mlthoughts2018

The article is completely wrong. Robinhood did not disable buys only, they disabled any trades that took a net new position. Existing options holders who needed to buy or sell were allowed to, and regular retail traders could also buy or sell on the other side of those transactions, because they went to closing existing open positions.

The reason you couldn’t buy but you could sell is just the simple mechanics of a short squeeze. All the net open positions were short sellers needing to buy (e.g. needing retail investors to sell) and there was just near zero volume of call options holders looking to sell (e.g. needing retail investors to buy) to close an existing position.

I feel pretty upset to see the article going into all these details of capitalization - that 100% was not the issue and at no point did Robinhood “disable buys but not sells.” They disabled creating net new positions which just happened to have a side-effect of disabling buys as a matter of the particular trading volume of various option types. If you were a call option holder, you could sell (and therefore the other party could buy).

I don’t think so. In fact there is actual theory about all this.

- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann%27s_agreement_theorem

- https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/agree-econ.pdf

and in particular,

- https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/prior.pdf

If your goal is just to manipulate someone else into doing what you want, regardless of what the facts say nor what their beliefs say about the facts or about your beliefs, then sure, that is pure manipulation and not related to strategies for effective disagreement resolution.

It’s also not relevant or useful to bring up the fact that humans are not rational Bayesian actors, again because we’re talking about how best to achieve unified shared understanding of the true facts and to ensure we only derive beliefs from that (anything else can only be manipulation, not decision resolution, by definition). We may fall short of the best solution due to our flaws and limitations, but that doesn’t render the best solution any less the best, not make some other seemingly more attainable solution better or more worthwhile.

I think you are saying tbe same thing. “Do the right thing” means “their beliefs are accurate with regard to what is the best action to take.” Of course, it assumes you are starting out with the “right” action, which is why a much better goal is “ensure everyone believes as accurately as possible.” That way you aren’t just persuading them (and in fact you aren’t even looking at it as an issue of persuading them), rather you are taking the view of how best to ensure both parties are optimally persuaded by the facts.

A goal to persuade without a goal to induce accurate beliefs is just manipulation.

Nobody is gaslighting anyone. By your own account, the perpetrators of the looting, property damage, etc., were not part of the BLM protests, but clearly differentiated groups adding violence to something non-violent.

I live in NYC and in my neighborhood we also had windows boarded up after days of looting, cars smashed in the street, fires and more. Literally none of it was related to the BLM movement.

Similarly with Portland where many friends and coworkers live, the violence there was literally brought about by Trump and his false allocation of Homeland Security agents to “protect” federal landmarks, yet they abducted people off the street with no due process.

I’m certain looting happened, destruction happened, violence happened. It happened literally around the corner from my apartment.

That absolutely does not give anyone any entitlement to indulge racist or fascist biases to blame that violence on BLM or associate it with somehow representing the purpose of BLM, etc.

What you are saying is simply not ok. If your take away of your experience led you to believe BLM is responsible for significant violence, that is a manifestation of problems with you and your beliefs, not an accurate fact-based conclusion drawn from a legitimate interpretation of the BLM movement or any experience of BLM protests. You saying that I sound unreasonable by not letting your shit slide doesn’t change anything. You can say that. You can cling to racism-based biased refusal to accept the facts or accept your stated understanding of your experience is wrong and unduly biased, but it does not make what you’re saying any more legitimate or worthy of respect. What you are saying is just unacceptably wrong - it really is, really - in a way where you cannot just say, “well I believe different” and have that be treated like it’s valid or on equal footing.

You are starting off from a position so irredeemably far from acceptable fact-based reality, that for you to say my response sounds unreasonable is completely unsurprising and carries no weight.

It might sting to have your attachment to what you think is an acceptable interpretation of your experience called out for the unreasonable anti-BLM bias that it is. Oh well, the anti-BLM fantasy stuff is not OK, not going to slide.

I do think the current rise of anti-truth fascism forking out of the Republican party is an extremely serious existential threat to the US. It does matter to challenge every false claim of a stolen election.

That’s not much of a point. It’s really just you being on the demonstrably wrong side of actual facts, but acting like your extreme and indefensible take deserves equal validity or ontological status as a “right” belief, but it completely and unequivocally doesn’t.

You wouldn’t be saying this stuff to BLM supporters, only an echo chamber filled with your non-fact-based alternate world. There’s a complete difference of kind between what you’re saying and actual reality, one that can’t be overcome or mitigated at all just by your own gainsaying. Your stance just is, factually, invalid, and you calling the opposite stance invalid as if it’s just two sides of some coin is likewise just invalid all the way down.

