Welcome to [UltimateAikidoMaster!](https://www.reddit.com/UltimateAikidoMaster) This subreddit is dedicated to Tenko Chabashira, and welcomes any content that's related to her.
A subreddit dedicated to Peko Pekoyama. Decided to make it since everyone was complaining about daily art on the main page so here you go! Now let's honor best girl!
11-13 21:44 - '[quote] Yes. Someone installing themselves without any right with the backing of the military is the literal definition of a coup. / [quote] / [link] / Seems both good and notable to me. / [quote] What? I didn’t men...' by /u/Riverboat_Gambler removed from /r/worldnews within 13-23min
'''
You know that he can be a bad President and she can be a fake who has installed herself without any right?
Yes. Someone installing themselves without any right with the backing of the military is the literal definition of a coup.
There is no reason he should have been president for 20 years. Nothing he did was particularly notable
[link]1 Seems both good and notable to me.
I guess you're the sort of shill that likes Putin though.
What? I didn’t mention Putin, nor do I like him. [link]2 [link]3 Speaking of shills, have you seen these?
I trust independent election observers than a random nobody (you.) on the internet spouting conspiracy
Then post their evidence. Meanwhile, read these: [link]4 [link]5 ''' Context Link Go1dfish undelete link unreddit undelete link Author: Riverboat_Gambler 1: *w*tter**om/sunra*sunr*y/status/11***1600*1*0*542*8 2: *wit*e**com/Benjam*n*ort*n/status*119*97924832***21*1 3: twit**r.c*m/r*dfi*h*t*eam/statu**1*9440394**8382387* 4: twit*er*com**arkWeisbr*t/s**tus/11*392108*847***9*0 5: tw*t*er.co**k**inmc*sh*an/st*tus/1*9*7*3918624*08544 Unknown links are censored to prevent spreading illicit content.
Dozens of Women Accuse Director James Toback of Sexual Harassment
This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 80%. (I'm a bot)
Oscar-nominated writer-director James Toback has been accused of sexually harassing at least 38 women stemming back to at least the 1980s. A Los Angeles Times report explains that while some of the women were looking for work in the entertainment industry at the time of the alleged incidents, others were simply women Toback approached. 31 of the women agreed to speak on the record, and they all detailed various incidents in which Toback allegedly made lewd suggestions, steered conversations into sexually explicit territory, and in the worst instances, rubbed against them until he ejaculated into his pants or on their bodies. Although Toback is not a widely recognized name outside of the film community, his writing credits include "Tyson," "The Gambler," and "The Pick-Up Artist." He has made enough films with prominent actors like James Caan and Robert Downey, Jr. that he was able to impress women who thought they were making a good connection in the industry. Writer Sari Kamin also recounted her experience with sexual harassment by Toback in the Times' piece as well as a blog post. Toback went on to commend women who have come forward with their stories of sexual assault and harassment surrounding Harvey Weinstein.
Summary Source | FAQ | Feedback | Topkeywords: Toback#1time#2Kamin#3women#4film#5 Post found in /entertainment. NOTICE: This thread is for discussing the submission topic. Please do not discuss the concept of the autotldr bot here.
Momentum is building in calling out sexual harassment.
This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 76%. (I'm a bot)
From companies taking a second look at their sexual harassment policies to the tide of #MeToo stories flooding social media, the controversy has sparked the biggest national conversation on sexual harassment since the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas battle in the early '90s. This look at seven men who've been accused of sexual harassment focuses just on allegations that CNN has reported on. Number of accusers: More than 40.Weinstein's world began to crumble a little over a month ago, after The New York Times published a story detailing numerous accusations of sexual harassment against the powerful movie producer, whose films have won a number of Academy Awards. Number of accusers: More than 200.The Hollywood screenwriter and director behind films like "The Pick-up Artist," "The Gambler" and "Bugsy" was accused by multiple women of sexual harassment throughout the years in a piece from the Los Angeles Times. Number of accusers: At least 12.Nickelodeon fired the creator of "The Loud House" animated show after a dozen women accused him, in a story from the Hollywood Reporter, of "Sexual harassment, unwanted advances and inappropriate behavior." Number of accusers: 1.Price, the head of Amazon Studios, quit five days after being put on leave after a producer accused him of sexual harassment. Number of accusers: At least 25.The celebrity chef stepped down from the company he founded after about two dozen current and former female employees accused him and other male workers of sexual harassment.
Lawbreakers or just really lucky? Mass. has more repeat lottery winners than any other state - The Boston Globe
This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 73%. (I'm a bot)
Massachusetts has more repeat lottery winners than any other state, people who redeem so many winning tickets that they raise questions about the integrity and oversight of the $5 billion state lottery, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis of nearly 11 million lottery records from 34 states. State officials have long suspected that some of the most frequent winners are cashing lottery tickets for customers who don't want to claim the money themselves because they owe taxes, child support, or other debts, which would be garnished from their winnings. Such warnings have not stopped Massachusetts from turning into a haven for lottery players who win more than 1,000 times a year, easily outpacing the most frequent winners in Georgia, Ohio, and other large states who typically redeem fewer than 100 tickets per year. Despite that prohibition, Massachusetts has had more than 50 residents cash more than 200 lottery tickets worth at least $600 each over the last six years, giving the state more repeat winners than any other state for which data is available, according to the analysis by PennLive.com and students from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Jones also submitted into evidence a manual he had written entitled "The Gambler," which contained his "Trade secrets" for beating the Massachusetts lottery, which he called "The easiest lottery system." Those "Secrets" included buying tickets in the middle of a pack, where he believed the winning tickets are grouped, and buying from stores that had recently sold prize winners, reasoning they had a greater chance of selling another jackpot. Sweeney, of the state lottery, pointed out that Massachusetts may have more lottery winners because residents here spend $746 per person per year on the lottery, more than residents of any other state.
Summary Source | FAQ | Feedback | Topkeywords: lottery#1ticket#2win#3more#4state#5 Post found in /offbeat. NOTICE: This thread is for discussing the submission topic. Please do not discuss the concept of the autotldr bot here.
Illegal Tactics and DTCC/Prime Broker Complicity In Naked Shorting & Retail Shutdown of GME (DTCC/Prime Brokers decision makers need to be questioned at the 2/18 GameStop Congress hearing)
TLDR: GameStop’s Congress hearing is on Feb 18th, they need to investigate the Prime Brokers and DTCC for their complicity in enabling naked shorting within GME and by extension, potential collusion to shut down trading on Jan 28th, the day the short squeeze was going to kick off. (stick to the end for an analysis of some illegal tactics short side hedge funds have been using) Thesis: On the day the retail market for GME shut down on 1/28 (the day the short squeeze would’ve happened had there been no market intervention), DTCC (clearing house monopoly) shut down retail buying in order to protect itself and Prime Brokers (which privately own the DTCC) from being exposed to the consequences of being party to illegal activity. I believe Prime Brokers and DTCC need to be called to the GameStop hearing on February 18th to be questioned for their complicity in enabling illegal naked shorting of the GME stock, as well as potential collusion to shut out retail buyers on 1/28. In my previous post (which I recommend reading for some context) I explored the subject of rampant illegal naked shorting in GME, and how Prime Brokers (consisting of banks like Goldman, Morgan, etc) and DTCC would be complicit in the naked shorting. This in turn raises the thought experiment that they would be incentivized to do anything possible to prevent the short squeeze from happening on 1/28 because had the short squeeze happened, the shorts would go bankrupt and their Prime Brokers who lent them their naked shorted shares would need to cover the shares. This would not only represent a humongous capital expense for Prime Brokers, the culpability of Prime Brokers (and that of the DTCC) in this situation would also have likely been exposed as well. A quick primer on what a Prime Broker is: Prime Brokers are essentially the service side of the short- selling business. They lend out securities and cash, you can think of them as the “house” in a casino: They provide a gambler with markers to play and to manage his winnings. According to Matt Taibi, “Under the original concept, if a hedge fund that wanted to short a stock they would first need to “locate” the stock with his Prime Broker but as time passed, Prime Brokers increasingly allowed their hedge-fund customers to use automated systems and “locate” the stock themselves, and what this does is enable short-sellers to sell stock without delivering and thereby perform naked shorts with counterfeit shares. (source: https://web.archive.org/web/20210213125246/https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/wall-streets-naked-swindle-194908/). (I highly recommend you read Matt Taibi’s article on naked shorting and how it was used to take down Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. There are so many parallels with GME it’s hard to miss. It’s amazing to consider that 12 years after this article was published and brought to public awareness, the problem of naked shorting still exists as a systemic issue.) Prime Brokers have a long history of being associated with naked shorting. To highlight a few examples, Prime Brokers like Merill Lynch and Goldman have long been implicated for naked shorting Overstock.com (https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/accidentally-released-and-incredibly-embarrassing-documents-show-how-goldman-et-al-engaged-in-naked-short-selling-244035/, https://www.forbes.com/2007/02/02/naked-short-suit-overstock-biz-cx_lm_0202naked.html?sh=271400d1763f). Another example is when Goldman’s Prime Brokerage was implicated by the SEC in 2016 and got away with a small fine of 16 million (Source: https://www.sec.gov/news/pressrelease/2016-9.html). An example that very recently came in the news is a story where CIBC, BOA, UBS and TD Bank Prime Brokerages are accused of facilitating naked short selling and using counterfeit stock to attack and bring the stock price of a company from $34.77 to $1.83 (Source: https://www.securitiesfinancetimes.com/securitieslendingnews/industryarticle.php?article_id=224548). The DTCC also has a very long history of being associated with naked shorting. The Wall Street Journal noted that 1% of the DTCC’s volume end in failure to deliver which “have put DTCC in the middle of a long-running fight over whether unscrupulous investors are driving down hundreds of small companies' share prices… DTCC has turned a blind eye to the naked-shorting problem. ” (Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118359867562957720). The DTCC has also had numerous complaints submitted to the SEC for enabling naked shorting (source: https://www.sec.gov/rules/proposed/s72303/decosta122203.htm) and have been sued tens or hundreds of times for assisting naked shorts (source: https://smithonstocks.com/part-3-in-series-on-illegal-naked-shortings-role-in-stock-manipulation-prime-brokers-and-the-dtcc-have-a-troubling-monopoly-on-clearing-and-settling-stock-trades/ and http://counterfeitingstock.com/CS2.0/CounterfeitingStock.html and https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118359867562957720) On 1/28 Robinhood received a letter from the DTCC at 4 am requiring them to halt trading or come up with 3 billion dollars, which Robinhood did not have, and therefore with one swoop of the pen the DTCC shut down buy side momentum but strangely allowed selling. Retail investors were shut out of the market and as any student of microeconomics would know, by shutting buy but only allowing sell, the price is bound to fall. Meanwhile while hedge funds were able to keep trading not only in the market but also crosstrade in the dark pools (“private” stock markets that retail is shut out of, more on this later), and use this crucial lifeline given to them by the DTCC to prevent the squeeze from happening that day. With retail abruptly being shut out from buy (even cash accounts were shut out, which didn’t make sense) and only allowed to sell, almost everyone could smell manipulation was afoot (which triggered the Congress hearing) and the most of the blame was pointed at Robinhood. Personally and in hindsight, I believe Robinhood was just a willing scapegoat. When we think about who had the most to lose if a short squeeze occurred, I’ll narrow it down to three entities, Shorts and their stakeholders (ie Citadel), Prime Brokers and the DTCC. It’s important to remember that the actual impetus that triggered the shutdown of the market for retail investors came from the DTCC. Working backwards, if you consider that GME was rampantly naked shorted and DTCC and Prime Brokers would have to be complicit in it, I believe the DTCC, Primer Brokers and possibly Citadel (who provides 40% of Robinhood’s revenue) brazenly manipulated the market on 1/28 by shutting down purchasing for retail buyers to prevent the squeeze from being squoze on that day as doing so would be catastrophic for all aforementioned parties involved. I believe that on the upcoming Gamestop Congress hearings the Financial Services Committee needs to call on decision makers of DTCC and Prime Brokers explore their role and complicity in the shut out of retail buyers that day as well as being enablers of naked shorting in GME. An interesting thought experiment: On 1/28 when the price was 450+ and shorts were likely under 100, if we assume prime brokers allowed naked shorting in GME, then when the squeeze was about to happen (or happening), if Prime Brokers had margin had called the shorts, they would presumably also also gone down because shorts would not be able to pay in that event and the brokers would be holding the bag. By that logic, they have every incentive in this case to NOT to margin call and instead the most logical option would probably would have been to make a backroom deal, which is what I personally think most likely happened. If you’ve read up to this point, you might be thinking what can I do about this? I am aware that there a lot of cynicism that we can’t do anything, that there will be no justice for retail investors who were harmed this situation, and that institutions and people in power will prevent anything from being done. I feel this sometimes too, but remember: A single voice can be drowned out, but if we all speak together then we will make our voice heard. Ape Strong