Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by beervirus 1974 days ago
> 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.

4 comments

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.

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.

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.

Nitpicking, but I think you're referring to The Big Short rather than Moneyball.
Right, of course— thanks. My brain was short-cutting to "the one that got made into a movie."
You mean 'The Big Short', Moneyball is about baseball. ;)
>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.

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.
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?
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.
Where have I stated that?
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).
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?
Early exercise, plenty of cash.
Source for Schwab?