FWIW, I think there are no conspiracies here on the side of Robinhood, and the attacks by the revolutionary mob are misguided.
Having said that, there is no question that banks ruined the economy during the GFC, and didn't pay enough of a price, and hedge fund managers often make a killing, while paying very little in taxes, and HFT make a killing without providing any social value.
But the answer to that is not, I'm afraid, hyping some gaming stock and trying to squeeze a few shorts.
The answer is political action - voting, pushing for proper regulation. There are lots of proposals out there: stringent capital requirements for banks; closing the "carried interest" loophole; changing the structure of markets (eg auctions every minute instead of continuous markets).
This is blatant anti-competitive behavior on the part of Robinhood and Citadel.
As i say elsewhere - this margin call was FORCED by RH because they blocked users ability to buy shares as Citadel + others were ladder short selling to artificially lower the stock price of GME, forcing the margin call.
This is horrific, criminal, and should be prosecuted.
Ultimately, they know that their SEC Fine will be less than the $50B+ in losses they face from their irresponsible naked short selling.
Did we learn nothing in 2008? Are we just going to continue to allow wall street to get away with fleecing everyone else in America / the world?
Something else we learned from 2008 is that the government and taxpayers made money on the bailout because it was paid back with interest, see sources like: https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/
A stock market is a high stakes gambling system. The smart and the powerful win. You'll never limit winners to just the smart. If you someone did for a period of time, those smart people would become powerful and decide to limit other smart people.
But so what if you did allow just smart people win? Most people aren't that smart and you'd wind-up with a fleecing. So making this game fair isn't particularly in the average not-genius-with-nerves-of-steel person's interests. It's more in the average person's interests to have an index-traded-funds go up a reliable amount each year.
Fleecing Reddit geeks isn't fleecing everyone in America.
Edit: My point is - sure it might be against the rules but this affair is between smart speculators and big speculators. Saying it's crime against everyone is ridiculous.
"It's more in the average person's interests to have an index-traded-funds go up a reliable amount each year."
You are saying that people are too dumb to decide what to do with their own money, and that's not your call.
The reason this is a crime against everyone is because there's allegedly a "free market", but moments like this show that the emperor has no clothes and that in fact that's not the case.
> Are we just going to continue to allow wall street to get away with fleecing everyone else in America / the world?
Well yeah. Why would you expect anything else? And if anyone complains about it, the complaints will get scrubbed off the internet. And if you go to private messengers to complain, your session keys will get escrowed because "terrorism" or "misinformation" or something and you'll be banned. Keep in mind that the WallStreetBets Discord server was banned for "hate speech" right in the middle of all the recent drama. Does anyone actually believe that was the real reason?
It's because of shenanigans like this that I'm categorically against any sort of control whatsoever over flows of information.
It won't be long before the Biden Administration is declaring members from WallStreetBets to be domestic terrorists acting in concert to attack the US financial system (it'll be part of the broader War on Domestic Terrorism program that they've begun). The powers that be in DC and on Wall Street will never allow this kind of action to go unchecked indefinitely.
They'll probably make it a crime to organize large groups of individuals to herd buy/short a stock.
For anyone saying, "Most likely trading on margin"
Remember:
This morning Robinhood conspired with Citadel to halt trading amid a short ladder sell to drive the price lower, allowing shorts to cover their losses with no competition.
This is blatant market manipulation and anti competitive behavior, and must be stopped.
Why does everyone insist on protecting billionaires who insist on playing the game with a different set of rules than the rest of us?
No, you are making bold claims providing no evidence whatsoever. I can also just start spewing unfounded opinions that the illuminati are trying to defraud r/WSB. Everyone can do that.
You are going around parroting the same stuff everywhere and making zero effort to at least provide links to credible sources to support your claim.
I'm not saying you are wrong, I'm saying that if you want people to take you seriously (as opposed to looking like a shill), you have to do more than spam every possible discussion.
Hey, I'm afraid you broke the site guidelines badly and repeatedly. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of how wrong other commenters are or you feel they are.
> You trade with robinhood's money, then they can decide not to lend it to you anymore for nearly any reason they want.
Can they? I thought margin calls were you personal debt. It's like the bank deciding to sell your house that you have mortgage on because they think the market is too volatile. Makes little senes.
> One of the most important things to understand about margin calls is that your brokerage firm has discretion as to when you are required to increase the equity in your margin account. Some firms will attempt to contact you to tell you additional equity is required, but they're not obligated to do so. Whether or not your firm has contacted you, they can take immediate action to increase the equity in your account if they decide the equity is too low and is not in line with the risk of your account. This means they can immediately sell out whichever securities they choose, regardless of the financial and tax obligations for you.
