970's you're referring to. But let me go out on a limb and take a guess that the invading force they were unable to repel was an existing nation-state that claimed sovereignty over that island and didn't accept the claim of its inhabitants to be outside of its rule. And if this is the case, then as a thought experiment, consider the hypothetical alternative of that very same island, with the only difference being that the new order there was not anarchist, but rather a state in which some subset of the people conquered and subjugated the rest under their rule, establishing a central ruling regime, and consider what that other already existing nation-state that claimed sovereignty over that island would have done in response. They would have still reclaimed it, and they would have still succeeded. The presence of a state there would have done nothing to prevent that, and in fact it would have made it easier, not harder.


A stateless island absolutely makes a better target for invasion because it wouldn't have a collective force to defend itself.

The proof of this is in the fact that there aren't any anarchies in existence unless you want to call Somalia an anarchy.

If anarchies were a superior design then they would be more common, especially as time goes on.  


Republic of Minerva
Main article: Republic of Minerva

Flag of the Republic of Minerva
In 1972, real-estate millionaire Michael Oliver, of the Phoenix Foundation, sought to establish a libertarian country on the reefs. Oliver formed a syndicate, the Ocean Life Research Foundation, which had considerable finances for the project and had offices in New York City and London.[6] In 1971, the organization constructed a steel tower on the reef.[6] The Republic of Minerva issued a declaration of independence on 19 January 1972.[7] Morris Davis was elected as the President of Minerva.[8]

However, the islands were also claimed by Tonga. An expedition consisting of 90 prisoners was sent to enforce the claim by building an artificial island with permanent structures above the high-tide mark.[9] Arriving on 18 June 1972, the Flag of the Tonga was raised on the following day on North Minerva and on South Minerva on 21 June 1972.[6][10] King Tāufaʻāhau Tupou IV announced the annexation of the islands on 26 June; North Minerva was to be renamed Teleki Tokelau, with South Minerva becoming Teleki Tonga.[11] The Tongan claim to the reef was recognized by the South Pacific Forum in September 1972.

In 1982, a group of Americans led again by Morris Davis tried to occupy the reefs, but were forced off by Tongan troops after three weeks.[citation needed] According to Reason, Minerva has been "more or less reclaimed by the sea".[12]

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## Brian4Liberty

> Bernie Madoff did what he did in a heavily regulated marketplace. His story isn't a story about what happens when government gets out of the way. It's a story about how government was very much in the way and didn't do a lick of good.
> 
> Yes, the government jailed him. Big deal. That consequence is of no greater significance than the other losses he experienced both financially and to his reputation. If those factors didn't provide him with enough disincentive against defrauding people, then the government couldn't either. Free markets don't make the world a perfect place. But more government regulations over our abilities to enter agreements with one another with money that belongs to us, not the government, taking risks according to our levels of tolerance, not the government's, are no improvement over free markets.
> 
> As a matter of fact, I'll join Jeffrey Tucker in saying, "Free Bernie Madoff!"


And I suppose you support massive daytime shoplifting and looting of stores too. After all, if damage to their reputations isn't a deterrent, then laws aren’t a deterrent either.

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## Madison320

> And I suppose you support massive daytime shoplifting and looting of stores too. After all, if damage to their reputations isn't a deterrent, then laws aren’t a deterrent either.


Although it's not really laws that are the deterrent, it's the collective force behind those laws.

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## Invisible Man

> A stateless island absolutely makes a better target for invasion because it wouldn't have a collective force to defend itself.


I don't see any reason why a stateless island is any less able to have a collective force to defend itself than an island with a state. The market proves itself more than capable of providing collective services all the time.

But a stateless island would have less of a need to defend itself because it would be less desirable to an invading force in the first place.

If anarchies were a superior design then they would be more common, especially as time goes on.




> The proof of this is in the fact that there aren't any anarchies in existence unless you want to call Somalia an anarchy.


I don't see how that proves anything. It took many millennia to get to that point.




> If anarchies were a superior design then they would be more common, especially as time goes on.


I don't see how this logically follows either. It seems to assume that the trend we see societal governance taking over time is one of improvement. By my estimation the general trend we see is the exact opposite. Switch out central banks for states and this argument would lead to the conclusion that central banks are a good thing.




> However, the islands were also claimed by Tonga.


See? Without even knowing what you were talking about I predicted exactly what the backstory was. There's a lot missing from the account you gave, like how many people even lived on these islands. It sounds like practically nobody even did. But do you honestly believe that replacing this scenario with an alternative where one group of people living on the islands enslaved the rest of the population (i.e. a state) would have resulted in its being able to fend off Tonga? Hardly. Unless they had a very large population and economy, in which case, that would have been the crucial factor and not the presence of the state.

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## TheTexan

> If I weren't an anarchist, I couldn't even say those invaders were doing anything wrong, as I would concede that their might makes them right.


Might does make right.  Always has, always will.

If you want anarchy to succeed, you will need to adapt that fact of life into your ideology.  The two are not mutually exclusive.

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## Invisible Man

> And I suppose you support massive daytime shoplifting and looting of stores too. After all, if damage to their reputations isn't a deterrent, then laws aren’t a deterrent either.


No.

And I have no problem with laws. I just have a problem with make believe laws that one day don't exist and then the next day do exist because some politicians dreamed them up and voted on them.

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## Invisible Man

> Might does make right.  Always has, always will.
> 
> If you want anarchy to succeed, you will need to adapt that fact of life into your ideology.  The two are not mutually exclusive.


Like I said in the post you're quoting, anarchy, as I see it, is not a goal to pursue such that something can be achieved that I could call a success. I'm not sure what anarchy succeeding is supposed to mean. But whatever that is, it's not something I'm striving after or hoping for.

But no, you are wrong. Might has never made right. Might does make success. But history is full of examples of success by way of doing wrong.

And if might does make right, then why not just join up with whoever is the mightiest, regardless of their cause? Then you'll always be on the right side. If you're worried that the extreme left is on a winning trajectory to take over America and crush its enemies, then rather than worry about it, just join them and be one of the crushers instead of the crushed. You will be a winner, and you will stand faultless.

If you see a reason not to do that, then it's because you know that might does not make right.

There exists an objective, timeless, universal moral law that doesn't change with our opinions, legislations, social mores, or success in violating it. We all know this inherently. We are incapable of not knowing it, and we prove this constantly in ways that could be pointed out if necessary. But we also have a tendency to suppress our knowledge of this law in order to excuse violations of it.