Together. With the hearing coming up on February 18th, I highly recommend you email and tweet the representatives involved in the hearing, as well as your own district representatives, and urge them to read into the factors presented in this post and call the DTCC and Prime Brokers to the hearingl. They need to be questioned on why GME has so many counterfeit shares, failed to deliver, their complicity in naked shorting, and investigated for their role in the retail shut down of 1/28. Below are 4 members of congress I recommend both tweeting and emailing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez https://twitter.com/AOC, email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) Al Green https://twitter.com/repalgreen, email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) Maxine Waters https://twitter.com/maxinewaters, email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) Nancy Pelosi Email: https://twitter.com/SpeakerPelosi email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]). And you can find other members of Financial Services Committee here to reach out to: https://financialservices.house.gov/about/committee-membership.htm What follows should probably be a separate post, but I will take the opportunity to summarize some of the illegal tactics that shorts have been identified to be using in their war with retail investors. Note that this may not be an exhaustive list and there may be newer tactics deployed in the future. Retail investors might not have the same tricks, resources and willingness to break the law for profit as hedgies do, but my hope and belief is that if we pool our knowledge and analysis, we will figure out their game and effectively adapt. Feel free to forward the list below to any representatives and lawmakers if you concur that these tactics were used: Rampant Naked Shorting - With the extremely high number of Fail to Delivers (FTID) , short interest being as high as 226% recently, and institutions alone holding a staggering 177% of the total float (likely due in large part to counterfeit shares), signs strongly point to GME being rampant with naked shorts and counterfeit shares. I believe the original goal of shorts was to drive GME to bankruptcy with these naked shorts, using the laddering of naked shorts (aka short ladder attack), executed with the help of counterfeit stock which is a classic and reliable method of driving down the stock price. I believe the GME stock has seen relentlessly aggressive short attacks, especially on the week of Monday February 1st, which drove the stock price down and triggered panic selling. Ladder Attacks with the help of Dark Pools - Another identified method of ladder attacks was identified to come from crosstrading with darkpools (the stock market has its own private stock exchange where institutions can trade…). Essentially darkpools are private stock markets retail investors do not have access to, where short side funds can purchase securities “off market” and then sell “on-market”, with the effect of creating a lot more downward pressure on the market without the upward pressure from buying. Illegally masking shorts with synthetic longs. Another tactic shorts are suspected of using in GME is the use of illegally using options to evade short positions in violation of Reg SHO which SEC describes in this risk alert and which I elaborate in this post. Essentially it’s the use of using options to create synthetic longs to illegally and artificially cover and prolong short positions and at same time obscuring the true short interest %. If you consider that it would be far more profitable for shorts to not cover at high prices but instead ladder attack the price and wait for retail investors to lose interest and close their shorts at as low of a price as possible, then you can see why this strategy would be very effective. Using way out-of-money call options to obscure true short interest. You may have heard about the 43 million worth of 800 dollar calls purchased when the price was 100 and found it odd. Later it was identified as a tactic to cheaply purchase synthetic call options (since at 800 its way out of money) to obscure their short positions (with the added benefit of hedging at 800 if a squeeze does happen) One thing I want to note, particularly to legislators at the GameStop hearing: Retail investors were not incited to pump GME. Retail investors spotted a unique Short Squeeze opportunity created by the greed of short side hedge funds, whereby GameStop was being abusively naked shorted with the goal of bringing it to bankruptcy, and hedge funds were so greedy about it that they shorted the company with a short interest of 226% of float, meaning A LOT of counterfeit shares were being used to short the company. Retail investors saw this as an opportunity to short squeeze the hedge fund shorters, which is a legal and legitimate investment strategy. The short squeeze would have happened had everyone played fair, but instead, financial institutions who were culpable to the naked shorting intervened and shut down retail buying, hurting the retail investors and successfully manipulating the market. The investment itself was in my opinion a sound decision based on the short squeeze, but in hindsight retail investors did not seriously consider the risk of the market would be blatantly and publicly manipulated and that the market would be rigged against them. If this post was useful (and I hope it was! Gave up my Friday night to write this for you Apes), please upvote for visibility and share it far and wide. The GameStop hearings could be a first step and hope towards legislative change, and it’s extremely important that the right story is told at those hearings (and by the right story I mean the real truth of what happened.) I hope the truly culpable parties are investigated and brought to justice. Again, I know many of us feel cynical that anything meaning will be done towards finding justice against the lawbreakers in this case, but if you feel even an ounce of injustice or empathy at how retail investors were unfairly harmed in the course of investing in GME, I strongly urge you to contact a legislator associated with the GameStop hearings and bring this to their attention so they can review this case with more complete information. In addition I recommend you to contact the SEC and any journalist you know or via journalist tip lines. It’s not going to be easy but the more awareness we raise the higher the likelihood our voices will be heard and positive change will be made. As we navigate the rocky waters ahead, I’ll gift you with a favorite quote of mine: The only difference between a nightmare and a dream is how big your balls are. 🚀🚀🚀 Disclaimer: I am not an investment advisor, I just like the stock. Ps. If you’ve read to the end, I’ll leave you with a few more thoughts and reminders: - If I were to distill life into one thing, it would be to never lose hope. - Remember that if you’ve lost money in any way shape or form, don’t be depressed, money can always be made back and the important thing is to maintain a good attitude. - Only invest what you can afford to lose. - Perhaps the most important factor in good investing is patience. If you’d like to read more about counterfeiting stocks this is a good place to start http://counterfeitingstock.com/CS2.0/CounterfeitingStock.html
Illegal Tactics and DTCC/Prime Broker Complicity In Naked Shorting & Retail Shutdown of GME (DTCC/Prime Brokers decision makers need to be questioned at the 2/18 GameStop Congress hearing)
TLDR: GameStop’s Congress hearing is on Feb 18th, they need to investigate the Prime Brokers and DTCC for their complicity in enabling naked shorting within GME and by extension, potential collusion to shut down trading on Jan 28th, the day the short squeeze was going to kick off. (stick to the end for an analysis of some illegal tactics short side hedge funds have been using) Thesis: On the day the retail market for GME shut down on 1/28 (the day the short squeeze would’ve happened had there been no market intervention), DTCC (clearing house monopoly) shut down retail buying in order to protect itself and Prime Brokers (which privately own the DTCC) from being exposed to the consequences of being party to illegal activity. I believe Prime Brokers and DTCC need to be called to the GameStop hearing on February 18th to be questioned for their complicity in enabling illegal naked shorting of the GME stock, as well as potential collusion to shut out retail buyers on 1/28. In my previous post (which I recommend reading for some context) I explored the subject of rampant illegal naked shorting in GME, and how Prime Brokers (consisting of banks like Goldman, Morgan, etc) and DTCC would be complicit in the naked shorting. This in turn raises the thought experiment that they would be incentivized to do anything possible to prevent the short squeeze from happening on 1/28 because had the short squeeze happened, the shorts would go bankrupt and their Prime Brokers who lent them their naked shorted shares would need to cover the shares. This would not only represent a humongous capital expense for Prime Brokers, the culpability of Prime Brokers (and that of the DTCC) in this situation would also have likely been exposed as well. A quick primer on what a Prime Broker is: Prime Brokers are essentially the service side of the short- selling business. They lend out securities and cash, you can think of them as the “house” in a casino: They provide a gambler with markers to play and to manage his winnings. According to Matt Taibi, “Under the original concept, if a hedge fund that wanted to short a stock they would first need to “locate” the stock with his Prime Broker but as time passed, Prime Brokers increasingly allowed their hedge-fund customers to use automated systems and “locate” the stock themselves, and what this does is enable short-sellers to sell stock without delivering and thereby perform naked shorts with counterfeit shares. (source: https://web.archive.org/web/20210213125246/https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/wall-streets-naked-swindle-194908/). (I highly recommend you read Matt Taibi’s article on naked shorting and how it was used to take down Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. There are so many parallels with GME it’s hard to miss. It’s amazing to consider that 12 years after this article was published and brought to public awareness, the problem of naked shorting still exists as a systemic issue.) Prime Brokers have a long history of being associated with naked shorting. To highlight a few examples, Prime Brokers like Merill Lynch and Goldman have long been implicated for naked shorting Overstock.com (https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/accidentally-released-and-incredibly-embarrassing-documents-show-how-goldman-et-al-engaged-in-naked-short-selling-244035/, https://www.forbes.com/2007/02/02/naked-short-suit-overstock-biz-cx_lm_0202naked.html?sh=271400d1763f). Another example is when Goldman’s Prime Brokerage was implicated by the SEC in 2016 and got away with a small fine of 16 million (Source: https://www.sec.gov/news/pressrelease/2016-9.html). An example that very recently came in the news is a story where CIBC, BOA, UBS and TD Bank Prime Brokerages are accused of facilitating naked short selling and using counterfeit stock to attack and bring the stock price of a company from $34.77 to $1.83 (Source: https://www.securitiesfinancetimes.com/securitieslendingnews/industryarticle.php?article_id=224548). The DTCC also has a very long history of being associated with naked shorting. The Wall Street Journal noted that 1% of the DTCC’s volume end in failure to deliver which “have put DTCC in the middle of a long-running fight over whether unscrupulous investors are driving down hundreds of small companies' share prices… DTCC has turned a blind eye to the naked-shorting problem. ” (Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118359867562957720). The DTCC has also had numerous complaints submitted to the SEC for enabling naked shorting (source: https://www.sec.gov/rules/proposed/s72303/decosta122203.htm) and have been sued tens or hundreds of times for assisting naked shorts (source: https://smithonstocks.com/part-3-in-series-on-illegal-naked-shortings-role-in-stock-manipulation-prime-brokers-and-the-dtcc-have-a-troubling-monopoly-on-clearing-and-settling-stock-trades/ and http://counterfeitingstock.com/CS2.0/CounterfeitingStock.html and https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118359867562957720) On 1/28 Robinhood received a letter from the DTCC at 4 am requiring them to halt trading or come up with 3 billion dollars, which Robinhood did not have, and therefore with one swoop of the pen the DTCC shut down buy side momentum but strangely allowed selling. Retail investors were shut out of the market and as any student of microeconomics would know, by shutting buy but only allowing sell, the price is bound to fall. Meanwhile while hedge funds were able to keep trading not only in the market but also crosstrade in the dark pools (“private” stock markets that retail is shut out of, more on this later), and use this crucial lifeline given to them by the DTCC to prevent the squeeze from happening that day. With retail abruptly being shut out from buy (even cash accounts were shut out, which didn’t make sense) and only allowed to sell, almost everyone could smell manipulation was afoot (which triggered the Congress hearing) and the most of the blame was pointed at Robinhood. Personally and in hindsight, I believe Robinhood was just a willing scapegoat. When we think about who had the most to lose if a short squeeze occurred, I’ll narrow it down to three entities, Shorts and their stakeholders (ie Citadel), Prime Brokers and the DTCC. It’s important to remember that the actual impetus that triggered the shutdown of the market for retail investors came from the DTCC. Working backwards, if you consider that GME was rampantly naked shorted and DTCC and Prime Brokers would have to be complicit in it, I believe the DTCC, Primer Brokers and possibly Citadel (who provides 40% of Robinhood’s revenue) brazenly manipulated the market on 1/28 by shutting down purchasing for retail buyers to prevent the squeeze from being squoze on that day as doing so would be catastrophic for all aforementioned parties involved. I believe that on the upcoming Gamestop Congress hearings the Financial Services Committee needs to call on decision makers of DTCC and Prime Brokers explore their role and complicity in the shut out of retail buyers that day as well as being enablers of naked shorting in GME. An interesting thought experiment: On 1/28 when the price was 450+ and shorts were likely under 100, if we assume prime brokers allowed naked shorting in GME, then when the squeeze was about to happen (or happening), if Prime Brokers had margin had called the shorts, they would presumably also also gone down because shorts would not be able to pay in that event and the brokers would be holding the bag. By that logic, they have every incentive in this case to NOT to margin call and instead the most logical option would probably would have been to make a backroom deal, which is what I personally think most likely happened. If you’ve read up to this point, you might be thinking what can I do about this? I am aware that there a lot of cynicism that we can’t do anything, that there will be no justice for retail investors who were harmed this situation, and that institutions and people in power will prevent anything from being done. I feel this sometimes too, but remember: A single voice can be drowned