On Tuesday, March 2, 2021 at 10:13:03 AM UTC-5, wrote:
On Tue, 2 Mar 2021 06:20:25 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote:

On Monday, March 1, 2021 at 11:43:44 PM UTC-5, wrote:
On Mon, 1 Mar 2021 23:12:22 -0500, Ed Pawlowski wrote:

On 3/1/2021 6:40 PM, wrote:
On Mon, 1 Mar 2021 16:52:51 -0500, Ralph Mowery
wrote:

In article ,
says...

How can there be an electric charge of one weeks of power that exceeds
abot 3 times what it should be for a year ?

Deregulation.

Simply put, as the supply of electricity approached zero, the price of electricity
approached infinity.

Cindy Hamilton



Looks like that should somehow come under the price gouging laws. Where
if due to some disaster prices can not rise much above the normal price
range.

Bear in mind this was only one company offering a very speculative
pricing scheme tied to the wholesale price of power with no caps on
the top or bottom number. Nobody complained when they were getting
electricity for half price or less.
There were plenty of normal options for these people.
If you really want to play this game, give them an account number with
limited funds in it and fight with them before you pay, not after the
fact. The guy who gave them access to his life savings was a moron.


While I'd normally agree with you, this is beyond all ethical and moral
business practice. If a normal bill is say $100 and it jumped to
$1000 it would be bad, but to jump to $10,000?

If I bought Game Stop or Bitcoin and it went to $0. I'd agree but this
is far beyond what anyone could ever guess. It is not like buying a
risky stock or a poker game.
Why not? If you had a short position on a stock that skyrocketed you
would need to make good on those shares at the market price. You could
be on the hook for thousands in a wink of an eye.

First you brought up commodities and I asked you to show us any example
where any commodity ever did anything like what we saw in TX, ie to go
up by a factor of 100x in a few days. Failing that, now you want to move to stocks.
So show us an example of that then. Where a stock skyrocketed
by anything like 100x in a few days. Nothing like it. And if it did start
to happen, you would know or should know it was happening and you could
get out when it was up 20%, 50%, 100%. Gamestop is the most extreme
example of anything like that I've ever seen and that's exactly what happened
there. It went up a factor of 20x, over many days. Furthermore, you couldn't
maintain the short position, without having sufficient capital to continue to
cover it. Unless you had the margin account capital to back it up, you'd have
to cover it or the brokerage would close the position without your.
It's nothing at all like a consumer in TX being unaware of what
the electricity price they were being charged today is and it going up 100x
in just a few days. Factor in that life experience for consumers, many of
which are elderly and/or not too smart is that utility bills can vary, but not
by 100x in just a few days. But I'm sure most of them know the futures
markets or shorting stocks can have a lot of risk and you need to be very
careful. This is like walking into a coffee shop, asking for a large coffee,
drinking it and then when you go to pay the bill, they say your owe $175
instead of $1.75. I suppose that would be OK too, it's the customer's
fault for not checking the price first? There is your correct analogy.

I told you I don't play commodities but I imagine people who do can
tell you some stories.

In other words you have no example of any commodity that went up 100X in
just a few days. That's understandable, because it doesn't exist.


As for the options market, just look at those
people who were stuck in a short squeeze on GameStop and they bought
on a margin. The thought is you can lever thousands into tens or even
hundreds of thousands but you also assume the same kind of risk.

Like Scott said, those "people" were mostly hedge funds. If not and they
are individual investors, then to be shorting stocks it's reasonable to expect
that you have some smarts and that you are at risk. And again, even then
Gamestop didn't got up 100X, it went up about 20X and that took many
days, almost everyone that was short was monitoring their position and
had many days to get out. Not so with those TX utility bills.


In real life I don't need a better example of stupid financial
decisions than Griddy. It happened.
Bob had the right answer.
If you are going to play this game, you better be watching the market
24/7 instead of just being happy your lights are on without asking how
much that costs. These people could have cut their losses by flipping
the main breaker right away. That $10 grand or whatever would have
bought a real nice whole house generator and had plenty left over.


Sure, I expected that would be your answer. Expecting regulators to prevent
this kind of absurd ripoff is too much to ask for. And that is exactly what it was.
Or are you going to try to tell us that some power suppliers had legitimate
costs that suddenly went up 100X in a day? But at least it's consistent with
your '**** the Kurds". This time it's **** all the consumers in TX, it's their
fault and this kind of abuse of capitalism is OK. Are you living in 1900?
Even the barrons of the day back then probably didn't pull this crap.