I don't hold out any hope of ever seeing a world without any theft in it. But that won't stop me from being able to say that theft is wrong and that less theft is better than more theft, even if zero theft is not an option on the table. Nor does the fact that people succeed at theft and enjoy material benefits from it make it right.

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## TheTexan

> There exists an objective, timeless, universal moral law that doesn't change with our opinions, legislations, social mores, or success in violating it. We all know this inherently. We are incapable of not knowing it, and we prove this constantly in ways that could be pointed out if necessary. But we also have a tendency to suppress our knowledge of this law in order to excuse violations of it.


I don't think there is such a thing as a set of universal moral laws that can be applied to everybody.

Besides perhaps the right of secession.

Upholding the right of secession means that both parties in an arrangement must make good faith efforts to allow the other to equitably separate.  (e.g., splitting assets in a divorce).  It also means that there is no such thing as a contract without an exit clause (implicit or explicit).

All other laws, "thou shall not steal", "thou shall not kill" are not even universal.  There are a great many philosophers that believe that theft has many justifications.  Even murder can be justified in some ethical contexts.

The right of secession, when properly upheld, allows an individual to choose what society (and thus, what set of ethics) that the person belongs to.

The degree to which anarchy is "achieved", can be measured directly by how much the right of secession, is upheld.

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## Invisible Man

> I don't think there is such a thing as a set of universal moral laws that can be applied to everybody.
> 
> Besides perhaps the right of secession.


I don't think this is possible. If you really believe that the right of secession is a universal moral law that can be applied to everybody, then it can't just stand on its own. It must have a foundation in a coherent moral framework that exists.




> All other laws, "thou shall not steal", "thou shall not kill" are not even universal.  There are a great many philosophers that believe that theft has many justifications.  Even murder can be justified in some ethical contexts.


That's a great segue into some examples of exactly what I said: We are incapable of not knowing that a universal, timeless, objective moral law exists, and we prove this constantly in ways that could be pointed out if necessary. Those philosophers you mention by virtue of the very arguments you allude to are showing that they recognize the existence of a universal, timeless, and objective moral law, which provides the justifications for those exceptions to "thou shalt not steal," etc. We could debate whether their arguments are right or wrong in each instance. But debating those specific claims would be beside the point, because the very debate itself would proceed on the basis of the assumption that such questions can be answered at all, which presupposes the existence of a standard against which the claims can be judged. And that standard is the thing that you're claiming doesn't exist.

As an analogy, the fact that Newton's Laws of Motion can be violated under certain circumstances doesn't mean that universal laws of physics don't exist at all. It only means that whatever those universal laws of physics are, they're something other than Newton's Laws. Newton's Laws are special cases of more general laws that serve us well practically as approximations of those general laws that apply as well as most people could ever want to any motion we are capable of experiencing. And the ways that today's best physicists may give expression to those more general laws may also prove to have exceptions, and themselves be special cases of a more universal set of physical laws out there that we haven't attained knowledge of yet. But even if we don't know with perfect exactness what the laws of physics are, we know that they exist, and we know good approximations of them.

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## Madison320

> I don't see any reason why a stateless island is any less able to have a collective force to defend itself than an island with a state. The market proves itself more than capable of providing collective services all the time.


How would that work? Who would pay for the collective defense? Who would decide when and how to use it?

I think the logical mistake anarchists make is that you can have a free market with force. You can't shop around for a "protection agency", they pick you, you don't pick them.

I would argue that there's no such thing as "no state". Some group or person is ALWAYS going to have the most force in a given area and they will be making the rules and doing the enforcing. Even in in the cave man days I'm sure there was Grog, the biggest baddest caveman that everyone else took orders from.

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## TheTexan

> I don't think this is possible. If you really believe this, the right of secession is a universal moral law that can be applied to everybody, then it can't just stand on its own. It must have a foundation in a coherent moral framework that exists.


Why can it not stand on its own?  Seems pretty stand-alone to me.  It's the fundamental basis of all other rights.





> That's a great segue into some examples of exactly what I said: We are incapable of not knowing that a universal, timeless, objective moral law exists, and we prove this constantly in ways that could be pointed out if necessary. Those philosophers you mention by virtue of the very arguments you allude to are showing that they recognize the existence of a universal, timeless, and objective moral law, which provides the justifications for those exceptions to "thou shalt not steal," etc. We could debate whether their arguments are right or wrong in each instance. But debating those specific claims would be beside the point, because the very debate itself would proceed on the basis of the assumption that such questions can be answered at all, which presupposes the existence of a standard against which the claims can be judged. And that standard is the thing that you're claiming doesn't exist.


The age-old question of whether ethics is absolute or subjective.  There is no way to prove it either way.  Suffice it to say that I fall on the "subjective" side of the argument.

The idea that there is an "absolute" set of ethics just seems entirely distasteful to me, as it reeks of authoritarianism.  "My ethics are better than your ethics!"

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## Invisible Man

> How would that work? Who would pay for the collective defense? Who would decide when and how to use it?


There you go again.

As I said in my earlier post, gambit declined. There are countless ways it could work. The fact that states do it proves it can work, and there's nothing a state can do that the market couldn't do without a state. But whatever prediction I might make about how it would work would not be what would actually happen. The way that the market would provide that it actually would work would be better than anything anyone could predict, which is why central planning is always less efficient than the free market.

Take any other so-called "public good" you want, as an analogy, whether it be post offices, lighthouses, or any other kind of infrastructure. In any of these cases you'll see their defenders asking the exact same questions you just did about how it would work if the government didn't do it. And in all of those examples (as well as the example of military by the way), you'll find plenty of actual cases in history where they actually did exist privately and work without being under the purview of any state.




> I would argue that there's no such thing as "no state". Some group or person is ALWAYS going to have the most force in a given area and they will be making the rules and doing the enforcing. Even in in the cave man days I'm sure there was Grog, the biggest baddest caveman that everyone else took orders from.


OK. On this point I actually agree (aside from the quibble that I don't think there was ever such a thing as cave man days), and I've said similar things before. I think that usually people have an unspecified line that they draw somewhere delineating when something is big enough to count as a state, and such a line is bound to be arbitrary and subjective. At the end of the day, every mugger in a dark alley is, at that moment in time and in that limited geographical area, no different than a state except in size.

