[theorymeltfool]

I'm curious if the HFs that shorted Gamestop, are also profiting off of the wild swings by Redditors who have now lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. They could easily swing-trade this stock all the way down, using massive buy/sell orders to drive the price.

If Melvin Capital isn't bankrupt after all of this, there might just be A LOT of broke redditors who cashed in their lifesavings on this gamble.

[klmadfejno]

The HFs that shorted Gamestop specifically? I'd guess not. But others? Most certainly yes there are institutional players in this one.

[stouset]

HFs who shorted GameStop at $400+ are swimming in money right now.

[Rapzid]

You can only short if somebody who owns the stock is betting it going the other way though? I'm not sure all the technical details, but I'm pretty sure you can't just short as much GME as you want when everyone expects it to crash..

[sjg007]

High volatility is good for the professional traders so yes.

[volta83]

I see often stated as a fact that "a lot of retail investors from WSB bough a lot of GME shares", but I never see any proof about any of this.

What's the proof that any retail investor actually bought GME?

How many retail investors actually bought GME?

How much money did they win or loose?

[piquadrat]

The fact that Robinhood had to emergency-raise $3billion to be able to put up the collateral with their clearing houses should be enough indication that a lot of retail traders were engaged in these highly volatile stocks.

See e.g. https://fortune.com/2021/02/02/robinhood-gamestop-restricted...

[itronitron]

I would be interested in seeing an audit of their emergency-raise and the reasons for it.

[pc86]

Robinhood uses its own, internal, clearinghouse.

[piquadrat]

They say otherwise on their blog[1]:

"Clearinghouses are SEC-registered organizations that act as the central depository for securities. They keep a record of the stocks owned through a brokerage. Clearing brokerages, like Robinhood Securities, are members of clearinghouses."

"The amount required by clearinghouses to cover the settlement period of some securities rose tremendously this week. How much? To put it in perspective, this week alone, our clearinghouse-mandated deposit requirements related to equities increased ten-fold."

https://blog.robinhood.com/news/2021/1/29/what-happened-this...

[pc86]

https://robinhood.com/us/en/support/articles/whats-clearing-...

[athriren]

yes, you just verified robinhood is a clearing broker. they are not a clearinghouse. imagine a clearinghouse as almost guilds brokerages set up to get a useful function they needed that banks do not want to provide. so you have a ton of clearing brokers and they all send their money to the clearinghouse and then they can just forget about everything other than order execution and settlement and ignore all of the hard problems in the middle. the clearinghouse is itself an institution that also has incentives, and one of them is “in periods of extreme volatility, i am going to increase the capital i require to be held here in order to be certain all of the middle bits can be executed”.

i have no idea why people think robinhood is a clearinghouse, that doesn’t make sense. they don’t want to do that! they want to do PFOF with execution or make settlement take 0 days so they can further take advantage of retail or whatever. being a clearinghouse sucks. no one likes you. banks don’t want to do your job.

[totalZero]

They use their own internal clearing, but they are not the clearinghouse.

[rsstack]

It's a public community. Did you open it even once? People (yes, people other than the one guy who started it) post screenshots from their investment accounts.

[Rebelgecko]

I wonder how many are authentic and not just inspect element

[volta83]

They might be authentic, in the sense that somebody is using a paper-trading account.

Using inspect element sounds like too much trouble when you can just use fake money instead.

[rsstack]

Everyone on the Internet is a bot. I'm waiting for you to post "your" YouTube channel and ask for likes.

[thatguy0900]

Why do you not believe people didn't jump on the free money hype train? It's not like redditors havent gathered together to do stupider things before. The fact that almost every easy to use trading app had to limit buys on gme specifically should tell you that it was not a small thing.

[volta83]

I've been frequenting it for years.

I find the memes there funny, and I like interacting with the people and just talking dumb stuff.

I think most of the screenshots that get posted are fake, and that most people that frequent it also mostly do because they find it fun.