out, but if we all speak together then we will make our voice heard. Ape Strong Together. With the hearing coming up on February 18th, I highly recommend you email and tweet the representatives involved in the hearing, as well as your own district representatives, and urge them to read into the factors presented in this post and call the DTCC and Prime Brokers to the hearingl. They need to be questioned on why GME has so many counterfeit shares, failed to deliver, their complicity in naked shorting, and investigated for their role in the retail shut down of 1/28. Below are 4 members of congress I recommend both tweeting and emailing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez https://twitter.com/AOC, email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) Al Green https://twitter.com/repalgreen, email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) Maxine Waters https://twitter.com/maxinewaters, email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) Nancy Pelosi Email: https://twitter.com/SpeakerPelosi email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]). And you can find other members of Financial Services Committee here to reach out to: https://financialservices.house.gov/about/committee-membership.htm If there's one thing I took away from this its that we can't wait for other people to do the right thing, we each need to individually step up to ensure it happens What follows should probably be a separate post, but I will take the opportunity to summarize some of the illegal tactics that shorts have been identified to be using in their war with retail investors. Note that this may not be an exhaustive list and there may be newer tactics deployed in the future. Retail investors might not have the same tricks, resources and willingness to break the law for profit as hedgies do, but my hope and belief is that if we pool our knowledge and analysis, we will figure out their game and effectively adapt. Feel free to forward the list below to any representatives and lawmakers if you concur that these tactics were used: Rampant Naked Shorting - With the extremely high number of Fail to Delivers (FTID) , short interest being as high as 226% recently, and institutions alone holding a staggering 177% of the total float (likely due in large part to counterfeit shares), signs strongly point to GME being rampant with naked shorts and counterfeit shares. I believe the original goal of shorts was to drive GME to bankruptcy with these naked shorts, using the laddering of naked shorts (aka short ladder attack), executed with the help of counterfeit stock which is a classic and reliable method of driving down the stock price. I believe the GME stock has seen relentlessly aggressive short attacks, especially on the week of Monday February 1st, which drove the stock price down and triggered panic selling. Ladder Attacks with the help of Dark Pools - Another identified method of ladder attacks was identified to come from crosstrading with darkpools (the stock market has its own private stock exchange where institutions can trade…). Essentially darkpools are private stock markets retail investors do not have access to, where short side funds can purchase securities “off market” and then sell “on-market”, with the effect of creating a lot more downward pressure on the market without the upward pressure from buying. Illegally masking shorts with synthetic longs. Another tactic shorts are suspected of using in GME is the use of illegally using options to evade short positions in violation of Reg SHO which SEC describes in this risk alert and which I elaborate in this post. Essentially it’s the use of using options to create synthetic longs to illegally and artificially cover and prolong short positions and at same time obscuring the true short interest %. If you consider that it would be far more profitable for shorts to not cover at high prices but instead ladder attack the price and wait for retail investors to lose interest and close their shorts at as low of a price as possible, then you can see why this strategy would be very effective. Using way out-of-money call options to obscure true short interest. You may have heard about the 43 million worth of 800 dollar calls purchased when the price was 100 and found it odd. Later it was identified as a tactic to cheaply purchase synthetic call options (since at 800 its way out of money) to obscure their short positions (with the added benefit of hedging at 800 if a squeeze does happen) One thing I want to note, particularly to legislators at the GameStop hearing: Retail investors were not incited to pump GME. Retail investors spotted a unique Short Squeeze opportunity created by the greed of short side hedge funds, whereby GameStop was being abusively naked shorted with the goal of bringing it to bankruptcy, and hedge funds were so greedy about it that they shorted the company with a short interest of 226% of float, meaning A LOT of counterfeit shares were being used to short the company. Retail investors saw this as an opportunity to short squeeze the hedge fund shorters, which is a legal and legitimate investment strategy. The short squeeze would have happened had everyone played fair, but instead, financial institutions who were culpable to the naked shorting intervened and shut down retail buying, hurting the retail investors and successfully manipulating the market. The investment itself was in my opinion a sound decision based on the short squeeze, but in hindsight retail investors did not seriously consider the risk of the market would be blatantly and publicly manipulated and that the market would be rigged against them. If this post was useful (and I hope it was! Gave up my Friday night to write this for you Apes), please upvote for visibility and share it far and wide. The GameStop hearings could be a first step and hope towards legislative change, and it’s extremely important that the right story is told at those hearings (and by the right story I mean the real truth of what happened.) I hope the truly culpable parties are investigated and brought to justice. Again, I know many of us feel cynical that anything meaning will be done towards finding justice against the lawbreakers in this case, but if you feel even an ounce of injustice or empathy at how retail investors were unfairly harmed in the course of investing in GME, I strongly urge you to contact a legislator associated with the GameStop hearings and bring this to their attention so they can review this case with more complete information. In addition I recommend you to contact the SEC and any journalist you know or via journalist tip lines. It’s not going to be easy but the more awareness we raise the higher the likelihood our voices will be heard and positive change will be made. As we navigate the rocky waters ahead, I’ll gift you with a favorite quote of mine: The only difference between a nightmare and a dream is how big your balls are. 🚀🚀🚀 Disclaimer: I am not an investment advisor, I just like the stock. Ps. If you’ve read to the end, I’ll leave you with a few more thoughts and reminders: - If I were to distill life into one thing, it would be to never lose hope. - Remember that if you’ve lost money in any way shape or form, don’t be depressed, money can always be made back and the important thing is to maintain a good attitude. - Only invest what you can afford to lose. - Perhaps the most important factor in good investing is patience. If you’d like to read more about counterfeiting stocks this is a good place to start http://counterfeitingstock.com/CS2.0/CounterfeitingStock.html
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” - Sun Tzu We're in a war with the hedge funds and with wallstreet and basically the root of corruption in America with our GME short squeeze proxy war, and if you autists want to win this war, you need to know the enemy, and know yourself.Firstly, education is KEY, so if you're new, you DEFINITELY need to go learn at least what a short squeeze is and a short ladder attack is. What the enemy is doing:
Make it cheaper for them to cover their more costly short positions.
Price manipulation will fail ultimately because while they are able to drive prices lower with their short attacks, when they eventually have to cover their short positions and buy, they will again drive prices up due to purchases of almost none existing stock (cuz we be holding), sending prices up as high as before they shorted or even higher. All the while hedge funds will continue to eat fees and interest on their short positions, making this cycle not doable indefinitely.https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/la7bhj/gme_mms_have_until_tomorrow_22_to_buy_shares_it/
Media manipulation
Most if not all American main stream media is clearly serving corporate and wallstreet interests, simply by the false narratives they are reporting.https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/la1022/hmmm/They are not to be trusted and if seen, can dishearten and shake the will of those who don't have diamond hands. Best to avoid if you are a paper handed bitch. Some examples of false narratives are:
Reddit is made up of alt-rights, or idiots, or gamblers, etc. -> We're not idiots, because we're the ones who were able to grab wallstreet by the nutsack. We're retards and autists who love the stock and the company. That is all.
Reddit is moving on to silver. -> SILVER CANNOT BE SQUEEZED!!!!! With a market cap of more than $1.5 Trillion, there is NO WAY for retail investors to be able to make a dent in that. The only possible short squeeze play is GME because it's a small cap company with a market cap of only $250 million as of July 2020, so it is definitely doable for a bunch of retards on WSB to affect the price of a small cap company stock. Literally all the posts on reddit promoting SLVR are from bot accounts that have sus creation dates and karma and post counts. Plus, Citadel owns a giant amount of silver so silver prices going up higher is gonna benefit them and give them more fuel to fight this GME war. You're shooting yourself int eh foot if you buy SLVR. https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/la1xhf/guess_who_owns_tonnes_of_slv_options_fuck_citadel/
"XXX IS THE NEXT GME" -> This is also a false narrative. NOTHING can be the next GME, because NOTHING is shorted as much as GME, which is STILL over 100% shorted. GME IS A ONCE IN A LIFETIME OPPORTUNITY GAIN FOR US, AND LOSS FOR THEM!
Breaking the law: Some if not all of the things posted above are pretty much border line illegal, but there has been clear signs of breaking the law and market manipulation, IE: freeze buying of select stocks and only allow for selling. They can spin it however they want, but as far as I know, it has been unprecedented for a majority of brokerages to simultaneously alter the way a stock can be traded with cash. And if the situation is desparate enough, they'll break the law again and again if it ends up costing them less than to just let the price get to $69.420. Expect them to fight dirty until the bitter end.
Social Media Manipulation: Hedge Funds now employ bots to spread doubt and misinformation in order to weaken your hands. Some places they target is WSB itself, other stock trading subreddits, facebook, and on sites / apps like Webull and Yahoo Finance. Don't believe in random comments. Always believe in WSB posts with huge amounts of likes (top posts are vetted by the 8 mil users here / by mods too to make sure they're factual)https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/lafh4d/in_case_you_needed_proof_that_there_are_imposters/
Their Current Strategy: Wallstreet calls us "dumb money", because they think we are unsophisticated and just chase after a quick buck, and we have short attention spans. They'll try and continue to manipulate the price so that the stock will trade sideways, or continuous short ladder attacks, trying to scare paper hands into selling, and bore diamond hands into selling as well. They will also try to tempt us with other "NEXT GME" type plays and may even artificially raise prices of a stock or two (IE: SILVER) to try and get people to hop off the GME rocket. They'll use media to continue to push narratives that the GME short squeeze is over, short positions are covered, and redditors have moved onto something else. If this fails, then they may simulate a "SQUEEZE" by suddenly letting the price go up to $700 or $800, then unleash a short ladder attack unlike which we have ever seen, to simulate the sell off, so idiot retards will be scared into thinking they missed the top, so they will all sell. But if people just look at the volume, they'll know it's all a ruse.
What we're doing, our advantage, and why the enemy can't win.
Enemy loses money everyday, we don't: It costs the hedge funds billions to continue to fight this war of attrition becauase they continue to eat insanely high fees and interest on their short positions because the cost of borrowing remains high because the short interest are remaining high. Melvin down over 50% just this month alone. You think they can hold on much longer and keep eating fees?https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/labq1a/this_is_so_satisfying_to_look_at/Meanwhile we don't have to pay anything for holding our stocks. We can literally just hold and not have a short squeeze and just from the cost of borrowing alone the hedge funds will run out of money, so that's why there will come a time where it's cheaper for them to cover their positions rather than just keep on bleeding until they die out. I don't think they can hold out for another month of trading sideways with no progress. I believe in Feb we will see some major action. It could even start as early as tomorrow, because that's the last day shorts have to cover their 1/29 puts that expired.
We're getting smarter: Everyday we get new DD on WSB and more and more people are reading these DD's and understand how to diamond hands, and can now filter out fake news from mainstream media. We've just hit 8 mil subs; our subs are going exponential. We've recovered from the RH fiasco and we're primed and loaded on other brokerages like Fidelity. We are more ready than EVER to continue this war and this fight.
An Ape's Move this week: Again, not financial advice, but hypothetically if there was an autistic ape, the autistic ape would buy the dips, ESPECIALLY at this insane discount price of around $100. The autistic ape knows that basically it is paying $100 for a ticket to ride the GME train past $1k, easily 10x their bananas. Those apes who bought in at $300 will only get to 3x their bananas at the end of the month. The autistic apes will also understand that this is not a 1 day thing, but the events leading up to the squeeze can take weeks. But the autistic ape will ask itself, is it willing to wait a few weeks to at least 3x their bananas? Most apes will answer yes. But the ape knows if they buy it, they should be prepared to see red in their banana tracker for a month. But those red number are just fake numbers generated by HFT short ladder attacks, and not due to other apes actually selling their bananas, because apes together STRONK.
TL;DR = 💎🙌 🐵 = 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🌙PS: You only lose if you sell. Stock stays down for a month, then rockets up in March = no loss, only historical profits for retail investors.
In the book THE GAMBLER Dostoevsky quotes: "People really do like seeing their best friends humiliated; a large part of the friendship is based on humiliation; and that is an old truth, well known to all intelligent people" Do you think what he says is true? Why?
