I have a bit amount of money on the side, I didn't know where to invest. Would now be a good opportunity to lump sum all the money, or would you Dollar Cost Average?
Anyone else with the same dilemma, and would have more arguments? Or maybe an other perspective on that?
I am putting 2k in tomorrow morning for VGRO. If it dips another 5% I am doing 2k more.
There's an old adage in London that it's time to sell when the retail buyers start entering the marketing...
I've been having a pretty good time perusing the forum and making bets of my own, even making a decent profit (relative to the money put in). I don't risk more than I'm willing to completely lose though. Some people on that forum are a quite reckless.
WSB tends to celebrate losses (aka “loss porn”) and it’s well-deserved - many tend to do really stupid things (like “YOLOing” 100% of their portfolio into a single position). But if you know how to manage risk effectively (Kelly’s criterion etc) it’s possible to consistently make profits.
Amidst the chaos of shitposts and degenerate gambling there is often quality DD hidden throughout. The odd thing is I suspect WSB has reached critical mass to the point where it’s achieved feedback loops and can actually move markets, thanks to algorithms misidentifying unusual options volume caused by wild speculation & shameless gambling.
It's easy enough on the surface to understand, but much harder to actually execute, because you generally do want some deeper understanding of market trends and how stocks move. That barrier of entry hasn't slowed down most people on WSB, because the loss porn was kind of the point of the subreddit. They didn't really care if they guessed right, they cared about having the most daring bet.
if there’s roughly 1000 upvotes on a piece of content, and assuming only 1% of lurkers ever up vote; that means there are roughly 100,000 people taking investment info from this sub.
let’s say they have an average portfolio size of $10k, then 100,000 users * $10,000 = $1 billion dollars.
assuming they split the portfolio by meme %, so like 1/3 TSLA, 1/3 SPCE, 1/3 AMD; then we’re looking at like $330 million in trading volume going into SPCE.
when you look at the last couple days of trading volume on SPCE, about 30million shares traded daily, was previously around $10 a share , it about equals out, that like $300million dollars of meme money did a pump and dump on SPCE
It’s not foolproof, but generally the idea is to keep positions small (relative to portfolio size) and quickly take profits - which is critical when dealing with something as insanely volatile as options. With options one can also improve their odds with intermediate strategies (such as call debit spreads, straddles/strangles during earnings). I often will temporarily buy calls on something like TECS (-3X Inverse Technology ETF) when I’m speculating on multiple tech earnings plays within the same week - that way if my calls on Apple or Microsoft don’t pan out it’ll be offset by the inverse ETF gains. Options can be an incredible tool, and used properly can be excellent for managing risk effectively.
On top of that, it's not even a P&D group, people there are just trading against each other, you have both bears and bulls and thetas. There's never been a concerted effort to pump SPCE for instance.
Someone's just bought a $1000 call option on a stock that's currently $400? Automated trading systems will probably raise alerts on that stock since someone must know something for that to happen.
This appeared to happen when WSB were meme-ing on TSLA and a whole bunch of them bought $1000 call options when it was $400. Shortly afterwards TSLA skyrocketed in value.
People buy far out-of-the-money calls all the time, they're actually overvalued compared to fair returns. Setting the strike price that high just makes the option more and more of a lotto ticket: the vast majority of the time it's just going to expire worthless, but that small chance of being "in the money" when the option expires is your jackpot. A fitting choice for that whole WSB attitude.
In other words, demand for volatility via buying options can actually beget volatility in the movement of the stock price.
The trading system and its operators deserve whatever fate results from such a decision.
Not an expert but I'd be surprised if one trade like that triggered anything, could easily be a hedge.
Regardless, option trading tends to have human traders behind the wheel, and they're trained to figure out what's going on (trading options is similar to playing poker).
It's still at $780, so whether they were the effect or not it's held some permanence.
Unlikely. Automatic trading systems will not see their trades. Most (if not all) of WSB trades are done through the Robinhood app. Robinhood users are not charged transaction fees executing their trades, they can do this because they sell their flow (these orders) to HFT firms. HFT firms are willing to pay for Robinhood's flow (trades) because the average user is not an insider, has no idea what he's doing and is most likely gambling. If you're an HFT you'd rather trade with a common person, then an informed investor because maybe they know something you don't.
https://themarketear.com/posts/cqKGhoO98L/image/0
Pair that with poor price discovery: few actively managed funds; shit-ton of indexation (both explicit and closet). We may, and I repeat - may, see some interesting action here. Legends like Michale Burry or David Einhorn often complain about price discovery. Which is even more strange given the fact that the number of publicly traded companies in the US was cut down in half since 1996.