In many cases, there is direct, tangible existential crisis at stake when aggregated across all the individual disagreements. The rise of modern white supremacy, fascism, insurrection, environmental devastation, harm and denial of basic rights to trans people, and so on. If in every individual case, you leave it unchecked and figure “whatever, they can just believe whatever they want, who cares” then it adds up to rioters charging into the Capitol with Confederate flags and pipe bombs. Working backwards it creates impetus on everyone to not leave any of that unchecked, whether it’s your crazy uncle on Facebook spouting off about young earth creationism or anti-environmentalism or a white supremacist yelling claims that the presidential election was stolen.

If you’re just disagreeing about which potato chip brand is the best, by all means let it go and leave it unchecked, but it seems clear the general context is about disagreements on contested social issues with serious stakes.

In a lot of ways the main issue is that several generations of the developed world have completely wasted decades of prosperity, to the point now where it really, actually is true that “mundane” day to day problems for people actually tie in to serious existential problems that have to be collectively dealt with.

I am sorry you feel this way, and I hope you will find a way past the biases that are preventing you from accepting the facts.

What I’m saying is that the heuristic you describe is perfectly understandable, but it’s a bad outcome for society. My comment is not about the “why” behind the existence of this heuristic. There are many obvious reasons that leap off the page in terms of evolutionary adaptation, confirmation bias, availability heuristic, halo bias and so forth.

Instead what I am saying is that if I approach a new conversation tomorrow and I say to myself something like this,

> “Boy, my friend Bob sure is not going to like to hear about the very overt evidence of Trump siding with white supremacists. He won’t like that so I’d better not appeal to facts where Trump’s quotes were compiled and analyzed by researchers. Instead I should tell him about my experience walking near a Trump rally and directly observing racist language going unrebuked by campaign staff. Then at least he’ll connect with the part that is my experience instead of immediately taking a motivated cognition biased position gainsaying the more official data.”

then that would be a very bad thing - much worse than directly confronting Bob with the actual facts and making it clear it’s not OK for Bob to inhabit a false reality where one type of fact (anecdotes) is accepted but another (data, research, journalism) is rejected. That cannot be left unchecked.

Mitt Romney actually said it quite well in the Senate inauguration proceedings after the Capitol riot,

“If you respect people who are disappointed by the outcome of the election and believe it was stolen, the best thing you can do is tell them the truth.”

Of course the election is just an example, but the point is more general. If someone is resistant to real facts, and you actually respect them and want to reach a positive conclusion, the best thing is absolutely always to confront them with the truth. If you instead deliberately mollify it and water it down to an anecdote they are more likely to accept while not adjusting their beliefs, you are only disrespecting them and hurting yourself, the other party, and discourse in general.

I think a precondition of the entire discussion is that we’re talking about what’s more effective in resolving disagreement - which would be measured by whether a disagreement process approaches the conclusion that would be reached between two rational agents sharing their information.

Note that I am not saying I believe humans do act that way, rather that is the yardstick of outcome to decide if one disagreement resolution technique is better than another.

I think the aspect that spans between your comment and the one you replied to is this:

Why should “personal experiences” be a different category than “facts?” (even taking for granted the extra step you mentioned, where it is the use of these experiences within a discussion, not the absolute existence of the experience, at play).

For example, suppose I know you and you are honest and trustworthy, so if you verbally testify to an experience, I’ll believe it.

Why would there be a difference in you coming to me and saying, “I attended a BLM rally and just observed such a clear and obvious peaceful sense of non-violent protesting” vs you coming to me and saying “According to research institute XYZ, statistically almost none of the BLM protests involved violence.”

Both of those things are facts in 100% the same sense, in every way. But because you personally claim to experience one of them, I am likely to give it more weight.

Even though there are plenty of reasonable hypotheses why humans would rely on this heuristic, it is still a big problem and a big source of manipulation, from liars, deceivers, conspiracy theories, debunked cranks, folk wisdom, etc.

If our goal is to believe as accurately as possible then we should not feel accepting or accommodating of a heuristic quirk in which we regard one set of facts that have the door wide open to manipulation (anecdotes of others) as generally more compelling than facts sourced through research, compiling data, journalism and so forth.

If we let up the pressure to thwart this heuristic, the most likely outcome is that people use confirmation bias and folk wisdom to construct false realities - and indeed in the US we have been seeing that play out in a huge violent saga. That didn’t happen because people don’t like being confronted with hard facts, it happened because we have allowed much too weak of a sense of social obligation to align beliefs with accurate predictions, as opposed to merely letting people feel they are entitled to believe whatever they want.

No, one does not have to respond to “citation-needed” requests for bolstering arguments. Others are perfectly free to discredit me for that, ignore what I am saying, that is fine, but nobody is “required” and nobody “should” engage with that in every case.