Not necessarily inspect element, but also screenshots from paper-trading accounts, etc.

If you follow the stock market, it is a relatively random place, and train collisions do often happen, so it is nice to have a place to talk about those with people that find them funny, and that also find "let's put out this fire with gasoline" funny.

[tehlike]

/u/deepfuckingvalue? he also posted screenshots iirc.

[volta83]

/u/deepfuckingvalue is a real trader actually, manages trades for clients, etc.

On their free time they do tutorials about their process, their tools, etc.

Saying that they are a retail trader is like saying that Warren Buffet is a retail trader when they trade with their own private money and not the money of their clients.

---

Also, you can just open a paper trading account and trade with fake money. Then the screenshots look real.

I do this all the time when I need to explain an options play to somebody. Just switch to paper trading, give yourself a million $, and enter the trade.

If I had to show somebody in a podcast how to trade, I would open a paper trading account just to put an amount of money that would be reasonable for that person, so that they can better get a feeling of what the wins and the losses look like.

[op00to]

You do know how easy it is to go into developer mode, inspect element, and make things say whatever you want to say, right? How do you prove that was not done?

[rpadovani]

Occam's razor: that dude started back in May to provide data and screenshots, I don't see feasible that somebody faked data for so long hoping to achieve what?

[tedunangst]

"Yeah, but see the hedge fund illuminati hacked into archive.org to make it seem like those posts were there last year."

[Traster]

I'm not sure you can really argue occam's razor is that this guy just makes incredible bets on stocks. Surely the simplest answer is: People on the internet lie.

I'm not saying I feel strongly either way, but I think peopel on the internet lying is a pretty simple explanation.

[itronitron]

It would be just as easy for DFV to create a second account and run a different strategy on that. Since DFV wasn't the instigator for the short-squeeze mania I am kind of hoping that he did.

[padobson]

You shouldn't be downvoted, these are the right questions to ask.

Citadel says you were right to ask these questions:

https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/i9SnRzR8AM1...

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-29/reddit...

[maest]

To clarify, those stats from Citadel show retail flow in GME that Citadel Securities saw.

The main takeaway is that the flow was, essentially, net 0. So retail (or the bit of retail flow that Citadel saw, anyway) wasn't buying GME more than selling, in aggregate.

[Macha]

Obviously it's anecdotal, but several of these people were my friends and coworkers. Some even set up trading accounts on the wake of the news (mostly the ones that were in late and lost money). Most went in small for the lols and made/lost a couple of hundred bucks, but there was one who did make a few thousand dollars, and given how much (starting when the share price was much lower) he shared during the process, I'm inclined to believe him.

Also aforementioned impact on robinhood and other retail brokers.

[thatguy0900]

It was pretty easy to make money if you got in at 200 and bailed above 300, you had a lot of time to do it. It's the people who listened to the diamond hands 10k+ nonsense that got screwed

[mrzimmerman]

There has been a lot of posts on WSB of screenshots showing people have made purchases, some having spent tens of thousands of dollars.

Is that proof enough? that's up to you, but I doubt most people have seen "proof" that hedgefunds have been buying up shorts either, we just trust that we aren't being lied to by whoever is doing the reporting (and I personally find that to be plenty sufficient).

[op00to]

I’d say screenshots of anything over a few shares of GME on wsb has a very good chance to be fake.

[RivieraKid]

> They could easily swing-trade this stock all the way down, using massive buy/sell orders to drive the price.

I call BS. Selling a huge amount of shares and then buying them again will not generate a profit.

[enragedcacti]

https://marketrealist.com/p/short-ladder-attacks-explained/

When you have millions reading a forum saying "BUY THE DIP" and you can create a dip, then you probably stand to make a lot of money.

[RivieraKid]

This article doesn't really explain much. I think this the following definition may be closer to reality (from Twitter, I follow a bunch of short-sellers):

> A short ladder attack is when a stock goes down for totally valid, normal reasons, but the bagholder realizes a conspiracy theory is preferable to admitting to a dumb trade."

