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What $GME has taught me in 36 hours of day trading

Jumped on the $GME bandwagon on Friday, 4 @ ~316. My 36 hours of day trading has already taught me that no matter how this plays out, I will never YOLO on a bubble ever again.
The principle seemed straightforward: hedge funds got lazy/greedy, over-shorted their positions, bet against a company that wasn't actually going under, and some astute monkies on reddit caught them and triggered a short squeeze. Even as someone who knows almost nothing about the stock market, the basic premise makes sense. But the devil's in the details, and hype is blinding.
First red flag was when I realized DeepFuckingValue did not bet on the short squeeze, he bet on undervalued stock price over a year ago. He has also trimmed his position such that no matter what happens in the squeeze, he walks away with 8 figures. So the people screaming "if he's still in, I'm still in!" and "look at those brass balls, if he can lose $5MM in a day then I can hold" are really living up to the dumb ape meme. He didn't lose $5MM yesterday, he lost $5MM in *unrealized gains*, there is a *huge* difference.
Second red flag was a common sense idea that hedge funds won't go down without a fight, and they have literally billions of dollars and decades of experience. You don't get that without learning how to game the system in complex, subtle ways. So even if they are still heavily shorted (which they might not even be anymore), and even if somehow WSB is holding some kind of meaningful leverage over them, that doesn't rule out the very real possibility they have a dozen ways out of this that people like me have no idea about.
But even in the off chance that somehow this turns around, and $GME does go "to the moon," that doesn't change the fact that it's bad long-term strategy to bet on bubbles and jump on bandwagons. They almost certainly fail, and if they don't, they only serve to inflate egos that will fall even harder on the next gamble. I'm still holding my shares but I don't expect to see my ~$1200 ever again. In the off chance I break even or see a profit here, I will count it as dumb luck and use it as seed money to learn how to invest in real long term gains.
Edit: holy shit RIP my inbox. No way I can read all that.
Want to clarify a few things. Not financial advice.
My position: I knew I was late to the party. I wanted to gamble. I knew what I was doing, and (mostly) why I did it. Hindsight showed me it was more based on emotion than I wanted to admit, but still, I'm not surprised by the outcome so far, and I'm totally OK with taking the L and calling it a lesson learned. I don't blame DFV, WSB, or anyone for my choices. I own them, even proudly, because I wanted to step out and take a calculated risk vs. sit on the sidelines out of fear of loss. I'm holding because I already bought my tickets to this ride, want to see this thing play out, and I'm fine with gambling the final $300 on the outside chance things turn around.
Your positions: brothers, sisters, nonbinary siblings: you are not your portfolio. whether up or down, your value is not based on how big or small an imaginary number is. you are a human being on the bleeding edge of 3.5 BILLION years of evolution, you have more actual success in your past and potential success in your future than you'll ever know. 12 years ago I was a penniless alcoholic literally stealing change from my grandpa to get loaded on 211 Steel Reserve. I hit my bottom, joined AA, and now I'm a network engineer, wife, kids, the whole lot. Anything is possible if you don't give up on yourself. But I know it's not that easy, we all need borrowed self-esteem before we can see the real value inside. So if this $GME gamble hit you hard, please reach out to someone. don't give up. Hell, this bubble isn't even over, it might even turn around! But either way, don't give up.
Edit2:
wow, never expected this to go this far. wrote it on my way out the door as a way to cope with the situation. read a ton of replies, probably missed most of them. thanks for all the love and hate and everything inbetween! A few more points:
Edit3 2/3/21:
Full disclosure, I closed my position this morning at a ~$900 realized loss.
My gut says the squeeze happened, short interest isn't what I thought it was on Friday, and the stock will return to actual value soon.
submitted by austindcc to stocks [link] [comments]