However, in setting that point aside for the sake of this discussion, I was actually going along with the terms you had set. If you want to make this point, then you can no longer say that the island you were talking about had anarchy either. It had a state just like everywhere else does.

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## Madison320

> There you go again.
> 
> As I said in my earlier post, gambit declined. There are countless ways it could work. The fact that states do it proves it can work, and there's nothing a state can do that the market couldn't do without a state. But whatever prediction I might make about how it would work would not be what would actually happen. The way that the market would provide that it actually would work would be better than anything anyone could predict, which is why central planning is always less efficient than the free market.



If I was asked "how would the market make a better pencil?" I wouldn't know how the process would be improved but I would answer businesses would compete with each other trying to make the best pencil for their customers at the lowest cost. 

I'm not asking how the best defense would be provided, I'm asking how would it be paid for and who would run it. The fact that your answer is "the market will magically make it happen" is just a way of avoiding the question. The reason you have to avoid the question is that the free market does not function with the use of force.

I'll ask again "who will pay for the defense and who will run it"? Just give me a possible scenario.

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## fatjohn

> Yet, John McAfee is the financial criminal, for posting on Twitter about crypto-currency.


He claimed he knew about IRS corruption in his extradition hearing (but the translator did not translate that)
McAfee had many enemies.
He got Whackd, plain and simple.
He expected this could be his probable end and made a crypto called WHACKD to bring attention to Epstein's death.
I bought some of the token, figure if the token blows up, the MSM will have to talk about McAfee and the possibility of a government hit.

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## Krugminator2

> GME and AMC getting a little heavy.  Small short in both. If GME breaks the 50 day could be start of 70 dollar plus drop.



GME down $55.  AMC down 44%.  

Sometimes I get it right.

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## devil21

> GME down $55.  AMC down 44%.  
> 
> Sometimes I get it right.


As always with shorting, don't get greedy.  The curious thing is that buying is outpacing selling by 3+ to 1 yet price keeps dropping slowly.  Level 2 shows that 1 share orders are constantly being wash-traded back and forth to slowly lower the price.  You were right but don't get greedy.  This same algo cycle repeats on GME every ~90 days but the bottom is higher each cycle.

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## Krugminator2

> As always with shorting, don't get greedy.  The curious thing is that buying is outpacing selling by 3+ to 1 yet price keeps dropping slowly.  Level 2 shows that 1 share orders are constantly being wash-traded back and forth to slowly lower the price.  You were right but don't get greedy.  This same algo cycle repeats on GME every ~90 days but the bottom is higher each cycle.


I covered AMC pre market last week at 40ish and didn't reshort. I covered GME around 178. and only got a small reshort at 190. Covered after hours yesterday around 154.

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## devil21

I like the stock at this price.  Feels like the on-sale price will end in a couple weeks.  Price averaging down is usually a good move when you like a stock, right @Krugminator2?  Thinking about adding another share or two this week.

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## Krugminator2

Robinhood IPOs Thursday, July 29th. Themes tend to underperform when significant IPOs and futures contracts hit the market. I wouldn't be surprised if Bitcoin and meme stocks hold up until Thursday and then there is a sell off. Not a prediction. More something to be aware of and take advantage of if things start to sell.

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## Krugminator2

> Robinhood IPOs Thursday, July 29th. Themes tend to underperform when significant IPOs and futures contracts hit the market. I wouldn't be surprised if Bitcoin and meme stocks hold up until Thursday and then there is a sell off. Not a prediction. More something to be aware of and take advantage of if things start to sell.


Meme stocks straight down. GME down 40ish dollars since. Fresh multi-month lows on AMC

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## devil21

nm can't get image to embed.

Gensler basically admitted during a CNBC interview that Citadel and Virtu are routing buy orders to dark pools but routing sell orders (and wash trading) to lit exchanges.  There's something very systemically wrong when the Citadel hedge fund naked shorts a stock, then the Citadel market maker routes trades that go against its hedge fund position off-exchange to a Citadel dark pool.  End result is Citadel literally controls half of the market's daily movements however it wants.  I've been writing about this through this entire thread.  Rigged piracy.  It's not even about shorting, per se, but rather that Citadel literally can ensure that its hedge fund never loses a bet since it controls half of all order flow and how that flow may or may not be allowed to affect exchange pricing.

On GME:  just watch the options chain starting wednesday of each week.  whatever price screws the most options holders on both sides, relatively close to the published price on wednesday, is where it'll close friday.  
this is what happens when two entities control almost all order routing and how that routing affects, (or doesn't affect, if that is the goal) the published price.  it's a license to steal under false pretenses.

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## Krugminator2

Reshorted GME. Might not work. Low risk idea. Closed at 157. Risk 8 bucks with idea that it will drop 100 bucks or so in a slow bleed over the next year

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## devil21

> Reshorted GME. Might not work. Low risk idea. Closed at 157. Risk 8 bucks with idea that it will drop 100 bucks or so in a slow bleed over the next year


Good luck.  Why you insist on messing with GME, given all the dodgy $#@! going on with that symbol, I'll never understand.

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## Krugminator2

> Reshorted GME. Might not work. Low risk idea. Closed at 157. Risk 8 bucks with idea that it will drop 100 bucks or so in a slow bleed over the next year



Really strong close today. Exited. for a small loss.

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## ccrsedona

This is my first time here, just registered and Don't know how to start a post, it says I don't have permission. This is off topic but I wanted to say I tried to post on FB a link to an old article here about the real reasons that the Civil War started. Lo and behold FB Blocked it and wouldn't let me post it? They said it went against Community Standards. F them Fascists!

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## oyarde

> This is my first time here, just registered and Don't know how to start a post, it says I don't have permission. This is off topic but I wanted to say I tried to post on FB a link to an old article here about the real reasons that the Civil War started. Lo and behold FB Blocked it and wouldn't let me post it? They said it went against Community Standards. F them Fascists!


Greetings .

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## devil21

Retail has started directing brokers who offer IEX exchange routing to place their GME buy orders through IEX, under the discovery that IEX isn't controlled by Citadel and Virtu and such routing does affect exchange pricing. Brokers offering IEX are already limited since most brokers are under Citadel's pay-for-order-flow scheme already. What has been revealed since retail started directing buys to IEX? ALL of the brokers who offer IEX routing still send the order to Citadel (CDRG) first and Citadel promises to then forward the order on to IEX exchange. I'm sure Citadel can be trusted to follow through  Never mind that such practice is explicitly illegal, since it violates SEC trading regulations for a broker to not route an order where the trader directs it to be sent.

