With 175MM+ pageviews yesterday alone, I'm sure they're ecstatic about WSB's growth.
This chapter in WSB has brought forth substantially better communication with the admins than we'd ever had in the past, including a direct line to Alexis.
Edit:
Thank you all for the outpour of support!
Our main challenges thus far have been technical (hitting API limits, automoderator backlog, etc.) however, those issues have now been resolved and our bots are running better than ever before.
We largely owe our success in handling this to the Reddit engineering team who has routinely stepped up and fixed things. As chaotic as the scene has been for us moderators, I'm sure they have been under much more pressure. If you know a reddit engineer, please give them your thanks as they have done a phenomenal job.
For those curious, the surge in activity broke a number of things. Here are just a few:
> modmail surpassing 80,000+ messages resulting in modmail going down
What SEC rule is WSB violating? I've seen no evidence yet that there is any sort of pump and dump collusion, the speculative bubble / stick-it-to-the-market-manipulators deal on WallStreetBets seems to be fairly organically driven as many memes are. There's no rules that I can think of against "tulip mania" type speculative bubbles. If there were, a huge amount of people would have been in serious trouble for the 2008 real estate bubble / crash.
To be honest, I think the recent restrictions on trading specific stocks (on Robinhood etc.) is absolutely dumb. Apparently, the sort of crappy market manipulation that led to the 2008 Volkswagen "short squeeze" or the 2010 "flash crash" is absolutely fine because it was driven by traders. But an amateur mob performing the short squeeze must be stopped at all cost? What bullshit. Either the "casino" should be open to all, or rules that apply to the "amateur mob" should apply to the HFT and derivatives market as well.
Market manipulation. Loosely, market manipulation happens when you artificially influence the price of a stock, resulting in a personal gain. Buying stock with the intention of causing a short squeeze can be interpreted to fit that definition. I believe that WSB is creating artificial demand to try to "screw over" certain institutional investors. I am not a lawyer; this is not a legal interpretation.
> Apparently, the sort of crappy market manipulation that led to the 2008 Volkswagen "short squeeze" or the 2010 "flash crash" is absolutely fine because it was driven by traders.
How were they "absolutely fine?" You do know that regulators attempted to prosecute the traders/executives responsible for the 2008 VW short squeeze [1], and successfully prosecuted a trader for the 2010 flash crash [2]? For the VW short squeeze, regulators were not able to find evidence that the traders involved intended to cause a short squeeze or engaged in any artificial demand; they actually demanded the stock because they sought to take over VW. This is also evidenced by the fact the Porsche sold stock on the open market once they released that a squeeze was happening [3].
> Market manipulation. Loosely, market manipulation happens when you artificially influence the price of a stock, resulting in a personal gain. Buying stock with the intention of causing a short squeeze can be interpreted to fit that definition. I believe that WSB is creating artificial demand to try to "screw over" certain institutional investors. I am not a lawyer; this is not a legal interpretation.
Bill Ackman went on CNBC last year in near tears saying the end was coming, helping stocks continue their nose dive...all the while he was buying tons and tons of stocks which he turned into billions. How is that allowed but people on a message board sharing positions and high number of short floats isn't? There is literally, and has been for a long time, a website that tells you the short interest in a stock. It's sole purpose is to help people find short squeezes. That's why you have stats like "days to cover."
> ...all the while he was buying tons and tons of stocks which he turned into billions
It's called activist investing. His fund did not buy stocks, but bought Credit Default Swaps to the tune of $27 million USD. In the event that the markets dropped, they were awarded massive gains if they exit position. They gained $1.3 billion.
Prior to exiting the position which was publicly released, he went on media outlets and promoted the idea of shutting down the economy. This is what activist investors do. They actively spread rumors that will help their positions.
That is -not- what an activist investor is. An activist investor is someone that buys a large enough portion of a company in order to have a say in board operations, etc (even liquidation.) You can go on air and talk up your company, ever CEO, etc does that. That is expected. What he did was talk down positions he was going into. That is not activism.
I'd be really interested in learning more about the Olympic level mental gymnastics one has to go through to write this off as O.K. but then turn around and say that a bunch of random people on an open public forum saying to buy an over-shorted stock is market manipulation. They don't even have the purchasing power to make a difference here.