Also, I like these tweets by Jima Chanos (@Diogenes), well-known short-seller:

> Can anyone explain to me what a “short ladder attack” is? I have seriously never heard the term before this week.

> Now I know why I had never heard of a “short ladder attack”...Because it is complete gibberish.

[NoOneNew]

Yes, short attacks are complete gibberish and never existed before the past week. Just a conspiracy by the poors and those dirty people without our shiny degrees.

Let me google that for you. OMFG, what's this 2014 article that details how this works?

https://seekingalpha.com/instablog/11442671-gerald-klein/309...

[Traster]

You're being unneccessarily flippant and you're not even addressing the point. The point wasn't about short attacks, it was about "short ladder attacks". The person you're replying to is actually right, that explanation of a "short ladder attack" actually just generically describes short attacks and doesn't address the nonsense conspiracy of short ladders.

The short ladder attack actually is a stupid conspiracy. It's the idea that you can paint the tape by trading back and forth with a conspirator, but do it at a price that's lower than fair market value. This is impossible. If you try and buy at a price lower than fair market value you aren't going to be matched with your conspirator, you're going to get matched against the order book at the best possible price. So to ladder down you need to control the entire demand in the market. It's absurd.

[iaml]

>So to ladder down you need to control the entire demand in the market

Isn't that what they did with robinhood/others restrictions?

[gruez]

debunked in a reddit thread. The order book simply doesn't work that way. Trading with your hedge fund buddies at an artificially low price doesn't cause the price to go down in the same way that trading with your wsb buddies at an artificially high price (eg. selling GME at $800 when the price is at $100) doesn't cause the price to go up.

https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/lbib0x/the_myth_...

[onion2k]

If the price doesn't change in between then yes, but buying when the price is low, selling again when the price is high, and then shorting the stock while the price is high and buying it back again when the price is low, is the very definition of HF trading.

[mam2]

Yes and that's why the short interest is still high.. they took more cash to short when it was at 450 / 300. Basic hedging

[Ataraxy]

I'm sure some HF's have, just as some HF's lost billions in their own right on the way up.

[dehrmann]

I assume this, and the whole Robinhood boom, has been amazing for Citadel.

[high_density]

ditto this. And the motivation for organizing "buy gamestop" isn't altruistic as it seems..

1. buy gamestop stocks

2. call in SJWs to 'fight against the bad guys (hedge funds)' by buying gamestop stocks

- they relay this message to others

3. watch price go up, thanks to campaigns from SJWs

4. sell off when the price is right (feels highest)

5. watch the price go back to normal valuation - you can't expect this high price to continue forever.

6. watch people who were fooled by SJWs cry over their lifesavings

this is a financial crime, though the victims fell for a temporary 'feel good' moment... so I guess they 'paid' their lesson?

as for Robinhood, blocking 'buy' seems to be a protective measure that backfired too much. Robinhood's branding depends on how it can explain this well...

edit: I agree that it's not a 'financial crime' by law... I just mean it's a detestable and almost 'criminal' campaign.

[NoOneNew]

Your argument is already questionable since you imagine a subred that makes retard/dick/cuck jokes has any SJWs in it.

I just find it amazing how so few people actually go on WSB, but have a garbage pail of opinions. Seriously, less then 5 min on WSB shows how incredibly wrong the media has been regarding that community or their motives. Mark Cuban, Kevin Oleary and a few others are backing what wsb are saying due to the exposure they generated of how manipulated the stock market is. This isnt, "this is the mob ruining the market". This is, "oh boo hoo did the wrong people manipulate the stock market and it hurt the hedge funds?"

There will be regulations on this. The trick is to regulate the market so the average schmuck can have a more level playing field instead of the cards stacked in the hedge funds favor.

[high_density]

I'm sorry, but you seems to be void of any refutation of my logic.

you iterated some famous people who are supportive of WSB, but... so what? Are they 'the wise ones of the stock market'? Are they financially supporting financial damage-takers?

