To paraphrase Mark Twain, it’s easier to fool people into believing they’ll make piles of money than it is to convince them they’ve been fooled. Here’s the true story of stock investors who smoked so much “hopium” they lost their shirts — and their minds.
social media has done fucking wild things to our collective ability to even conceive of opsec. how many of these asshole companies do you think would survive if we taught opsec and data security in high school like we should?
Yeah, cryptocurrency people also are very weird re their security, for all the things they say about how their shit is revolutionary they never seem to really grasp the further security implications. I recall the person posting on a bitcoin place about his travel plans in way to much detail and if people wanted to meet up (a nice mugging target I’d say, hope they didn’t get mugged), but also the bitcoin boat thing where only John Mcafee seemed to have thought about personal security in a libertarian world and brought actual hired goons to protect him (I doubt many of the coiners realized that this kind of thing also creates a risk for them in the libertarian world as now there is a personal security red queen race).
Hedge fund managers (and their staff) can read reddit, of course, and they can even participate and - for example - manipulate people into betting on a stock they themselves have a “leveraged long” bet on (or desperately need to dump for whatever reason). It’s important to remember that those with the deepest pockets are very likely to win here, and also that hedge funds (and other institutional investors) might have deep pockets in part because they use investment money from everybody’s pension funds. In rare cases (such as Gamestop) they may be taken by surprise, but only when there is a very specific attack from an angle they didn’t expect, which is hard to replicate systematically IMHO.
Traditional collective action is successful mainly because actual people show up (or refuse to show up at their workplaces) in large numbers. IMHO it’s impossible to replicate that via accounts on a trading app and anonymous sock puppets. This is simply not how financial markets work.
Also, if this gets more people addicted to gambling on the stock market (which obviously happened), Wall Street is going to win either way through fees etc.
Gamestop just seemed to me like a ‘that will only work once’ thing, as now their moves are predictable and dumb, and dumb predictable people are easily exploited on the stock market. Just sell them BBBY!
it always confused me a bit, just due to the ‘you know wallstreet people can read reddit right?’ factor.
social media has done fucking wild things to our collective ability to even conceive of opsec. how many of these asshole companies do you think would survive if we taught opsec and data security in high school like we should?
Yeah, cryptocurrency people also are very weird re their security, for all the things they say about how their shit is revolutionary they never seem to really grasp the further security implications. I recall the person posting on a bitcoin place about his travel plans in way to much detail and if people wanted to meet up (a nice mugging target I’d say, hope they didn’t get mugged), but also the bitcoin boat thing where only John Mcafee seemed to have thought about personal security in a libertarian world and brought actual hired goons to protect him (I doubt many of the coiners realized that this kind of thing also creates a risk for them in the libertarian world as now there is a personal security red queen race).
Hedge fund managers (and their staff) can read reddit, of course, and they can even participate and - for example - manipulate people into betting on a stock they themselves have a “leveraged long” bet on (or desperately need to dump for whatever reason). It’s important to remember that those with the deepest pockets are very likely to win here, and also that hedge funds (and other institutional investors) might have deep pockets in part because they use investment money from everybody’s pension funds. In rare cases (such as Gamestop) they may be taken by surprise, but only when there is a very specific attack from an angle they didn’t expect, which is hard to replicate systematically IMHO.
Traditional collective action is successful mainly because actual people show up (or refuse to show up at their workplaces) in large numbers. IMHO it’s impossible to replicate that via accounts on a trading app and anonymous sock puppets. This is simply not how financial markets work.
Also, if this gets more people addicted to gambling on the stock market (which obviously happened), Wall Street is going to win either way through fees etc.
IMHO, the only way to “win” here is not to play.
Gamestop just seemed to me like a ‘that will only work once’ thing, as now their moves are predictable and dumb, and dumb predictable people are easily exploited on the stock market. Just sell them BBBY!