The general conclusion being drawn by deep-diving folks is that there are no more organic shares being traded (they've all been bought and held by retail and various institutions). Citadel is now simply conjuring up fake shares to "sell" from their dark pool, using their 6 day ability to do so as a market-maker (a form of temporary naked shorting which is legal for market makers to do to ensure market liquidity and trading activity), until they locate a real share to deliver to the buyer's account. If no real shares are found, and apparently there aren't any being traded, Citadel just experiences a fail-to-deliver and hides it in the dark pool. Buyer still sees that share in their account, though.  Such a practice would explain a lot about what's going on and what has been going on in "markets" for a long, long time.

----------


## Krugminator2

> The general conclusion being drawn by deep-diving folks is that there are no more organic shares being traded (they've all been bought and held by retail and various institutions). Citadel is now simply conjuring up fake shares to "sell" from their dark pool, using their 6 day ability to do so as a market-maker (a form of temporary naked shorting which is legal for market makers to do to ensure market liquidity and trading activity), until they locate a real share to deliver to the buyer's account. If no real shares are found, and apparently there aren't any being traded, Citadel just experiences a fail-to-deliver and hides it in the dark pool. Buyer still sees that share in their account, though.  Such a practice would explain a lot about what's going on and what has been going on in "markets" for a long, long time.



GME is easy to borrow (meaning I don't have to pay to locate it) at all three brokers I use.  The current short interest is only 13%.    There is no reason to naked short. It doesn't even make sense. People can short all the shares they want. 

Lets say every retail trader made it so they couldn't have their shares lent (probably .0005% do this)  but lets say they did. You have still have institutions that hold 40% of the shares.  They get paid interest to lend shares. It is no brainer for Vanguard or whoever has shares to do this with their index funds.

Here is the reality. This is $30-$60 stock. No one is suppressing the price.  This WILL drop. It isn't a matter of if but when. And it will have nothing to do with the Jews or Blackrock or Citadel or Steve Cohen or market makers. The company is junk and the fundamentals aren't getting better. Weeds don't grow to the sky. Gravity is undefeated.

----------


## devil21

> GME is easy to borrow (meaning I don't have to pay to locate it) at all three brokers I use.  The current short interest is only 13%.    There is no reason to naked short. It doesn't even make sense. People can short all the shares they want.
> 
> Lets say every retail trader made it so they couldn't have their shares lent (probably .0005% do this)  but lets say they did. You have still have institutions that hold 40% of the shares.  They get paid interest to lend shares. It is no brainer for Vanguard or whoever has shares to do this with their index funds.


So you know that your borrowed shares for retail shorting are either shares taken from someone's margin account at your broker or an institutional holder _lending_ but not _selling_ you sell their shares.  What I posted is that liquidity of organic, owned shares being bought and sold has dried up.  If you chose to simply buy a share, you would likely receive a fake share from Citadel's off-exchange dark pool, not a NYSE traded share.  Retail buys are being routed into dark pools to keep them off the exchange of organic buy/sell spreads.  Short sales like yours, along with wash trading, is what constitutes most of the daily volume.  Volume which continues to drop lower and lower.  Or put more succinctly, retail and institutions own the entire float and are not selling.  Only buying and lending for shorting.  Of course all expect to receive those lent shares back at some point.  Published SI is irrelevant.  I respect your general knowledge of trading but there's several ways to game SI numbers using options and other tricks.  Or better yet, just read this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/...shares_part_1/




> Here is the reality. This is $30-$60 stock. No one is suppressing the price.  This WILL drop. It isn't a matter of if but when. And it will have nothing to do with the Jews or Blackrock or Citadel or Steve Cohen or market makers. The company is junk and the fundamentals aren't getting better. Weeds don't grow to the sky. Gravity is undefeated.


LOL nothing about valuation matters in the entire "market" anymore, and most certainly not regarding GME.  You may be right about real value but real value stopped mattering one bit when the Fed started doling out money directly to Wall St and when underhanded tactics to suppress normal market functions were implemented back in January.

----------


## devil21

> Really strong close today. Exited. for a small loss.


I bet you're glad you're not still short today, eh?

----------


## Krugminator2

> I bet you're glad you're not still short today, eh?


The only time I have bought GME was last November around 12 and sold it around 14 or 15.  It was actually a pretty good spot to get long today.  AMC was a perfect squeeze setup.  I have a such a hang up buying crap like this. Good work if you still have AMC.

These have been my best last couple of days in a long time. Took some off the table today. Will take a bunch off the table tomorrow before the Fed Meeting on Wednesday. This feels like a last ditch squeeze to get people back into the market before a rug pull later in the week. Might be wrong but will use this rally to sell into.

----------


## devil21

Some recent developments in the Gamestop saga:

- lawsuit discovery has revealed that both Vlad Tenev and Ken Griffin lied to Congress during the first hearing.

- Citadel loaded up fresh shorts overnight Jan 27-28 on GME after RH and other brokers were directed to shut down buying the following morning of Jan 28 (and in my case, at least, my entire trading account with Ally was locked at the direction of APEX Clearing for 2 days, preventing me from maintaining other positions also).  This indicates massive conspiracy between Citadel, clearinghouses and brokers to defraud traders since they knew the price would plummet once buying was turned off.  RH's COO said "we will be crucified for pco'ing (position close only)".  It's one thing to claim pco'ing to protect the overall markets.  It's something entirely different to purposely attempt to hugely _profit_ from it at the same time....but that's what Citadel did.  Pirates can't just _not_ steal, can they?

- (edited) Some GME holders are directly registering shares in their names through Computershare, thus removing the shares from "street name" registration with Cede&Co and by extension, could prevent the new shares from being lent right back to Citadel to short again.  Recent educated estimates show many times the published "shares issued" have been created by market makers (perhaps as high as 1 billion+ synthetic shares).  Indeed the market is full of "fake shares" of GME and probably every other stock of consequence.