They're just famous people, and that's all.

I agree that making a more level playing field is good. But that should be done by congress and law makers, not by burning gullible people's money.

[NoOneNew]

Except for the fact that lawmakers had zero reason to crack down on it. Only the wise and specially educated could comprehend how any of the market works. The poors are incapable of understanding charts and positions because it's so difficult. Only us in the ivory tower can keep the market stable and understand what companies actually deserve investment.

Part 2, again, you've never been on WSB for even 1 minute. At every part of this venture, everyone says this is a terrible profit venture. Everyone on wsb shows off their losses and calls it "loss porn". The only gullible folks are the ones listening to the media. Namely CNBC. Theyre the ones pushing the profit narrative, not wsb. This was more to screw over predatory short sellers and to help a few struggling companies people like. AMC for example, got to leverage their boost in stocks to have a fighting chance to survive through 2021. Effectively holding off bankruptcy for now. Gamestop is now able to position themselves to fight through the next few years.

[itronitron]

A lot of people want GameStop to succeed and join the ranks of Netflix and Amazon. Retail investors that bought a few shares now have a tremendous amount of goodwill and loyalty towards the company.

[high_density]

that's when you pour almost all of your savings...

And is 'loyalty towards a company' for having few shares a good thing? loyalty towards what ends? towards massive financial damage?

[slg]

It is extremely weird to define the people buying GME as SJWs.

[high_density]

well they might not be the SJWs, but the gullible ones fooled by SJWs.

the whole premise of the campaign is to 'fight against the injust hedge funds' (by burning your own money, that is)

[slg]

WSB was heavily pushing the "fight against the injust hedge funds" narrative and the way that community speaks is a pretty big indication that they don't normally align themselves with SJWs.

[high_density]

sorry I thought Social Justice Warrior is a term for 'people who rally to do good for the society but are just a bunch of fools'

[slg]

I guess that is how the term is defined by people who dislike them, but I think the core motivation is social progressivism and generally left leaning politics. SJWs are unlikely to favorably compare themselves to 4chan or use the n-word and r-word. I don't think the heart of WSB is particularly political, but it certainly gives off vibes that are closer to the alt-right than SJWs.

[TheHypnotist]

Not initially. The early adopters were touting business fundamentals for a very long time. The deal with microsoft, the impending release of PS5 and the new Xbox, all this started the ground swell.

Where this hedge fund idea came from, i'm not entirely sure. I think it was just a game when someone woke up and explained that this massive amount of shorting could not be covered if everyone bought shares. At some point that just spiraled into some altruistic hedge funds are evil marketing thing.

[nxc18]

Watching this whole saga from the sideline (no investments aside from 401k, which I don’t look at), it has been really disappointing to watch everyone acting like lemmings. These aren’t particularly difficult patterns to spot, but I guess people love running with a narrative. Maybe next time people can keep their pants on and maybe keep a level head?

[high_density]

on the side note, this makes an excellent youtube material...

there's a Korean investment channel that explains how people were gullible, and it's really funny to hear the fiascos...

...but not when I'm the gullible that is!

[elwell]

> this is a financial crime

How so? I may be ignorant, but isn't that just the way the stock market works. Sad, yes. Crime though?

[syrgian]

Pump and dump is fraud. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump But the effort was distributed and hard to track and prove, so the scammers that knew what they were doing are most likely safe.

[TheHypnotist]

Except there is a difference between a pump and dump and a short squeeze. No one is listening to the fundamentals, it doesn't matter.

I think you'd be hard pressed to make that argument on either side.

[high_density]

yes agreed. it's not crime by law... but it's like using uncovered parts of the law to swindle people.

Though it'll be really difficult to make a law preventing this without hurting beneficial actions.

[high_density]

well depends on the law though...

but this time, there's no 'fradulent' element, so I guess no.

If there were promises of earnings, it might have been.