Gamestop Big Picture: The Short Singularity Pt 3 - WTF edition

Disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor. This entire post represents my personal views and opinions, and should not be taken as financial advice (or advice of any kind whatsoever). I encourage you to do your own research, take anything I write with a grain of salt, and hold me accountable for any mistakes you may catch. Also, full disclosure, I hold a net long position in GME, but my cost basis is very low (average ~$67--I have to admit, the drop today was too tasty so my cost basis went up from yesterday)/share with my later buys averaged in), and I'm using money I can absolutely lose. My capital at risk and tolerance for risk generally is likely substantially different than yours. In this post I will go a little further and speculate more than I'd normally do in a post due to the questions I've been getting, so fair warning, some of it might be very wrong. I suspect we'll learn some of the truth years from now when some investigative journalist writes a book about it.
Thank you everyone for the comments and questions on the first and second post on this topic.
Today was a study in the power of fear, courage, and the levers you can pull when you wield billions of dollars...
Woops, excuse me. I'm sorry hedge fund guys... I meant trillions of dollars--I just briefly forget you control not just your own but a lot of other peoples' money too for a moment there.
Also, for people still trading this on market-based rationale (as I am), it was a good day to measure the conviction behind your thesis. I like to think I have conviction, but in case you are somehow not yet familiar with the legend of DFV, you need to see these posts (fair warning, nsfw, and some may be offended/triggered by the crude language). The last two posts might be impressive, but you should follow it in chronological order and pay attention to the evolution of sentiment in the comments to experience true enlightenment.
Anyway, I apologize, but this post will be very long--there's just a lot to unpack.

Pre-Market

Disclaimer: given yesterday's pre-market action I didn't even pay attention to the screen until near retail pre-market. I'm less confident in my ability to read what's going on in a historical chart vs the feel I get watching live, but I'll try.
Early in the pre-market it looks to me like some momentum traders are taking profit, discounting the probability that the short-side will give them a deep discount later, which you can reasonably assume given the strategy they ran yesterday. If they're right they can sell some small volume into the pre-market top, wait for the hedge funds try to run the price back down, and then lever up the gains even higher buying the dip. Buy-side here look to me like people FOMOing and YOLOing in at any price to grab their slice of gainz, or what looks to be market history in the making. No way are short-side hedge funds trying to cover anything at these prices.
Mark Cuban--well said! Free markets baby!
Mohamed El-Erian is money in the bank as always. "upgrade in quality" on the pandemic drop was the best, clearest actionable call while most were at peak panic, and boy did it print. Your identifying the bubble as the excessive short (vs blaming retail activity) is money yet again. Also, The PAIN TRADE (sorry, later interview segment I only have on DVR, couldn't find on youtube--maybe someone else can)!
The short attack starts, but I'm hoping no one was panicking this time--we've seen it before. Looks like the momentum guys are minting money buying the double dip into market open.
CNBC, please get a good market technician to explain the market action. Buy-side dominance, sell-side share availability evaporating into nothing (look at day-by-day volume last few days), this thing is now at runaway supercritical mass. There is no changing the trajectory unless you can change the very fabric of the market and the rules behind it (woops, I guess I should have knocked on wood there).
If you know the mechanics, what's happening in the market with GME is not mysterious AT ALL. I feel like you guys are trying to scare retail out early "for their own good" (with all sincerity, to your credit) rather than explain what's happening. Possibly you also fear that explaining it would equate to enabling/encouraging people to keep trying to do it inappropriately (possibly fair point, but at least come out and say that if that's the case). Outside the market, however...wow.

You Thought Yesterday Was Fear? THIS is Fear!

