BC TRADING
Saved by @ThomassRichards

A couple days back, I wrote up my best understanding of what happened with /r/wallstreetbets and meme stocks like Gamestop, trying to show how all the different, seemingly contradictory takes on the underlying financial stuff could all be true.

https://t.co/xWzre4r0Yj

1/

 In the days since, a new series of contradictory takes has emerged, these ones disputing the meaning of this bizarre financial spectacle, and likewise what response, if any is warranted as it unfurls.

2/
I think that all of these takes can also be true, and as with the trading itself, reconciling them requires that we widen the frame.

Let's start with Jimmy Carter.

3/
In 1978, Carter's IRS created the 401(k), a tax-sheltered account for people who wanted to gamble on stocks to fund their retirement.

That was a fringe proposition at best.

4/
The normal retirement system was a "defined benefits" pension where your employer guaranteed you a certain monthly percentage of your salary from retirement to death.

The vast majority of Americans wisely prefered a guaranteed payout to a tax-advantaged gambling account.

5/
Obviously, right? On the one hand, you have the guarantee of a pension (maybe even inflation-indexed); on the other, you have a bunch of bets, that, if they go wrong, leave you literally homeless and starving.

6/
When gamblers remortgage the family home and cash in the kids' college funds to play the tables, we consider them to have a mental illness, a pathological condition that harms them and the people around them.

7/
Giving up a defined benefits pension in favor of a 401k is just the same kind of bet - staking all the money that will support you when you exit the workforce on the movement of stocks and bonds.

Who would do that voluntarily?

8/
Pretty much no one. But the transition from defined benefits to 401k was not voluntary. Finance ghouls like Ethan Lipsig wrote memos to major employers like Hughes Aircraft showing them how they could ditch their pension obligations by moving workers to 401ks.

9/
In the 80s, Reagan created a bunch of legal tools that allowed employers to coerce their workforces into giving up the security of a pension and force them into gambling their salaries on the prayer of a win in the markets.

10/
This was insanely, amazingly great for the finance sector, in three ways:

I. It made companies more profitable. Guaranteeing that the workers whose labor made your company viable wouldn't spend their dotage starving and homeless is expensive.

11/
Helping fund wagers on shares is much cheaper. The finance sector represented the major shareholders of the companies that transitioned to 401ks. The savings were transferred to these shareholders and the finance sector got commissions.

12/
What's more, this temporary inflation of share prices disguised what was going on with the pension switcheroo: workers' defined benefits pensions were liquidated and turned into stocks, just as stocks were going up because their pensions had been liquidated!

13/
Their legs had been amputated out from under them, but so subtly that they didn't yet feel the pain - and now their bosses cooked their legs and snuck them into their dinner, and everyone marveled at how full they felt after that hearty, meaty meal.

14/
II. 401ks brought a lot of suckers to the table. The market was - and is - dominated by "sophisticated investors," AKA predators, who knew all the ways to fleece the rubes who had no idea how any of this worked.

15/
The predatory nature of finance only increased over time. Hedge funds, for example, exist to find unethical practices that are legal (thanks to loopholes in the rules) and exploit them until they are illegal.

16/
III. 401ks created a political force outside the finance sector that would lobby on its behalf. Transforming America into a nation of stockholders meant that workers had to choose between supporting rules that protected their jobs and rules that protected their retirement.

17/
For your pension account to grow, you had to support policies that permitted finance ghouls to offshore your job, or misclassify you as a contractor, or eliminate the safety rules that prevented you from being maimed, or take away your right to sue for compensation.

18/
Every time there's a particularly ghastly bankruptcy driven by PE or hedge funds - Toys R Us, Sears, etc - it emerges that at least some of that money is coming out of a union pension fund.

19/
That's marketization - turning the once obscure, boring business of market-based capital allocation into a matter of import to everyday people.

Marketization begat financialization.

20/
While marketization is primarily about capital allocation (who gets what money), financialization is about bets. Sometimes those bets are about things - businesses, houses, coal and timber - but things are limited. Mostly the financial market consists of bets on other bets.

21/
Bets are infinite. Every time you make a bet, you create inventory for a market in a bet on the outcome of your bet. And that's inventory for a new market: bets on the outcomes of bets on the outcomes of bets.

It's called Wall Street Bets for a reason.

22/
Bets need referees, someone who decides who the winner is. In sports, it's a major scandal if a referee is caught wagering on one of the teams in a match. In the financial markets, it's the norm - referees that lay wagers on the outcome of the contest they're overseeing.

23/
Let's take stock:

* Workers are forced to play the casino, and if their bets fail, they spend their old ages homeless and starving;

* The vast majority of casino games are wholly abstract - bets on bets on bets - and require layers of refs;

* the refs are all crooked.