The question is "what effect does have?", not "does option trading effect the market?"
Day trading on your smartphone was not really a "thing" pre-Robinhood, and then they came along with commission free trades on both stocks and options.
So not only did they make it easier to day trade given no explicit fees for doing so, they also mainstreamed options trading, which is actually what most people in WSB do almost exclusively, and really the only way you can 10x-100x your money in a few months (or in less time).
IMX trails what happens in the markets. Retail investors don't create trends, they follow them off the cliff.
https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/ef0xhj/eli5...
P.S: Stonks only go up! ... I mean down (as of late).
imho, robinhood gets the most out of it. the number if issues this reddit sub has found with RH is mind-boggling
I was imagining that some big money quant fund had written bots and scrapers to use r/wsb as an algorithmic amplifier since over time they can make money on tiny shifts. Or maybe that would just make a good movie plot.
> We have discussed this theory before, during Tesla’s wild rally, and I conceded that they’ve got a point. Not a perpetual motion machine, but a motion machine, sure. The machine runs on leverage. If you have $100, you can buy $100 worth of stock, and the stock will go up a little; your trade will be self-reinforcing. If you get a margin loan, you can buy $200 worth of stock, and the stock will go up a bit more; your trade will be a bit more self-reinforcing. On the other hand if the stock then goes down a bit, your broker might call more margin from you, and if you can’t put up more money the broker will liquidate your whole position and the stock will go down. Trading on margin magnifies swings
Or what he originally wrote:
> the call options should have a volatility-increasing effect: Dealers who sell call options have to buy stock to hedge, and they have to buy more stock to adjust their hedge as the stock goes up (and sell as it goes down), meaning that speculators who buy Tesla call options to bet on the price and volatility going up also to some extent cause that to happen. To some extent! “LOL BLOOMBERG ADMITTING THAT AS LONG AS WE BUY THE CALLS THE STOCKS WILL GO UP BECAUSE OF HEDGING ALGORITHMS,” was Reddit’s takeaway from Kawa’s article, and I would not personally go that far.
How do you get from Matt Levine saying "this cannot perpetuate an upward movement" and "other people are taking this to mean that the stocks will keep going up as long as we keep buying the calls, but those people are wrong" to "Matt Levine says this perpetuates an upward movement"? He made a direct, first-person statement of what he thinks, and you've inverted it.
Options are derivatives of the security so any influence on share price will be a very diluted reaction based on risk and general market sentiment which I don't think a few thousand users are capable of. They would need to carry serious notional volume (in the 9+ figures) or major hedging risk with their brokers for any price action to occur, and even that might not last beyond days or hours.
So...a second order derivative manipulation at best.
Theta gang just means someone who sells options and expects that option to expire worthless, thereby profiting from the slow decay of option value due to theta. It's a legitimate strategy in the options world for professionals, not just for WSB autists. Here's a random example of a finance professional running this strategy successfully in his personal account: https://earlyretirementnow.com/2019/03/27/passive-income-thr...
Disclaimer: I don't know this person, nor do I recommend copying his strategy if you don't know the options greeks; actually the amount of money you would need to execute his strategy would probably make most options beginner uncomfortable anyways.
Some people sell these contracts on the probability that they will expire worthless and they keep all the money that someone else paid for them.
On a naive level you could just think of the Reddit group simply spooking the herd to start going in a certain way. All fun and games.
In reality it's likely the same few individuals doing the triggering making it an effective pump and dump scheme. Someone has to lose out when stocks move with no underlying justification.
1) /r/wallstreetbets and /r/wsb are two different subreddits. /r/wsb are for those that got banned from wallstreetbets
2) When wallstreetbets first started it wasn’t as crazy as it was today. There were some aggressive gamblers but there was opportunity for real due diligence and decent conversation. I contributed more than a few posts back in the early days. After it got crazy I unsubscribed until recently. Robinhood and the options trading and margin trading has really made things crazy. I see absurd bets made on there that make me both jealous and glad I’m not 25 with too much money to gamble.