In this particular case I think the arguments have been repeated many times across all the different GME threads. My goal is not to repeat them here, only to register dissent, which is a perfectly valid goal for me to have.

Ugh. I’m pretty sure if someone wrote a huge essay giving compelling reasons why they were basing the strategy on fundamentals, bolstered with various details about the board changes and track record, the current stock performance, franchise cash flow, etc., then the least crackpot explanation here is that they actually meant it and that was in fact their strategy.

Your sarcastic “.. if the reddit author said it” totally misses the point. The point is not whether the reddit author is right only the reddit author is actually describing their honest strategy based on fundamentals.

Given the specificity of the strategy and the fact that it actually did turn out to be right it would seem like an extreme claim requiring extreme evidence to disagree or to presume some ulterior secret market manipulation motive.

Separately, I for one am not sure you are right to say $20B market cap of GameStop is crazy. I think it will drop yes, but not nearly as far as most people think. The change of board management for GME is quite a big signal of the large-scale ecommerce revamp they plan to execute, and that strategy was executed by the new board member previously at Chewy, so there is actual track record to believe this.

The valuation is high right now, sure, but I sincerely think it’s not crazy high. That’s why a lot of the WSBers and redditors are still refusing to sell. The plan absolutely was not a pump and dump, it was more like jumping on an airplane before it takes off - at least in their minds. Time will tell.

> “I'm still waiting for you to point out what exactly I've said that's wrong.”

I don’t know why you’re waiting on that. It’s absolutely not my job to go item by item through the comments and chronicle it for you, that’s on you if you care (or don’t, I don’t care, and I won’t be baited further). I just felt somebody needed to mention that they don’t take what you’re saying as accurate or trustworthy.

If true, I’m quite shocked just based on the bald-faced, zeroth order flagrant incorrectness of things you wrote in other comments about it.

I worked as a fund manager at an asset management firm for a few years, often sitting daily with our general counsel on many issues. Nothing you have said about this, including the totally off the wall comparison with Phil Falcone, causes me to believe your take is trustworthy here. I’m not a lawyer, but just because you allegedly are one doesn’t mean I’m going to take your opinion on this at face value.

> “ I'm sorry are you trying to make an argument that GME right now is based on evaluating the fundamentals?!?”

I’m saying the author of the article (the reddit post) approached valuing it based on fundamentals. That is the whole point of a short equity squeeze - a stock’s valuation is predicted by many (wrong folks) to fall, institutional money takes a large short position, but a few smart speculators see a valuation-based reason why the price will actually (truly, not artificially) go up, thus squeezing the short sellers. The strategy kicks in only at that point, when buying and holding (based on speculating more intelligently about the true valuation) leads to further gains because of the short sellers’ situation. The reddit author even says explicitly - this is not a pump and dump, the stock will stay high.

Sharing a smart analysis and offering others the chance to execute the same strategy is not manipulation. It’s just a smart strategy. This guy and others who saw the opportunity early, realized GME was both fundamentally undervalued and also had super high short interest, just out-smarted professional traders and they are mad, so resorting to backchannel politics to drum up claims of “manipulation.”

Nope, the stated intention was to buy the shares before GME valuation rose from all the other factors listed. At many points the writer mentions it’s not a pump and dump, the stock’s fundamentals and management changes indicate it is undervalued, and the short interest creates a mechanical condition that will push it up to the “true” higher value - the writer mentions an intention to buy and hold, it will go up and stay high.

The redditors have absolutely broken no laws, in fact there is not the slightest whiff of any reason to even suggest they might have. It’s just anger from wealth classes for having been embarrassed.

I’m sorry but you have written several blowhard comments along these lines and it’s just wrong. There is no such thing as “creating” a short squeeze. There is just a buying strategy based on hard work of appraising the fundamentals and speculating correctly, and you are perfectly free to tell others you plan to do that and coordinate with them.

Calling anything the retail / WSB investor crowd did in this scenario “manipulation” is ridiculous and insulting. “Coordinating” by explaining a strategy and inviting others to participate is not “manipulation.”

Such false equivalence. Everything costs resources to produce. Simply stating that it costs resources, or even just stating how much resources it costs, is completely meaningless on its own.

Pixar movies cost resources, prolonging life with medical treatment costs resources, chocolate candy bars cost resources, operating the Olympic Games costs resources.

In each case, various people believe the resource costs are worth it to get the thing that is produced. Same for bitcoin, same for ads.

You can’t just say they cost resources. If you’re advocating these things shouldn’t exist, you either need to get into the specifics of why they offer value but just not enough to offset their resource costs, or why they don’t offer value, and persuade others to agree with you.