24/
Every couple of years, we have a massive, systemic financial crisis, and every time that happens, the finance sector lobbies for a no-strings-attached bailout, abetted by suckers who hate the finance sector but fear starving in their old age.

25/
We're about to be engulfed in the second-largest crisis of our lifetime - the reckoning from trillions in capital market gains propped up by the Trump administration's policy of buying all corporate debt as a covid stimulus.

https://t.co/tNFjGSD95v

26/
(the largest crisis of our lifetimes is a few years off, as the climate emergency piles losses on losses, stranding tens of trillions in assets, from fossil fuels to obsolete gas-stations to literally underwater coastal real-estate to whole towns incinerated by wildfires)

27/
That's where we're at: a crooked casino that we've trusted our futures too, a crisis on the horizon, and a bunch meme-stock "players" who have thrown the normal weirdness of the market into stark relief through a spectacular stunt.

28/
A lot of people are angry at Robinhood, the stock-trading platform at the center of all this. Robinhood froze trading on meme stocks, and has only allowed it to come back in a useless, performative trickle that is seemingly calculated to prevent more meme-stock gamesmanship.

29/
Is Robinhood just another crooked ref? Yes…and no. The meme stock run upset the stable cheaters' equilibrium whereby cheating never escalated to the point where the game just collapsed.

For example, the total short position on Gamestop exceeds its total stock issuance.

30/
Translation: there were more Gamestop shares promised between bettors than exist. When the game stops, all those promises come due, and they literally can't be paid off because there aren't enough tokens in circulation to settle all the debts.

31/
Robinhood halted trading in part because the big fish upstream of Robinhood also halted trading, because they have even more at risk than Robinhood does if the game collapses - they the refs for MANY players, all the same size as Robinhood or larger.

https://t.co/6eSpIv9pup

32/
But remember, the refs are cheating. And they are both downstream and upstream from other games in which the refs are also cheating.

33/
And the games, as a whole, encompass our economy, including the solvency of the "real economy" (the people who make masks, deliver groceries and drive ambulances), and whether you spend your old age homeless and starving.

34/
So the people who say, "Don't blame Robinhood, they didn't halt trading to help billionaires, they halted trading to prevent the game from collapsing are right."

But they're not the only ones who are right.

35/
Also, there's the people who say that meme stocks aren't making money for little guys at the expense of the big guys. They're right too.

First, because these stocks will all need to be converted to cash, and that means selling them.

https://t.co/YcGLFT3stc

36/
When the selloff starts, the price will plunge, because even if the stock was undervalued before, it's certainly overvalued now. Every bubble produces wealth for its early bettors who sell out to later players who lose everything when they can't find a sucker later on.

37/
From Beanie Babies to subprime, bubbles burst and leave suckers holding the bag. If you just heard about meme stocks last week, you're too late to make money off of them.

38/
There's another version of the "this isn't little guys, it's big whales" that's ALSO true: the main beneficiary of the meme stock runs is giant funds who magnified and the bets from r/wallstreetbets and got out smart and fast.

https://t.co/biDxNTjerI

39/
So given all this, what can we make of calls (from parties as varied as @AOC and @tedcruz) to investigate Robinhood and other retail brokerages to see whether they're honest refs, or in the tank for billionaires?

40/
At @nakedcapitalism, @yvessmith calls this a "fatuous uproar," saying that the Senate has more important things to do during the racing-out-of-control pandemic than to investigate a literal penny-ante grift.

https://t.co/eDrQxtMoVu

41/
Do we really care who the winner is in "a beauty contest between Cinderella’s ugly sisters" ("clueless new gen day traders versus clumsy shorts")?

Smith is right too.

42/
A speculator-v-speculator contest that falls apart when the crooked ref halts play to prevent collapse - who cares who "wins?"

But here's how they can all be right - the "who cares" and the "goliath v goliath" and the "bubble" and the "Robinhood is a plutes' honeypot."

43/
IF there's hearings, and IF those hearings expose the absurdity and corruption of the system, THEN there is a chance to build the political will to make real, systemic changes when the crisis comes.

44/
And there's a real crisis coming: two, in fact. The covid junk bond financial crisis, which is due very soon, and the climate crisis stranded asset emergencies, which will unroll with increased tempo and intensity for decades to come.

45/
The half-century cycle of "addressing" finance crises by increasing financialization MUST stop.

If the meme stock spectacle gets us to pay attention to hearings that reveal the irredeemable rot of the system, then it's a unique chance to spread REAL "financial literacy."

