What's the energy cost of a financial sector that takes a ~3% cut of all retail transactions, puts up physical bank branches to manage money, empowers a federal reserve to manage the value of currency with more or less competency... Comparing BTC energy costs to some mythical world where we just burn free lunches for heat is not honest.
Even fairly strong correlations break down on restricted ranges of inputs. Eg, if you're hiring between 80-90th percentile candidates (top ones get better offers, lower ones get filtered out), yes, the correlation will get swamped by noise; not so much if you are hiring between 0 and 100.
That is specious. People remember during the opening days of the Covid fiasco, when "disinformation" encompassed interpretations of publicly available data that were forbidden exactly until the moment they were mandatory (airborne transmission, fecal transmission, immunological vectors, potential treatments, and so on). In fact it still does!
Yes, I was banned “for spreading disinformation”from a popular online forum for suggesting mask wearing could be helpful. The authorities at the time were fighting “disinformation” that masks work. A few weeks later I’m sure the same mods were banning people for saying the opposite.
More recently people are getting banned and censored on YouTube and other platforms for suggesting widespread use of ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment. It isn't on the "official" recommended list in most places and so some would consider that harmful disinformation. But there have been some encouraging study results recently so I wouldn't be surprised if the WHO or CDC guidelines change again in a few months.
So remember some "encouraging" studies saying Hydrochloroquine worked? Yeah.
People aren't getting banned for talking about studies, they're getting banned because the video they make opens with "the secret cure THEY don't want you to know about". They're not starting from a point of view grounded in facts about the actual scientific process of data.
The current scientific evidence for ivermectin is far stronger than that for Hydroxychloroquine (not Hydrochloroquine) ever was. So instead of posting a dismissive, low-effort comment I would encourage you to actually read the linked studies.
By the way, there was another study published a few days ago indicating that Hydroxychloroquine might offer some limited benefit. The observational study was rather weak from an evidence-based medicine standpoint, but maybe it does work at least slightly. Research continues.
Hydroxychloroquine particularly seems to be effective in combination with certain other medications which neutralize a part of the virus which HCQ does not. Fluvoxamine is also showing a lot of promise.
Amazing how we have these stark examples of the obvious dangers of aggressive moderation to enforce a party line (sorry, I mean "to combat disinformation") and it just doesn't seem to register at all. I'll bet it wouldn't even be hard to find people who say that banning mask advocacy one week and mask skepticism the next was the correct thing to do "because the available information changed."
The fun thing is that if you have biased moderation removing lies from one side it means that almost all lies people will see is from the other side. To me it seems obvious that this would cause people to distrust that side, since in their feed almost all liars comes from that side.
So really I don't think that this kind of moderation helps.
It doesn't really matter who engages in disinformation for it to be exactly that.
But with honor now totally absent from politics (being factually wrong or lying knowingly is no longer a reason to fall one ones' sword) we will need some other mechanism to deal with this, especially because the cost of spreading disinformation has gone down tremendously. It's a bit like spam: when it cost 50 cents to get your spam in front of an audience you made sure it landed as targeted as possible. But with the cost approaching zero you can afford to spread it in bulk and indiscriminately all day long.
How much evidence is there that the "reddit onslaught" actually moved the price, as opposed to them being the stalking horse for more sophisticated actors with more capital exercising a vanilla short squeeze strategy?
So many conspiracy theories on both sides these days. Don't forget Ocram's razor. I don't think there are many sophisticated actors here at all. I'm speaking as one who did DD on GME back in September and throw some money in (thought it was a great opportunity mainly because of Cohen +
the upcoming console super cycle with a tiny chance of squeeze thrown in) It was a smart discovery by WSB and got a bit more than average attention but then it kept growing.. every week more DD's posted and more attention. Now the entire sub is so dedicated to GME its actually annoying.
I think it really is the simple dumb story of a really bad bet by a hedge fund getting called out online and a with more and more jumping on the wagon and with the hedge fund making more and more dumb mistakes. And everyone is underestimating the redditors who, behind the emojis and crap talk, are actually pretty smart. Collectively they can, and did, cause this.. no need to invent other actors to explain it.
It's virtually guaranteed that this stock popped up on the radars of the funds who run momentum trading strategies. And it would be very weird for a lot of them not to jump on that bandwagon (at the very least because it's their mandate to do so).
Feedback loop for sure. A movie will be made on this. YOLO!