How luck plays an important role in the stock market (GME and others)
Fellow retards, I noticed that this sub is going to hit 2 million people soon, and I have decided to put aside my project assignments to write this DD (albeit more towards psychologically) on why luck is extremely important in the stock market, and what you can do to potentially get in favor of luck. Before I start, I want to congratulate you on being here. You have came a long way in life, and there’s more to come. Be happy. TLDR at the last paragraph. I want to talk mainly 3 things; luck, the psychology behind investing and what you should do to maximize profits. Luck In the book 'The Drunkard's Walk', under chapter of 'Illusions of Patterns and Patterns of Illusion', and I quote: "In 1978, Koppett revealed a system that he claimed could determine, by the end of January every year, whether the stock market would go up or down in that calendar year. His system had correctly predicted the market, he said, for the past eleven years. Of course, stock-picking systems are easy to identify in hindsight; the true test is whether they will work in the future. Koppett's system passed that test too: judging the market by the Dow Jones Industrial Average, it worked for eleven straight years, from 1979 through 1989, got it wrong in 1990, and was correct again every year until 1998. But although Koppett's predictions were correct for a streak of eighteen out of nineteen years, I feel confident in asserting that his streak involved no skill whatsoever. Why? Because Leonard Koppett was a columnist for Sporting News, and his system was based on the results of the Super Bowl, the championship game of professional football. Whenever the team from the (original) National Football league won, the stock market, he predicted, would rise." In the book 'Fooled by Randomness', the Prologue mentioned "...luck disguised and perceived as nonluck (that is, skills) and, more generally, randomness disguised and perceived as non-randomness (that is, determinism). " In the book ‘The Black Swan’ by Taleb Nassim Nicholas, Page 119 mentioned " A successful person will try to convince you that his achievements could not possibly be accidental, just as a gambler who wins at roulette seven times in a row will explain to you that the odds against such a streak are one in several million, so you either have to believe some transcendental intervention is in play or accept his skills and insight in picking the winning numbers." More often than not, luck is rarely on your side. I can provide many other articles, but I believe you get the point. To emphasize it, "the habit of mistaking luck for skill is most prevalent - and most conspicuous - and that is the world of markets." So why am I saying all these? What I am trying to imply is, do appreciate your GME gains, or whatever astronomical gains that you have. These gains, more often than not, are results of extremely lucky happenstances, where most people are incapable of harnessing them. Yes, there are tons of good DDs. But you yourselves are incredibly lucky to be part of WSB, and personally reading the DDs yourselves, and lucky enough to decide that you would be retarded enough to take the risk. You should be happy and grateful about it, because like I said, this is hugely, and heavily dependent on luck. Humans are flawed, because we have the tendency to look for specific causes that lead to effects. We often find it hard to accept that an event can be the result of total randomness, but sometimes it is. In financial forecasting, several times random volatility is mistaken for accurate prediction. In a group of many analysts, it is normal to expect that someone's predictions will turn out to be true (u/DeepFuckingValue). So, in case you get way too ahead of yourselves thinking you are absolutely a genius for having triple percentage gains in your portfolio, remember you're most likely just lucky. And since you're lucky, be appreciative and do not be complacent. Psychology behind Investing Several studies have fooled people into believing they are in control of something they actually have no control over. In fact, human decision-making shows systematic simplifications and deviations from the tenets of rationality (‘heuristics’) that may lead to suboptimal decisional outcomes (‘cognitive biases’). There are currently three prevailing theoretical perspectives on the origin of heuristics and cognitive biases: a cognitive-psychological, an ecological and an evolutionary perspective. To simplify that, it basically means that cognitive biases arise from intrinsic brain mechanisms that are fundamental for the working of our neural networks. Your mind is always on the cautious side of things, because it is trying to protect you. Remember a time when you were very near the edge of a building/cliff, and all of a sudden you feel hypersensitive to the surrounding around you? You are aware of every rocks and stones that might sabotage you. Another example can be that you shiver when peeing, because your body is exaggerating the signal that you are rapidly losing body heat, and is trying to shiver up the muscle fiber to keep you warm, etc. You get the idea. This unfortunately, applies in investing as well. Your mind will inevitably forces you to be on the safer side. A dip? Oh no... you panic. But relax, that is normal. In my last point, I will explain what you can do to overcome it. What you can do to stay calm? So now you know that it is in human nature to be a paper handed bitch. The first step is realizing that your own neural networks are playing a huge part in giving you a paper hand. When you realized that it is your own mind that is keeping you on the safer side, perhaps you can be more self-aware. Being impatient in the market is the worst mistake that you would commit while investing in the stocks. You have to know that if you do not have good patience in the market then you would find difficulty in getting the right stocks for your investment. You have to finally take your own decisions when you wish to select the stocks. Remember however, you do have to be lucky to hit the jackpot on certain investments as per my first point. Confirmation bias is also a bitch. As philosopher Francis Bacon put it in 1620, "the human understanding, once it has adopted an opinion, collects any instances that confirm it, and though the contrary instances may be more numerous and more weighty, it either does not notice them or else rejects them, in order that this opinion will remain unshaken." This happens very often in WSB, and I want you to be cautious as well. To show you how easy confirmation bias is, imagine I have 5 numbers here. After presenting you these numbers, I want you to guess what is the rule of the game. Here are the 5 numbers: 4 6 8 10 12. What will your next 3 numbers be? What is the rule of the game? The rule is: Increasing Numbers, the next 3 numbers can be 13 14 15 Most of you might have guessed "increasing even numbers and provided with 14 16 18, when in fact it is not. Luck does not solely come from deciding whether to listen to another retard's DD on a thread, and YOLO-ing your life savings onto some stocks. It also comes in the form of your birth status, etc. Having a $100,000 head start in the stock market, is almost always better than someone having $1000 as a starting capital (or worse still, negative capital simply because your parents are poor, that's unlucky). That being said, I believe all of us here are in some way privileged to be gathered here and discussing individually. The poor kids in some countries have to fight for clean water and food. So the next time you realized that you are earning money in the stock market, remember, it is incredibly hard to do it, and you should be proud of yourselves. And in the scenario where you lose your money, well, you shouldn't be surprised either way. You are bound to be losing. Here are some books you can refer to if you're interested: The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow (How Randomness Rules Our Lives), Fooled by Randomness by Taleb N, The Black Swan by Taleb N, Who’s in Charge? by Michael S. Gazzaniga (on Free will and the science of the brain), Success and Luck by Robert H. Frank, The Most Good You Can Do (How effective altruism is changing ideas about living ethically) by Peter Singer. Clarification: Some people mentioned if this post was directed to "diminish the contributions of skill and the hard effort of anyone". Absolutely not. This post is assuming that in the top few % (if you're reading this, yourself included), everyone is just as talented. But to be part of that 1% in that 1%, to be the richest among the richest, you have to be incredibly lucky. TLDR: If you make huge gains, go and give some of it to other people that may not have been so lucky. Go and give it to the homeless people at the unemployment line, who ain't so lucky as you. Maybe buy him food. Get him clothes. Donate to your local charities. Most importantly, give it back to your parents, because your parents are the one who, most likely, set you up in this direction, and you are lucky enough to be here today. If you did not make any gains, remember, it is perfectly okay. Shorter TLDR: Be happy, be grateful. 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀
Illegal Tactics and DTCC/Prime Broker Complicity In Naked Shorting & Retail Shutdown of GME (DTCC/Prime Brokers decision makers need to be questioned at the 2/18 GameStop Congress hearing)
TLDR: GameStop’s Congress hearing is on Feb 18th, they need to investigate the Prime Brokers and DTCC for their complicity in enabling naked shorting within GME and by extension, potential collusion to shut down trading on Jan 28th, the day the short squeeze was going to kick off. (stick to the end for an analysis of some illegal tactics short side hedge funds have been using) Thesis: On the day the retail market for GME shut down on 1/28 (the day the short squeeze would’ve happened had there been no market intervention), DTCC (clearing house monopoly) shut down retail buying in order to protect itself and Prime Brokers (which privately own the DTCC) from being exposed to the consequences of being party to illegal activity. I believe Prime Brokers and DTCC need to be called to the GameStop hearing on February 18th to be questioned for their complicity in enabling illegal naked shorting of the GME stock, as well as potential collusion to shut out retail buyers on 1/28. In my previous post (which I recommend reading for some context) I explored the subject of rampant illegal naked shorting in GME, and how Prime Brokers (consisting of banks like Goldman, Morgan, etc) and DTCC would be complicit in the naked shorting. This in turn raises the thought experiment that they would be incentivized to do anything possible to prevent the short squeeze from happening on 1/28 because had the short squeeze happened, the shorts would go bankrupt and their Prime Brokers who lent them their naked shorted shares would need to cover the shares. This would not only represent a humongous capital expense for Prime Brokers, the culpability of Prime Brokers (and that of the DTCC) in this situation would also have likely been exposed as well. A quick primer on what a Prime Broker is: Prime Brokers are essentially the service side of the short- selling business. They lend out securities and cash, you can think of them as the “house” in a casino: They provide a gambler with markers to play and to manage his winnings. According to Matt Taibi, “Under the original concept, if a hedge fund that wanted to short a stock they would first need to “locate” the stock with his Prime Broker but as time passed, Prime Brokers increasingly allowed their hedge-fund customers to use automated systems and “locate” the stock themselves, and what this does is enable short-sellers to sell stock without delivering and thereby perform naked shorts with counterfeit shares. (source: https://web.archive.org/web/20210213125246/https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/wall-streets-naked-swindle-194908/). (I highly recommend you read Matt Taibi’s article on naked shorting and how it was used to take down Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. There are so many parallels with GME it’s hard to miss. It’s amazing to consider that 12 years after this article was published and brought to public awareness, the problem of naked shorting still exists as a systemic issue.) Prime Brokers have a long history of being associated with naked shorting. To highlight a few examples, Prime Brokers like Merill Lynch and Goldman have long been implicated for naked shorting Overstock.com (https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/accidentally-released-and-incredibly-embarrassing-documents-show-how-goldman-et-al-engaged-in-naked-short-selling-244035/, https://www.forbes.com/2007/02/02/naked-short-suit-overstock-biz-cx_lm_0202naked.html?sh=271400d1763f). Another example is when Goldman’s Prime Brokerage was implicated by the SEC in 2016 and got away with a small fine of 16 million (Source: https://www.sec.gov/news/pressrelease/2016-9.html). An example that very recently came in the news is a story where CIBC, BOA, UBS and TD Bank Prime Brokerages are accused of facilitating naked short selling and using counterfeit stock to attack and bring the stock price of a company from $34.77 to $1.83 (Source: https://www.securitiesfinancetimes.com/securitieslendingnews/industryarticle.php?article_id=224548). The DTCC also has a very long history of being associated with naked shorting. The Wall Street Journal noted that 1% of the DTCC’s volume end in failure to deliver which “have put DTCC in the middle of a long-running fight over whether unscrupulous investors are driving down hundreds of small companies' share prices… DTCC has turned a blind eye to the naked-shorting problem. ” (Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118359867562957720). The DTCC has also had numerous complaints submitted to the SEC for enabling naked shorting (source: https://www.sec.gov/rules/proposed/s72303/decosta122203.htm) and have been sued tens or hundreds of times for assisting naked shorts (source: https://smithonstocks.com/part-3-in-series-on-illegal-naked-shortings-role-in-stock-manipulation-prime-brokers-and-the-dtcc-have-a-troubling-monopoly-on-clearing-and-settling-stock-trades/ and http://counterfeitingstock.com/CS2.0/CounterfeitingStock.html and https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118359867562957720) On 1/28 Robinhood received a letter from the DTCC at 4 am requiring them to halt trading or come up with 3 billion dollars, which Robinhood did not have, and therefore with one swoop of the pen the DTCC shut down buy side momentum but strangely allowed selling. Retail investors were shut out of the market and as any student of microeconomics would know, by shutting buy but only allowing sell, the price is bound to fall. Meanwhile while hedge funds were able to keep trading not only in the market but also crosstrade in the dark pools (“private” stock markets that retail is shut out of, more on this later), and use this crucial lifeline given to them by the DTCC to prevent the squeeze from happening that day. With retail abruptly being shut out from buy (even cash accounts were shut out, which didn’t make sense) and only allowed to sell, almost everyone could smell manipulation was afoot (which triggered the Congress hearing) and the most of the blame was pointed at Robinhood. Personally and in hindsight, I believe Robinhood was just a willing scapegoat. When we think about who had the most to lose if a short squeeze occurred, I’ll narrow it down to three entities, Shorts and their stakeholders (ie Citadel), Prime Brokers and the DTCC. It’s important to remember that the actual impetus that triggered the shutdown of the market for retail investors came from the DTCC. Working backwards, if you consider that GME was rampantly naked shorted and DTCC and Prime Brokers would have to be complicit in it, I believe the DTCC, Primer Brokers and possibly Citadel (who provides 40% of Robinhood’s revenue) brazenly manipulated the market on 1/28 by shutting down purchasing for retail buyers to prevent the squeeze from being squoze on that day as doing so would be catastrophic for all aforementioned parties involved. I believe that on the upcoming Gamestop Congress hearings the Financial Services Committee needs to call on decision makers of DTCC and Prime Brokers explore their role and complicity in the shut out of retail buyers that day as well as being enablers of naked shorting in GME. An interesting thought experiment: On 1/28 when the price was 450+ and shorts were likely under 100, if we assume prime brokers allowed naked shorting in GME, then when the squeeze was about to happen (or happening), if Prime Brokers had margin had called the shorts, they would presumably also also gone down because shorts would not be able to pay in that event and the brokers would be holding the bag. By that logic, they have every incentive in this case to NOT to margin call and instead the most logical option would probably would have been to make a backroom deal, which is what I personally think most likely happened. If you’ve read up to this point, you might be thinking what can I do about this? I am aware that there a lot of cynicism that