I remember, a few years back, that Musk made news because he shut down someone asking questions in a public earnings report. The press was giving him a lot of flack about it. Then I kept reading, and found out the person who was trying to ask those questions represented a firm(s) that had large short positions on the stock, and was trying to cause the stock to dip. Musk knew what was going on, and headed it off. Seemed like he made a good call, but then the press made THAT the story instead.
> There is literally, and has been for a long time, a website that tells you the short interest in a stock. It's sole purpose is to help people find short squeezes. That's why you have stats like "days to cover."
Again, I am not a lawyer, I am not your lawyer, and this is not a legal interpretation or legal advice; just my personal opinion.
Motivation and intent are the main factors in determining manipulation. So there are two cases:
1. A trader buys stock, seeking to profit, because they believe that a short squeeze may be incoming soon.
2. A trader buys stock, seeking to profit, because they intend to drive the stock price up, thereby causing a short squeeze.
(1) is legal (in my understanding; see the disclaimers above). (2) is not. They differ in their intents. The first one is "legitimate" demand, the second is "artificial."
Now, it's difficult to prove intent in court. And clearly, many people in WSB legitimately are buying the stock because of (1). But there are some who are doing (2). They have plausible deniability, though, and that's why it's unlikely that anyone in WSB will be successfully prosecuted without more concrete evidence.
> Bill Ackman went on CNBC last year in near tears saying the end was coming, helping stocks continue their nose dive.... How is that allowed?
It shouldn't be allowed without proper disclosure on their actual positions. The SEC has prosecuted people in the past for making public statements while taking the other direction without proper disclosure.
I believe that this should be investigated by the SEC, but it likely may not since, at the direction of the Trump administration, the SEC has instead focused their efforts on other financial crimes.
> The SEC has prosecuted people in the past for making public statements while taking the other direction without proper disclosure.
There a difference between "This stock is going down. (I buy long because I know something I'm not saying)" and "This stock is going down. (I buy short because I believe what I say)"
This is essentially Reddit saying "This stock is going up, so buy options to exacerbate that and to profit." No misrepresentation.
If the SEC doesn't like this, they should fix the underlying market structure that makes this action possible. Effectively: what allows the traders to create leverage by abusing / forcing brokers to take specific actions.
Or just give up and accept that by digitizing markets we're past the rubicon to smart trading and predatory pack algorithms being successful.
First, I am not arguing that WSB is engaging in fraud or misrepresentation, as is alleged with Ackman. That is entirely different from the activity I am alleging is being done on WSB (by a subset of posters).
> This is essentially Reddit saying "This stock is going up, so buy options to exacerbate that and to profit." No misrepresentation.
I see threads where WSB is saying "This stock is going up, and if we make it go up more, hedge funds & market makers will have to buy more stock to cover their short positions, and therefore it will go up even further [and we will make more money]." That's the manipulative part — creating artificial prices to induce even more demand.
I think it's the "manipulative" that's debatable here, because the manipulation is effectively being done by a second party.
Is it manipulation if you're so predictable that an action by me causes you to always act a certain way? And I profit when you take that action?
If hedge funds refused to cover their shorts (I'm probably using the wrong terminology) and left them open, this wouldn't be an issue, no? Or, conversely, if market makers refused to sell options on overly volatile stocks / stocks being manipulated?
The rationale is that markets are better for participants when their prices are accurate and reflect true supply and demand. Price manipulation subverts that, so the SEC disallows it (except in some cases where manipulation is explicitly allowed for historical reasons).
> refused to cover their shorts (I'm probably using the wrong terminology) and left them open, this wouldn't be an issue, no?
This is imprecise; hedge funds might cover short positions to hedge further losses, or because their prime broker might require them to maintain a certain margin (to reduce counterparty risk). I have no experience in institutional investing, so that's a guess.
> Or, conversely, if market makers refused to sell options on overly volatile stocks / stocks being manipulated?
Market makers will increase a premium for options on "overly volatile stocks." If the risk is too high, then they may stop selling the options altogether. But the problem is — it's difficult to predict which next stock WSB might start manipulating. That's another issue. If regulatory agencies don't step in and prevent this type of manipulation, the premiums on all retail-adjacent options will be higher because of the increased risk and fear that a capricious WSB crowd might turn on a MM. That's bad for people who use options "correctly" — not for gambling, but as a way to hedge and reduce risk.