3) those who say it’s likely too small to make a difference go check out the timing of the Lumber Liquidator due diligence post and the subsequent jump in price. I don’t know what the difference is between pump and dump vs posting due diligence but there definitely was a correlation. I wish I still had my data account because I would love to see the exact correlation of options trading and stock trading to the posts.
4) the memes and gifs are hilarious if not vulgar and bigoted. But if you have thick skin some of the memes are very well made.
> Tips - Report a potential violation of the securities laws directly to enforcement@sec.gov. Please do not use this email box for general comments or questions.
The SEC exists to protect the people exchanging securities.
It involved a lot of web scraping Yahoo with Perl (specifically LWP) and then lots of analysis by humans with some help from automated tools. For example, if you plotted a histogram of each user's posts, you could clearly see when someone was at work (posted between 9am and 5pm with a drop off around noon) and at home (posts between 6pm and 2am with a peak around 10pm).
The analysts would often find a piece of information from a 2 year old post, e.g. 'Go Cubs!', and a one week old post "I just attended my 20 year UofI reunion" and quickly be able to narrow down on who the person might be. Coupled with Lexis Nexis (which was just coming online at the time), we routinely narrowed down individuals to just one possible person.
Given that this was done back in the early 2000's using ancient servers (by today's standards) and basic statistical analysis with a lot of legwork, I would be surprised if there weren't companies also trying to find the people on Reddit today.
We're writing about this speculative culture emanating from WSB and 4chan in a daily email. We send out a list of the most mentioned stocks, and do a longer form commentary, with quotes from those communities a few times a week.
It's just an email now, but we're going to roll out options analysis and a few other goodies in the coming weeks :)
(The language can be a bit crude, so this might not be for you, if that is a concern.)
I didn't realise that Bloomberg blocks private mode too. Messages like this assume that tracking is the default and make sure that we keep losing privacy. I really dislike this trend.
So, it's somewhat ironically become a way to coordinate purchase/selling of a stock by getting enough of the hivemind to go along with a particular stock.
It's still a terrible place for general advice though.
The charm of the subreddit is that it's hard to figure out who's who.
I love WSB, though. It's been a constant source of laughter and entertainment over the past few years. Now that it's hit the mainstream, I hope the wild culture doesn't dilute down too much.
There are a few honest stories of losses and failure in WSB, but the majority of loss stories or bad picks quickly fade into obscurity or are deleted by their original posters. What remains are the highly-upvoted success stories.
If anything wallstreetbets loves massive loses more than massive gains.
Secondly, maybe there are some people genuinely attempting to use the forum to pump and dump but frankly, they're probably not succeeding and even if they are, that's exactly the sort of person the SEC is actually interested in prosecuting. But literally there is no evidence it's happening at all, let alone at any scale or is profitable.
Finally, I love the idea that market makers are just sitting there going "sure is weird that we've seen a lot of retail flow on MIK, better continue straight forwardly hedging using the future and not exploit this predictable market pattern"
I'd really recommend subscribing (free, email, don't think there's RSS) if you don't already (I got the recommendation on HN). He's prolific though, rarely a day without an email, and often two or three - it wasn't long before I couldn't keep up; I just skim and read more thoroughly those that grab my attention now.
I don't understand options, other than a few things about them which help me trade them
It's ok to ignore the big picture. Not everything has to have a profound meaning behind and similar are the stock moves. I believe most of the movements are irrational, so studying fundamentals or anything is going to offer nothing other than wasted time.
I love the crazy vibe of that subreddit which motivates me to take crazy positions which I'd have never taken if I carried on with my risk averse friends.
Even if probability of becoming double digit millionaire from a single digit millionaire is small through options trading. It's well worth it because once you've saved enough to retire, why not bet on random positions? You never know when you'll fall on the long tail end of the game and experience the Black Swan event which changes your life forever.
Then I am also doing other things which people might consider crazy like steroids to maintain Greek god physique - considering neither I am model, atheletic or body builder.
YOLO is not bad way to live if it gives you the highs you need move out of sorrows and sufferings.
https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Options-Trading-Frans-We...
[0] http://link.mail.bloombergbusiness.com/join/4wm/moneystuff-s...
Oh wait, Bloomberg's trying to run for president?
Owning one of the authoritative news outlets feels like maybe that's an illegal conflict of interest, there, then.