we can’t do anything, that there will be no justice for retail investors who were harmed this situation, and that institutions and people in power will prevent anything from being done. I feel this sometimes too, but remember: A single voice can be drowned out, but if we all speak together then we will make our voice heard. Ape Strong Together. With the hearing coming up on February 18th, I highly recommend you email and tweet the representatives involved in the hearing, as well as your own district representatives, and urge them to read into the factors presented in this post and call the DTCC and Prime Brokers to the hearingl. They need to be questioned on why GME has so many counterfeit shares, failed to deliver, their complicity in naked shorting, and investigated for their role in the retail shut down of 1/28. Below are 4 members of congress I recommend both tweeting and emailing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez https://twitter.com/AOC, email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) Al Green https://twitter.com/repalgreen, email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) Maxine Waters https://twitter.com/maxinewaters, email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) Nancy Pelosi Email: https://twitter.com/SpeakerPelosi email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]). And you can find other members of Financial Services Committee here to reach out to: https://financialservices.house.gov/about/committee-membership.htm What follows should probably be a separate post, but I will take the opportunity to summarize some of the illegal tactics that shorts have been identified to be using in their war with retail investors. Note that this may not be an exhaustive list and there may be newer tactics deployed in the future. Retail investors might not have the same tricks, resources and willingness to break the law for profit as hedgies do, but my hope and belief is that if we pool our knowledge and analysis, we will figure out their game and effectively adapt. Feel free to forward the list below to any representatives and lawmakers if you concur that these tactics were used: Rampant Naked Shorting - With the extremely high number of Fail to Delivers (FTID) , short interest being as high as 226% recently, and institutions alone holding a staggering 177% of the total float (likely due in large part to counterfeit shares), signs strongly point to GME being rampant with naked shorts and counterfeit shares. I believe the original goal of shorts was to drive GME to bankruptcy with these naked shorts, using the laddering of naked shorts (aka short ladder attack), executed with the help of counterfeit stock which is a classic and reliable method of driving down the stock price. I believe the GME stock has seen relentlessly aggressive short attacks, especially on the week of Monday February 1st, which drove the stock price down and triggered panic selling. Ladder Attacks with the help of Dark Pools - Another identified method of ladder attacks was identified to come from crosstrading with darkpools (the stock market has its own private stock exchange where institutions can trade…). Essentially darkpools are private stock markets retail investors do not have access to, where short side funds can purchase securities “off market” and then sell “on-market”, with the effect of creating a lot more downward pressure on the market without the upward pressure from buying. Illegally masking shorts with synthetic longs. Another tactic shorts are suspected of using in GME is the use of illegally using options to evade short positions in violation of Reg SHO which SEC describes in this risk alert and which I elaborate in this post. Essentially it’s the use of using options to create synthetic longs to illegally and artificially cover and prolong short positions and at same time obscuring the true short interest %. If you consider that it would be far more profitable for shorts to not cover at high prices but instead ladder attack the price and wait for retail investors to lose interest and close their shorts at as low of a price as possible, then you can see why this strategy would be very effective. Using way out-of-money call options to obscure true short interest. You may have heard about the 43 million worth of 800 dollar calls purchased when the price was 100 and found it odd. Later it was identified as a tactic to cheaply purchase synthetic call options (since at 800 its way out of money) to obscure their short positions (with the added benefit of hedging at 800 if a squeeze does happen) One thing I want to note, particularly to legislators at the GameStop hearing: Retail investors were not incited to pump GME. Retail investors spotted a unique Short Squeeze opportunity created by the greed of short side hedge funds, whereby GameStop was being abusively naked shorted with the goal of bringing it to bankruptcy, and hedge funds were so greedy about it that they shorted the company with a short interest of 226% of float, meaning A LOT of counterfeit shares were being used to short the company. Retail investors saw this as an opportunity to short squeeze the hedge fund shorters, which is a legal and legitimate investment strategy. The short squeeze would have happened had everyone played fair, but instead, financial institutions who were culpable to the naked shorting intervened and shut down retail buying, hurting the retail investors and successfully manipulating the market. The investment itself was in my opinion a sound decision based on the short squeeze, but in hindsight retail investors did not seriously consider the risk of the market would be blatantly and publicly manipulated and that the market would be rigged against them. If this post was useful (and I hope it was! Gave up my Friday night to write this for you Apes), please upvote for visibility and share it far and wide. The GameStop hearings could be a first step and hope towards legislative change, and it’s extremely important that the right story is told at those hearings (and by the right story I mean the real truth of what happened.) I hope the truly culpable parties are investigated and brought to justice. Again, I know many of us feel cynical that anything meaning will be done towards finding justice against the lawbreakers in this case, but if you feel even an ounce of injustice or empathy at how retail investors were unfairly harmed in the course of investing in GME, I strongly urge you to contact a legislator associated with the GameStop hearings and bring this to their attention so they can review this case with more complete information. In addition I recommend you to contact the SEC and any journalist you know or via journalist tip lines. It’s not going to be easy but the more awareness we raise the higher the likelihood our voices will be heard and positive change will be made. As we navigate the rocky waters ahead, I’ll gift you with a favorite quote of mine: The only difference between a nightmare and a dream is how big your balls are. 🚀🚀🚀 Disclaimer: I am not an investment advisor, I just like the stock. Ps. If you’ve read to the end, I’ll leave you with a few more thoughts and reminders: - If I were to distill life into one thing, it would be to never lose hope. - Remember that if you’ve lost money in any way shape or form, don’t be depressed, money can always be made back and the important thing is to maintain a good attitude. - Only invest what you can afford to lose. - Perhaps the most important factor in good investing is patience. If you’d like to read more about counterfeiting stocks this is a good place to start http://counterfeitingstock.com/CS2.0/CounterfeitingStock.html
What’s up, u/WSBGamer here… IT’S TIME TO GET SERIOUS ABOUT $NOK! If you want to learn more about this LEGENDARY COMPANY, then get reading! The next few weeks will be OURS, $NOK Bulls. Okay Retards, first of all, yes I know this account is new. I’ve been lurking on WSB since 2019, so don’t come for me. Also, I’m still holding my $GME and have no intention to sell it until Dumb Street COLLAPSES! However, you need to play close attention to $NOK in these coming days and BUY IN as soon as you can. SHARES AND NEAR-OTM CALLS ARE CHEAP AS HELL RIGHT NOW! IMPORTANT: ROBINHOOD IS NOW ALLOWING AUTISTS TO TRADE 2,000 SHARES OF $NOK PLUS 1,000 OPTIONS CONTRACTS… MASSIVE INCREASE INBOUND! AT ONE POINT, WE WERE ONLY ABLE TO HOLD 5 SHARES MAX, WHICH OBVIOUSLY RESULTED IN A DOWNWARD SWING ON FRIDAY. GET IN NOW BEFORE YOU REGRET IT LATER! $NOK CLOSED AT 4.89 TODAY AND IS CURRENTLY DOWN TO $4.86, SO THERE IS NO REASON FOR YOU TO NOT COP SOME SHARES DURING AH. Now, let’s get into my $NOK DD. Because you guys used up all of your Adderall last week, I’m going to organize it into a Top 10 List. Just to get this out of the way, there isn’t going to be a massive Short Squeeze. $NOK is a legitimately good company that will grow in value over time. Sure, there could be a potential Gamma Squeeze, but we are really looking for an increase in price because people realize that $NOK is an extremely great investment. You can hold it for a few weeks or a few years, you are guaranteed to make money when the market wakes up. IF YOU WANT TO GET IN NOW, SNAG AS MANY SHARES AS YOU CAN BELOW $5.75 (IT CLOSED AT $4.56 ON FRIDAY, WHICH IS BASICALLY THE SAME PRICE THAT IT WAS TRADING AT BEFORE THERE WAS HYPE) AND BUY AS MANY CHEAP CALLS AS YOU WANT! My Positions: 300 Shares @ $4.70 (About to Buy 200 More Shares in Momentum) & 15 $5 Strike Calls expiring on 2/5/2021 @ $0.48 * 100. To those of you who still think that $NOK is solely a phone manufacturer, you are living in the past. Though they still sell cell phones, $NOK is primarily a 5G / Telecommunications Stock that has strong growth potential. $NOK’s primary sources of revenue are its Nokia Technologies, Global Services, Ultra Broadband Networks, and IP Networks and Applications segments. $NOK is involved with mobile radio, network planning and optimization, the implementation and integration of 5G network systems, fiber optics, cell phones, networking solutions, SaaS, maintenance services, cybersecurity hosting, and analytics platforms. Its primary innovations and developments are in the 5G network infrastructure and integration space, and they will be able to increase their top-line revenues substantially as 5G becomes more prevalent and they are able to utilize their strategic partnerships to acquire more market share. Investors should value their potential 5G growth the most and I believe that this is how $NOK will be able to transform itself into a more relevant and popular company. $NOK is a serious company with a market cap of nearly $30,000,000,000 and a bright future. You should know that it is listed on both the NYSE and the Helsinki Stock Exchange and usually releases statements based on Finnish Time. Here is my Top 10 List (IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER) for why $NOK is a great investment.
Currently Undervalued for the Sector - $NOK currently has a P/E Ratio of 31, an EV/EBITDA of 8-9, a P/BV Ratio of 1.44, P/CF Ratio of 11.62, and a PEG Ratio of about 11. There is obvious room for $NOK to go up in value and it would be fundamentally justified. I have had great success investing in companies that appear to be underpriced for the sector.
Strategic Partnerships, Collaborations, & Developments - Recently, $NOK has been obtaining several key partnerships that will allow them to grow their 5G business. They have established partnerships with major companies like $MSFT and $QCOM and already have substantial 5G market share. I have never seen so many positive articles regarding new developments before, if you just search for $NOK on Google you will find even more articles. If you didn’t already know this, NASA selected $NOK to build the first ever network literally ON THE MOON!
Q4 Earnings Releasing on 2/5/2021 - $NOK should have a nice Q4 Earnings Report and I am expecting a SIGNIFICANT BEAT. After $ERIC jumped after releasing its Q4 Earnings, people are expecting $NOK to shoot up even more. $NOK has a history of performing well in Q4, and the recent contracts and partnerships that it acquired during Q4 should help us out. I think that we will likely see $NOK hit $8.00 for a decent period of time on Thursday or Friday.
Strong Fundamentals & Clean Financials - $NOK has great fundamentals, a clean Balance Sheet, a sound Income Statement, and an above average Cash Flow Statement. You can check everything out here: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NOK/financials?p=NOK
WSB & FinTwit Hype - $NOK has been gaining a lot of traction with gamblers and we even have The President, Dave Portnoy, on our side. As more and more people find out about $NOK and get HYPED for Thursday, our army will grow in size and more and more people will buy in, driving the price up and giving us even more relevance on WSB and Twitter. Let’s keep this momentum going!
Analyst Ratings & Price Targets - The overwhelming majority of analysts believe give $NOK a rating of ‘Buy’ or ‘Hold’ and very few of them actually consider it to be a ‘Sell’ at this time. Also, with the upcoming Q4 Earnings, it has been receiving some favorable price target upgrades. THE ANALYSTS ARE ACTUALLY ON OUR SIDE HERE, SO WHY ARE YOU STILL READING THIS?
Extremely High Volume - Recently, $NOK has had an insane amount of volume. It has an average volume of about 30,000,000 shares, but the recent hype has caused it to skyrocket. Last week, we hit a volume of about 1,200,000,000 shares traded on Wednesday, which is absolutely insane! If a company has high volume, that usually means that there is high demand for the stock and the stock is very liquid. It also means that the price movements are more tangible, sustainable and meaningful since there are a large number of investors trading a large amount of shares and agreeing on the price.
Growth of 5G & Increased Demand - As 5G becomes more prevalent and both corporations and regular people begin to utilize the new technology, $NOK will soar. 5G, though available, is still much less popular than 4G. With more and more people relying on the Internet in their daily lives, companies overhauling their networks and data centers, and 5G being rolled out across the globe, $NOK can only get bigger.
New CEO’s Performance & Potential Dividend Increase - Pekka Lundmark became the CEO of $NOK on 8/1/2020. He has been doing an amazing job with securing the recent partnerships and contracts and has been giving positive guidance. He will continue to grow the company and is going to assert $NOK’s 5G dominance. There is also lots of speculation that they want to bring back the pretty significant dividend that they cut, so be on the lookout for that as well! Dividends are FREE CASH!
Increased Mainstream Media Attention - Because people are associating $NOK with other Meme Stocks ($NOK is not a joke and is a great, investable company), it is getting a lot more coverage. This will build hype for the Q4 Earnings on Thursday and entices investors to buy in because of FOMO. $NOK isn’t normally heavily talked about during its Earnings SZN, but trust me, they’ll be all over this one! 2021 & 2021 will be $NOK’s breakout years, so the Q4 results will be an early indication of potential success. I am expecting there to be a big surge on Wednesday as more and more people realize that they are releasing Q4 Earnings soon.
TLDR: NOK is about to pop off, I’m calling it now. It has great fundamentals, a clean balance sheet, a new CEO, strong growth potential (especially with its recent partnerships), good market share, is currently undervalued, has a lot of justified hype, and is about to release Q4 Earnings on 2/5/2021, after rival $ERIC just had a nice beat. Buy NOK below $5.75 (CURRENTLY $4.88) and get ready for the growth! Recommended Positions: BUY AS MANY SHARES AS YOU CAN BELOW $5.75 BEFORE Q4 EARNINGS ON 2/5/2021. YOU CAN STILL BUY PAST THAT, BUT YOU WILL SEE THE GREATEST RETURN IF YOU GET IN BELOW $5.00 SINCE THE BOTTOM IS APPROXIMATELY $4.50. If you want to buy Calls, the $5.00 Call expiring on Friday is very cheap. I am planning on increasing my position further. Price Targets: We actually broke $10 for a few seconds last week but the SEC instantly halted it and destroyed the momentum. Later, Robinhood and other 0 IQ brokers decided to prevent us from purchasing it and then changed it to just 5 SHARES the next day, successfully dropping the price. This created a great buying opportunity, however, and I snagged even more. I am looking for $NOK to break $8.00 by the end of the week after a strong Q4 report. In the long-term, we could see a price of $17.00+ if they successfully capitalize on their new partnerships in 2021. WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT SELL AT A LOSS. IF YOU DECIDE TO SELL AT A LOSS, YOU ARE JUST AN IDIOT; $NOK HAS MASSIVE GROWTH POTENTIAL, SO JUST WAIT IT OUT! Lastly, I am not a financial advisor! Please send this $NOK DD to everyone you know so that we can spread the word. If $NOK manages to cross $12 by the end of this week, I will eat a Carolina Reaper and post the video to Reddit. $NOK TO THE FUCKING MOON! 🚀 HOLD THE LINE! 💎🙌 Sincerely, u/WSBGamer Edit: I cannot post on wallstreetbets or Wallstreetbetsnew because my account isn’t old enough, so put this on all of your socials! We need eyes!