I can see GameStop putting an end to some of this by issuing non-voting shares to one of the hedge funds that is current shorting, giving them a known out and pocketing a huge investment for M&A.
that's what i've been thinking about too-- at what point is it economically expedient for GameStop to sell shares directly to the shorts to bail them out? doesn't seem much weirder than all the credit default swap silliness that's happened for the past few years.
they cannot just make whatever stocks they want up. they are limited there on the number they can emit. plus, not sure if they get to choose who gets to buy the shares.
also, why would gamestop bail out the same people that wanted to drive it into the ground?
2-3 weeks ago when share prices were around $17, GME had a market cap of less than 1.2B. WSB has 7.6 million users now, but I assume it went up a lot recently. Say 2 million of them bought some GME. To buy 50% of the shares a couple weeks ago it would have only taken $296 each. So they could ABSOLUTELY get prices moving significantly. Now of course lots more people have jumped on now. But that 20B volume number is after they got the price to ramp up!
Well considering it's currently at 7.8 million subscribers, and a week ago it was 2.1 million subscribers [1] I'd love to know how 4 million redditors subscribed without opening reddit
Don't know about that. I have never in my life bothered with stocks, and now I bought a share with all the spare money I could afford to lose. Me, a complete outsider. I can say at least 1M of the members hold stocks. And probably many more. I only got in the sub to watch how things unfold, intent on buying from the beginning. I don't think anyone would bother following WSB just for the giggles. Most of the posts are for the sole purpose of reaffirming our collective choice of holding GME.
Thats assuming all of wsb bought in on it. There are plenty of casual followers there that did not. Alternatively, there are plenty of non-wsb-ers that followed the hype.
Best number should be Robin Hood consumer. I read somewhere that 56% of RH subscribers were owning GME. I dont do stock trade, not sure whether this means every one has atleast one or the company let you group the $$ amounts too.
I keep seeing this metric everywhere, it's irrelevant, $GME became a meme stock, people are joining the sub to check out the fun, not to invest. Max 1% of them are really investing anything of value.
Cannot confirm, I joined to watch things to eventually buy, and I bought. I never bothered with stocks before. I also know many like me, in my real life circle, who did the same. A good chunk of WSB holds GME, is my estimate.
Retail has 10x leverqge with out of money call options, don't forget that. Of course hedge funds need to sell and hedge those options that create the huge volume
I do not agree that Occum's razor is much help here.
AFAIK this is completely unprecedented. A crowd of whomever and bankers with clients money at stake, disagreeing so absolutely about fundamental values. A mass action making the third corner of a very strange triangle.
The explanation you offer (it's sensible, except it is not one hedge fund) is no more or less complex than a conspiracy. What ever is going on there are a lot of moving parts.
I wouldn't call it a conspiracy theory or call this out as an example of Occam's razor.
> Collectively they can, and did, cause this.. no need to invent other actors to explain it.
The thing is, people imagine this requires a lot of capital to pull off. How did WSB get so many people to invest so much into GME as to hit a hedge fund so hard? Do so many people really have that much money just to throw away? There is a need to explain this, and inventing other big actors does explain this much better for people.
As I noted in a similar thread a couple days ago..
When all of this started last fall, the price was bouncing between $5-10. Therefore, with as little as $500 (aka less than a stimulus check), you get 50-100 shares. Even as recently as ~3 weeks ago, it was $20-25/share. It cost more to buy in but still within reach for all but the smallest investors.
And that's not considering the options side.
As of the 19th (aka 12 days ago), you could still buy $35 calls for $12 with a Feb 19th expiration. That $1200 is worth upwards of $12-15k now.
Now multiply any of those by a couple hundred thousand investors, some with much more to put in.. and we still haven't touched the medium, let alone the BIG players.
number of shares shouldn't matter much though. especially now that all these brokerages offer fractional shares. I guess it does matter a little more for options since those lots are bigger and fixed.
I mean the WSB user count has grown from 2.2m on Monday to now 7.5m. If 5 million of those users all bought $100 worth of GME that's half a billion, if they bought $1000, that's 5 billion.
On average I don't think $100 is that crazy. Most haven't YOLO-ed anything. While many YOLO-ed for 1-2 shares, there are many who have YOLO-ed for thousands to tens of thousands of dollars.
I'll also add that tons of people I know who have never traded in the markets woke up Tuesday and Wednesday and decided to buy a single share for the lulz. I'm fairly convinced 70% of the volume may have been due to retail.