The Reddit comments usually aren't long enough to be meaningful, and I think that there are now organised p&d teams, so that level of investigation isn't very useful anymore
The Yahoo comments usually weren't that long either. The key point was that while each individual post gave you, on average, only a little but of information, in the aggregate you got enough to narrow down who the source was to within 5 people. From there, you could usually narrow it down using "legwork" etc.
Lexis Nexis has been around a lot longer than that. By "online" do you mean web accessible?
And the best part with P&D is that most everyone involved knew what was happening, but they played along hoping to get out before it peaks.
And it was very real. You could get the emails pimping whatever the OTC stock was and watch as it pumped up, pumped up, pumped up, and then crashed to nothing.
1- Upon sign up, the confirmation email says: For questions about this list, please contact: coand@gmail.com - I'd suggest you use the @topstonks.com address - it really looks more professional.
2- The page focuses too much on the features and not the benefit. I think people are less interested in 'data' 'analysis' and seeing a sample and more on what's in it for them. Maybe run a regression analysis and tout the benefits. If most of the stocks tank, then tout how you can fade the public, or if they tend to go up, again, mention that.
3- Why is it beta? What's beta about it? It's OK to mention it's in beta, but then you need to make it clear what's the long term vision or why you say beta. Personally, I'd get rid of that part.
In any case, this is an excellent idea that could easily branch out in a lot of directions. I'm subscribed and will look forward to seeing what you develop this into. :)
The BUZZ ETF is traded and invests based on how often particular stocks get mentioned in social media and new reporting. I'm sure they're monitoring r/WSB as well.
Disclosure, do not hold or have any affiliation with Buzz Index products. Just heard about it before.
(This is a personal pet peeve since I have a short email address that tons of people sometimes think belongs to them, and get a huge amount of mail intended for other people.)
- Even if you are in the US, there is still some liability risk of EU recipients. Not super clear, but better safe than sorry.
- Double Opt-in can improve email deliverability. Clutter folders are starting to detect and filter out emails with low engagements. An opt in email forces an engagement, and weeds out bad recipients.
- It's a better all-around experience.
I could be a minor and they wouldn't have a clue.
I suspect that if somebody were to invent a good anonymous micropayment system they'd be happy to adopt that instead. They just want to get paid; your privacy just happens to be the currency that's easiest to come by.
They'd also be guilty of of violating AML, KYC, and other money transfer regulations. It would get shut down faster than you can say "Wait! Don't do that!"
Win-win!
Baitblock has tracking resistance that also deletes first party cookies/other tracking mechanisms when it detects that you're not logged into a website.
I don't think it's about throwing away privacy for readers using reader mode, it's a matter of wanting to be compensated through the subscription model. Between the two, getting compensated won out.
This userscript fixes that. Same protection is used in several other mainstream media websites. I have found one website which is broken by this userscript though, so I don't recommend using it with wildcard for all websites instead of the few which use this protection.
If I want to force them to either fall in line with the GDPR or get out of Europe, I need to find my local responsible agency, send them an email, and pray that they have the will and resources to act on it.
It was so frustrating in the earlier days of WSB to want to talk about options. The rules were that "it was the place to talk about VIX and speculative options trades" but it was just full of trash about biomed penny stocks and FDA approval gambles.
It was what set it apart from other "finance" communities online and especially reddit: not being risk adverse.
But then it became similar to other finance communities by having an absolute anathema to anything bitcoin or crypto. The mods there didn't seem willing to see them as options trades that never expire. Crypto has similar returns to options contracts, without the time limitation or theta decay or an actual option. If you are an options trader, crypto is not risky. This still seems to be the case there, so thats been making it less interesting to me.
If I do fund an equities options account and want to trade earnings or some follow on swings for the rest of the quarter, I still like to enjoy the memes and laughs with the WSB crowd.
They really fall short on commodities trading, credit trading, crypto trading, amongst other markets.
Thank god. I just recently joined WSB and would immediately quit if this was about shitcoin gambling. Options at least are based on stocks and they have real value. Way different than the inherent value of 0 of crypto BS.
Total system? its mostly a zero sum outcome against normal incremental gains. Individuals? huge swings. Many snakes and few ladders. Feels like you got onto a ladder but (if I read this right) also got off on a higher cloud, than you entered.
There were a few posts by people pumping their stocks and the like but I think the current market correcrion/recession bell tolling will scare most people off
It is precisely because so few feel it is worth the effort, that the effort is worthwhile.