46/
And that literacy is the necessary (but insufficient) precursor to taking action when the time comes - and the time is certainly coming soon.

47/
If you'd like to link to a version of this essay as a blog post on a site with no ads, trackers, or surveillance, here's a permalink on Pluralistic:

https://t.co/M8KOqi1GX8

eof/

More from Cory Doctorow #BLM

Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Criti-Hype; Right to Repair is back for 2021; The free market and rent-seeking; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/pXnzoWKJn2

#Pluralistic

1/


Criti-Hype: Tech bros will settle for "evil genius."

https://t.co/OyiM1vUS8Y

2/


Right to Repair is back for 2021: Will Apple sabotage this one too?

https://t.co/3gcyEZQWfk

3/


The free market and rent-seeking: Unauthorized bread and poor doors.

https://t.co/7Ob6AdmkDz

4/


#10yrsago Diane Duane’s crowdfunded publishing experiment finally concludes https://t.co/qsRnZxiL8b

#10yrsago Inside Sukey, the anti-kettling mobile app https://t.co/puGNKw5XgF

5/
SOCIETY
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
The Night of the Short Fingers saw many of the US's largest tech companies blocking Trump and trumpist platforms like Parler, provoking a storm of punditry about What It All Means for the tech companies to have taken this content moderation step.

1/


The best expert I know on the subject is @jilliancyork, my @eff colleague. She's published "an ongoing list" of "everything pundits are getting wrong about this current moment in content moderation."

You should read it.

Here's some highlights:

“Deplatforming Trump sets a precedent."

York: "The only 'precedent' set here is that this is indeed the first time a sitting US president has been deplatformed by a tech company."

3/

But political leaders around the world have already received this treatment: Lebanon, Burma, etc. Even the reach of the deplatforming is nothing new: last summer's US Iran ban saw blocks of everything, up to and including Etsy listings for "Persian dolls."

4/
HISTORY
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
The Democrats are at least two parties. The progressive wing of the party (which is by no means unified) and the finance wing of the party, which is also the party leadership.

1/

During the leadership race, the progressive wing was represented by @SenSanders and @SenWarren; the former wants to minimize the role of markets in our lives, the latter wants to redeem markets by regulating them. It's a distinction with a difference, but I donated to both.

2/

Both wings of the party have prominent representatives in Congress; Sandersism are most visibly associated with @AOC (whom I donated to) and Warrenism is embodied by @RepKatiePorter (likewise), who was also one of Warren's law school proteges.

3/

Porter is a force of nature. She is infamous - and celebrated - for her brutal, no-holds-barred questioning of both corporate and administration witnesses, using a white-board to pin them down and eviscerating any attempts at bullshittery.

4/

This isn't just about getting facts into the record (though, she is SO GOOD at getting facts into the record!), it's also about effecting change, like when she single-handedly cornered the CDC's chief into guaranteeing universal, free covid
POLITICS
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
When it's railroading time, you get railroads.

When the railroads turn into the personal satrapies of rail-barons, you get trustbusters.

A couple decades ago, it was online service time. We had the users, the telcoms systems, the computers, the modems, so we got platforms.

1/

We had that, but we lacked something important: effective antimonopoly enforcement. Lax merger laws allowed companies with access to capital markets to buy out or neutralize all their competitors, so we got monopolies.

Right on schedule, we're getting digital trustbusters.

2/

Now, some people aren't technically sophisticated, but they do understand a lot about competition law. That's how you get meat-and-taters antitrust proposals like @amyklobuchar's #CALERA, which address the structural problems with antitrust

Klobuchar's bill is hugely important. The reason we have monopolies is that we stopped enforcing anti-monopoly law 40 years ago. Monopoly isn't a tech problem, it's everywhere from sneakers to glass bottles to pro wrestling to candy to

Klobuchar's CALERA doesn't just seek to apply antitrust law to tech - it also explicitly restores the pre-Reagan basis for fighting monopolies: we fight monopolies because they concentrate power and corrupt our politics. All monopolies are guilty unless proven otherwise.

5/
SOCIETY
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
We are in an extraordinary moment, but not an entirely unprecedented one. Since the earliest days, societies have had to cope with disasters that wiped out the ability of everyday people to service their debts and thus threatened to destroy their societies.

1/


If you've read U Missouri econ prof Michael Hudson's writings on the subject, you know that for millennia, rulers in these circumstances simply wiped out the debts, declaring a "jubilee" that allowed people to rebuild after disasters rather than being trapped in debt spirals.