I personally believed that stocks would continue at depressed valuations for the duration of the pandemic, yet bought during the crash because I knew there would be a recovery. I don’t think those actions are contradictory. (And of course I wound up being surprised how quickly prices recovered.)
You weren't a huge fund manager on TV talking down the market in real time while having your firm buy. A lot of people vested around last March, that's completely different than trying to scare people out of positions on national TV so that you can get into the position at a lower price.
This is not artificially influencing the stock price. Buying a stock believing it will increase in value is basically the point of the stock market. Believing it will increase in value because it's been over-shorted is a legitimate reason to ascribe value to it.
> The US Securities Exchange Act defines market manipulation as "transactions which create an artificial price or maintain an artificial price for a tradable security".
It is my opinion that this demand is not artificial, it is genuine, although caused by factors other than the inherent value of the stock itself.
If this is considered to be 'creating an artificial price', I don't see how a position where 140% of the shares of a company are shorted could not be, meaning significantly wider implications than just a single subreddit.
> Every purchase, is a market manipulation by the definition.
Well, I don't think this would hold up in court. Both the SEC and courts have made a distinction in the past between "real demand" (i.e. demand motivated because you think the stock is undervalued) and "artificial demand" (i.e. demand that is not based on any underlying analysis, but instead motivated because you intend to trigger other market mechanisms, including coverings of short positions). Like most legal definitions, the actual definition is hazy, and courts may have established legal tests. Read Matt Levine for a nuanced analysis [1].
And every time, an effort to judge whose demand is more real that other ends up with absurd, scandalous legal rulings.
They should not be.
These guys have full understanding how laughable it the attempt to judge somebody by pretending the judge/bureaucrat can peer into somebody's mind, and yet they do it.
> pretending the judge/bureaucrat can peer into somebody's mind
But historical cases don't peer into people's minds. They look at evidence, such as texts in chat rooms that show clear intent to manipulate. See the Libor scandal chats [1], where one trader wrote "its just amazing how libor fixing can make you that much money" and "its a cartel now in london."
I think it's unlikely that the SEC will be able to successfully prosecute WSB traders, though, due to lack of evidence. It's also probably not even worth their time.
Since I am not a lawyer and therefore unfamiliar with the potential liabilities I might incur by not including that disclaimer, I would rather cover my ass.
There are no repurcussions for not having that antiquated disclaimer. Which wouldn't hold up even if there was some magic that allowed a case to be brought
Wall Street asked for exactly these sorts of deregulations. It's absolutely hypocritical for them to ask for exceptions to be made now and those half-assed versions of older regulations brought back but for only some traders.
IMO the same is true with mask mandates. Businesses probably fear lawsuits from employees and customers who might get sick, and blame them for not doing enough. Sometimes a business does something that it claims is in the public interest but in reality is to protect them; i.e. Green Washing.
Yep. In Virginia a church sued and forced the mandate to put the misdemeanor on the individual rather than the church. I wish they would do this for businesses as well.
The hedge funds went to CNBC and told them they settled their short positions at $90. This news rippled through the entire trading community, exactly the same as WSB information ripples through the entire trading community. There is zero difference.
Most likely this will be like accessibility to poker online and in casinos which don't profit off the game directly interestingly in the 2000s. A lot of people got involved. A few made a lot of money and the rest went to do other things after a while.
Would be interesting if WSB was allowed to invest in private startups as easily as they can invest in meme stocks.
Robinhood doesn't like us? We'll start out own.
Reddit doesn't like us? Let's just kickstart and crowd-source another.
This idea that the common man needs to be protected from himself is paternalistic and condescending. Private equity is the means of collective action and the rich people don't want us to organize without their blessings.
> Reddit doesn't like us? Let's just kickstart and crowd-source another.
There's Ruqqus which is already a working alternative to reddit. However, what I found going there is that there are a lot of anti-left memes being shared. Some amount of toxicity. I'm all for freedom of speech, but I wish the platform was a bit less political, a more neutral alternative to reddit... but hey, if enough people leave reddit, maybe it will become just that.