Judging by the success of ads and bitcoin, I think, “these things consume resources” is a pretty weak and useless argument. It would not matter if the resource costs were astronomical or tiny, it’s a specious chain of reasoning in principle.

Similar for platforms that let you build ecommerce sites, like Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, etc. They might be cookie cutter and usually over-priced for the level of hosting you get and the poorness of the wysiwyg site editing experience, but they solve a big problem of letting you get up and running with a trustworthy site fast.

It’s interesting though because there still are plenty of scam sites hosted by those platforms, plenty of dark patterns on Amazon too.

On the other hand, precious metal prices fluctuate quite a bit and it’s a normal part of assessing and valuing them as stores of value.

I normally agree, but this is clearly just for fun and for poking around with cloud tools. The author is not making claims about accuracy or anything, I think this post is not a good one for the stampede of “well actually...” ML approach bashing of HN. This is a nice post.

In my mind it stands in contrast to the SMART stats hard drive failure model post from a few days ago - that was an inappropriate approach AND the person was putting forward as actually being a valid analysis workflow & conclusion.

This post is obviously just for giggles, and it’s very good.

They did halt both buying and selling of net new positions. They did not halt adjustments of existing positions (calls & shorts).

This was actually a very fair, by-the-books standard trading halt. It just happened to benefit the short sellers who had been squeezed because they could easily find people willing to sell.

You definitely could still buy GME if you found some extremely random call option holder who needed to sell to cover their position. This would not be changing a net new position, just like selling to someone looking to cover a previous short, and this was never blocked - it’s just there was no volume for this, nobody owned calls and needed to sell.

I’ve read this article twice now and it feels like confused word soup with no clear statements of the intended differences, specifically none of the statements about the order of state vs behavior validation are intelligible to me. I have read them multiple times and just feel (a) frustrated and (b) a mock and a stub are really the same idea with nothing more than occasional conventional differences that amount to semantic hair-splitting with no material consequence or need for articles to be written about the platonic difference.

This is still a highly debated thesis. Just using BTC to store value away from a volatile fiat currency and eventually exchange for a different, more stable currency, is another candidate for the underlying valuation model, no widespread medium of exchange beyond currency trading needed.

If you live in Venezuela, converting to BTC even if you cannot buy anything with it but perhaps Columbian or Brazilian currency at a slight loss, is a hugely valuable capability, with significant advantages over both traditional fiat currency exchanges and custodial stores of value like gold.

What is the total global demand for cryptocurrency for this use case? Certainly not anywhere close to the total market cap of first world fiat currencies, but also probably still much higher than today’s total market cap of BTC.

This stands in contrast to smart contract and d-app marketplace currency like ETH, which has a completely different hypothetical valuation model.

That’s not how laws work. Just because you personally see a way it can be philosophically generalized or conceptually generalized does not mean laws apply the same to all generalizations. Brokers, exchanges, investment firms, banks, etc., all have specific legal obligations based on different types of fiduciary duty, different service offerings, etc. It can easily be the case that an exchange entity has a legal ability to deny access through delisting while a broker entity does not have the right to deny service in some particular scenario.

I am not saying what the case is for brokers today, but regardless, appealing to some notion of proof by contradiction because of generalizing a behavior is not a valid way to analyze the situation.

How is this related at all to the broker question? Exchanges and brokers are completely different concepts.

It’s also not a clear conclusion even remotely at all. There’s nothing remotely illegal about retail investors coordinating together to profit from a short squeeze opportunity.

Is there any data to support this? I was talking to my therapist about it recently and she suggested the opposite. There’s a huge glut of therapists, they just only want to have clients who pay out of pocket because then they offload the work of any insurance reimbursement, paperwork or other overhead to the client. She also suggested therapists want good filters to avoid difficult clients, like low-income clients that have a hard time paying and have more difficult social or behavioral issues.

As I understood it, she was saying basically this:

1. therapists typically just want to work freelance, make their own hours, and don’t mind having very few clients / taking extended breaks from working many hours.

2. therapists don’t want to deal with “challenging” clients (who generally are the most in need of therapy in the first place). “Ability to pay out of pocket” is a good filter to implicitly reject “undesirable” clients.

3. therapists want to externalize the labor burden of coordinating with insurance onto the patient

4. None of this has any connection to charging higher prices - that’s a separate supply & demand phenomenon based on the talent of the therapist, population & demographics of the area, and specializations that deal with issues more correlated with wealthy clients.

My impression from all this has been a massive negative opinion of “working class” therapists and counselors, to the point where I believe they should be required to accept insurance and they should be required to manage the paperwork process of insurance claims as a regulated condition of practicing therapy - it’s a matter of public health that’s in all our collective best interest to enforce with regulation.