The standard story is about delta hedging (i.e. the buyers are speculators that don't delta hedge, but the sellers do hedge, introducing a lot of gamma into the market, thereby amplifying moves).
My larger point is that in this state of the market one really has to wonder who's ultimately setting the prices.
Oil was 23 cents a barrel once and people were worried about it crashing to 10 cents. The utility of oil had not expanded and it was a viscous substance without any intrinsic value, yet.
Oil doesn’t need to be physical to retain that reality.
Most commodities, including the largest cryptos, have options on them.
> really fall short on commodities trading, credit trading, crypto trading, amongst other markets.
Exhibit A
I have myself brought two cases to court in Sweden, but settled before verdict. The reason I was able to settle is the verdict would probably have gone my way.
I agree with you that your local DPA is toothless. There are way to many cases for them to handle, that’s why we need to turn to the courts and not to our DPA to protect our rights.
Lastly, most claims will be small claims, that is, less than 1000 EUR. In small claims you’re only liable for a small portion of lawyers fee should you lose.
IANAL.
I am a believer (bad word, but no other choices) in AA and I hate the anti-AA rhetoric. I still struggle when people who could have benefited from AA either by gender or race say they don't like it, but I won't pretend they don't say it, or there aren't problems. AFAIK its always the best candidate, its just AA re-defines what 'best' is in ways some other people don't like. The whole PC/SJW language is just shit: its labels to deny the underlying problem.
I am the other side of this problem, never faced the bias, never had to overcome it. I might even be part of the problem. Can't hire wisely if you don't know your own biases. That said, hiring women and minorities into my ICT space is just hard, and thats from a not-for-profit with 80 staff and more cultures than I can count. We still put women into finance and HR more than into tech and we still have next to no leadership outside the anglo core. The board is mixed. So there's that, I think it helps. (not in the USA btw)
Money is colourblind.. kinda. I do not believe this is completely true. I don't know any Koch brothers, or Walmart owners, or Peter Theil, and so I work in third hand knowledge. I do not believe they are colour or politics blind: their view of money is complicated. But I do believe you when you say that proven skills cut more with hiring in the money space, than in other spaces. Indian capital by definition is non-white and there are some standout Indian capital movers-and-shakers who own steel, coal, but who also live in a culture which badges people from birth "other" and that totally freaks me out. (there is one, Sanjeev Gupta, who I will put to one side. He might be capitalist, but he's no racist: he's accormittel and tata steel. he's big)
If you wind up in quant with money, ethical investment will be out there, in the future state, as something to talk about as a sub-set of investment to model. I get, that plays in tobacco and drugs and oil will include speculative gains as they crash and burn, or take off and persist. You would get to make choices in that too: Do you want to make $m on the strength of coal-tar sand mining, as KSA and others dump oil stocks to move to Solar? Or do you want to invest in battery tech to ride the up wave in Solar, but be tied into KSA legals? Do you even have to care? No, you don't. And I won't try to pretend you cannot, and won't say you should, even if I do say I would like you (and others) to care.
I read about black radio/tv entrepreneurs some time ago. People who could have been in the weather underground or panthers, but chose to invest in the system instead. I have also read that Clarence Thomas is not an AA backer, believes its better to prove you got there without the help. I don't respect Thomas for obvious reasons. He's pretty anti-social, never mind anti-socialist)
Doesn't this make it more likely, rather than less likely, that HFT algos are affected by WSB madness?
>I use some leverage to overcome the lower premium revenue.
he uses the premium from the OTM short puts to borrow?
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.
That being said, double opt-in is still a good idea regardless of the law.
> 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.
But at the same time, it's not like there's defacto leaders. It's more once the zeitgeist takes hold mobs of people will, for whatever reason, follow along.
I'm sure there are a lot of very smart people trying to figure out how to weaponize this and have their positions locked in before the mobs move the market and time their exits.
what about box spreads? it’s foolproof!
The GP was correct, Matt clearly says it can create some upward momentum, albeit not an unlimited amount.
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.
Thank you random HN commenter for pointing out my flaw in the “perpetual upward” comment. Levine’s take still claims that r/wsb can technically move the market, no? Or should I go back and re-read? Maybe I interpreted differently. But I don’t know for sure, because I don’t study such things and hardly know options or markets. Neither does like 98% of the folks on this post based on their comments here (yourself included!)
If your bots do "stupid things".
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.
