[zemptime]

There's a complex of people in Washington dedicated to defending the mechanisms which allow for the siphoning like FTD's (failure-to-deliver's), asset lending with no return dates, what is effectively asset lending by other legal names, and other things like exemptions for market makers being allowed to provide naked positions in the name of "liquidity."

This complex of people has a name (!) - "The Blob." It's the amorphous bureaucratic mass of people who will send vague and threatening letters to people actually attempting reform ("Dear Mr. Young Senator, we recommend you don't pursue your inquiry into naked shorting further, or it will be bad for your career.")

Then you have, diametrically opposed to the Blob, the $GME apes. Forget for a second about the mother of all short squeezes, "dying brick and mortar," "nfts," etc. The property worth paying attention to here is how antifragile and self-correcting the ape community is. Here you have tons of random, highly distributed and highly passionate people apprehending the real nature of our financial, media, and political institutions. You have a system where when the Blob pulls a fast one, a set of people who got in for a squeeze/quick profit are converted from a set of ambivalent retail traders into an intolerant minority whose focus has shifted from profit to "If we haven't achieved systemic change, we have failed."

The fight for reform is well underway. There's so much more to be said here but I'll end with this: even if you don't care or believe in $GME, believe in the apes. They're the individuals putting their skin in a the game and exposing themselves to harm for what they believe is right. Pay attention.

[abeppu]

> converted from a set of ambivalent retail traders into an intolerant minority whose focus has shifted from profit to "If we haven't achieved systemic change, we have failed."

> They're the individuals putting their skin in a the game and exposing themselves to harm for what they believe is right. Pay attention.

I'm not familiar with this part of the story. Can you point me to more info? What are the actual goals of the systemic change being pursued, and how is it being pursued?

[AutumnCurtain]

I would save your time. The "apes" are bagholding on a pump and dump. The reason they want "systemic change" now is because the fortune they promised GME investors would make has never and will never materialize, and the only way to continue evangelizing is to sell the stock of a failing physical video game retailer as your ticket to some kind of brave new world.

[zemptime]

I'm personally attracted to this investment not because of squeeze potential but because I believe they're going to corner the online used games market & open up new business models for smaller game devs. First mover in a major way.

https://gmedd.com/

If you truly believe what you're spouting here, then - have you shorted it?

[zemptime]

I can't directly speak for the autonomous groups of people in loose orbit around https://old.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/ who can be labelled the apes (I know for sure there are other groups but this is an easily accessible one), but what I've observed:

Goals:

  Elimination of FTD's, period. Market participants who FTD regularly are ejected.
  Information symmetry between blob & retail - true regular reporting on short positions, Swaps, other derivatives. Teeth for this.
  Increase in reporting penalties to be less than a cost of doing business.
  T+3 Settlement to T+0.
  Widespread usage of implementations like IEX to eliminate profitability of low-latency arbitrage.

How:

  Routing orders through IEX
  Exiting brokers who are simply bad for retail (Robinhood)
  Withdrawing equities from the DTCC accounts and broker dealer system as a vote of no-confidence (GME recently stated 5m+ individual had directly registered their shares w/ transfer agent as of Oct 31... and put it on their 10-Q, making them only company I'm aware of to have done that in past year).
  Suing brokers/applying regulation pressure to those who don't allow basic rights (direct share registration from europe)
  Actual monitoring of which brokers are dipping their hands in their customer's cookie jars (see: Fidelity a couple months ago suddenly posting 10m+ shares available to borrow in a very illiquid stock. Where could those have come from? Customer's cash accounts? Oh, it's not *lending*, it's *posting as collateral*? etc)
  Signal boosting for existing, honorable efforts: Dennis Kelleher @ https://bettermarkets.org/ / Susanne Trimbath
  Awareness & localized support of legislation
  Filing FINRA complaints, getting in touch with compliance officers, actually watching & asking.

The beauty and confusion here is, you just have a lot of people learning and teaching each other. Over time, they learn more and do more things.

I'd say probably most valuable at this point in time is the mixture of identified and pseudonymous journalism increasing financial literacy/awareness of just how... pardon my french, fucking bad, the existing incentive structures are w/r/t regulators. Good example: https://upsidechronicles.com/2021/09/05/how-wall-street-shor...

Suspect most valuable long-term will be the mass direct registration of shares in individuals book names rather than beneficiary ownership through a broker. If/when the apes have directly registered all available shares, 1) any significant amount of continued trading volume in lit markets is fraudulent and you have a slam-dunk legal case. 2) GME could legally exit participating in the DTCC and move onto a crypto-run automated market maker which meets all of the above goals. Any synthetic GME positions floating around would have to be immediately and forcibly closed, and there's a lot of material research on how the real number of shares floating around might be on the order of magnitude of 1 billion. Big problems for the blob.