(eta^^^: I do not endorse the direct registration of stocks, DRS, as a way to bypass Dtc since it does no such thing.  Seems to me that it adds another layer of complexity that isn't needed for selling.  Only physical stock certs bypass Dtc.  DRS does not.  DRS may be a benefit for taking shares out of the "available short pool" but it does not provide full ownership rights.  DRS agents even admit that selling at very high price generally requires sending written letters, processing time, perhaps even a fee and then after all of that is processed the DRS agent sells in mass lots of shares at whatever the market price is at that time.  Good luck with that stuff working out if/when GME launches, as DRS agent wades through multiple thousands of "SELL NOW" letters.  IMO, it's better to keep shares liquid with a broker and sit on hold waiting to talk to the broker's trading desk for relatively quick execution.  Perhaps they can shut down the website but would they risk shutting down all customer access phone lines also?  Yes there are other considerations such as whether a shareholder through retail brokerage is eligible for a dividend, as opposed to a registered shareholder....remember that "registration" of anything means turning over ownership to some other entity....I have no thoughts on the dividend scenario.  It's quite a system of mumbo jumbo and $#@!ery they've built.  Probably best course imo is to spread existing shares and newly bought shares out amongst brokers and the DRS agent, including direct purchase via DRS agent, to limit counterparty risk.  It is worth noting that DRS agent accounts are generally -not- covered by SIPC insurance, though, unlike regular brokers.)

----------


## devil21

A decent clif notes video of GME events to date:




Stayed tuned.  Fun is just getting started.

----------


## devil21

Post 293 mentioned the IEX exchange.  A new wrinkle in the IEX lit market routing appears today.  Citadel sued the SEC for implementing a rule that allows IEX submitted orders to circumvent Citadel's illegal price fixing.  I've noticed how PFOF-to-Citadel brokers are limited in how much an order re-submission can be adjusted if the bid isn't met.  Usually only in .05 increments.  Where does that extra .04-.05 cents go?  You already know folks....Hamptons beach houses!  This new order system anticipates the rigged piracy and instead automatically resubmits at better pricing for the buyer, thus limiting the PFOF skim.  Of course Citadel hates that and will claim their piracy of investor's money is for investors own good in court......  

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-c...-idUSKBN27201E 




> (Reuters) - Citadel Securities, which provides trading services to asset managers, banks, broker-dealers and hedge funds, has sued the Securities and Exchange Commission over its decision to approve a new mechanism for trading stocks at upstart exchange operator IEX Group Inc.
> 
> “The SEC failed to properly consider the costs and burdens imposed by this proposal that will undermine the reliability of our markets and harm tens of millions of retail investors,” a Citadel Securities spokeswoman said in an email on Friday.
> 
> The lawsuit, which was filed on Friday and first reported by the Wall Street Journal, increases Citadel Securities’ dispute over IEX’s “D-Limit” order type. The D-Limit is designed to give traders a way to buy or sell stocks at the exchange while protecting them against unfavorable price moves.
> 
> Citadel Securities earlier asked the SEC to reject the proposal from IEX, saying the D-Limit will damage the U.S. stock market’s integrity. But in August, the SEC sided with IEX allowing the plan to go forward.
> 
> Citadel Securities asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to review the SEC’s decision to approve the D-Limit order, according to a copy of the court filing.
> ...


IEX CEO: Markets are rigged.  Check out this video.  You can tell who's the $#@!heel and whos the decent dude.



Long interview with Flash Boys author from above video about HFT theft and author of The Big Short book.

----------


## devil21

Totally natural and normal movement of a stock, of course.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...lly-since-2010




> March 28, 2022, 4:51 PM EDT
> 
> GameStop Corp. rose for a 10th consecutive session Monday, giving the stock its longest winning streak since April 2010.
> 
> The Grapevine, Texas-based video game retailer has surged a staggering 143% during this run...



CNBC:  Move along folks, nothing to see here.  Can I interest you in some Tesla today?    (while GME was up 25% on the day, not a word about GME but mentions Foot Locker's 1% move and Campbell's 1% move)

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/28/stoc...-and-more.html

----------


## Madison320

> Totally natural and normal movement of a stock, of course.
> 
> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...lly-since-2010
> 
> 
> 
> 
> CNBC:  Move along folks, nothing to see here.  Can I interest you in some Tesla today?    (while GME was up 25% on the day, not a word about GME but mentions Foot Locker's 1% move and Campbell's 1% move)
> 
> https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/28/stoc...-and-more.html


Let's see how gamestop, amc, bitcoin, etc does after a few more rate hikes and if the Fed finally stops doing QE. They're supposed to be done with QE but they're still printing (60 billion over the last 2 weeks). I'm guessing the short term bond market was starting to crash and they had to fix it.

----------


## devil21

> Let's see how gamestop, amc, bitcoin, etc does after a few more rate hikes and if the Fed finally stops doing QE. They're supposed to be done with QE but they're still printing (60 billion over the last 2 weeks). I'm guessing the short term bond market was starting to crash and they had to fix it.


There's all sorts of $#@!ery going on with the "meme stocks" that financial media tries to deflect away from.  It's honestly got very little to do with rate hikes, QE, etc.  I can share some links to info if you're interested.  All kinds of dirty underbelly of financial markets has been exposed.  Economic sabotage of businesses by a handful of hedge funds who plant poison pill people in executive and board leadership positions for the sole purpose of running the company into bankruptcy, to name one example.

(It's a good idea to buy a few shares of GME and just sit on them.  They may prove to be the best ever hedge against a market crash.)

----------


## Madison320

> There's all sorts of $#@!ery going on with the "meme stocks" that financial media tries to deflect away from.  It's honestly got very little to do with rate hikes, QE, etc.  I can share some links to info if you're interested.  All kinds of dirty underbelly of financial markets has been exposed.  Economic sabotage of businesses by a handful of hedge funds who plant poison pill people in executive and board leadership positions for the sole purpose of running the company into bankruptcy, to name one example.
> 
> (It's a good idea to buy a few shares of GME and just sit on them.  They may prove to be the best ever hedge against a market crash.)


I agree there's all kinds of shady stuff going on, but I think most of it is caused by the free money supplied by the Fed. I don't think most of this stuff would be happening in a free market and free market money. My guess is when the free money starts drying up you'll see the meme stocks get wiped out because there won't be any free money left to play with.

----------


## devil21

> I agree there's all kinds of shady stuff going on, but I think most of it is caused by the free money supplied by the Fed. I don't think most of this stuff would be happening in a free market and free market money. My guess is when the free money starts drying up you'll see the meme stocks get wiped out because there won't be any free money left to play with.


Yeah I agree in the big picture that the money spigot is at the root of it all but that applies to pretty much everything going sideways these days.  Everything is $#@!ed up and distorted beyond repair.  I'm sure you saw what happened in nickel LME market recently, also.