2/

In a new essay on @NakedCapitalism called "How an 'Act of God' Pandemic Is Destroying the West: The US Is Saving the Financial Sector, Not the Economy," Hudson reveals the abyss on whose brink we are balanced, and what we must do to pull back from

Hudson's oft-repeated golden rule is "Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid." That is to say: making it harder to declare bankruptcy, or binding debtors over to arbitration or wage-garnishing won't actually get them to pay debts they cannot afford.

4/

This is a very sharp observation in the US context. The 2008 crisis was "solved" by bailing out finance, not people - and so the finance sector was able to lend to consumers to buy things again, while consumer debt mounted to spectacular levels.

5/
ECON

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FEAR - It’s the re-experience of failure in advance.

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A thread on How to pull the trigger when the opportunity knocks.


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A traders goes through many phases before becoming Profitable.

The first phase is the " APUN HI BHAGWAN HAI" phase-

When we first begin Trading, we don’t know any concepts, we don’t know about the risks , the dangers.

So we start trading, and like most guys by beginners luck we start making good, we start to calculate how much money we will make in next 1yr, 5 yrs, Greed start to Hop in.


We get introduced to Various instruments, F&O, LEVERAGE.

We take big positions as we don’t have any FEAR cause we haven't seen those bad phases yet.

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Now we know How the market can kick our ass, we now know the risk that comes with those big positions.

"THE LEARNING PHASE"-

Now we know that we were just lucky initially and now we have to learn why we get those losses, so we start learning concepts , fundamental, Technicals.
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Emperor\U0001f451
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Technical Analysis Masterclass- Part 2

'Entering the trade'

Entering a trade without ascertaining a certain things is gambling.

In this masterclass we will learn the pre-requisites to enter a trade.

DON'T ENTER A TRADE WITHOUT DETERMINNG THE FOLLOWING.

Please share.

We understand what reward to risk (popularly called risk to reward) is.
It will be denoted by R:R.

We will also try to bust a few myths about R:R and how to avoid losing trades.

Before entering a trade, you need to determine 3 things.

1. Entry trigger
2. Stop loss
3. Target

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Generally a set of reasons AKA confluence is a higher probability trade and a generally a safer entry.

Example of an entry trigger.


2. Stop Loss.

The price in the opposite direction of the trade where the trade is exited, at a loss.

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Trader knight
Trader knight
@Traderknight007
Life is a continuous journey of going through peaks and troughs of Happiness and struggle.

We can only see the Happy part of other lives, but ignore what they might have gone through to achieve that.


But let me tell you, even if someone is at ease right now, doesn't mean that he will continue to be at ease for their whole life.

The struggle will come again and we will have to go through it ,whatever we do, whoever we are , we have to cross that river of pain.

Even,In trading there are times when nothing works out, you go through long time and money draw-downs.

Even if you think you are a master, you have to go through it.

If you are struggling right now, don't lose hope as the tables will turn.

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Emperor\U0001f451
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@EmperorBTC
CHEAT-SHEET

Multiple Confirmation short.

A Short Entry that we shared in 2020.

Study it point wise.

1. Bearish Candle type and lowering of volume on Price rise.

2. OBV divergence.

3. Accumulation with Bearish candles and Volume increase on Price decrease.

STUDY IT!


Explanation

1. When price increases with a decreasing volume, it's bearish.

2. OBV, On Balance Volume should be correlated with price.
If price increases without similar increase in OBV, it's bearish.

3. During consolidation, if the volume increases during dumps, it's bearish
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1/ I used to think that the biggest gains had to come from stocks that no one knew about

One of the harder lessons for me to internalize has been that oftentimes, unknown stocks stay unknown for a reason and you can still earn attractive returns from stocks everyone's bullish on

2/ While I’m not contrarian just for the sake of being contrarian, I do think it’s important to question everything.

When I started out, I would buy "quality" stocks like FB or TSLA without doing much research.

But an opinion being consensus doesn’t make it the truth.

3/ So owning the most popular stocks made me nervous. If a winner is so obvious then either it's priced in or maybe I'm missing something?

I preferred owning stocks that others weren’t aware of or were bearish on for the wrong reasons (more room for upside surprises).

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So when it first appeared in Normandy, the Sherman Firefly and it's meaty 17 pounder represented an ideal combo of reliable chassis, great gun and devastating firepower right?

Ummm...

Truth is a bit more complex. /1
#WW2 #SWW #History


Deliveries of Firefly to units only commenced in April 1944,
just a few weeks before Overlord & left minimal time for familiarisation.

Armoured Regiments mostly utilised Fireflies on a basis of 1 per troop of 4 tanks. /2


Finally each armoured regiment troop had access to integral, meaty, anti-tank firepower capable of dealing serious damage to any German AFV likely to be encountered. /3


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[See image below] /5
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