You have to admit, though - that is disingenuous. Those plays were profitable, no need to call them (unless there has been irresponsible behavior on the behalf of the broker)
That is entirely up to the broker. They make no guarantees to you that they'll underwrite your risk taking with no limits. If you don't want this to happen, go to a reputable broker and make sure you are not trading on margin. This is not rocket science, but does require a basic level of understanding.
I agree that this is the technically correct definition of how margin is typically utilized, and that investors should be prepared for this in the case of high volatility.
The fact does remain, though, that the way the data is presenting itself seems to indicate that there was disingenuous behavior on the behalf of market makers and a number of hedge funds. To be seen, I guess.
I mean, assuming manipulative self-interested disingenuous behavior on the part of market makers and hedge funds on a daily basis is usually a safe bet. Also on the part of nearly anyone interacting with the stock market who has the power to do it. It's kind of the whole game. True, that may not be how they teach it to you in high school.
It's in the logs, go see for yourself?
GME purchases blocked this morning on apps where Citadel is the clearing house.
SOMEONE proceeds to ladder short sell GME to cause a massive price dump.
Users are margin called from previously profitable positions (without being able to provide buying pressure needed to fight against a ladder short sell)
Shorts are able to unethically cover your position.
Read into this... it's all over the news and verifiable with documentation from various regulatory agencies.
These type of comments just feel naive to me. Maybe this hurts a few firms and causes losses for a few billionaires, but do people think there aren't other firms and other billionaires making a killing on this too?
Samsung fridges are hot garbage and imo should be avoided at all costs.
I had a not-so-drastic experience with a high-end samsung fridge: A design flaw where the recirculation fan would accrue ice, and symptoms were that it sounded like a chainsaw every time it turned on, and eventually the fan would freeze over. The only way to "fix" it was to thaw it out every few weeks, and any attempt to replace parts was futile since it was a design flaw, not a mechanical failure.
I doubt it. I open the door of course, but I don't put hot things into the fridge.
My shelves are generally packed with large jugs. For example, on a main shelf I might have 4 gallons of milk and a half dozen half-gallon containers of juice and then more stuff to fill out the remaining space. Door shelves are similarly packed, with the ones in the Samsung being about 12x8 inches and thus big enough for gallons of milk.
The fridge is constantly used by kids. It needs to be mostly restocked every other day.
Glass shattered in one of the $400 fridges. The other $400 fridge is wire. Glass shelves in the Samsung would break around the edge, leaving me with an intact sheet of glass and some broken plastic. Door shelves are always plastic. Samsung snapped white and clear plastic together to make the shelves, with a fragile zig-zag at the joint. I got to wrapping the shelves with string-embedded packing tape before installing them, which increased the typical life from weeks to months.
Give me forged metal grates please, or at least something like rustproof storm drain covers.
Info: Chewy is one of the largest pet retailers in the world and more recently was the largest eCommerce acquisition.
As the first data scientist on the digital marketing team, you will be working to build predictive models to help determine future user behavior and value.
Benefits: 401k, travel subsidy, beer, pet friendly office, cold brew, great coworkers, and awesome projects to work on (big data)
As it happens, I literally just now posted the curriculum for part 2 of the course - http://www.fast.ai/2017/01/17/curriculum2/ . If you're near SF, you may want to join us. Either way, I'd love to get feedback on the curriculum - anything you'd like to see added? Anything from part 1 that you'd like to know more about?
I am just getting started actually, so I will provide you more feedback as I complete part 1!
For starters, I found the pairing of the lecture, the code, AND the documentation to be particularly useful. The setup in anaconda really enables to you compare/understand inputs and outputs, which at least for me, is very helpful! Big fan of learning through practical application, which the aforementioned combo is well suited for, imo.
Kudos and thank you (and the team) very much for all of the hard work! I am not sure I'll be able to attend part 2 in person but I will be sure to follow along online. If I am ever in SF at the time of a course, I will certainly apply!
"A key teaching goal for us is that you come away from the course feeling much more comfortable reading, understanding, and implementing research papers. We’ll be sharing some simple tricks that make it much easier to quickly scan and get the key insights from a paper."
My interest is musical style transfer. I'd like to replicate these examples from Sony Computer Science Lab-Paris: http://www.flow-machines.com/odetojoy/
They've published papers, but not code (except for DeepBach).
Pretty sad to see most of HN willfully ignoring this fact and jumping to the defense of Hedge Funds and the billionaire class.