I disagree about the outcome of "meme stocks" however.  Wall St basically shut off the BUY button again yesterday (see engineered market open halt of both GME and AMC at exactly the same time, wiping out the bid/ask and resetting the price) because another squeeze was about to pop off.  They're doing everything they can to contain the meme stocks and the reason is that the hedge funds, working in collusion with Citadel, were planning on naked shorting them into bankruptcy (along with placing poison pill executives and board members) and delisting.  Bankruptcy and delisting means the shorters never have to close their shorts and never have to pay taxes on their short gains!  The scheme is called "cellar boxing".  That plan is obviously not going to work now with GME so they can't get out of their ridiculously huge naked short positions.  If the money spigot dries up, how will the hedge funds caught in an uncloseable short position continue "kicking the can"/service their short positions?  It's really crazy what's going on with the these brick-n-mortar retail stocks that hedge funds thought they could naked short into bankruptcy.  It'll only get crazier so holding a few shares is a cheap lottery ticket.

more info on engineered halt to stop another squeeze and rob call options holders of gains.  pirates still pirating.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/...the_luld_vwap/

----------


## Krugminator2

> Y
> I disagree about the outcome of "meme stocks" however.  Wall St basically shut off the BUY button again yesterday (see engineered market open halt of both GME and AMC at exactly the same time, wiping out the bid/ask and resetting the price) because another squeeze was about to pop off.  They're doing everything they can to contain the meme stocks and the reason is that the hedge funds, working in collusion with Citadel, were planning on naked shorting them into bankruptcy (along with placing poison pill executives and board members) and delisting.  That plan is obviously not going to work now and they can't get out of their ridiculous short positions.  If the money spigot dries up, how will the hedge funds caught in an uncloseable short position continue "kicking the can"/service their short positions?  It's really crazy what's going on with the these brick-n-mortar retail stocks that hedge funds thought they could naked short into bankruptcy.  It'll only get crazier so holding a few shares is a cheap lottery ticket.
> 
> more info on engineered halt to stop another squeeze
> https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/...the_luld_vwap/



Halts are in place to slow panics.  AMC and GME are absolute junk and up on air. When you have stocks built up on fantasy that double in a week you have people who sell. It's how things work.

I have literally probably had positions in 500 stocks or more that have halted intraday. There is nothing unusual or nefarious about it. 

GME loses 400 million a year. It has a 12 billion market cap. Book value of $20 a share. It will drop 30 bucks from 180 over the next couple of days and it wont be because of evil insiders. It is a junk company. No reason to think about buying at these levels. Only thing that could hold it up is some scam trash news which is the kind of thing scam companies put out so always have to beware even though it is *obviously* going down.

----------


## devil21

> Halts are in place to slow panics.  AMC and GME are absolute junk and up on air. When you have stocks built up on fantasy that double in a week you have people who sell. It's how things work.
> 
> I have literally probably had positions in 500 stocks or more that have halted intraday. There is nothing unusual or nefarious about it. 
> 
> GME loses 400 million a year. It has a 12 billion market cap. Book value of $20 a share. It will drop 30 bucks from 180 over the next couple of days and it wont be because of evil insiders. It is a junk company. No reason to think about buying at these levels. Only thing that could hold it up is some scam trash news which is the kind of thing scam companies put out so always have to beware even though it is *obviously* going down.


Yeah you keep saying all that but it never happens.  So maybe, just maybe there's something _else_ going on here?  I know for a 100% fact that there is indeed _something else going on here_ but it's not my job to convince you.  Just keep waiting for that $20 per share price you've been calling for for the last 12 months instead of figuring out why a "junk company" stock runs up 143% in a week and a half.

Btw, the halt was on the price going _up_, not down.  So who precisely would be panicking at the price going up?  Perhaps those caught in uncloseable naked short positions (hedge funds) and call options sellers (Citadel) who would lose a crap ton of money?  A Jan 2021 redux.

----------


## Invisible Man

> Yeah you keep saying all that but it never happens.


What is it that you're saying never happens?

----------


## Krugminator2

> Yeah you keep saying all that but it never happens.  So maybe, just maybe there's something _else_ going on here?  I know for a 100% fact that there is indeed _something else going on here_ but it's not my job to convince you.  Just keep waiting for that $20 per share price you've been calling for for the last 12 months instead of figuring out why a "junk company" stock runs up 143% in a week and a half.


The stock dropped from from $250 in late November down to 78 bucks. I have already been proven right. The drop already happened.  The stock is the single greatest gift in the world.   It will drop 30 to 40 bucks in the next couple of days because that's what turds do.

These engineered squeezes are nice wealth transfers from the stupid to the smart.





> Btw, the halt was on the price going _up_, not down.


No it wasn't. Do you know how I know that? Because I was short AMC and GME when the halt happened watching both tick for tick.

----------


## devil21

> What is it that you're saying never happens?


Krugminator's $20 stock valuation claims, generally.  Since that's not happening and that isn't going to happen (at least not in this current iteration of a "stock market"), perhaps it's worth digging into to understand why it isn't happening.

----------


## Invisible Man

> Krugminator's $20 stock valuation claims, generally.  Since that's not happening and that isn't going to happen (at least not in this current iteration of a "stock market"), perhaps it's worth digging into to understand why it isn't happening.


It has to happen at some point. Did he put a time line on it? You're talking about it like you think it's taking a really long time to happen when this whole thread only got started 14 months ago.

----------


## Krugminator2

> Krugminator's $20 stock valuation claims, generally.  Since that's not happening and that isn't going to happen (at least not in this current iteration of a "stock market"), perhaps it's worth digging into to understand why it isn't happening.


The stock was around 180 when I wrote the last post. It is around $177.  If the move is legit, there will be people who buy the dip and support it . I think it drops to $130-$140 by Monday. It will be an interesting test case.

----------


## Krugminator2

> It has to happen at some point. Did he put a time line on it? You're talking about it like you think it's taking a really long time to happen when this whole thread only got started 14 months ago.



Here's what I said. From July 1st when the stock closed at $204.36. It bottomed at $78. I do think $20 is probably not far off the "correct" valuation in the long run. It has a $21 book value and loses money.  That could be a long time. And it isn't impossible they turn the company around with all the money they raised on the backs of messageboard posters.




