I don't think that Robinhood had any other choice here. Their partner is Citadel, which is basically a "middleman" broker. Citadels main business is this, for every incoming stock purchase, they buy stock at an amount that is just slightly lower, driving up the stock price a tiny bit, and then sell the stock to the buyer, pocketing the difference. They can do this because they have direct access to the stock market and are fully autonated. Robinhoods access to the stock market is also through Citadel. Citadel also bailed out the Melvin Capital hedge fund earlier this week.
I would imagine that Citadel can simply force one of their partners like Robinhood to do anything by threatening to cut them off from the market entirely.
I think their main goal now is to make sure that the lawsuits and fines they will be hit with will cause them to loose less than a short squeeze in this stock would eventually have.
But all of this is just speculation. I don't actually know anything about the stock market, I started reading about it two days ago. I don't want to "conspire" or anything like that, just my theory.
I don't see how Citadel can force them into that when that will be much more clearly market manipulation.
Though at any rate, I am not convinced Citadel had much of a stake at this point - Melvin had supposedly closed its shorts and the current short sellers were very possibly different actors.
If Melvin Capital got out, then why was the stock still 140% shorted after that announcement? I thought that 11% of the shorted stock was from Melvin Capital, it doesn't make sense that there was no significant change in that figure.
> If Melvin Capital got out, then why was the stock still 140% shorted after that announcement? I thought that 11% of the shorted stock was from Melvin Capital, it doesn't make sense that there was no significant change in that figure.
Source?
Also potentially new shorters getting in? I shorted AMC yesterday and have made quite a bit today.
I saw this coming from a mile away because the way these threads were used was entirely new. Essentially, threads were used more like live chats where people reacted to the stock price. Everytime a thread hit the 100k comment limit, they had to create a new one. Due to the activity, the threads were also constantly at the top of the reddit frontpage.
This was my first and last "gambling session" with stocks. Bought in at 70 and sold at 380. Really glad that I got lucky for once but I'm never gonna do that again!
True. It will render the web and certain CAPTCHA systems entirely broken.
What we need instead is more control on what can be accessed with javascript. Things like screen and window size, locale etc. should all be spoofable and configurable by default. We also need a sophisticated firewall and control matrix right in the browser.
I can already do a similar thing for mobile apps on android. I spoof what permissions they can use and what data they actually get. That can include sophisticated things, such as stripping EXIF data from any image before an application gets access to it. Or a simple popup that asks whether an application can access the clipboard once.
I can't even fathom how most people live without such finegrained control. The only hope is a new browser that respects the user from the beginning.
In this case they have actually a pretty interesting goal and motivation. They chose GME because it had a short ratio of 138%. Basically, big hedge funds were betting on the downfall and demise of this stock excessively.
What WSB daytraders are trying to do is to bleed out these hedge funds by buying in and holding. The stock doesn't even have to increase and the damage to the big hedge funds is already happening, see the situation that Melvin Capital is in. To those who participate it is a david vs. goliath situation.
The thing is, what they are trying to do is not that dumb and actually quite interesting, but they won't get anywhere by remaining "civil". They need this to spread and be on the frontpage of Reddit constantly. Negative or positive press helps, because more regular people want to participate if they hear about it.
I think that this will go down in history. Constant timeouts, organised selling at certain intervals, unnatural spikes, we've yet to hear about the shady stuff that keeps this stock from surging even faster considering the current "virality".
I don't think the Hacker News crowd likes this and that is reflected in the top comments.
I can see why someone had the urge to build this seeing as this capitol riot was perhaps the biggest threat to american democracy in recent years. What really irks me though is not only how many people brought their phones but also how many actively posted and boasted about their participation on social media.
There is a social media site called "Clapper" that is kind of like TikTok but describes itself as a "free-speech" alternative. Naturally, it is pretty much filled to the brim with conservatives. When the capitol riot happened, hundreds of videos from the event appeared on Clapper. But Clapper acted quickly and seemingly took down all of the videos with geolocation data close to the event at that time. Now, almost nothing can be found there about it.
But the platform is still filled with conservatives who post videos of their laptop screens about the Q conspiracy and "encouraging" videos where they ensure each other that Biden is not yet president and it is not yet over. They seem very technologically illiterate and also very unconcerned about how easily they could get themselves fired for racist or conspiratory content, because they think that this "platform" unlike Twitter and Facebook is somehow on their side. They don't realise that social media platforms cannot advertise when their content isn't "clean" and thus act in their own interest when they ban this type of content, and not in the interest of some opposing party.
So honestly, I think this is just the beginning of such projects, because somehow the people who would do something as ridiculous as storming the capitol keep documenting their crimes and releasing the material themselves... they make it extremely easy for any political opponents.
The newest version of NextCloud is perfectly fine, not sure if you have tried that.
It is fast, extensible and due to its status, many clients and apps can sync to NextCloud. At this point it is known enough, that it can replace sonething like iCloud for anyone looking to switch.
That is the marketing side - reality is different.
I am always running the latest stable version.
Phone sync is terrible (does not work properly), opening gallery view with a few images takes from 30sec to never, iOS app crashes frequently, there are all kinds of UI glitches, etc.
Almost all of these problems have been reported in their bug tracker, some of them have been there for years, but since those are not that relevant for their business customers, they don't really fix them.
Try njalla, a privacy focused domain provider. It was founded by Peter Sunde, one of the original creators of The Pirate Bay. You can pay with crypto currencies and they even have a .onion domain of their website, so you can reach them over Tor.
They buy the domain themselves, and let you pay with Dogecoins -- possibly a good deal for the next Pirate Bay, but not what I would use for general domain registration. There is a good chance one day they will go down and take your (their!) domain with them.
From their website:
---
We're not actually a domain name registration service, we're a customer to these.
[...]
When you buy a domain in our system, we're actually purchasing it for ourselves. We will be the actual owners of the domain.
I would imagine that Citadel can simply force one of their partners like Robinhood to do anything by threatening to cut them off from the market entirely.
I think their main goal now is to make sure that the lawsuits and fines they will be hit with will cause them to loose less than a short squeeze in this stock would eventually have.
But all of this is just speculation. I don't actually know anything about the stock market, I started reading about it two days ago. I don't want to "conspire" or anything like that, just my theory.