On Sat, 30 Jan 2021 05:03:00 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote:

On Friday, January 29, 2021 at 6:41:41 PM UTC-5, Jim Joyce wrote:
On Fri, 29 Jan 2021 05:48:30 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote:

On Thursday, January 28, 2021 at 2:30:11 PM UTC-5, Jim Joyce wrote:
On Thu, 28 Jan 2021 07:26:33 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote:
On Thursday, January 28, 2021 at 9:21:47 AM UTC-5, Ed Pawlowski wrote:
On 1/28/2021 3:35 AM, Jim Joyce wrote:


You are probably right. It makes gold, ammo and MREs an attractive
investment.

I'll pass on each of those since I'm not seeing the upside, but we were
pretty fortunate to be able to buy 250 shares of Gamestop stock at $13 a
week or two ago. Today's closing price was $347.51, giving us a gain of
about $80K in less than 2 weeks.

Probably a good time to unload it before the bubble bursts. I bet a lot
of late comers will get hit hard.

Most of these people think they can get out anytime, get out if it goes down
5%, etc. It's very possible it will end with trading being halted either by the
exchange or SEC. In which case, if you are still holding it, you're toast.
Bunker Hunt learned a similar lesson back in 1980 when he tried to corner
the silver market. Those running the markets won. And even if that doesn't
happen, it could suddenly plummet by 50% or more as everyone tries to get
out at the same time. I would expect there are plenty of dummies that have
most of their IRA in this, have used margin to buy it, etc.
People who are manually initiating buy/sell orders are always going to be
at a tremendous disadvantage compared to letting a computer manage it.

That's a factor only if you're doing split second day trading. It had nothing to
do with what went on with Gamestop.


Those same people may not even realize that trades continue to happen
regardless of whether the market is open. A computer can watch all related
activity, around the clock, and will carry out your decisions without
emotion or delay. Humans like to sleep and do other things.

Yes, it will carry them out, eg execute a sell order on a stop, but that doesn't
mean if you have an order in to sell at 150 that you're going to get filled at 150
when everyone has sell orders hitting at the same time. It also does you no
good if the exchange halts trading, which they can and have done in extreme cases.
In this case, the exchange didn't halt trading.

Now the big dust-up is that the Robinhood folks halted buying via their
app, so that stopped the retail buying for people who use that app, but
they didn't halt selling, and they didn't do anything at all to hinder the
institutionalists (the hedge fund managers). Thus, they disadvantaged the
little guys and benefited the hedge fund managers, the very people they
claim to be against. It seems like they felt some real pressure to give the
hedge fund managers an opportunity to get out.

I heard someone explaining the technical details of the issue on the radio.
He sounded knowledgeable. He said the issue was the capitol requirements
that are required for broker/dealers and that due to so many people holding
positions in Gamestop and it's value, Robinhood no longer had the required
capitol required. Had they not put the measures in place, they would have
been in violation of the law or exchange rules.

That's pretty much word for word what the Robinhood CEO said in a TV
interview. Pretty quickly, he was followed on multiple channels by
financial experts saying he was blowing smoke, and that it appeared that he
blocked retail buying (because buying drives the price up) as a response to
pressure he was likely receiving from the hedge fund people (who needed the
price to fall). Selling, which drives the price down, was never blocked.

It doesn't matter much, though. Robinhood caved, after the hedge fund
managers had time to get out, and no other brokerage houses followed suit
to block anything.