Ok short-side people, my hat is off to you. Just when I thought shouting fire in a locked theater was fear mongering poetry in motion, you went and took it to 11. What's even better? Yelling fire in a theater with only one exit. That way people can cause the financial equivalent of stampede casualties. Absolutely brilliant.
Robin Hood disables buying of GME, AMC, and a few of the other WSB favorites. Other brokerages do the same. Even for people on 0% margin. Man, and here I thought I had seen it all yesterday.
Side note: I will give a shout out to TD Ameritrade. You guys got erroneously lumped together with RH during an early CNBC segment, but you telegraphed the volatility risk management changes and gradually ramped up margin requirements over the past week. No one on your platform should have been surprised if they were paying attention. And you didn't stop anyone from trading their own money at any point in time. My account balance thanks you. I heard others may have had problems, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt given the DDOS attacks that were flyiing around
Robin Hood. Seriously WTF. I'm sure it was TOTALLY coincidence that your big announcements happen almost precisely when what has to be one of the best and most aggressive short ladder attacks of all time starts painting the tape, what looked like a DDOS attack on Reddit's CDN infrastructure (pretty certain it was the CDN because other stuff got taken out at the same time too), and a flood of bots hit social media (ok, short-side, this last one is getting old).
Taking out a large-scale cloud CDN is real big boy stuff though, so I wouldn't entirely rule out nation state type action--those guys are good at sniffing out opportunities to foment social unrest.
Anyway, at this point, as the market dives, I have to admit I was worried for a moment. Not that somehow the short-side would win (hah! the long-side whales in the pond know what's up), but that a lot of retail would get hurt in the action. That concern subsided quite a bit on the third halt on that slide. But first...
A side lesson on market orders
Someone printed bonus bank big time (and someone lost--I feel your pain, whoever you are).
During the face-ripping volatility my play money account briefly ascended to rarified heights of 7 figures. It took me a second to realize it, then another second to process it. Then, as soon as it clicked, that one, glorious moment in time was gone.
What happened?
During the insane chop of the short ladder attack, someone decided to sweep the 29 Jan 21 115 Call contracts, but they couldn't get a grip on the price, which was going coast to coast as IV blew up and the price was being slammed around. So whoever was trying to buy said "F it, MARKET ORDER" (i.e. buy up to $X,XXX,XXX worth of contracts at any price). This is referred to as a sweep if funded to buy all/most of the contracts on offer (HFT shops snipe every contract at each specific price with a shotgun of limit orders, which is far safer, but something only near-market compute resources can do really well). For retail, or old-tech pros, if you want all the contracts quickly, you drop a market order loaded with big bucks and see what you get... BUT, some clever shark had contracts available for the reasonable sum of... $4,400, or something around that. I was too stunned to grab a screencap. The buy market order swept the book clean and ran right into that glorious, nigh-obscene backstop limit. So someone got nearly $440,000 PER CONTRACT that was, at the time theoretically priced at around $15,000. $425,000 loss... PER CONTRACT. Maybe I'm not giving the buyer enough credit.. you can get sniped like that even if you try to do a safety check of the order book first, but, especially in low liquidity environments, if a HFT can peak into your order flow (or maybe just observes a high volume of sweeps occurring), they can end up front running your sweep, pick off the reasonable contracts, and slam a ridiculous limit sell order into place before your order makes it to the exchange. Either way, I hope that sweep wasn't loaded for bear into the millions. If so... OUCH. Someone got cleaned out.
So, the lesson here folks... in a super high volatility, low-liquidity market, a market order will just run up the ladder into the first sell order it can find, and some very brutal people will put limit sells like that out there just in case they hit the jackpot. And someone did. If you're on the winning side, great. It can basically bankrupt you if you're on the losing side. My recommendation: Just don't try it. I wouldn't be surprised if really shady shenanigans were involved in this, but no way to know (normally that's crazy-type talk, but after today....peeking at order flow and sniping sweeps is one of the fastest, most financially devastating ways to bleed big long-side players, just sayin').
edit *so while I was too busy trying not to spit out my coffee to grab a screenshot, piddlesthethug was faster on the draw and captured this: https://imgur.com/gallery/RI1WOuu
Ok, so I guess my in-the-moment mental math was off by about 10%. Man, that hurts just thinking about the guy who lost on that trade.*
Back to the market action..