> I think GME will probably drop back to the 50-60 bucks over time. Every bounce is getting sold. It is breaking a range to the downside so I got short. If it doesn't go down I will cover. Really nothing more to it. I really have no idea what these random numbers and Michael Burry and engineered crash or any of that means and I don't want to know.

----------


## devil21

> The stock dropped from from $250 in late November down to 78 bucks. I have already been proven right. The drop already happened.  The stock is the single greatest gift in the world.   It will drop 30 to 40 bucks in the next couple of days because that's what turds do.


And here it is back to ~180 again.  78 does not equal 20, does it?  When will we see your $20 valuation?  We won't.  Ever.




> These engineered squeezes are nice wealth transfers from the stupid to the smart.


Are they?  Or are they transfers from honest people playing by agreed contracted rules to criminals who don't follow or enforce their own contracts and regulations when they become on the losing side?  See nickel LME recently for another example.  Pirates stealing as always.




> No it wasn't. Do you know how I know that? Because I was short AMC and GME when the halt happened watching both tick for tick.


Post the Level 2 feed for proof.  I've watched the L2 feed.  It was going _up_.  The link I posted to the reddit thread has the video in it.

What's really going on:
It's clear that some hedge funds planned to "cellar box" certain retail brick-n-mortar stocks for Amazon's benefit, naked short them into delisting while placing executives and board members into those companies to purposely bankrupt them.  Delisting and bankruptcy means never having to close the naked shorts and pay any taxes on the gains.  Their main sabotage tool is a "consulting group" controlled by Citadel named Boston Consulting Group.  Since retail thwarted that cellar box plan, there's huge short positions between hedge funds and Citadel that can _never_ be closed.  All they can do is keep up shenanigans to kick the can while the SEC watches porn.




> And it isn't impossible they turn the company around with all the money they raised on the backs of messageboard posters.


Bingo.  Now you're catching on.  The huge naked short positions can't be closed (eta: meaning closed without a squeeze....they can be closed, just not without a squeeze, they _must_ let this play out at some point).  The playbook of bankrupting the company failed.  It's all various $#@!ery tactics to kick the can now.

----------


## devil21

@Krugminator2       @Invisible Man
Both of your inputs prompted me to look and think deeper about the halt yesterday.  I have concluded that what happened was actually a manufactured test on a live market of what will happen when the real squeeze of GME (and possibly AMC, BBBY and other heavily shorted "meme stocks") pops off.  There are reports of the last bid/ask being .02bid vs 486Kask.  Those numbers are exactly what would be expected during a real short squeeze of GME.  People reported that their RH accounts notified them that their $500+ calls were suddenly ITM, even though that price was never displayed.  Believe what you will Krug but that was an engineered halt.  The bid/ask was wiped and the GME price reset to where it opened at.  Big options profits wiped out.  It had all the hallmarks of a market test (as was 1987 crash....a test of new computer based trading).  They know that at some point these massive short positions must be cleared and any decent market maker that's knee deep in them will engineer a test of the algo's reactions for observation, alteration and risk mitigation.  I assure you there's much more going on with these symbols than meets the eye.  

(But they need to pay up, clear out the fraud and restore balance if they want to move to the planned blockchain based stock system...trying to weasel out of it before "building back better" with a new system only guarantees a negative karmic balance from the start.  GME apes can be great advocates for the new system if treated fairly during the unwind or fierce opponents of it if not.)

----------


## Madison320

> It has to happen at some point. Did he put a time line on it? You're talking about it like you think it's taking a really long time to happen when this whole thread only got started 14 months ago.


I agree. Stuff that has no value will eventually get to their inherent price. Like you said the bubble only started 14 months ago. Let's see what happens IF they stop doing QE for about 6 months or so and raise rates up to something not ridiculously low like maybe 2%. They haven't even stopped QE yet. Give it some time.

----------


## devil21

removed

----------


## devil21

Free dividend shares of GME hitting accounts after market close on Thursday 7-21-22.  

Assuming there's no naked shorts left that created a $#@! load of fake shares, it shouldn't ever matter.  But OTOH, there's a wee math problem here if there's fake shares (meaning share counts on the books exceeding the ~76million actually issued by Gamestop) still sitting on various broker/DTC books.

----------


## Krugminator2

GME is 156 now. I think it is a good short here. Think it can puke short term and after stock split think it drops 30-40%.

Edit:157 now. Not breaking down. Maybe holds one more day.

Edit 2 July 23: Down 7% yesterday. Took off a third around the close. Going to try to play the rest out for a collapse.

----------


## devil21

> GME is 156 now. I think it is a good short here. Think it can puke short term and after stock split think it drops 30-40%.
> 
> Edit:157 now. Not breaking down. Maybe holds one more day.
> 
> Edit 2 July 23: Down 7% yesterday. Took off a third around the close. Going to try to play the rest out for a collapse.


I hope you understand the implications of shorting during a dividend split...

----------


## Krugminator2

> I hope you understand the implications of shorting during a dividend split...


Split was last week. Was short before the split and held through. No implications. Cutting a pie that had 4 pieces into 16 pieces is still the same amount of pie. A+ trade. Took some more off today. Down to one quarter size. Will look to add if it stays heavy.

----------


## devil21

> Split was last week. Was short before the split and held through. No implications. Cutting a pie that had 4 pieces into 16 pieces is still the same amount of pie. A+ trade. Took some more off today. Down to one quarter size. Will look to add if it stays heavy.


Yeah you don't understand.  It wasn't a generic stock split.  Good luck.

----------


## Krugminator2

MASSIVE bubble in meme junk .  They probably don't collapse today. But a gap up tomorrow would be a gift from the gods.

GME, AMC, BBBY.   Apes handing out free money right now for a short. Probably safest to wait a day.

Mini meme stock is Revlon which is bankrupt and shareholders will get zero or very close is $8.35. High borrow cost but if you can time the turn, plenty of downside meat.

----------


## devil21

> MASSIVE bubble in meme junk .  They probably don't collapse today. But a gap up tomorrow would be a gift from the gods.
> 
> GME, AMC, BBBY.   Apes handing out free money right now for a short. Probably safest to wait a day.
> 
> Mini meme stock is Revlon which is bankrupt and shareholders will get zero or very close is $8.35. High borrow cost but if you can time the turn, plenty of downside meat.


You should go all-in shorting all of them.  Literally can't go tits up.

----------


## Krugminator2

Covered BBBY, GME and AMC yesterday and today in selloffs.  Might collapse tomorrow but without me. Would love to see one more crazy spike.