Illegal Tactics and DTCC/Prime Broker Complicity In Naked Shorting & Retail Shutdown of GME (DTCC/Prime Brokers decision makers need to be questioned at the 2/18 GameStop Congress hearing)
TLDR: GameStop’s Congress hearing is on Feb 18th, they need to investigate the Prime Brokers and DTCC for their complicity in enabling naked shorting within GME and by extension, potential collusion to shut down trading on Jan 28th, the day the short squeeze was going to kick off. (stick to the end for an analysis of some illegal tactics short side hedge funds have been using) Thesis: On the day the retail market for GME shut down on 1/28 (the day the short squeeze would’ve happened had there been no market intervention), DTCC (clearing house monopoly) shut down retail buying in order to protect itself and Prime Brokers (which privately own the DTCC) from being exposed to the consequences of being party to illegal activity. I believe Prime Brokers and DTCC need to be called to the GameStop hearing on February 18th to be questioned for their complicity in enabling illegal naked shorting of the GME stock, as well as potential collusion to shut out retail buyers on 1/28. In my previous post (which I recommend reading for some context) I explored the subject of rampant illegal naked shorting in GME, and how Prime Brokers (consisting of banks like Goldman, Morgan, etc) and DTCC would be complicit in the naked shorting. This in turn raises the thought experiment that they would be incentivized to do anything possible to prevent the short squeeze from happening on 1/28 because had the short squeeze happened, the shorts would go bankrupt and their Prime Brokers who lent them their naked shorted shares would need to cover the shares. This would not only represent a humongous capital expense for Prime Brokers, the culpability of Prime Brokers (and that of the DTCC) in this situation would also have likely been exposed as well. A quick primer on what a Prime Broker is: Prime Brokers are essentially the service side of the short- selling business. They lend out securities and cash, you can think of them as the “house” in a casino: They provide a gambler with markers to play and to manage his winnings. According to Matt Taibi, “Under the original concept, if a hedge fund that wanted to short a stock they would first need to “locate” the stock with his Prime Broker but as time passed, Prime Brokers increasingly allowed their hedge-fund customers to use automated systems and “locate” the stock themselves, and what this does is enable short-sellers to sell stock without delivering and thereby perform naked shorts with counterfeit shares. (source: https://web.archive.org/web/20210213125246/https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/wall-streets-naked-swindle-194908/). (I highly recommend you read Matt Taibi’s article on naked shorting and how it was used to take down Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. There are so many parallels with GME it’s hard to miss. It’s amazing to consider that 12 years after this article was published and brought to public awareness, the problem of naked shorting still exists as a systemic issue.) Prime Brokers have a long history of being associated with naked shorting. To highlight a few examples, Prime Brokers like Merill Lynch and Goldman have long been implicated for naked shorting Overstock.com (https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/accidentally-released-and-incredibly-embarrassing-documents-show-how-goldman-et-al-engaged-in-naked-short-selling-244035/, https://www.forbes.com/2007/02/02/naked-short-suit-overstock-biz-cx_lm_0202naked.html?sh=271400d1763f). Another example is when Goldman’s Prime Brokerage was implicated by the SEC in 2016 and got away with a small fine of 16 million (Source: https://www.sec.gov/news/pressrelease/2016-9.html). An example that very recently came in the news is a story where CIBC, BOA, UBS and TD Bank Prime Brokerages are accused of facilitating naked short selling and using counterfeit stock to attack and bring the stock price of a company from $34.77 to $1.83 (Source: https://www.securitiesfinancetimes.com/securitieslendingnews/industryarticle.php?article_id=224548). The DTCC also has a very long history of being associated with naked shorting. The Wall Street Journal noted that 1% of the DTCC’s volume end in failure to deliver which “have put DTCC in the middle of a long-running fight over whether unscrupulous investors are driving down hundreds of small companies' share prices… DTCC has turned a blind eye to the naked-shorting problem. ” (Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118359867562957720). The DTCC has also had numerous complaints submitted to the SEC for enabling naked shorting (source: https://www.sec.gov/rules/proposed/s72303/decosta122203.htm) and have been sued tens or hundreds of times for assisting naked shorts (source: https://smithonstocks.com/part-3-in-series-on-illegal-naked-shortings-role-in-stock-manipulation-prime-brokers-and-the-dtcc-have-a-troubling-monopoly-on-clearing-and-settling-stock-trades/ and http://counterfeitingstock.com/CS2.0/CounterfeitingStock.html and https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118359867562957720) On 1/28 Robinhood received a letter from the DTCC at 4 am requiring them to halt trading or come up with 3 billion dollars, which Robinhood did not have, and therefore with one swoop of the pen the DTCC shut down buy side momentum but strangely allowed selling. Retail investors were shut out of the market and as any student of microeconomics would know, by shutting buy but only allowing sell, the price is bound to fall. Meanwhile while hedge funds were able to keep trading not only in the market but also crosstrade in the dark pools (“private” stock markets that retail is shut out of, more on this later), and use this crucial lifeline given to them by the DTCC to prevent the squeeze from happening that day. With retail abruptly being shut out from buy (even cash accounts were shut out, which didn’t make sense) and only allowed to sell, almost everyone could smell manipulation was afoot (which triggered the Congress hearing) and the most of the blame was pointed at Robinhood. Personally and in hindsight, I believe Robinhood was just a willing scapegoat. When we think about who had the most to lose if a short squeeze occurred, I’ll narrow it down to three entities, Shorts and their stakeholders (ie Citadel), Prime Brokers and the DTCC. It’s important to remember that the actual impetus that triggered the shutdown of the market for retail investors came from the DTCC. Working backwards, if you consider that GME was rampantly naked shorted and DTCC and Prime Brokers would have to be complicit in it, I believe the DTCC, Primer Brokers and possibly Citadel (who provides 40% of Robinhood’s revenue) brazenly manipulated the market on 1/28 by shutting down purchasing for retail buyers to prevent the squeeze from being squoze on that day as doing so would be catastrophic for all aforementioned parties involved. I believe that on the upcoming Gamestop Congress hearings the Financial Services Committee needs to call on decision makers of DTCC and Prime Brokers explore their role and complicity in the shut out of retail buyers that day as well as being enablers of naked shorting in GME. An interesting thought experiment: On 1/28 when the price was 450+ and shorts were likely under 100, if we assume prime brokers allowed naked shorting in GME, then when the squeeze was about to happen (or happening), if Prime Brokers had margin had called the shorts, they would presumably also also gone down because shorts would not be able to pay in that event and the brokers would be holding the bag. By that logic, they have every incentive in this case to NOT to margin call and instead the most logical option would probably would have been to make a backroom deal, which is what I personally think most likely happened. If you’ve read up to this point, you might be thinking what can I do about this? I am aware that there a lot of cynicism that we can’t do anything, that there will be no justice for retail investors who were harmed this situation, and that institutions and people in power will prevent anything from being done. I feel this sometimes too, but remember: A single voice can be drowned out, but if we all speak together then we will make our voice heard. Ape Strong Together. With the hearing coming up on February 18th, I highly recommend you email and tweet the representatives involved in the hearing, as well as your own district representatives, and urge them to read into the factors presented in this post and call the DTCC and Prime Brokers to the hearingl. They need to be questioned on why GME has so many counterfeit shares, failed to deliver, their complicity in naked shorting, and investigated for their role in the retail shut down of 1/28. Below are 4 members of congress I recommend both tweeting and emailing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez https://twitter.com/AOC, email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) Al Green Al Green https://twitter.com/repalgreen, email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) , email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) Maxine Waters https://twitter.com/maxinewaters, email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) Nancy Pelosi Email: https://twitter.com/SpeakerPelosi email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]). And you can find other members of Financial Services Committee here to reach out to: https://financialservices.house.gov/about/committee-membership.htm What follows should probably be a separate post, but I will take the opportunity to summarize some of the illegal tactics that shorts have been identified to be using in their war with retail investors. Note that this may not be an exhaustive list and there may be newer tactics deployed in the future. Retail investors might not have the same tricks, resources and willingness to break the law for profit as hedgies do, but my hope and belief is that if we pool our knowledge and analysis, we will figure out their game and effectively adapt. Feel free to forward the list below to any representatives and lawmakers if you concur that these tactics were used: Rampant Naked Shorting - With the extremely high number of Fail to Delivers (FTID) , short interest being as high as 226% recently, and institutions alone holding a staggering 177% of the total float (likely due in large part to counterfeit shares), signs strongly point to GME being rampant with naked shorts and counterfeit shares. I believe the original goal of shorts was to drive GME to bankruptcy with these naked shorts, using the laddering of naked shorts (aka short ladder attack), executed with the help of counterfeit stock which is a classic and reliable method of driving down the stock price. I believe the GME stock has seen relentlessly aggressive short attacks, especially on the week of Monday February 1st, which drove the stock price down and triggered panic selling. Ladder Attacks with the help of Dark Pools - Another identified method of ladder attacks was identified to come from crosstrading with darkpools (the stock market has its own private stock exchange where institutions can trade…). Essentially darkpools are private stock markets retail investors do not have access to, where short side funds can purchase securities “off market” and then sell “on-market”, with the effect of creating a lot more downward pressure on the market without the upward pressure from buying. Illegally masking shorts with synthetic longs. Another tactic shorts are suspected of using in GME is the use of illegally using options to evade short positions in violation of Reg SHO which SEC describes in this risk alert and which I elaborate in this post. Essentially it’s the use of using options to create synthetic longs to illegally and artificially cover and prolong short positions and at same time obscuring the true short interest %. If you consider that it would be far more profitable for shorts to not cover at high prices but instead ladder attack the price and wait for retail investors to lose interest and close their shorts at as low of a price as possible, then you can see why this strategy would be very effective. Using way out-of-money call options to obscure true short interest. You may have heard about the 43 million worth of 800 dollar calls purchased when the price was 100 and found it odd. Later it was identified as a tactic to cheaply purchase synthetic call options (since at 800 its way out of money) to obscure their short positions (with the added benefit of hedging at 800 if a squeeze does happen) One thing I want to note, particularly to legislators at the GameStop hearing: Retail investors were not incited to pump GME. Retail investors spotted a unique Short Squeeze opportunity created by the greed of short side hedge funds, whereby GameStop was being abusively naked shorted with the goal of bringing it to bankruptcy, and hedge funds were so greedy about it that they shorted the company with a short interest of 226% of float, meaning A LOT of counterfeit shares were being used to short the company. Retail investors saw this as an opportunity to short squeeze the hedge fund shorters, which is a legal and legitimate investment strategy. The short squeeze would have happened had everyone played fair, but instead, financial institutions who were culpable to the naked shorting intervened and shut down retail buying, hurting the retail investors and successfully manipulating the market. The investment itself was in my opinion a sound decision based on the short squeeze, but in hindsight retail investors did not seriously consider the risk of the market would be blatantly and publicly manipulated and that the market would be rigged against them. If this post was useful (and I hope it was! Gave up my Friday night to write this for you Apes), please upvote for visibility and share it far and wide. The GameStop hearings could be a first step and hope towards legislative change, and it’s extremely important that the right story is told at those hearings (and by the right story I mean the real truth of what happened.) I hope the truly culpable parties are investigated and brought to justice. Again, I know many of us feel cynical that anything meaning will be done towards finding justice against the lawbreakers in this case, but if you feel even an ounce of injustice or empathy at how retail investors were unfairly harmed in the course of investing in GME, I strongly urge you to contact a legislator associated with the GameStop hearings and bring this to their attention so they can review this case with more complete information. In addition I recommend you to contact the SEC and any journalist you know or via journalist tip lines. It’s not going to be easy but the more awareness we raise the higher the likelihood our voices will be heard and positive change will be made. As we navigate the rocky waters ahead, I’ll gift you with a favorite quote of mine: The only difference between a nightmare and a dream is how big your balls are. 🚀🚀🚀 Disclaimer: I am not an investment advisor, I just like the stock. Ps. If you’ve read to the end, I’ll leave you with a few more thoughts and reminders: - If I were to distill life into one thing, it would be to never lose hope. - Remember that if you’ve lost money in any way shape or form, don’t be depressed, money can always be made back and the important thing is to maintain a good attitude. - Only invest what you can afford to lose. - Perhaps the most important factor in good investing is patience. If you’d like to read more about counterfeiting stocks this is a good place to start http://counterfeitingstock.com/CS2.0/CounterfeitingStock.html Note: This is a re-post for visibility
-Elon Musk Oh Elon, sorry to steal your thunder. But GME will make TSLA vol look like TLT. Jeff haunting your every accomplishment yet again. I’m back with the final warning bell. The next time I post in 2021 will be to recap the squeeze’s results and post gain porn along with u/Deep_Fucking_Value, u/SIR_JACK_A_LOT, u/Tomatotowers, and more. This is the last stop before the moon mission. It’s currently not too late. But after Q3 earnings on Dec 8th, it will be. And of course, as always, not financial advice. Just for bragging rights and entertainment. Here goes: Here’s a comprehensive GME overview for all new and returning WSB-monkeys. Sit down and grab some tea. This is a long one unlike the previous posts. GME Overview: The GME story can be broken up into 2 main theses. The first is a deep value play which has credibility all on its own. The second is an infinity short squeeze like we’ve never seen before in history, which has credibility all on its own. When combining the two, you get the trade of a lifetime. In all my (albeit limited) days, I have never EVER seen a trade set up like this before. I’ve pored over every source of historical finance material I can get my hands on, and still have nothing to reference to. IMO, this will look more like the 2008-MBS bet, or the Ackman 2020-COVID “Hell is coming” bet, than TSLA, OSTK, KBIO, or VW. Just a fucking face-ripping, out-of-nowhere, legendary-HOF-ticker bet that will bankrupt some funds and get people fired - and of course, with no community other than WSB’s name next to it in the history books (and if I could pencil in our lovely GME discord hosted by u/BadElf21 and u/RoaringKitty’s YT stream). Let’s begin. Act 1 - The Set Up: Q: Why is GME so heavily shorted in the first place? Why are we betting the long? Aren’t they going bankrupt ala Blockbuster? If not, are we just trading this short term like a HTZ/CCL meme stonk? A: NO. This is a fundamentally solid deep value play at its core. First let’s go back a few years. We must give the shorts due credit in order to understand where we are now. GME has been profitably shorted since 2013 when the market correctly bet on the digitization of video games and spread of mobile gaming. Some data here:
GME sales have plunged from $9.5 billion in fiscal year 2011 to $6.4 billion in fiscal year 2019.
GME Annual EBITDA has dropped from $839 million in fiscal year 2011 (before the last console cycle) to only $111 million in fiscal year 2019.
Net income has fallen off a cliff from $339 million in fiscal year 2011 to a staggering loss of $470 million in fiscal year 2019.
In the two most recent quarters alone, GME lost another $277 million.