A Ray of Light Through the Darkness

So I was worried watching the crazy downward movement for two different reasons.
On the one hand, I was worried the momentum pros would get the best discounts on the dip (I'll admit, I FOMO'd in too early, unnecessarily raising my cost basis).
On the other hand, I was worried for the retail people on Robin Hood who might be bailing out into incredibly steep losses because they had only two options: Watch the slide, or bail. All while dealing with what looked to me like a broad-based cloud CDN outage as they tried to get info from WSB HQ, and wondering if the insta-flood of bot messages were actually real people this time, and that everyone else was bailing on them to leave them holding the bag.
But I saw the retail flag flying high on the 3rd market halt (IIRC), and I knew most would be ok. What did I see, you ask? Why, the glorious $211.00 / $5,000 bid/ask spread. WSB Reddit is down? Those crazy mofos give you the finger right on the ticker tape. I've been asked many times in the last few hours about why I was so sure shorts weren't covering on the down move. THIS is how I knew. For sure. It's in the market data itself.
edit So, there's feedback in the comments that this is likely more of a technical glitch. Man, at least it was hilarious in the moment. But also now I know maybe not to trust price updates when the spread between orders being posted is so wide. Maybe a technical limitation of TOS
I'll admit, I tried to one-up those bros with a 4206.90 limit sell order, but it never made it through. I'm impressed that the HFT guys at the hedge fund must have realized really quickly what a morale booster that kind of thing would have been, and kept a lower backstop ask in place almost continuously from then on I'm sure others tried the same thing. Occasionally $1,000 and other high-dollar asks would peak through from time to time from then on, which told me the long-side HFTs were probably successfully sniping the backstops regularly.
So, translating for those of you who found that confusing. First, such a high ask is basically a FU to the short-side (who, as you remember, need to eventually buy shares to cover their short positions). More importantly, as an indicator of retail sentiment, it meant that NO ONE ELSE WAS TRYING TO SELL AT ANY PRICE LOWER THAN $5,000. Absolutely no one was bailing out.
I laughed for a minute, then started getting a little worried. Holy cow.. NO retail selling into the fear? How are they resisting that kind of price move??
The answer, as we all know now... they weren't afraid... they weren't even worried. They were F*CKING PISSED.
Meanwhile the momentum guys and long-side HFTs keep gobbling up the generously donated shares that the short-side are plowing into their ladder attack. Lots of HFT duels going on as long-side HFTs try to intercept shares meant to travel between short-side HFT accounts for their ladder. You can tell when you see prices like $227.0001 constantly flying across the tape. Retail can't even attempt to enter an order like that--those are for the big boys with privileged low-latency access.
The fact that you can even see that on the tape with human eyes is really bad for the short-side people.
Why, you ask? Because it means liquidity is drying up, and fast.

The Liquidity Tide is Flowing Out Quickly. Who's Naked (short)?

Market technicals time. I still wish this sub would allow pictures so I could throw up a chart, but I guess a table will do fine.
​
Date Volume Price at US Market Close
Friday, 1/22/21 197,157,196 $65.01
Monday, 1/25/21 177,874,00 $76.79