----------


## Krugminator2

Shorted BBBY at 25.  Probably drops 10 bucks from here over the coming days.

Very similar to Gamestop. Same guy pumping it. Half the shares are short. Lots of low IQ buffoons buying call options which causes market makers to have to hedge by buying the stock which creates a self reinforcing loop of buying. But when it tops out the selling will be even faster.

Edit: Covered after hours in the 18.5-19.5 range.  

Will short Gamestop huge on a gap down.

----------


## Krugminator2

BBBY down below 12 after hours.  Gamestop down 10% on the news after hours as well.

----------


## devil21

> Shorted BBBY at 25.  Probably drops 10 bucks from here over the coming days.
> 
> Very similar to Gamestop. Same guy pumping it. Half the shares are short. Lots of low IQ buffoons buying call options which causes market makers to have to hedge by buying the stock which creates a self reinforcing loop of buying. But when it tops out the selling will be even faster.
> 
> Edit: Covered after hours in the 18.5-19.5 range.  
> 
> Will short Gamestop huge on a gap down.


Same guy pumping it?  You mean Ken Griffin, right?  lol  Citadel enables these naked short squeezes by creating fake shares for hedge funds (and Citadel's own hedge fund) and never delivering actual shares, allowing short interest to exceed actual float shares.

Ryan Cohen had owned his BBBY positions since January-March buy window so no, he wasn't "pumping" anything.  Or do you think he pulled that old "buy shares and options months in advance then sell for a profit without making a single public comment."  lol again.

Media lies constantly and I guess he's no exception.  According to Wall Street's media foot soldiers, Wall Street is never the cause of anything, especially not illegal naked shorting that causes short interest to exceed 100% of float which triggers a squeeze.  Again.  Pirates still stealing, as always.

That was a pretty wild chain of events, though.  I made a small profit since I had to work during the run-up and didn't get to sell any when it hit 25+.

GME and BBBY are sync'ed up because they're both tied together (along with a bunch more "dying brick and mortars" that hedgies tried to cellar-box into bankruptcy) through swaps, a la Archegos/Hwang.  The media just labels them meme stocks to deflect from the real story of failed cellar boxing via illegal naked shorting that I explained in earlier posts.

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## Krugminator2

> Same guy pumping it?  You mean Ken Griffin, right?  lol  Citadel enables these naked short squeezes by creating fake shares for hedge funds (and Citadel's own hedge fund) and never delivering actual shares, allowing short interest to exceed actual float shares.
> 
> Ryan Cohen had owned his BBBY positions since January-March buy window so no, he wasn't "pumping" anything.  Or do you think he pulled that old "buy shares and options months in advance then sell for a profit without making a single public comment."  lol again.
> 
> Media lies constantly and I guess he's no exception.  According to Wall Street's media foot soldiers, Wall Street is never the cause of anything, especially not illegal naked shorting that causes short interest to exceed 100% of float which triggers a squeeze.  Again.  Pirates still stealing, as always.
> 
> That was a pretty wild chain of events, though.  I made a small profit since I had to work during the run-up and didn't get to sell any when it hit 25+.
> 
> GME and BBBY are sync'ed up because they're both tied together (along with a bunch more "dying brick and mortars" that hedgies tried to cellar-box into bankruptcy) through swaps, a la Archegos/Hwang.  The media just labels them meme stocks to deflect from the real story of failed cellar boxing via illegal naked shorting that I explained in earlier posts.



Ken Griffin, cellar boxing, naked shorts.... I should send every one of the people who believe this stuff a thank you card.

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## devil21

> Ken Griffin, cellar boxing, naked shorts.... I should send every one of the people who believe this stuff a thank you card.


I bought back into bbby on the dip but with more conviction.  I heard something about some obscure SEC and FINRA regulation created by a guy named Reggie Sho, regarding naked shorts selling shares that don't exist and then failing to deliver actual market shares and being required to buy them in open market by a certain day.  Something about a t+13 and September 2nd and 6th.  Dunno.  Probably just more crazy tinfoil, right?  Probably.  It's not like the SEC and FINRA actually enforces their own rules or whatever.

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## Krugminator2

> I bought back into bbby on the dip but with more conviction.  I heard something about some obscure SEC and FINRA regulation created by a guy named Reggie Sho, regarding naked shorts selling shares that don't exist and then failing to deliver actual market shares and being required to buy them in open market by a certain day.  Something about a t+13 and September 2nd and 6th.  Dunno.*  Probably just more crazy tinfoil, right?  Probably.  It's not like the SEC and FINRA actually enforces their own rules or whatever*.




Reg Sho doesn't mean anything. No shortage of shares to short. There's nothing to enforce. From 30 seconds ago.



AVYA

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## devil21

> Reg Sho doesn't mean anything. No shortage of shares to short. There's nothing to enforce. From 30 seconds ago.
> 
> 
> 
> AVYA


Weird that it doesn't mean anything, considering the obvious short and distort (aka lie your $#@!ing ass off through Wall St owned media outlets) narrative that flooded the net the last few days to scare people into selling that stock.  "BBBY BANKRUPT!  TRUST ME BRO!  SELL NOW!    (few moments later:  oops not bankrupt but thanks for selling to cover our illegal shorts due to our fear campaign.)  Hell, at this point there's so much crime that it could have just been removed from the list to protect the shorts, rules be damned.  The whole system is a giant theft operation.  Pirates stealing as always.

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## Brian4Liberty

Wish I had more info, but heard in the background on Fox Business that there are a lot of options out there trying to drive the market indexes down right now.

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## Krugminator2

Covered the remainder of my GME short yesterday and this morning.  +10 dollars.  Still another 20 in downside but getting oversold with a market poised to rip higher.  It has earnings next Wednesday. If it gaps up on whatever nonsense they say will be another great entry for a short.

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## Krugminator2

> Weird that it doesn't mean anything, considering the obvious short and distort (aka lie your $#@!ing ass off through Wall St owned media outlets) narrative that flooded the net the last few days to scare people into selling that stock.  "BBBY BANKRUPT!  TRUST ME BRO!  SELL NOW!    (few moments later:  oops not bankrupt but thanks for selling to cover our illegal shorts due to our fear campaign.)  Hell, at this point there's so much crime that it could have just been removed from the list to protect the shorts, rules be damned.  The whole system is a giant theft operation.  Pirates stealing as always.


I am sure the company is doing great.

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