Over 700 million shares were traded last week, so even if every WSB user bought 10 shares, that wouldn't account for close to a majority of the activity.
Volume is meaningless, as the same share might be traded back and forth several times, e.g HFT or order flow buyers flipping stocks within microseconds.
Would HFT traders flip a stock 10 times among each other just to fulfill a single Redditor's buy order? (Honest question, I don't know enough about standard HFT practices to confidently guess.)
Reddit users would be an amount of the capital in the GME situation, but far from the majority.
There's a huge amount of other hedge funds who actually control the vast majority of the capital screwing over Melvin at the moment. This whole scenario is hedge funds making money off of other hedge funds and a bunch of retail investors making a small amount but risking huge amounts when GME inevitably collapses.
This has been my question as well. Especially when you overlay the charts for gme and amc and bb, they move almost identically. I really struggle to believe it's all gressroots. This entire thing was astroturfed if you ask me.
word on the wall street bets street is that there are a couple of big whales that are long on gme,amc and they are trying to generate a squeeze. at this point in time it’s basically a battle of the trading bots with the whole world watching.
My experience of reddit is you can get a "wildly successful" meme or post, yet rarely that translates into more than a few thousand dollars of cash being spent on anything.
All the "wildly successful" kickstarters and stuff seem to have commercial backers lined up to make the social media buzz effect appear bigger than it is.
> All the "wildly successful" kickstarters and stuff seem to have commercial backers lined up to make the social media buzz effect appear bigger than it is.
This is interesting (and not at all surprising). Do you have a link to more information or is this just something you've noticed?
Well, what's the evidence of that then? I think the reddit behaviour explains what happened much better, and then everyone jumped on the train because of the groundwork they set.
The thing that moved the share price up was simple supply and demand.
From what I've read the short sellers had taken a short interest that exceeded 100% of the available GameStop shares.
But remember these are short sellers are selling something they don't yet own.
They are selling a promise to sell shares at some time in the future for given price.
When that future date turns up the they are forced into the market to buy shares at what ever price just so they can full fill their original promise to sell shares.
They have no choice in this as it was the contract they signed.
Now because shareholders weren't prepared to sell, that created massive buying pressure which then drove up the price.
I suspect where reddit played it's part is they spread the word that the shore sellers had taken up such a massive short position, adding to the buy pressure and effectively killing off any sell pressure, which then makes that short sell position even worse..
> From what I've read the short sellers had taken a short interest that exceeded 100% of the available GameStop shares.
When someone shorts a stock, it creates a new long position as well. The term is "short sell" because the borrowed shares are sold to someone else. The new buyer is also long.
Long interest is always greater than short interest for this reason. This is why short interest can be greater than 100%.
The facts didn't really matter in this pump, though. The running joke on Reddit was that no one was reading the "DD" anyway, just hopping on the bandwagon.
I don't know if you're right. But that definitely sounds like a good game plan for state to pretend to be on the side of the little guy, and do what they like to do...
Create a bigger, more sinister enemy...and you can have the crowds on your side.
Yeah, Matt Levine pointed this out in an article last week... the total buy and sell numbers for ‘retail investors' was actually pretty well matched (meaning retails investors bought and sold roughly the same number of shares)
This is not a just simple “Redditors keep buying shares” story
The media portrays it as "Redditors take on hedge funds". In reality, the volume indicates there's hedge funds, as well as a broad group of retail investors from outside Reddit, who have all jumped on the train. Hedge funds are on both sides of this.
yes, there are large whales that are long on gme. yes, a lot of retail investors have jumped on it. reddit is the propaganda machine that ignited the fire
A strat that quant funds use are algorithms that look for movement in the market. When they noticed an uptick in gamestop they bought in. When they buy in the price goes up which signals to other algorithms to also buy in. Thus raising the price and causing a tsunami.
Simultaenous with pausing buys of GME they were allowing accounts and positions to be opened and margin trades to occur, so it cannot be that they simply needed to limit their capital requirement full stop. The capital requirement is a prerequisite for being in the business and this is not an unforeseen circumstance, it's why they have lines of credit (which in fact they did draw on, just not enough to support the business they purport to be in) on top of their working capital.
These links cover one person's research, the same person as the parent article, via press releases seeking controversy and attention for his commercial work.
His work doesn't appear to have been desk-drawered or self-censored.