Tuesday, 1/26/21 178,587,974 $147.98
Wednesday, 1/27/21 93,396,666 $347.51
Thursday, 1/28/21 58,815,805 $193.60
What do I see? I see the shares available to trade dropping so fast that all the near-exchange compute power in the world won't let the short-side HFTs maintain order flow volume for their attacks. Many retail people asking me questions thought today was the heaviest trading. Nope--it was just the craziest.
What about the price dropping on Thursday? Is that a sign that the short-side pulled a miracle out and pushed price down against a parabolic move on even less volume than Wednesday? Is the long side running out of capital?
Nope. It means the short-side hedge funds are just about finished.
But wait, I thought the price needed to be higher for them to be taken out? How is it that price being lower is bad for them? Won't that allow them to cover at a lower price?
No, the volume is so low that they can't cover any meaningful fraction of their position without spiking the price parabolic almost instantly. Just not enough shares on offer at reasonable prices (especially when WSB keeps flashing you 6942.00s).
It's true, a higher price hurts, but the interest charge for one more day is just noise at this point. The only tick that will REALLY count is the last tick of trading on Friday.
In the meantime, the price drop (and watching the sparring in real time) tells me that the long-side whales and their HFT quants are so certain of the squeeze that they're no longer worried AT ALL about whether it will happen, and they aren't even worried at all about retail morale to help carry the water anymore.
Instead, they're now really, really worried about how CHEAPLY they can make it happen.
They are wondering if they can't edge out just a sliver more alpha out of what will already be a blow-out trade for the history books (probably). You see, to make it happen they just have to keep hoovering up shares. It doesn't matter what those shares cost. If you're certain that the squeeze is now locked in, why push the price up and pay more than you have to? Just keep pressing hard enough to force short-side to keep sending those tasty shares your way, but not so much you move the price. Short-side realizes this and doesn't try to drive price down too aggressively. They can't afford to let price run away, so they have to keep some pressure on at the lowest volume they can manage, but they don't want to push down too hard and give the long-side HFTs too deep of a discount and bleed their ammo out even faster. That dynamic keeps price within a narrow (for GME today, anyway) trading range for the rest of the day into the close.
Good plan guys, but those after market people are pushing the price up again. Damnit WSB bros and Euros, you're costing those poor long-side whales their extra 0.0000001% of alpha on this trade just so you can run up your green rockets... See, that's the kind of nonsense that just validates Lee Cooperman's concerns.
On a totally unrelated note, I have to say that I appreciate the shift in CNBC's reporting. Much more thoughtful and informed. Just please get a good market technician in there who will be willing to talk about what is going on under the hood if possible. A lot of people watching on the sidelines are far more terrified than they need to be because it all looks random to them. And they're worried that you guys look confused and worried--and if the experts on the news are worried....??!
You should be able to find one who has access to the really good data that we retailers can only guess at, who can explain it to us unwashed masses.