Because they used standard, well-defined terms from that particular field? "Gamma" is further from mumbo-jumbo than 90% of computer programming vocabulary - it has a clear definition and everyone in the field understands exactly the same thing by it.
Options dealers don't necessarily sell options. They can also buy them. And "writing" an option means to sell it, so "wrote the contract and sold it" is redundant.
Options dealers are not automatically short all of the contracts that they sell. They may already have a long position in that option contract, in which case their sale is a closing sale. Also, I think you may be a bit confused...a short sale of options is not determined based on one's position in the underlying; you can be short an option and long the stock at the same time (for example, an overwrite is a sale of upside calls by someone who is already long the stock).
Delta is the first-order change of the option contract value, with respect to a unit change in the underlying price. I wouldn't refer to it at "velocity" because while I understand what you are intending to communicate (it is a rate), there is another options Greek called "speed," which is the change in gamma with respect to the underlying price. Wikipedia has a really nice description of the various options Greeks. For the truly curious, Sheldon Natenberg wrote a nice book called "Options Volatility and Pricing" that explains the Greeks better than I or Wikipedia can.
Options dealers who are short gamma will hedge by buying stock as it goes up, and selling stock as it goes down. Their demand for (or supply of) the underlying stock will impact the underlying price in a way that pushes the price in whatever direction it has already started to move.
In defense of my word choice: theory and practice are not mutually exclusive. If you want to be excellent at something, you should aim to learn both. BTW I have never taken an academic course on options or finance.
You know, that's totally fine with me. It's good to have those people around. As I learn more I'll be able to decide for myself what I think of that perspective. Your side is great too.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-02-26/reddit...
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.
This is wrong.
I want to be able to enter an email address and get a newsletter. This is good UI/UX blah
There is nothing dark about helping a user using single opt in. Single opt in is great and preferred.
But because of the world we live in, as you explain well, we have to make everyone's lives a PiTA by securing it.
It might be a anti-pattern collecting emails to easily, since the Spam Bots might punish you because of bad actors, which reduces your email reach.
But it's also a anti-pattern to think double opt in is normal. If you can get away with not doing it, then don't. ie. I see idiots doing it in corporate settings or after having paid money
Market makers are sensitive to wing trades, precisely because pricing skew is more of an art than a science. Trading away from spot can have a substantial impact on the way the implied volatility surface looks. And this can affect trades of other maturities and strikes.
Trading options, for me, is nothing like playing poker. Poker doesn't have an underlying storyline the way companies do. Nor are there catalyst dates in poker.
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?
The effect of buying the stock with leverage instead of out of pocket (which is what call options let you do) is that the noise is amplified. The "true value" component doesn't change. Thus, when the noise is increasing the price, the price is higher than it otherwise would have been, and when the noise is decreasing the price, the price is lower than it otherwise would have been. Imagine the difference between P(x) = v(x) + cos n and P(x) = v(x) + 2 cos n.
Can technically move the market? Sure, but everything that happens in the market is technically moving the market. The main effect (as discussed in the Matt Levine pieces) is to increase the volatility of the stocks in question.
Someone thinks my email address is their email address, and keeps filling it in in various places as "their" email address.
They seem to live in France, and so the things they sign up for are in French.
Sometimes, these are double opt-in, and I can just ignore them.
Other times, I suddenly have to figure out how to unsubscribe from a newsletter that's in french.
Often, the "unsubscribe" link is just a mailto link to their customer service, and now I have to hope they can understand my English as I ask them to remove me from their list.
Also, this same ne'er-do-well has taken out loans with my email address as one of their few pieces of contact information. So now I have a loan company trying to get money from "me." Obviously, loan companies aren't going to be very accomodating when you tell them they have the wrong address. That's what they all say, no?
(It's not quite identity theft, as the loan people really are after the other guy, not me. It's not my credit score being impacted. They just emailed me because mailing the address on file, phoning the phone number on file, etc. didn't work.)
Wouldn't it be great if I could contact this person to tell them to stop? Well, think about how I could accomplish that for a moment. All I know about them is... my own email address!
I don't want to be single opt-ined to random crap, but apparently lots of people want me to be.
All modern web browsers have a debug mode that allows you to easily edit HTML.
It's the fact that people are called retards, autists, and homophobic slurs. To some it's about "having thick skin". To others it's about normalizing "hate speech".
