Reddit’s profane, greedy traders are shaking up the stock market

Their biggest losers are probably making essentially random bets in such a stupid way that they lose all their money.

A bet between trader & brokerage that the price will move a particular direction, with no actual trading or stock ownership occurring

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/stocks/09/trade-a-cfd....

EDIT: It occurs to me this may not be quite what you meant after all, but I think the end result is fairly similar

All modern web browsers have a debug mode that allows you to easily edit HTML.

In that sense it's similar to poker; you don't have all the information to analyze what other players do. In this particular case, is it an informed trader or a noise trader?

In plain English: Options are basically a contract, with a time limit, that states the holder can buy a certain amount of stock at a certain price. "Options dealers" are the people who wrote the contract and sold it to another party. They are on the "hook" for fulfilling the terms, if the buying party wishes to "exercise" an option and buy their promised stock at the promised price.

Options dealers are automatically "short" all of the contracts they sell, because that's literally the definition of "shorting" -- selling something you don't own. Options dealers technically do not own the stock they're promising to sell to the buyer, but will have to once the buyer "exercises" the options contract.

Delta is basically the difference in velocity of the price of the options contract vs. the price of the stock it's representing. So, if the option is selling for $10, and has a delta of 1 (100%), then a $5 increase in the stock price will increase the option contracts price by $5 to $15. If the delta is 0 (0%), the price of the contract will not change.

Actually, I was wrong. The GP was correct to use the vocabulary he did -- because what I wrote isn't even the full explanation I was planning. However, three paragraphs in, I realized it would take much more to completely explain it.

Basically, options dealers hedge by buying the stock they issue options contracts for, and this can cause the price to move up.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-02-26/reddit...

The order flow data is worthless (because the orders come from uninformed traders) the value is in filling them without the risk of being shortchanged (because the orders come from uninformed traders).

This is market making which is the bread and butter of HFTs. This is the one thing they do which helps, not hurts, human traders.

They can do thousands of trades in the time it takes your nervous system to react and click the mouse. They parse a news headline many seconds before it ever shows up on the internet. They rent satellites to count how many trucks leave factories. They have access to person-to-person dark pool trades that never show up on the normal exchanges.

Algorithmic trading is a secretive black box, but who knows. These are just my speculations from hearsay and random research. If they can make a fraction of a cent from messing with you, they will. It can scale up infinitely. It's just software--there's no marginal cost to do so, provided they are properly hedged.

Also, it takes some guts to defend the idea "this perpetuates an upward movement" by quoting someone explicitly saying it doesn't. A finite upward boost and an infinite upward boost are different things, as explicitly noted in the quote you just pulled and in your comment on it.

For example, if you want to sell an SPX put at $3000 strike, then the notional value of that trade is $300k. He doesn't have $300k in the account for that one trade though. If you want a leverage factor of 2x, then for $300k in the account you'd trade two such options, each having a margin equity of $150k. Since you're trading two options, the profit and loss are both enlarged by 2x. The worst case scenario is that if SPX drops by 50% and he doesn't take any action before that, he'd have no money left.

The author mentioned that he uses a leverage of 2x to 3x. That means you need $100k to $150k in the account to trade a single contract. Hardly for beginners.

As someone who fell into category 1 for most of my childhood, I think you have the labels reversed. I think it takes a tremendously sheltered privileged life to get offended by such weak words, especially when they're clearly in jest. Thick skin comes from being exposed to the realities of the world and having an idea of the magnitude and context of e.g. those memes compared to actual hate speech such as I experienced.

It's not a case of 'people who never experienced hate speech think its ok', it's a case of 'people who experienced real hate speech can differentiate it from crude jokes and shitposts'

If anyone remembers Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan, the American couple who went to Tajikistan and started video blogging to show that 'all humans are kind' and promptly got murdered by ISIS because they had no idea how dangerous the country was? That's the kind of sheltered privileged demographic that gets offended by shitposting. They have no clue what actual hate or actual danger looks like.

Political correctness and victim culture are pretty unique to the wealthier segments of the West and Europe.

In my opinion this is backwards. You can have people who lived an extremely privileged life, they never experienced that many hardships at all, and so when they see someone being called anything that could be slightly offensive they overreact in defense of the other person, because if they were insulted in a similar manner they would really feel it strongly.

Similarly, you can have people who receive a lot of hate and don't fit in, grow a thicker skin because of it, and then tells others that they should do the same because it worked for them. Those people might have some combination of personality traits that allowed them to grow a thicker skin in the first place, so their advice will work for some people but not others.

From my life experience these two modes happen much more often than the ones you described.

Seeing the ensuing discussion: QED

It happens all the time that you use a slur casually and don't realize it applies to someone next to you. If a person is conscious of that happening daily where it's not socially acceptable to say anything, then they may internalize that this is normal and expect others to also have a "thick skin".

> You may be wondering how the European Union will enforce a law in territory it does not control. The fact is, foreign governments help other countries enforce their laws through mutual assistance treaties and other mechanisms all the time. GDPR Article 50 addresses this question directly. So far, the EU’s reach has not been tested, but no doubt data protection authorities are exploring their options on a case-by-case basis.

Again, the risk may be low, but it's there.

Anyone can pass anyone else's email address as input to a form, so simply receiving an address as input is not actually permission. If a newsletter does not employ double opt-in, then it will eventually end up on a list of "single opt-in newsletters" which are used to harass people by subscribing their email to a ton (100s or 1000s) of newsletters that they don't want. People who are the victim of this will rightly mark those messages as spam, causing your email reputation to drop. Random Internet bots will also submit subscriptions using your form with weird addresses for who-knows-what reasons. It's a very good idea to have some data validation to make sure garbage doesn't end up in your list, and double opt-in is one of the best ways to achieve that.

Furthermore, competitors might maliciously attack you by subscribing random email addresses to your list. They can get these addresses from data dumps from compromises (like what haveibeenpwned is using). Sending to these addresses will harm your reputation because recipients will mark as spam, or will fail to interact with your messages which is also a spam signal. Smart malicious competitors will cause you to start sending to spamtraps.

The best defense against being manipulated in these ways is double opt-in. Lastly, your email list as such has more value overall if you know that every single entry was confirmed by double opt-in.

As a corollary, you should remove addresses from the list if messages to the address start bouncing, or if you receive a spam complaint from them; sometimes people are lazy and will mark spam instead of unsubscribing. Ideally, support the List-Unsubscribe feature so that people can unsubscribe from it directly in their email client. A good email platform will help with all of these things.

I consider single-opt-in use of email addresses to be a dark pattern or anti-pattern in most contexts, especially non-transactional contexts like newsletters. Any sort of recurring communication needs double opt-in.