Ok, So.. Questions

There is no market justification for this. How can you tell me is this fundamentally sound and not just straight throwing money away irresponsibly?? (side note: not that that should matter--if you want to throw your money away why shouldn't you be allowed to?)
We're not trading in your securities pricing model. This isn't irrational just because your model says long and short positions are the same thing. The model is not a real market. There is asymmetrical counterparty risk here given the shorts are on the hook for all the money they have, and possibly all the money their brokers have, and possibly anyone with exposure to the broker too! You may want people to trade by the rules you want them to follow. But the rest of us trade in the real market as it is actually implemented. Remember? That's what you tell the retailers who take their accounts to zero. Remember what you told the KBIO short-squeezed people? They had fair warning that short positions carry infinite risk, including more than your initial investment. You guys know this. It's literally part of your job to know this.
But-but-the systemic risk!! This is Madness!
...Madness?
THIS. IS. THE MARKET!!! *Retail kicks the short-side hedge funds down an infinity loss black hole\*.
Ok, seriously though, that is actually a fundamentally sound, and properly profit-driven answer at least as justifiable as the hedge funds' justification for going >100% of float short. If they can be allowed to gamble INFINITE LOSSES because they expect to make profit on the possibility the company goes bankrupt, can't others do the inverse on the possibility the company I don't know.. doesn't go bankrupt and gets a better strategy from the team that created what is now a $43bn market cap company (CHWY) that does exactly some of the things GME needs to do (digital revenue growth) maybe? I mean, I first bought in on that fundamental value thesis in the 30s and then upped my cost basis given the asymmetry of risk in the technical analysis as an obvious no-brainer momentum trade. The squeeze is just, as WSB people might say, tendies raining down from on high as an added bonus.
I get that you disagree on the fundamental viability of GME. Great. Isn't that what makes a market?
Regarding the consequences of a squeeze, in practice my expectation was maybe at worst some kind of ex-market settlement after liquidation of the funds with exposure to keep things nice and orderly for the rest of the market. I mean, they handled the VW thing somehow right? I see now that I just underestimated elite hedge fund managers though--those guys are so hardcore (I'll explain why I think so a bit lower down).
If hedge fund people are so hardcore, how did the retail long side ever have a chance of winning this squeeze trade they're talking about?
Because it's an asymmetrical battle once you have short interest cornered. And the risk is also crazily asymmetrical in favor of the long side if short interest is what it is in GME. In fact, the hedge funds essentially cornered themselves without anyone even doing anything. They just dug themselves right in there. Kind of impressive really, in a weird way.
What does the short side need to cover? They need the price to be low, and they need to buy shares.
How does price move lower? You have to push share volume such that supply overwhelms demand and price therefore goes down (man, I knew econ 101 would come in handy someday).
But wait... if you have to sell shares to push the price down.. won't you just undo all your work when you have to buy it back to actually cover?
The trick is you have to push price down so hard, so fast, so unpredictably, that you SCARE OTHER PEOPLE into selling their shares too, because they're scared of taking losses. Their sales help push the price down for free! and then you scoop them up at discount price! Also, there are ways to make people scared other than price movement and fear of losses, when you get right down to it. So, you know, you just need to get really, really, really good at making people scared. Remember to add a line item to your budget to make sure you can really do it right.
On the other hand..
What does the long side need to do? They need to own as much of the shares as they can get their hands on. And then they need to hold on to them. They can't be weak hands either. They need to be hands that will hold even under the most intense heat of battle, and the immense pressure of mind-numbing fear... they need to be as if they were made of... diamond... (oh wow, maybe those WSB people kind of have a point here).
Why does this matter? Because at some point the sell side will eventually run out of shares to borrow. They simply won't be there, because they'll be safely tucked away in the long-side's accounts. Once you run out of shares to borrow and sell, you have no way to move the price anymore. You can't just drop a fat stack--excuse me, I mean suitcase (we're talking hedge fund money here after all)--of Benjamins on the ticker tape directly. Only shares. No more shares, no way to have any direct effect on the price whatsoever.
Ok, doesn't that just mean trading stops? Can't you just out-wait the long side then?
Well, you could.. until someone on the long side puts 1 share up on a 69420 ask, and an even crazier person actually buys at that price on the last tick on a Friday. Let's just say it gets really bad at that point.
Ok.. but how do the retail people actually get paid?
Well, to be quite honest, it's entirely up to each of them individually. You've seen the volumes being thrown around the past week+. I guarantee you every single retailer out there could have printed money multiple times trading that flow. If they choose to, and time it well. Or they could lose it all--this is the market. Some of them apparently seem to have some plan, or an implicit trust in certain individuals to help them know when to punch out. Maybe it works out, but maybe not. There will be financial casualties on the field for sure--this is the bare-knuckled capitalist jungle after all, remember? But everyone ponied up to the table with their own money somehow, so they all get to play in the big leagues just like everyone else. In theory, anyway.
And now, Probably the #1 question I've been asked on all of these posts has been: So what happens next? Do we get the infinity squeeze? Do the hedge funds go down?
Great questions. I don't know. No one does. That's what I've said every time, but I get that's a frustrating answer, so I'll write a bit more and speculate further. Please again understand these are my opinions with a degree of speculation I wouldn't normally put in a post.