It really depends on what your life experience is to determine which camp you fall in. If you've been on the receiving end of hate speech or discrimination, you tend to be in the second camp. If you've lived a relatively privileged life in terms of 'fitting in' to the world around you, you tend to think people just need to grow thicker skin.
And this disagreement between those two groups sums up like 95% of all social media posts right now.
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.
The even weirder thing is it's finding a reception among weak-willed administrators at various institutions who capitulate under the slightest provocation from these small groups of highly vocal outage mobs (largely because these groups have gotten really good at stirring up controversy, and the low-budget modern internet media is perpetually looking for controversy, legitimate or not).
But if you did a survey of the general population (or the institution's actual customers) instead of just listening to these small mobs you'd find that it really isn't that big of a deal to the vast majority of people. The average person understands context and intent - assuming they heard the original source, not the filtered down unfunny reinterpretations that make the rounds.
I was listening to a "best of Jeff Ross" on Youtube recently and all I could think of was that if any of his stuff had been filtered through these cancel culture people over the last few decades he'd basically be considered the devil instead of one of the funniest people in comedy.
I fear for the future of culture, especially comedy, which thrives in a sort of experimental unfiltered chaos. Maybe it will have to live on in the underground like Samizdat in the Soviet Union.
And that's why you do see people campaigning against hate speech outside of the West and Europe - but much more quietly and less visibly, partly because they're not amplified and partly because (as you've noticed) it's genuinely dangerous for them to do so.
There's a Pride in Uganda. It's illegal. You won't find people telling you not to use "f-g" there, because they don't have the power to say so safely.
Thank you for letting me know that Asia has no complex rules about how to address people, and no social consequences for failure to obey those rules.
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.
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".
Seeing the ensuing discussion: QED
In other words, he's upset because people put mean words on an imageboard.
It is a far cry from the many subreddits that actually preach hatred against an outgroup.
Is that another way of saying that retail traders buy on the offer and sell on the bid while HFTs buy on the bid and sell on the offer?
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.
> This is the one thing they do which helps, not hurts, human traders.
Providing liquidity is their job, and it benefits the market as a whole. If market making by HFTs is a good thing, it’s difficult to malign those same firms for, well, making markets.
> They rent satellites to count how many trucks leave factories.
This isn’t their business model in the slightest. Quant funds certainly do this, but HFTs look for alpha in market microstructure.
> They have access to person-to-person dark pool trades that never show up on the normal exchanges.
Institutional investors can use dark pools to minimize market impact when trade large blocks. HFTs don’t benefit from having limited information on these flows.
> Algorithmic trading is a secretive black box
Algorithmic trading != HFT in the same manner that a rectangle is not a square.
> It can scale up infinitely.
HFT strategies don’t scale. ‘Scalable’ strategies support a large amount of capital. HFTs run high sharpe, low capacity strategies.
Either way, those hft firms definitely like retail order flow data. My guess is they're easier to "pick nickels in front of steamroller" kinda trades than institutional money which may cause extended one way moves that hits high frequency balanced traders adversely.
I'm also entirely talking out of my ass in the last paragraph. I don't actually know that any of what I said is true. Just speculation.
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).
2) even if that were not true, hft works on volumes. So I contradict my previous speculative comment by saying this but volumes of institutional flows absolutely dwarves retail flows. You'd have much more opportunities trading around institutional money than retail money.
So if you've got a company and the city in which it's headquartered just gets a strong buy signal, sure that could be random but I'd imagine ...
Surely having the meta-data on who is trading and linking that to trades is the primary benefit?
The best traders in the world are worth billions? So the above translates to "I am a billionaire". Seems unlikely!
Whether that merits the title, on the other hand...
> totalzero: i am the best.
But we're going through history with a fine-tuned brush and destroying anyone who doesn't fit into our modern conception of socially acceptable.
It'd be dumb to say the PC crowd is always getting it wrong. They do get it right often, but the pitchfork mob career/life ending response is where I part ways.
Where I differ, and I wish more people took a more rational approach to it, is that we're all flawed humans moving through a fucked up world. And we're unfairly destroying manu great minds and contributors in the process using some idealistic and unrealistic standard that none of us will ever achiever.
The end result is that the only people we allow to be leaders are milquetoast, authority-loving, angels who've never experimented in their lives.
This kind of this destroys culture. And the solution is to stop taking these small highly vocal mobs so serious and look at what they are. New idealistic well-intentioned Puritans 2.0.
