/r/WallStreetBets has written an open letter to powers that be @CNBC - they threaten to continue to bankrupt every last hedge-fund since Wall Street has screwed over the average American & always gets bailed out. They actually make great points, read:
also really enjoying the image of some serious-ass trader having to plow through hundreds of comments on /r/wsb in order to have a fully up-to-date picture of meme-based market movements
Quants are scraping WallStreetBets now. We are off the rails lmao https://businessinsider.com/hedge-funds-data-reddit-tracking-wallstreetbets-tickers-gamestop-short-yolo-2021-1…
Step 0: Citadel pays Robinhood for order flow. Citadel gets to see RH's orders a few milliseconds before they're filled. Citadel may choose to front-run some of those trades.
Step 1: RH's customers and WallStreetBets start manipulating $GME. This is happening in the open.
Step 2: HFTs buy shares ahead of Robinhood users.
Remember Citadel, the firm who can front-run robinhood trades, and got to see all of that RH data a little early because they paid for flow? Yeah. When do you think they started buying $GME in front of RH traders on momentum?
Step 3: A hedge fund becomes insolvent. Today it was Melvin Capital Management. It very likely won't be the last.
Melvin immediately sells off a portion of itself, because it needs the influx of cash or it will vanish in a poof of smoke, vaporizing ~$15 Billion in the process.
Step 4: Who's the lead investor, picking up part of a usually successful fund at fire-sale prices?
Right. Citadel, probably with some of the cash they made by repeatedly profiting in the milliseconds before filling the trades that collapsed this fund.
https://wsj.com/articles/citadel-point72-to-invest-2-75-billion-into-melvin-capital-management-11611604340…
Step 5: Citadel still has access to RH order flows, is still allowed to front-run them and/or pocket the spread, and can use that and other information to determine the next over-leveraged fund that's going to get squeezed.
They might even be able to accelerate the squeeze.
I am not sure what special award the internet can give to @matt_levine which would match the value of his commentary on the GameStop madness, but whatever it is, I would like to vote for it.
Links to the past few episodes from today’s if you’ve missed: https://bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-27/reddit-driven-surge-puts-gamestop-and-ryan-cohen-in-a-weird-spot…
has anyone covering the Wall Street GME reaping and sowing gone into the fact that a lot of the GameStop and directly associated trades have been largely amplified by social listening powered mega firms doing machine learning automated trades because the “idea” of GME is popular?
Arm young men, in a basement, not at work, not having sex, not forming connection, with an RH account, a phone and stimulus and you have the perfect storm of volatility as they wage war against established players while squeezing the dopa bag,,,harder and harder
i lied look at this trash lying-through-their-teeth statement
holy shit they're just looking out for us guys
us little people thanks robin hood
https://blog.robinhood.com/news/2021/1/28/keeping-customers-informed-through-market-volatility…
There is no shortage of takes about what's going on with Gamestop (and other surging stocks), Robinhood and Reddit's r/wallstreetbets, many of them contradictory - at least on the face of them. But I think it's possible for most of these takes to be right. Here's how.
1/
hmm
this generated a vague thought i'm having trouble putting into words about the internet as the global brain, something something information cascades, something something system-wide updates
(running in exhausted)
OK I'm here I have the take
The actual story of Gamestonk isn't that Redditors figured out how to do financial mayhem
It's that we're learning how to Do Reflexivity and just wait until this starts to happen to political campaigns
https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/28/r-whitehousebets/…
I really think at this point it calls upon the regulators to consider simply suspending this newsletter for a month and stop sending it. https://bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-28/knowing-when-to-sell-gamestop-stock-at-the-top-is-impossible…
So @aoc is right to ask how it can be that Robinhood stopped its clients from buying certain securities. And what she'll find is that the reason is that Dodd-Frank requires brokers like RH to post collateral to cover their clients' trading risk pre-settlement.
Hopefully I can put out this newsletter to add some sanity, and most of all, some kindness back in this market. https://bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-29/reddit-traders-on-robinhood-are-on-both-sides-of-gamestop…