The Market and the Economy. Main Street, Wall Street, and Washington

The pandemic has hurt so many people that it's hard to comprehend. Honestly, I don't even pretend to be able to. I have been crazy fortunate enough to almost not be affected at all. Honestly, it is a little unnerving to me how great the disconnect is between people who are doing fine (or better than fine, looking at my IRA) versus the people who are on the opposite side of the ever-widening divide that, let's be honest, has been growing wider since long before the pandemic.
People on the other side--who have been told they cannot work even if they want to, who wonder if congress will get it together to at least keep them from getting thrown out of their house if they have to keep taking one for the team for the good of all, are wondering if they're even living in the same reality.
Because all they see on the news each day is that the stock market is at record highs, or some amazing tech stocks have 10x'd in the last 6 months. How can that be happening during a pandemic? Because The Market is not The Economy. The Market looks forward to that brighter future that Economy types just need to wait for. Don't worry--it'll be here sometime before the end of the year. We think. We're making money on that assumption right now, anyway. Oh, by the way, if you're in The Market, you get to get richer as a minor, unearned side-effect of the solutions our governments have come up with to fight the pandemic.
Wow. That sounds amazing. How do I get to part of that world?
Retail fintech, baby. Physical assets like real estate might be a bit out of reach at the moment, but stocks will do. I can even buy fractional shares of BRK/A LOL.
Finally, I can trade for my own slice of heaven, watching that balance go up (and up--go stonks!!). Now I too get to dream the dream. I get to feel connected to that mythical world, The Market, rather than being stuck in the plain old Economy. Sure, I might blow up my account, but that's because it's the jungle. Bare-knuckled, big league capitalism going on right here, and at least I get to show up an put my shares on the table with everyone else. At least I'm playing the same game. Everyone has to start somewhere--at least now I get to start, even if I have to learn my lesson by zeroing my account a few times. I've basically had to deal with what felt like my life zeroing out a few times before. This is number on a screen going to 0 is nothing.
Laugh or cry, right? I'll post my losses on WSB and at least get some laughs.
Geez, some of the people here are making bank. I better learn from them and see if they'll let me in on their trades. Wow... this actually might work. I don't understand yet, but I trust these guys telling me to hold onto this crazy trade. I don't understand it, but all the memes say it's going to be big.
...WOW... I can pay off my credit card with this number. Do I punch out now? No? Hold?... Ok, getting nervous watching the number go down but I trust you freaks. We're still in the jungle, but at least I'm in with with my posse now. Market open tomorrow--we ride the rocket baby! And if it goes down, at least I'm going down with my crew. At least if that happens the memes will be so hilarious I'll forget to cry.
Wow.. I can't believe it... we might actually pull this off. Laugh at us now, "pros"!
We're in The Market now, and Market rules tell us what is going to happen. We're getting all that hedge fund money Right? Right?
Maybe.
First, I say maybe because nothing is ever guaranteed until it clears. Secondly, because the rules of The Market are not as perfectly enforced as we would like to assume. We are also finding out they may not be perfectly fair. The Market most experts are willing to talk about is really more like the ideal The Market is supposed to be. This is the version of the market I make my trading decisions in. However, the Real Market gets strange and unpredictable at the edges, when things are taken to extremes, or rules are pushed beyond the breaking point, or some of the mechanics deep in the guts of the Real Market get stretched. GME ticks basically all of those boxes, which is why so many people are getting nervous (aside from the crazy money they might lose). It's also important to remember that the sheer amount of money flowing through the market has distorting power unto itself. Because it's money, and people really, really, really like their money--especially when they're used to having a lot of it, and rules involving that kind of money tend to look more... flexible, shall we say.
Ok, back to GME. If this situation with GME is allowed to play out to its conclusion in The Market, we'll see what happens. I think all the long-side people get the chance to be paid (what, I'm not sure--and remember, you have to actually sell your position at some point or it's all still just numbers on your screen), but no one knows for certain.
But this might legitimately get so big that it spills out of The Market and back into The Economy.
Geez, and here I thought the point of all of this was so that we all get to make so much money we wouldn't ever have to think and worry about that thing again.
Unfortunately, while he's kind of a buzzkill, Thomas Petterfy has a point. This could be a serious problem.
It might blow out The Market, which will definitely crap on The Economy, which as we all know from hard experience, will seriously crush Main Street.
If it's that big a deal, we may even need Washington to be involved. Once that happens, who knows what to expect.. this kind of scenario being possible is why I've been saying I have no idea how this ends, and no one else does either.
How did we end up in this ridiculous situation? From GAMESTOP?? And it's not Retail's fault the situation is what it is.. why is everyone telling US that we need to back down to save The Market?? What about the short-side hedge funds that slammed that risk into the system to begin with?? We're just playing by the rules of The Market!!
Well, here are my thoughts, opinions, and some even further speculation... This may be total fantasy land stuff here, but since I keep getting asked I'll share anyway. Just keep that disclaimer in mind.

A Study in Big Finance Power Moves: If you owe the bank $10,000, it's your problem...

