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My take on YOLO short squeeze and volatility..

I guess much has been said/written/memed about the most recent r/WSB YOLO short squeeze, and tbh have nothing really smart to add... but i'm puzzled by the pro-investment community reaction to this (namely HFs, bank sales desks

and prop traders)...

While squeezing traders position has long been a guilty pleasure of the Hedge Fund community (and few aggressive banks, with questionable motives to skew prices), everybody seem to be shocked that retail traders do that, and running a decent risk management

scheme...

My best recollection of a brutal position squeeze was the $12bn JPM lost on CDX spread (aka, the London Whale)

https://t.co/bDHAL2UwpX

Back in these days the entire market knew that JP's trader was, in fact, the entire position in the illiquid index (off-the-run)

so almost every credit trader that I knew traded against that position... Now, that's perfectly legal right? it's not crossing any legal boundaries of price manipulation, so why is it ok for pro traders to do that but it becomes shocking when your neighbor's kid does that?

and the CDX example is only one of a handful of examples of skewed position that got squeezed hard, the only difference is the orderbook distribution...

While in "normal" markets orderbook distribution oscillates between normal to slightly skewed, in the YOLO case I think that
OK, I don’t think there is much to jump on about the Amsterdam thing.


But I also think that that Andrew Bailey misses the


During the referendum the argument was made that because the EU regulatory regime was agreed with the UK that passporting would be granted.


And we were told it was crucial by Andrea Leadsom’s campaign team after the referendum.


There is a reason why financial services tend to be in separate chapters of trade deals.

They are not the average service.
Did you catch our thread on the expanding reach of US company Palantir into UK public institutions? £91m+ awarded to the controversial Silicon Valley data-analytics outfit across government. Let's take a closer look at their work with the NHS...


examined the NHS contracts Palantir won under Covid19, trying to find out what aspects of our health data this private company has been given access to. But we couldn’t find out - key parts of the contracts are redacted.


At least £25.4m in contracts have been awarded to Palantir from UK Health Services. Their latest (Dec 2020) was worth up to £23m for them to continue deploying their Foundry data management platform within the NHS until

Foundry claims it can ‘source, connect, and transform’ data to ‘make operations analytical and analytics operational.’ It’s a big-data system that, in an NHS context, analyses patient data. More specifically, your

Palantir won their first NHS contract for just £1, supporting the COVID-19 datastore (Mar-June 2020); then a £1m, 4 month extension for the same work; then £908k for aiding the Test & Trace system (June-Sep
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Competition is Killing Us; Predatory lender seeks national bank charter; Militarizing cops was a failure; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/mFat1Fsadn

#Pluralistic

1/


Competition is Killing Us: Consumer harm considered harmful.

https://t.co/oJTENrDhFD

2/


Predatory lender seeks national bank charter: Oportun led America in suing latinx borrowers during the pandemic.

https://t.co/FPK6NTwFjj

3/


Militarizing cops was a failure: Water still wet.

https://t.co/OACizKzNru

4/


#15yrsago Hollywood’s Canadian MP claims she’s no dirtier than the rest https://t.co/iOEH3n3sON

#15yrsago John McDaid’s brilliant sf story Keyboard Practice free online https://t.co/ciVbtorYiV

5/
The proposal for $2000 stimulus checks is divisive, and not along simple left-right lines. Lots of disagreement among progressives, with people like Bernie Sanders very pro but many others not on board. Both sides have a point 1/

My take: the economics aren't very good, but the political economy may make such checks necessary 2/
https://t.co/XY7d9E8SDY


The key economic argument, which @crampell picks up on, is that given a slump that has affected people very unevenly, aid should concentrate on those actually suffering 3/

So if you have a fixed amount to spend, unemployment benefits and maybe small-business aid should be priorities, not checks that will in many cases go to people who are doing OK 4/

But is there a fixed amount to spend? No binding budget constraint for the feds, so this is all about politics. And my sense is that broad issuance of checks is actually kind of a loss leader, helping to sell a package that includes UI 5/
many points of this list boil down to MORE money for cops.

they’re asking for ONE BILLION DOLLARS in additional funding for the rape kits ALONE.


notice many of these points are about giving more money to the state so they can put more people in jail.

i’ve long said the concept of a “rape kit backlog” is copaganda. it helps cops look like they’re not the ones actively sabotaging rape cases AND justify get more $$ for an issue they don’t care about.

"as you know, this means that thousands of sexual offenders remain at large, free to reoffend"

Carceral.


Ah, yes, trauma-informed abuse 🤩

Notice how they use "strongest predictor of arrest" as a metric for success. So it isn't even about victims...its about the system throwing more people in jail. They keep talking about rapists being "at large#"