The shorts are betting on $0. However, in the last 12 months, GME has shown that their terminal velocity does not lead to bankruptcy. GME has a strong balance sheet. Cash on hand is worth over $12 a share. Net cash is worth over $5 a share and is FCF positive (nixing the bankruptcy thesis). They also paid off $125M in debt last month just to show Moody’s they are healthy due to their incoming console cycle FCF (which may lead to possible bond upgrade, enticing more institutional investors). So give the shorts credit. They had a legitimate case until the last 12 months, when George Sherman (CEO), Reggie Fils-Aime (ex-Nintendo, current GME board member), and others have been conducting a phenomenally well executed turnaround. That explains why we currently have ~70M shares short out of ~65M shares outstanding - but they’re all now caught on the wrong side of the trade. In case the severity of the short interest hasn’t hit you yet, there is a bigger market for shorting GME than the business of GME itself. This is not even taking into account the long holders (Senvest, Ryan Cohen, Burry, Donald Foss, Sherman, Hestia/Permit) which takes ~25M shares out of circulation. So short interest in reality could be around 180%+ of true float. A true head-scratcher. And a worthy opponent. But they’re wrong. Act 2 - Avengers, Assemble: Q: Why am I so sure GME is prime to blow? Isn’t this just another meme stonk hunch driven by WSB and Michael Burry hype? How can a few online gamblers and a few activist investors turn a dying business into a trade of a lifetime? Couldn’t the shorts be right? Also, hasn’t it blown already? A: NO AGAIN. Let me show you the ridiculous Avengers team we have. By Avengers team, I mean all the bullish cases: 1) Ryan Cohen Iron Man of the bunch, some call him the Dog-Man. This guy is a crazy entrepreneur. He took on Bezos with a pet food company (CHWY) and won. Let me repeat - he beat Jeff Amazon without AWS subsidizing his loss leaders. In other words, he built Markk I (CHWY) in a tiny cave with scraps all by himself with his dad, and now that he has billions, he wants to build nanotech Markk 50 (GME). Read up on this guy. He’s as crazy and as smart as they come. He also wrote a scathing letter to GME leadership, but if you read between the lines, he’s not addressing the existing board, who had only been there temporarily. He’s setting this letter up in order to potentially offer a takeover bid (rumor mill - unconfirmed). Either way, GME leadership needs to address this letter in the Q3 earnings call on Dec 8th - which means they need to either post a good quarter, provide good guidance, or add color to existing developments. Otherwise George Sherman (Cpt America)’s ass is out the door and Cohen takes over as the leader of the Avengers through a vote or buyout. Either of which requires shares to be recalled. One more thing to note about RC. There has been no 13D/A filling since his initial purchases. Which means he is STILL IN. He has not sold a single share. 2) GME Leadership and activist investors - Guardians of the Galaxy, Dr. Very Strange Burry, and the old Captain trying to fit in with the youngsters: Dr. Very Strange Burry - AKA Big Short Man. Supreme numbers aspie who might have a screw loose but is unmatched at spotting contrarian trades. *Edit 2: BTW for those asking about his holdings drop. He's trimming to stay under 5%, but still has a large position:
Q1: 3,000,000 shares worth $10,500,000
Q2: 2,750,000 shares worth $11,935,000
Q3: 1,703,400 shares worth $17,375,000
Hestia/Permit/Senvest - Contrarian, activist investors. Cpt George Sherman - Boomer CEO who knows what he’s doing. Reggie Fils-Aime - Beloved ex-Nintendo President. 3) Bond repurchase GME just bought back $125M of debt maturing in 2021. Who cares? Yes - normally this is a nothing burger even for a micro-cap, but if the shorts are betting on $0 - this is clear evidence against that bet. Secondly, rumor mill has it that this debt repurchase plus positive Q3 earnings/guidance will allow Moody’s to upgrade their 2023 debt to A or maybe higher. This is HUGE because it allows institutional investors to long GME without further restrictions. In other words, they may not be allowed to long companies with B- debt. Once this is upgraded, more buyers are allowed to come in. Very underplayed story here. 4) TA - When the stars and crayons align. Here’s an excerpt from our resident astrologist u/JayAreW:
Ignoring the short squeeze element of GME and just looking at chart action, there are two elements that are important to keep track of. The cup and handle pattern and $15.80. While my trading style is 90% technical analysis, there are certain elements which I shy away from – mainly chart patterns. However, it is important to at least recognize the obvious ones because if you see it, chances are others see it too. The main pattern I keep an eye out for are the massive cup and handle patterns. This is an example from Pring figure 1. The buy signal is traditionally a breakout above the handle, and a good estimate for price target is the distance from the base of the cup to the handle, added to the breakout point. A recent example of this is $JMIA (daily - figure 2). Notice not one, but two failures to break the top of the handle and the subsequent parabolic run. Compare $JMIA with $GME and you see almost the same pattern (daily – figure 3). The traditional buy signal would be a breach above the red line (~$15.80). The difference between $JMIA and $GME is that $JMIA was far more condensed; the pattern played out over a period of a few months where $GME’s cup and handle started in late 2019. Playing this pattern exclusively, I would expect a price target of roughly $27, stretched out over a period of weeks/months and not as explosive as it’s African counterpart (assuming a squeeze doesn't happen between now and then). Typically, any chart pattern calls for a retest of the breakout point, so don’t be surprised if $GME retraces to $15.80 and look for a bounce there as confirmation that the breakout is on. The other important element is the $15.80 price. Not only is it the breakout point for the cup and handle pattern, but it coincides to a price point which I believe was a major short-selling entry point (fig 4). Notice the nearly 20% gap down on 33 million of volume. This type of action doesn’t just happen with selling alone and I believe massive short positions were opened on that day. This $15.80 then represents a breaking even point for those shorts if they have not closed their positions (and we have no real reason to believe they have). Breaking even is a huge psychological barrier for people when a trade isn’t going their way and often times represents an exit point for crowded positions. Most of the shorts were already underwater - above $15.80 and that water begins to boil. I believe this position is becoming borderline untenable for existing short positions and is a crowded and disastrous trade. So to recap, $15.80 not only serves as an important chart pattern breakout point, but the proverbial “line in the sand” for existing short positions.
JeffAmazon here again: Note Jay and I don’t agree on a few major points, but are nevertheless both seeing bullish action to come very very soon. 5) Product Mix GameStop is expanding their product mix to include monitors, PC parts, and more. GME is no longer a Disc-Drive only store (which is fine itself), but an all-things-tech e-commerce growth start up. Or you can at least bet that’s the narrative. GIVE ME THAT F-ING CHWY SALES MULTIPLE. 6) Three signs of a bubble: leverage, lack of liquidity, and consensus. This is an inverse bubble - it will rise as quickly as other bubbles drop. KBIO and VW are often quoted as short squeeze examples. Those are wrong comparisons. The only similarity is the fact that shorts were involved. Instead, think of any other market bubble. It’s simply about leverage, lack of liquidity, and consensus. We have all 3 in GME. Everyone thinks GME will go like BlockBuster to $0 and is using leverage to short (by definition and current SI). So instead, think of Burry’s 2008 MBS trade, Ackman’s 2020 COVID trade, PTJ’s Black Monday Trade, or Chanos’ Enron trade. Same thing, different direction. Will go up as fast as the others went down. And oh boy do we lack liquidity. Crowded party, one exit. 7) Phenomenal numbers due to current console cycle. $GME bull Rod Alzmann (Uberkikz on Stocktwits) has great breakdowns on Q4 EPS/order count due to console cycle. He tracks orders by order number among a slew of other information here. Check out his models. In short, we expect over $5 EPS in Q4 base case. Which is bananas. 8) MSFT Partnership gross margin GME is getting free money from Satya Nadella. Conservative estimate $180M, 100% margin for 2 years. 9) January and April option OI OI in option calls for Jan and April are almost 4X that of Decembers. Is GME going to exercise the ITM calls for a squeeze? Why are they so insanely large? Who are these buyers? WTF are they doing? No clue. But something is about to go down. Note put call skew isn’t that low, so no infinity gamma squeeze yet, but it will come as GME obtains meme status. 10) Most importantly, YOU. CNBC and other misled, egoistic mass media companies and institutional investors continue, time and time again, to look down upon the new generation of traders and laugh at WSB. Tell me, which one of them has read all of Moody’s credit reports on GME? Which one of them live streams collaborative GME DD 20+ hours a week for 6+ months straight? Which one of them tracks order flows by the f-ing second based on skimmed CC data? Who scours GameStop to see how leadership is treating their employees and customers at a testimonial level? Do they even know about the bond repurchase? They don’t know jack s-. Act 3 - The Trade What more evidence do you want? Time for action. First, the PT. u/ronoron summed it up well:
A 3 billion market cap (not even 0.5x of their revenues) would already leave GME at $46/share.Going back to their 2013 peak at around 6 billion market cap would leave them at almost $100/share already, not the $56 peak/share. The algos trading still can't appreciate the fact that GME halved its number of outstanding shares a while ago. For comparison. Bestbuy is trading at almost ~0.7x of revenues with lower gross margins. Nordstrom is almost at 0.4x of revenues despite the bigger liability their department stores are having through corona (never mind their uglier balance sheet). GME is still hovering just above 0.2x revenues because stinky shorts overestimated how bad corona would be for GME (e.g. delayed console cycle, digital consoles becoming widely popular).”
PT can easily be over $100. The JeffAmazon target is $420 which gives them about ~$25B market cap at a P/S ratio of 5, maybe 4 with console cycle revenue. That wouldn’t even be considered an euphoric price with today’s growth stocks. For comparison, NVDA is 22, TSLA is 20, and CHWY is 5. Timing: This all hinges on Dec 8 earnings. If GME misses (it historically has), Cohen will use this opportunity to attack leadership and take over as CEO. Therefore, GME leadership needs to provide a great earnings report or else Sherman will lose his job. Here’s my responsible trade (do whatever you want): All in calls and shares now. If IV and $GME is sky-high before earnings, sell half to secure profit. If GME misses and tanks, bet your bottom dollar a takeover bid will be announced shortly. In all honesty, I'm going to probably hold everything through earnings WSB style. My positions: 1/15/21 $30Cs, shares (I would buy April $30Cs too, but I'm all tapped out of cash). Shorts and longs both have their cases. All the cards are on the table. Which side are you on? If I missed anything, comment and I will update above. I’m aiming to make this the final stop for all high-level GME DD. *Edit 1: Educate yourself right now on IV crush (in short, we expect a lot of vol now, so option prices are high. After earnings, expected vol normally decreases, so your option prices will normally drop). GME is the king of IV crush after earnings. If you're playing FDs, prepare to get destroyed like always. Safer bets are LEAPs or FDs after earnings. *Edit 2: All these beat earnings recently: SNE, MSFT, BBY, BBBY, NTDOY, ATVI, TTWO, JWN, M, KSS
Analyze this quote in context to Dostoyevsky's "The Gambler"
This quote is from the 2014 film "The Gambler" a remake of the 1974 James Caan film loosely based on Dostoyevsky's novel. This quote really stuck with me, can someone explain the philosophical value of this? What themes would it refer to? "There was a student... just the other day... who said that my problem, if one's nature is a problem, rather than just problematic, is that I see things in terms of victory or death, and not just victory but total victory. And it's true: I always have. It's either victory, or don't bother. The only thing worth doing is the impossible. Everything else is gray. You're born... as a man... with the nerves of a soldier, the apprehension of an angel, to lift a phrase, but there is no use for it. Here? Where's the use for it? You're set up to be a philosopher or a king or Shakespeare, and this is all they give you? This? Twenty- odd years of school which is all instruction in how to be ordinary... or they'll fucking kill you, they fucking will, and then it's a career, which is not the same thing as existence... I want unlimited things. I want everything. A real love. A real house. A real thing to do... every day. I'd rather die if I don't get it. Did I just say that out loud?"