> what I found going there is that there are a lot of anti-left memes being shared
This is probably because reddit is quite clearly a left-leaning platform. Due to the lack of healthy balance, the refugees from reddit are mostly people who feel their views and voices are being silenced by aggressive moderation.
In my opinion this state of affairs is only reddit's fault.
Which is more or less how most big investment (hedge) and prop trading firms use it anyway. The key difference here as the same is it always is: which group has the ear of those with power.
Then payment processors ban you. Then you start your own visa. Let's start our own visa. Banks ban you. Let's start our own bank. Your hosting service bans you. Host your own. Your ISP bans you. Start your own ISP. Other ISPs don't peer with you. Start your own internet. Then the feds shut down your bank.
There is absolutely nothing stopping the members of WSB from pooling their money to start an angel fund, VC fund, or any other form of private equity. You don’t need special Wall Street credentials to do that, just some money and a lawyer.
That’s a pretty long-term bet, though, and I don’t think WSB is usually into those.
> This idea that the common man needs to be protected from himself is paternalistic
Interesting word choice. Conservative wording of "common man", but liberal wording of "paternalistic". I don't mind the former but I do wonder how a father would be more inclined to protect a child from itself than a mother; if anything, I would find maternalistic a more fitting descriptor.
How do we know what 'the public' is cheering? Has there been any reputable sources of this?
On one hand, the rise of meme stocks is shining light that one of the central conceits of capitalism is wrong (i.e. that the stock market isn't a good arbiter of the value of companies).
But as a member of the public, I'm concerned about what happens when the meme stocks come crashing back to earth. When that happens institutional investors will overreact, doom and gloom will reign, and CEOs of public companies will use that to lay off people and cut worker benefits.
The common person always loses when bubbles burst.
"The common person always loses when bubbles burst."
That is a tautology, because you define the "common person" as the person who loses.
I'm sure there were people who made good money in the 2008 housing bubble. Didn't they all live like kings for a while, because they could borrow arbitrary sums against their houses?
Similarly, some people may make good money on that GameStop thing now.
The "common people" who didn't participate in this will probably never even notice. At most they'll notice that their favorite shopping mall is closing, but that is part of a larger trend. And they can now shop on Amazon instead, so their quality of life probably remains the same or gets improved.
Actually, I never defined the common person. Because I felt it's pretty obvious.
The common person is the majority of Americans who live paycheck-to-paycheck and don't invest in the market.
Those who don't participate will be negatively impacted if this causes another recession, which is likely as investors get spooked by another bubble burst. Which means standard of living, job benefits, and salaries will continue to stagnate.
This also ignores the fact that we've moved from guaranteed pensions to 401ks, which are heavily dependent on hedge funds. If hedge funds lose their shirts, they'll get a bailout from the government because we didn't learn our lesson about too big to fail last time. Which will mean government austerity in other areas, typically starting in social welfare programs.
If there was no meme-stockery happening, Gamestop would have gone bust and everyone that works there would have been laid off. That's what the whole short strategy was intended to do, bleed them dry just like Toys R Us.
In a crazy way this is probably saving a lot more jobs than it's jeopardizing.
Why would GameStop have gone bust? Even if GameStop stock would trade at zero, the company still exists until it runs out of money and declares bankruptcy, which is independent of its stock price.
In this case, it's not really saving any jobs, since GameStop employees (excluding higher ranked employees) probably don't have any part of their compensation that's stock based.
Toys R Us was a leveraged buyout, which is definitely a much more ethically dubious strategy, and that can cause jobs to be lost. This won't cause any jobs at GameStop to be lost, although there probably will be some unhappy traders and people left holding bags of GameStop stock.
Out of curiosity, has that actually happened to a public stock? I'd assume the minority shareholders would have standing for a lawsuit if someone were to do a hostile takeover of a stock and liquidate the assets of the company.
Afaik it used to be popular in the 70s and 80s. It’s sometimes called “Corporate Raid” [0]. In the movie Wall Street, Gordon Gecko wants to buy the airline to sell it for parts.