He delayed publication for years (in the proverbial desk drawer) while he attempted to develop a positive and politically acceptable spin on the results (self censorship). He is also probably one of the top ten most prestiguous living social scientists. Consider the incentives of researchers with less accumulated social capital who are far easier to attack for their findings.
It's "self-censorship" no more than I am self-censoring myself right now, in this comment.
Reinvigorating your old work for publication, once you have a commercially viable avenue to promote it, is pretty average capitalism.
Plenty of work that is politically awkward is published under a strict pseudonym. This wasn't - and the author's position is that it was their choice not to publish.
for one, editorializing by using an emotionally-charged term like "massively", which indicates bias, and incidentally lowers trust.
in any case, it's not ethnic diversity that impacts social trust but (sub-)cultural friction, which can happen between subsets ('tribes") of the same ethnicity (which is mostly a superfluous distinction anyway). tabs vs spaces, for instance.
we like to imagine mountains out of molehills and then point to our mounded constructions to prove how we're so irreconcileably different, but it's often a thin veil over an insecure assertion of authority and superiority.
Any kind of diversity that is seen as novel reduces trust, among other social consequences. (I note that the US has just elected it's second Papist president in 240ish years.)
Those consequences can be reduced; the question is, can they be reduced faster than forcing a new generation grow up under the diversity?
To be fair, the author of the findings was trying to avoid such things happening, which were obvious to him. From the first link, it appears those efforts did not pay off.
Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The first link seems to heavily imply so, but that's not obvious to me.
> Academics aren’t supposed to withhold negative data until they can suggest antidotes to their findings.
That seems incredibly naive. If an academic finds a way to create a potent poison, it would be unethical to disseminate that knowledge without an antidote. Why would this be different?
Well, academics routinely do disseminate such knowledge. Not least, to appeal to the community to find such a solution.
It is highly unlikely a researcher in "finding X" is an expert in "solving X" or otherwise has the capacity to do so.
The "head in the sand" approach here doesn't "ease community tensions" it does precisely the opposite: prolong them for fear open investigation "goes against the consensus".
> If an academic finds a way to create a potent poison, it would be unethical to disseminate that knowledge without an antidote. Why would this be different?
Well, that metaphor doesn't apply here. The research shows that something we're already doing is potentially harmful. A more accurate metaphor would be discovering milk is actually poisonous as currently processed, and withholding the research for fear of disrupting the dairy industry (which the researcher happens to be a member of).
Your mistake is in presupposing the goodness of the thing the research is revealing to be potentially harmful. Hiding science that disagrees with your preconceived ideas is a dangerous path to take. You strengthen your position by whittling away the pieces that disagree with reality and updating your approach, not by denying reality and insisting you were right all along.
You can consider "hyperinflation" as a consensus that the government is lying about the value of its currency. How does a consensus develop that someone is lying? It's a complex process, and doesn't have a neatly aggregatable answer.
This is incidentally why Sargent considers the end of hyperinflation to be coincident with a regime change - a liar cannot become credible nearly as easily as he can be replaced.
Security agencies of democratic regimes (that happen to be marginally accountable to the people elected) don't have the ability to synthesize known molecules and use them for political purposes? They don't have the ability to lie under the piercing eyes of lady liberty? That's sort of what they exist for.
If you ignore the evidence outside molecular signature yes, the “Moon of Alabama” hypothesis sounds plausible. Given the facts and circumstances, however, the conclusion becomes unavoidable.
The circumstances are that an english-tweeting western-sponsored Yale World Fellow with approximately zero actual Russian support found himself "poisoned" (nonfatally, of course) in a way politically useful to the west in their ongoing project of destabilizing Russia, as diagnosed by western security services.
Do you have any evidence that other entities are using 'this molecule'?
As for being distrustful of Germany, well, you're of course free to make your own determinations there, as are everyone else that have been watching both nations. Personally, if one of Rainbow Vlad's minions told me the sky is blue, I'd have to double check.
Especially while Nawalny was under heavy FSB observation. And why did the russians "not find" any traces of Novichok?
Why did the russians not start a massive investigation but have to wait for the official german report in the correct format or whatever.
If there would have been any possibility at all this being a false flag or a charade by Nawalny the city and airplane would be one big CSI labor.
It's not "a laboratory of the German armed forces".
And it's not "clear political conflict" - it's Russia lying about destroying their chemical weapons and instead using them in Europe and UK - see Navalny and Skripal.
Because they burned 300 million dollars on a massive shift in recruitment priorities and are now having an "oh shit" moment and hiring back people from the ancien regime.