Illegal Tactics and DTCC/Prime Broker Complicity In Naked Shorting & Retail Shutdown of GME (DTCC/Prime Brokers decision makers need to be questioned at the 2/18 GameStop Congress hearing)
TLDR: GameStop’s Congress hearing is on Feb 18th, they need to investigate the Prime Brokers and DTCC for their complicity in enabling naked shorting within GME and by extension, potential collusion to shut down trading on Jan 28th, the day the short squeeze was going to kick off. (stick to the end for an analysis of some illegal tactics short side hedge funds have been using) Thesis: On the day the retail market for GME shut down on 1/28 (the day the short squeeze would’ve happened had there been no market intervention), DTCC (clearing house monopoly) shut down retail buying in order to protect itself and Prime Brokers (which privately own the DTCC) from being exposed to the consequences of being party to illegal activity. I believe Prime Brokers and DTCC need to be called to the GameStop hearing on February 18th to be questioned for their complicity in enabling illegal naked shorting of the GME stock, as well as potential collusion to shut out retail buyers on 1/28. In my previous post (which I recommend reading for some context) I explored the subject of rampant illegal naked shorting in GME, and how Prime Brokers (consisting of banks like Goldman, Morgan, etc) and DTCC would be complicit in the naked shorting. This in turn raises the thought experiment that they would be incentivized to do anything possible to prevent the short squeeze from happening on 1/28 because had the short squeeze happened, the shorts would go bankrupt and their Prime Brokers who lent them their naked shorted shares would need to cover the shares. This would not only represent a humongous capital expense for Prime Brokers, the culpability of Prime Brokers (and that of the DTCC) in this situation would also have likely been exposed as well. A quick primer on what a Prime Broker is: Prime Brokers are essentially the service side of the short- selling business. They lend out securities and cash, you can think of them as the “house” in a casino: They provide a gambler with markers to play and to manage his winnings. According to Matt Taibi, “Under the original concept, if a hedge fund that wanted to short a stock they would first need to “locate” the stock with his Prime Broker but as time passed, Prime Brokers increasingly allowed their hedge-fund customers to use automated systems and “locate” the stock themselves, and what this does is enable short-sellers to sell stock without delivering and thereby perform naked shorts with counterfeit shares. (source: https://web.archive.org/web/20210213125246/https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/wall-streets-naked-swindle-194908/). (I highly recommend you read Matt Taibi’s article on naked shorting and how it was used to take down Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. There are so many parallels with GME it’s hard to miss. It’s amazing to consider that 12 years after this article was published and brought to public awareness, the problem of naked shorting still exists as a systemic issue.) Prime Brokers have a long history of being associated with naked shorting. To highlight a few examples, Prime Brokers like Merill Lynch and Goldman have long been implicated for naked shorting Overstock.com (https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/accidentally-released-and-incredibly-embarrassing-documents-show-how-goldman-et-al-engaged-in-naked-short-selling-244035/, https://www.forbes.com/2007/02/02/naked-short-suit-overstock-biz-cx_lm_0202naked.html?sh=271400d1763f). Another example is when Goldman’s Prime Brokerage was implicated by the SEC in 2016 and got away with a small fine of 16 million (Source: https://www.sec.gov/news/pressrelease/2016-9.html). An example that very recently came in the news is a story where CIBC, BOA, UBS and TD Bank Prime Brokerages are accused of facilitating naked short selling and using counterfeit stock to attack and bring the stock price of a company from $34.77 to $1.83 (Source: https://www.securitiesfinancetimes.com/securitieslendingnews/industryarticle.php?article_id=224548). The DTCC also has a very long history of being associated with naked shorting. The Wall Street Journal noted that 1% of the DTCC’s volume end in failure to deliver which “have put DTCC in the middle of a long-running fight over whether unscrupulous investors are driving down hundreds of small companies' share prices… DTCC has turned a blind eye to the naked-shorting problem. ” (Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118359867562957720). The DTCC has also had numerous complaints submitted to the SEC for enabling naked shorting (source: https://www.sec.gov/rules/proposed/s72303/decosta122203.htm) and have been sued tens or hundreds of times for assisting naked shorts (source: https://smithonstocks.com/part-3-in-series-on-illegal-naked-shortings-role-in-stock-manipulation-prime-brokers-and-the-dtcc-have-a-troubling-monopoly-on-clearing-and-settling-stock-trades/ and http://counterfeitingstock.com/CS2.0/CounterfeitingStock.html and https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118359867562957720) On 1/28 Robinhood received a letter from the DTCC at 4 am requiring them to halt trading or come up with 3 billion dollars, which Robinhood did not have, and therefore with one swoop of the pen the DTCC shut down buy side momentum but strangely allowed selling. Retail investors were shut out of the market and as any student of microeconomics would know, by shutting buy but only allowing sell, the price is bound to fall. Meanwhile while hedge funds were able to keep trading not only in the market but also crosstrade in the dark pools (“private” stock markets that retail is shut out of, more on this later), and use this crucial lifeline given to them by the DTCC to prevent the squeeze from happening that day. With retail abruptly being shut out from buy (even cash accounts were shut out, which didn’t make sense) and only allowed to sell, almost everyone could smell manipulation was afoot (which triggered the Congress hearing) and the most of the blame was pointed at Robinhood. Personally and in hindsight, I believe Robinhood was just a willing scapegoat. When we think about who had the most to lose if a short squeeze occurred, I’ll narrow it down to three entities, Shorts and their stakeholders (ie Citadel), Prime Brokers and the DTCC. It’s important to remember that the actual impetus that triggered the shutdown of the market for retail investors came from the DTCC. Working backwards, if you consider that GME was rampantly naked shorted and DTCC and Prime Brokers would have to be complicit in it, I believe the DTCC, Primer Brokers and possibly Citadel (who provides 40% of Robinhood’s revenue) brazenly manipulated the market on 1/28 by shutting down purchasing for retail buyers to prevent the squeeze from being squoze on that day as doing so would be catastrophic for all aforementioned parties involved. I believe that on the upcoming Gamestop Congress hearings the Financial Services Committee needs to call on decision makers of DTCC and Prime Brokers explore their role and complicity in the shut out of retail buyers that day as well as being enablers of naked shorting in GME. An interesting thought experiment: On 1/28 when the price was 450+ and shorts were likely under 100, if we assume prime brokers allowed naked shorting in GME, then when the squeeze was about to happen (or happening), if Prime Brokers had margin had called the shorts, they would presumably also also gone down because shorts would not be able to pay in that event and the brokers would be holding the bag. By that logic, they have every incentive in this case to NOT to margin call and instead the most logical option would probably would have been to make a backroom deal, which is what I personally think most likely happened. If you’ve read up to this point, you might be thinking what can I do about this? I am aware that there a lot of cynicism that we can’t do anything, that there will be no justice for retail investors who were harmed this situation, and that institutions and people in power will prevent anything from being done. I feel this sometimes too, but remember: A single voice can be drowned out, but if we all speak together then we will make our voice heard. Ape Strong Together. With the hearing coming up on February 18th, I highly recommend you email and tweet the representatives involved in the hearing, as well as your own district representatives, and urge them to read into the factors presented in this post and call the DTCC and Prime Brokers to the hearingl. They need to be questioned on why GME has so many counterfeit shares, failed to deliver, their complicity in naked shorting, and investigated for their role in the retail shut down of 1/28. Below are 4 members of congress I recommend both tweeting and emailing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez https://twitter.com/AOC, email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) Al Green https://twitter.com/repalgreen, email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) Maxine Waters https://twitter.com/maxinewaters, email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) Nancy Pelosi Email: https://twitter.com/SpeakerPelosi email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]). And you can find other members of Financial Services Committee here to reach out to: https://financialservices.house.gov/about/committee-membership.htm What follows should probably be a separate post, but I will take the opportunity to summarize some of the illegal tactics that shorts have been identified to be using in their war with retail investors. Note that this may not be an exhaustive list and there may be newer tactics deployed in the future. Retail investors might not have the same tricks, resources and willingness to break the law for profit as hedgies do, but my hope and belief is that if we pool our knowledge and analysis, we will figure out their game and effectively adapt. Feel free to forward the list below to any representatives and lawmakers if you concur that these tactics were used: Rampant Naked Shorting - With the extremely high number of Fail to Delivers (FTID) , short interest being as high as 226% recently, and institutions alone holding a staggering 177% of the total float (likely due in large part to counterfeit shares), signs strongly point to GME being rampant with naked shorts and counterfeit shares. I believe the original goal of shorts was to drive GME to bankruptcy with these naked shorts, using the laddering of naked shorts (aka short ladder attack), executed with the help of counterfeit stock which is a classic and reliable method of driving down the stock price. I believe the GME stock has seen relentlessly aggressive short attacks, especially on the week of Monday February 1st, which drove the stock price down and triggered panic selling. Ladder Attacks with the help of Dark Pools - Another identified method of ladder attacks was identified to come from crosstrading with darkpools (the stock market has its own private stock exchange where institutions can trade…). Essentially darkpools are private stock markets retail investors do not have access to, where short side funds can purchase securities “off market” and then sell “on-market”, with the effect of creating a lot more downward pressure on the market without the upward pressure from buying. Illegally masking shorts with synthetic longs. Another tactic shorts are suspected of using in GME is the use of illegally using options to evade short positions in violation of Reg SHO which SEC describes in this risk alert and which I elaborate in this post. Essentially it’s the use of using options to create synthetic longs to illegally and artificially cover and prolong short positions and at same time obscuring the true short interest %. If you consider that it would be far more profitable for shorts to not cover at high prices but instead ladder attack the price and wait for retail investors to lose interest and close their shorts at as low of a price as possible, then you can see why this strategy would be very effective. Using way out-of-money call options to obscure true short interest. You may have heard about the 43 million worth of 800 dollar calls purchased when the price was 100 and found it odd. Later it was identified as a tactic to cheaply purchase synthetic call options (since at 800 its way out of money) to obscure their short positions (with the added benefit of hedging at 800 if a squeeze does happen) One thing I want to note, particularly to legislators at the GameStop hearing: Retail investors were not incited to pump GME. Retail investors spotted a unique Short Squeeze opportunity created by the greed of short side hedge funds, whereby GameStop was being abusively naked shorted with the goal of bringing it to bankruptcy, and hedge funds were so greedy about it that they shorted the company with a short interest of 226% of float, meaning A LOT of counterfeit shares were being used to short the company. Retail investors saw this as an opportunity to short squeeze the hedge fund shorters, which is a legal and legitimate investment strategy. The short squeeze would have happened had everyone played fair, but instead, financial institutions who were culpable to the naked shorting intervened and shut down retail buying, hurting the retail investors and successfully manipulating the market. The investment itself was in my opinion a sound decision based on the short squeeze, but in hindsight retail investors did not seriously consider the risk of the market would be blatantly and publicly manipulated and that the market would be rigged against them. If this post was useful (and I hope it was! Gave up my Friday night to write this for you Apes), please upvote for visibility and share it far and wide. The GameStop hearings could be a first step and hope towards legislative change, and it’s extremely important that the right story is told at those hearings (and by the right story I mean the real truth of what happened.) I hope the truly culpable parties are investigated and brought to justice. Again, I know many of us feel cynical that anything meaning will be done towards finding justice against the lawbreakers in this case, but if you feel even an ounce of injustice or empathy at how retail investors were unfairly harmed in the course of investing in GME, I strongly urge you to contact a legislator associated with the GameStop hearings and bring this to their attention so they can review this case with more complete information. In addition I recommend you to contact the SEC and any journalist you know or via journalist tip lines. It’s not going to be easy but the more awareness we raise the higher the likelihood our voices will be heard and positive change will be made. As we navigate the rocky waters ahead, I’ll gift you with a favorite quote of mine: The only difference between a nightmare and a dream is how big your balls are. 🚀🚀🚀 Disclaimer: I am not an investment advisor, I just like the stock. Ps. If you’ve read to the end, I’ll leave you with a few more thoughts and reminders: - If I were to distill life into one thing, it would be to never lose hope. - Remember that if you’ve lost money in any way shape or form, don’t be depressed, money can always be made back and the important thing is to maintain a good attitude. - Only invest what you can afford to lose. - Perhaps the most important factor in good investing is patience. If you’d like to read more about counterfeiting stocks this is a good place to start http://counterfeitingstock.com/CS2.0/CounterfeitingStock.html
50 Quotes about Gambling. There is nothing wrong with gambling, especially when you are spending your hard-earned money on something that gives you fun. However, if it causes you to lose more than what you are earning and affects every aspect of your life, then it is a sign that you have a gambling addiction. Jack London. “. I have a notion that gamblers are as happy as most people, being always excited; women, wine, fame, the table, even ambition, sate now & then, but every turn of the card & cast of the dice keeps the gambler alive— besides one can game ten times longer than one can do anything else. Lord Byron. The Gambler Quotes Showing 1-30 of 73. “People really do like seeing their best friends humiliated; a large part of the friendship is based on humiliation; and that is an old truth,well known to all intelligent people.”. ― Fyodor M. Dostoevsky, The Gambler. tags: friendship. The subject of gambling is one that generates a lot of opinions, and some great quotes too. On this page we have put together a collection of some of the best gambling related quotes. We also explain a little background behind each of the quotes chosen. March is a month without mercy for rabid basketball fans. There is no such thing as a 'gentleman gambler' when the Big Dance rolls around. All sheep will be fleeced, all fools will be punished severely... There are no Rules when the deal goes down in the final weeks of March. Even your good friends will turn into monsters. Hunter S. Thompson Popular quotes “It was no easy task to tame the barbarians' language. One quick three-week-old autumn, the brothers were sitting in their cell, trying to write out the letters that men would later call Cyrillic. They were not getting anywhere. Go wild with the winnings you get from gambling and spend it how you please, but don’t put the money for your food and rent into a bet. The best throw of the dice is to throw them away. – Italian Proverb, 1790 (first recorded in writing). Popular amongst those who don’t like gambling or risk-taking. “The better the gambler, the worse the man.” – Publius Syrus “The guy who invented poker was bright, but the guy who invented the chip was a genius.” – Julius Weintraub. “Last year people won more than one billion dollars playing poker. And casinos made twenty-seven billion just by being around those people.” –Samantha Bee Here are the best quotes from “The Gambler,” a movie that tells the story of one man who gets into trouble while gambling. The crime drama is an adaptation of the 1974 film of the same title and was directed by Rupert Wyatt using a screenplay by William Monahan. “The Gambler” opened in theaters on December 25, 2014. Best proverbs and quotes about gambling, fortune, luck, money and loss - A gambler never makes the same mistake twice. It's usually three or more times.
I always thought orc with title "Gambler" is the main guy for these odds/lucks quotes but it turns out the title "Lucky" fit these quotes even more! ===== Yo guys! The last time I played Middle ... I love how he shouts ''Rangeeaaar'' xD About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features Press Copyright Contact us Creators ... Subscribe to TRAILERS: http://bit.ly/sxaw6h Subscribe to COMING SOON: http://bit.ly/H2vZUn Like us on FACEBOOK: http://goo.gl/dHs73 Follow us on TWITTER: htt... Titanic Thompson led a wild life, always chasing the next big score, including cheating the infamous mobster Al Capone. He was said to be the model for the c... About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features Press Copyright Contact us Creators ...