You're right, what I meant is that the share price doesn't affect the finances of the company (eg. a company that sells widgets makes the same amount of money whether their stock is worth $1 or $100000). As you point out, the share price should in theory reflect the value of the company (bankrupt company -> share price of $0), but a fluctuating stock price doesn't really change the value of the company itself (excluding shares that it owns, obviously).
> one of the central conceits of capitalism is wrong (i.e. that the stock market isn't a good arbiter of the value of companies)
The "central conceit" is not that the market is a "good arbiter" of the value of a company. Just that it's the least bad one.
The central conceit of every alternative to capitalism is that there's such a thing as a singular, coherent definition of "the value of a company" and that it's consistently, accurately measurable by some central authority.
Just looking at this from a technical perspective, it'll be pretty exciting if all this ends up leading to an explosion in the take up of self-hosted social media platforms.
The question is, will the creators of these communities trust cloud providers where the platforms are hosted to not de-platform them, or will we end up with P2P, distributed networks instead?
Until China, Japan and Russia unite to provide disenfranchised Americans with a free internet that is off-limits from the grabbing hands of the US elites.
And it will thrive and will be a better place to make more money that SV for 5-10 years, until it gets censored like any public space.
Dogecoin subreddit may get banned too. Saw elsewhere that they're trying to push it to $1 (it's at $0.01 and the push has raised it 72%). Half tempted to drop $1k in it, in a Just-In-Case thing. Supposedly the total volume of Dogecoin is only 128k coins, though that sounds low. If it is that low it explains why the coin is so volatile. My main cryptocurrency positions are Bitcoin and Cardano.
It's definitely not 128k coins. When it was first created it was notable for having such a huge supply of coins that people could have silly fun with it and not care about the 'value' of it. That hasn't remained true, but it was the initial idea behind it, a joke coin people could give tons of coins to other people to for pennies.
Too many whales in dogecoin that want to keep a lid on it. It's meant to be used for charity and community building. Sometimes you can play the run and use derivatives to short it on the way down. Easier plays than this though.
I think its fine that the SEC attempts to clean up stock manipulation schemes. The reason anyone cares is that you can lose all your money playing around in the market, and the SEC is responsible for trying to keep people from being taken advantage of, and in cases like this swept up in manias.
You can lose all your money in the market playing around in the market. If I could sign some sort of statement saying I know what I'm doing, I won't invest more than I'm willing to lose, and while I may make extremely risky bets, I'm willing to forego your "protection" in favor of being able to lose all of my money, I would.
And I did, because I'm a registered investor. But this isn't available to most people, only the top 10%.
I agree with your skepticism of registered investor requirements, but that's not really a related issue. Regulators and platforms intervene in this way against even the most sophisticated investors; the possibility of a trading freeze when the market exhibits crazy volatility is well-known.
I can buy GameStop. My friend can't. Trading freeze for everyone, sure. Trading freeze for some people, but not for other people? That's fucking bullshit.
There are other ways of applying pressure. AWS hosting Wikileaks was not illegal but they were still pressured to stop hosting if they wanted lucrative hosting contracts with the federal government.
Now I doubt Reddit has huge contracts with the government, but I’m sure the government could find something to harass them with if it wanted to. Drive long enough and a cop will eventually find a reason to pull you over.
Definitely. It wouldn’t at all surprise me to find out reddit was being pressured in some way but I think that pressure is far more likely to come from investment folks than regulators. And I think elite investor class pressure would be far more threatening & potentially costly to reddit than anything the SEC might be able to dig up.
I'm not so sure. This subreddit is immensely popular right now, when they get banned the receiving backslash might be Reddits Digg-moment. And they are probably aware of this.
It would be interesting to know what the difference is between CNBC talking heads VS a community of "traders"?
Jimmy Cramer pumping stocks every evening to his boomer audience which ultimately has some effects (not sure how much though) on stock prices seems fine but a group of people discussing stocks seems like a threat...
Exactly, this is the point that I am trying to figure out. Moderators control the conversation and that's it. So what is the difference between CNBC talking heads pumping up a stock VS subredditors who are, as you might imagine, everyday people just having some financial fun and sharing ideas. One can get paid off whilst the other cannot I imagine is the difference.
Given the track record Reddit has of keeling over to public pressure, there is no way they are going to stand up to the SEC.