We need to embrace the chaos and let people get offended again, and move on with our lives, because it really isn't that bad. It's not the way we reach progress.
If you want progress them embrace experimentation of all kinds, not some overton window with an ever growing list of things that are not okay. Or reevaluating the great people in history as if they grew up in the 1990s/early 2000s.
History is littered with mistakes but it's also full of great moments and experimentation and progress. The more we shut down this chaos every time we get offended the less great culture we'll get out of it.
If in the 1700s+ free speech had a clause where no one can get offended ever we'd live in the most boring and backwards world imaginable. The pseudo-progressives are attacking the very freedoms that allows progress to exist. And we need people will balls again to set up and push back. Because we aren't getting it from our university administrators trying to protector their jobs or from corporate pro-diversity divisions that are trying to keep up with culture, so you keep buy their products.
Top-down control of what is and what is not okay from culture is not that solution, period. Not doing that has allowed culture to flourish in the free democratic western states for decades and we're moving backwards, always with the best intentions, but too quickly to realize the side-effects and massive downsides of doing so.
/rant
https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2020-02-20/mo...
Worth a read. Short version is that a lot of the ways people lose money are hard to just do the inverse of.
Those are considered illegal in US. CFD and like skirt the law here.
The big problem with bucket shops is that they tend to not honor the bets once you start winning too much as Jesse Livermore found out in late 1890s.
Still common today with all the fake forex exchanges. The rare winners have trouble getting money out.
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
Their biggest losers are probably making essentially random bets in such a stupid way that they lose all their money.
(This is what happens when a society stops reading books.)
Reading this whole thread is nerve-wracking and puts me through the ringer.
Turn off adblock and go to finance and forex oriented sites. You will see many ads for them at least in Europe.
A common marketing strategy for them is to offer heavy affiliate comissions and this leads to make-money-with-forex type of affiliate sites. That's another sign.
Bigger ones would be someone like Saxo Bank which started as a bucket shop in 90s and now is medium sized and somewhat legitimate now.
Another sign to be aware is the use of Metatrader software. Up to version 5 now.
I am sure there are turnkey solutions offering a whole bucket-shop as a service.
Even if there are honest bucket-shops you are still betting against the house not against other players in the market. Might as well bet on horses or sports then.
EDIT: nice discussion here on situation in UK: https://www.elitetrader.com/et/threads/is-there-an-actual-ma...
Specifically an eggcorn involves an erroneous analysis, in the name example a person figures an acorn does look rather like an egg and so maybe that's why the name for it is "eggcorn". Likewise "tow the line" mistakes the metaphor as involving pulling a rope rather than standing against a chalk mark ("toe the line") and "free reign" assumes it's about some analogy to absolute power of kings rather than controlling horses.
The top 5 Asian countries by size are Russia, China, India, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia. None of them have correctness, in fact all of them are anti-PC and see it as a weakness, especially in China and Russia where westerners are viewed as thin-skinned and weak minded due to PC culture. And in 3 of them people will either express real hate speech or outright violence towards homosexuals.
Your flowery ideals about the world around you are proving the point I was making.
"Political correctness is a right-wing term used when they want to call somebody X, but may face social consequences for doing so."
He thinks terms like 'political correctness' and 'victim culture' are some sort of right-wing slurs for virtuous attributes. He doesn't seem to be aware that this notion doesn't exist for 90%+ of the world's population.
Political correctness is a right-wing term used when they want to call somebody X, but may face social consequences for doing so.
It's not a wealthy western phenomena. It's global and it's as old as the hills.
NB: I have lived in these countries, and I am also part of what you may call a "protected group" in western areas. I have come to terms with it.
Counter examples:
1 - PRC's treatment of Uighar muslims, LGBTQ+, Tibetans
2 - Light-hearted potrayals of lolicon, sexual harassment in the entertainment (specifically anime) industry
3 - "No foreigners / (insert specific race group here)" signs in some Japanese establishment that normalize xenophobia.
All the objectionable language used there is self-applied. The members of that community call themselves gay, autist, etc. Are they trying to persecute themselves, and evading social standards by calling it comedy?
To him, it’s insane that a white person could care about a non-white; or a straight could care about a queer. He thinks that’s fake.
It’s sad, but it’s a peek inside the mind of a shitty human being who had abhorrent parents.
Only in the West do they lose their mind defending the honor of people who are not in their in-group. I'm not sure if that is honorable, or just idiotic.
