[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.