[xorx]

Yes, but retail is going to get destroyed in the end.

The power elite always get what they want. Right now there appear to be curbs on GME and AMC buy orders for TD Ameritrade and Schwab customers.

If you have to pull strings with your drinking buddy from Dartmouth to blow up a bunch of propertyless zoomers in order to prevent a margin call on the account you've leveraged to buy your house in the Hamptons, then that's what you're going to do.

[balls187]

> Yes, but retail is going to get destroyed in the end.

Mainly because they're playing with their own money, while the hedgefunds are playing with House's Money.

[beervirus]

> Right now there appear to be curbs on GME and AMC buy orders for TD Ameritrade and Schwab customers.

Yes indeed. Ameritrade won't even let me exercise the calls I already own. It's ridiculous.

[piva00]

This is absolutely fucking ridiculous. Someone is getting fucked by their own leverage, they got caught, isn't that what the market is supposed to do? Kill the overleveraged non-sense to redistribute wealth to more efficient investments?

It isn't a bank run to be blocked for the sake of society, this is just a bunch of rich people paying the price for risking too much... Boils my blood so deeply.

[kqr]

This is part of the game, though.

The hardest part of gambling is not coming up with the big winning bet -- it's getting whatever counterparty to pay you once you've won. It's always been this way, in sports, in horses, and on Wall Street. People come up with all sorts of reasons to not pay you and you have to shape your strategy around this.

Aaron Brown talks about how being a successful gambler is not about a few high-stakes wins, or a super-consistent record. It's about winning the right fraction of bets, so that nobody suspects you're a winner.

[mikepurvis]

The Big Short talks about this too— people trying to figure out how to bet against subprime mortgages in a way that the entity on the other side of it will actually be in a position to pay out (and be able to be compelled to do so).

Perhaps ironically, one of the central characters of that story, Michael Burry, is none too pleased at the current situation: https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/michael-burry-calls-gamestop-ral...

EDIT: The Big Short, of course, not Moneyball.

[seanosaur]

Nitpicking, but I think you're referring to The Big Short rather than Moneyball.

[mikepurvis]

Right, of course— thanks. My brain was short-cutting to "the one that got made into a movie."

[exoque]

You mean 'The Big Short', Moneyball is about baseball. ;)

[nathanasmith]

>The hardest part of gambling is not coming up with the big winning bet -- it's getting whatever counterparty to pay you once you've won.

Isn't that the truth. I know crypto is hated on here but just as an anecdote, I've traded on a lot of exchanges in the last few years and I almost wince whenever I make a really great trade that 5 or 10x's because as sure as the day is long inside of an hour my account will get frozen and I'll have to submit documentation, answer a bunch of questions, or whatever else to get my account unfrozen and access to the funds. It's almost like they're saying thanks for your business and we don't mind you getting lucky but don't get too lucky.

[chromaton]

Business Adventures has the tale of the Piggly Wiggly short squeeze of 1923. The old boys of the NYSE changed the rules to help the shorts and undo trades after the fact.

[QuesnayJr]

So you think GameStop shares are genuinely worth $375? GameStop traded around $20 a share for the past couple of years. You think that right now the company is worth almost 20 times what it was worth two years ago?

[chromaton]

It's worth whatever somebody will pay for it. And right now the short sellers will pay a lot for it to stop their losses.

[piva00]

Where have I stated that?

[thebean11]

Remember you can file a dispute for things like this. Gather as much evidence as you can that you attempted to exercise. If you win the dispute they have to exercise at whatever the price was during your attempt (IANAL, this is just my understanding).

[jscheel]

Are you trying to do an early exercise, or do you mean that they won't let you sell your calls? If you are trying to exercise, do you have the cash to cover, or are you trying to use margin to do it?

[beervirus]

Early exercise, plenty of cash.

[loosetypes]

Source for Schwab?

[HNfriend234]

Also they apparently have the "biden economic team" looking into the situation so it does go to show that lobbying dollars allows you to get your concerns addressed rather quickly.

[asdfman123]

You can still buy AMC on Robinhood. I just did.

[koheripbal]

Very likely is that the SEC is making phone calls to the big trading firms. Firms don't restrict transactions like this much voluntarily.

They are going to call the Reddit CEO and have wsb shut down under the threat of SEC enforcement actions.

Looks like the wsb discord is down.

[jimbob45]

Same stuff goes down on 4chan and several other sites. Not to mention the fact that the SEC has neglected to investigate insider trading for years now.

IMHO why the fuck is shorting legal to begin with. Short insurance should be mandatory for short trading.

[koheripbal]

> the fact that the SEC has neglected to investigate insider trading for years now.

Obviously false: https://secsearch.sec.gov/search/docs?utf8=%E2%9C%93&affilia...

> 4chan and several other sites...

Scale dictates enforcement priorities, obviously. Like a lot of people, they don't deal with issues until they are large and impact the market. They are ABSOLUTELY going to intervene here. First with some immediate action, and later they'll craft a new rule to guide social media on stock advice being not allowed on their platforms (IMO).

> why the f** is shorting legal

Short selling rewards investors who believe that certain stocks are overvalued or that the company is covering up fraud. They helped bring Lehman Brothers down, as well as Enron, Wirecard, etc... In those instances, the shorts were instrumental in reverting stocks down to correct (sometimes zero) prices. Without them, bubbles would rise higher and poop much bigger. That sort of volatility destroys liquidity and confidence in the market.

> Short insurance should be mandatory for short trading.

There are naked short limits already, but yeah, this issue with GameStop should have those rules re-evaluated, because they obviously didn't work in this case.

[mrec]

> bubbles would rise higher and poop much bigger

Please don't fix this, it's perfect.

[jcfrei]

> They are ABSOLUTELY going to intervene here.

I wouldn't be so certain about this at all. Matt Levine has a good take on it: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-01-26/will-w...

[tony101]

> "First with some immediate action, and later they'll craft a new rule to guide social media on stock advice being not allowed on their platforms (IMO)."

What about Section 230?

[bilegeek]

Well, the IRS doesn't go after rich people because they don't have the funding[1]; they only go after the people they can afford to go after[2].

I know the IRS is different from the SEC, Apples to Oranges. But like you said, they've neglected insider trading; it's probably for very similar reasons, because those being investigated just have too much power to take down. I'm sure the SEC will hammer these easy targets on WSB well before they even dare touch the Big Boys.

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/sunday-review/tax-rich-ir...

[2]https://www.propublica.org/article/earned-income-tax-credit-...

[koheripbal]

If you look at the SEC website, they list all their current complaints filed against people for Insider Trading.

There are many [1].

[1] https://secsearch.sec.gov/search/docs?utf8=%E2%9C%93&affilia...

[boringg]

SEC got neutered when the previous US administration got into power. The administration before that was actively pursuing cases.

[koheripbal]

False: https://secsearch.sec.gov/search/docs?utf8=%E2%9C%93&affilia...

[boringg]

True: https://wp.nyu.edu/compliance_enforcement/2017/10/09/trump-v...

[TuringNYC]

Could you note any major cases the previous administration pursued that didn't involve some lone scapegoat trader and/or a minority everyone could agree to dislike? Were there any actual cases after the 2008 mortgage/cdo/cds crisis, for example?

[TuringNYC]

Prediction: SEC will go after one or two retail traders who are minorities and blame the entire episode on their probably harmless tweet or post.

[sayhar]

I don't know why you're being voted down here. These are legitimate articles in major publications that are broadly accepted by experts in the field. Sad!