Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2021/01/26/billionaire-investors-dump-2-7b-into-stock-shorting-battle-vs-r-wallstreetbets.html
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The stock market is fucking stupid. A bunch of idiots out there making bets with other people’s money at little risk to themselves, and we’re told to trust this over social security.
Doomed.
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Quite liking this. Capitalism and its relationship with Wall Street relies on stock price manipulation only to be available to big spenders with a lot of money. This shows that the same process allows lots of investors with little money each to manipulate prices if they can organise properly.
In other words, capitalism can’t complain when their processes work as they designed them to.
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Enough money to improve the lives of countless people…all being used for a pissing match.
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Blackberry. That got a laugh out of me.
I doubt this kind of tr0lling would be tolerated for very long in a regular casino, but the “free” market can’t do much about it (except for the incumbents to bail out the stock shorting firm for their own profit). Popcorn, anyone?
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Wall Street =/= The Economy.
Never more true than this.
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Some people say we are living in 1984. Some people say we are living in A Brave New World. Others say we are living in Lord of the Flies or maybe even The Matrix.
But they are all wrong. We are living in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of the Crowds
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Well we just emerged from the prequel to Idiocracy, so it seems like we can probably run multiple narrative fuckups at the same time.
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this is a great reason why big investors should get behind the ftt.
wall street i’m sure hates it because it would help eliminate day trader gambling and all those fees they’re able to suck up. but, it would also help eliminate day trader gambling and all those fees wall street is able to suck up. 
we gotta balance that federal budget somehow(*)
(* okay. we don’t. but if saying so gets us to start taxing investors properly to free up money for things people actually need, that’s fine by me. )
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I’m all for screwing over hedge funds, but I’m not comfortable with the direct line of meme lords progressing from the social fuckery of GamerGate to massive political fuckery of /r/The_Donald and the 2016 election to now financial fuckery.
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I hope these assholes don’t blow up the economy –– again.
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Citadel isn’t bailing out the hedge fund, so much as they’re using a privileged position (HFT with access to Robinhood’s data stream) to buy into the hedge fund at firesale prices that they helped cause (click through for the thread):
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The HFT bunch also would hate it, for obvious reasons. I’d be fine with that. This kind of tax is one of the revenue mechanisms Andy Stern sees funding a UBI (discussed in this topic).
Now that would be something for the SEC to look into. Not sure if there’s much evidence yet, though.
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And I just saw on Slashdot Elon Musk is in this too, egging it on.
What a stupid shitshow
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Oops.
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The more momentum the bigger the crash.
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Trading Places 2. I can’t wait.
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POOF
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No one in the press seems to want to mention that this stock didn’t just have a ‘short position’ - it was shorted at 140% of it’s available stock.
140%
It’s illegal to short a stock to over 100% - this is called naked shorting. People are going to go to jail over this - but it won’t be the little robinhood investors.
You know what happens when a stock price goes up and there are no shares to cover a short? Yeah - no wonder people jumped on this.
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Hopefully there will soon be a podcast or YouTube video to explain all this to a dummy like me.
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