What happens when you owe money you have no way to pay back? It's a scary question to have to face personally. Still, on balance and on average, if you're fortunate enough to have access to credit the borrowing is a risk that is worth taking (especially if you're reasonably careful). Lenders can take a risk loaning you money, you take a risk by borrowing in order to do something now that you would otherwise have had to wait a long time or maybe would never have realistically been able to do otherwise. Sometimes it doesn't work out. Sometimes it's due to reasons totally beyond your control. In any case, if you find yourself there you have no choice but to dust yourself off, pick yourself up as best as you can, and try to move on and rebuild. A lot of people had to learn that in 2008. Man that year really sucked.
Wall street learned their lessons too. Most learned what I think most of us would consider the right lessons--lessons about risk management, and the need to guard vigilantly against systemic risk, concentration of risk through excess concentration of leverage on common assets, etc. Many suspect that at least a few others may have learned an entirely different set of, shall we say, unhealthy lessons. Also, to try to be completely fair, maybe managing other peoples' money on 10x+ leverage comes with a kind of pressure that just clouds your judgement. I could actually, genuinely buy that. I know I make mistakes under pressure even when I'm trading risk capital I could totally lose with no real consequence. Whatever the motive, here's my read on what's happening:
First, remember that as much fun as WSB are making of the short-side hedge fund guys right now, those guys are smart. Scary smart. Keep that in mind.
Next, let's put ourselves in their shoes.
If you're a high-alpha hedge fund manager slinging trades on a $20bn 10x leveraged to 200bn portfolio, get caught in a bad situation, and are down mark-to-market several hundred million.. what do you do? Do you take your losses and try again next time? Hell no.
You're elite. You don't realize losses--you double down--you can still save this trade no sweat.
But what if that doesn't work out so well and you're in the hole >$2bn? Obvious double down. Need you ask? I'm net up on the rest of my positions (of course), and the momentum when this thing makes its mean reversion move will be so hot you can almost taste the alpha from here. Speaking of momentum, imagine the move if your friends on TV start hyping the story harder! Genius!
Ok, so that still didn't work... this is now a frigging 7 sigma departure from your modeled risk, and you're now locked into a situation that is about as close to mathematically impossible to escape as you can get in the real world, and quickly converging on infinite downside. Holy crap. The fund might be liquidated by your prime broker by tomorrow morning--and man, even the broker is freaking out. F'in Elon Musk and his twitter! You're cancelling your advance booking on his rocket ship to Mars first thing tomorrow... Ok, focus--this might legit impact your total annual return. You need a plan, and you know the smartest people on the planet, right? The masters of the universe! Awesome--they've even seen this kind of thing before and still have the playbook!! Of course! It's obvious now--you borrow a few more billion and double down again first thing in the morning. So simple. Sticky note that Mars trip cancellation so you don't forget.
Ok... so that didn't work? You even cashed in some pretty heavy chits too. Ah well, that was a long shot anyway. So where were you? Oh yeah.. if shenanigans don't work, skip to page 10...
...Which says, of course, to double down again. Anyone even keeping track anymore? Oh, S3 says it's $40bn and we're going parabolic? Man, that chart gives me goosebumps. All according to plan...
So what happens tomorrow? One possible outcome of PURE FANTASTIC SPECULATION...
End of the week--phew. Never though it'd come. Where are you at now?... Over $9000\)!!! Wow. You did it boys, and as a bonus the memes will be so sweet.
\)side note: add 8 zeros to the end...
Awesome--your problems have been solved. Because...
​
..
​
BOOM
​
Now it's EVERYONE's problem. Come at me, Chamath, THIS is REAL baller shit.
Now all you gotta do is make all the hysterical retirees watching their IRAs hanging in the balance blame those WSB kids. Hahaha. Boomers, amirite? hate when those kids step on their law--I mean IRAs. GG guys, keep you memes. THAT is how it's done.
Ok, but seriously, I hope that's not how it ends. I guess we just take it day by day at this point.
Apologies for the length. Good luck in the market!
Also, apologies in advance for formatting, spelling, and grammatical errors. I was typing this thing in between doing all kinds of other things for most of the day.
Edit getting a bunch of questions on if it's possible the hedge funds are finding ways to cover in spite of my assumptions. Of course. I'm a retail guy trying to read the charts and price action. I don't have any special tools like the pros may have.
submitted by jn_ku to investing [link] [comments]

My Options Overview / Guide (V2)

Greeting Theta Gang boys and girls,
I hope you're well and not bankrupt after last week. I'm just now recovering mentally myself. I saw a few WSB converts and some newbies asking for tips, so here you go. V2 of my Options guide. I hope it helps.
​
I spent a huge amount of time learning about options and tried to distill my knowledge down into a helpful guide. This should especially be useful for newbies and growing options traders.
While I feel I’m a successful trader, I'm not a guru and my advice is not meant to be gospel, but this will hopefully be a good starting point, teach you a lot, and make you a better trader. I plan to keep typing up more info from my notebook, expanding this guide, and posting it every couple months.
Any feedback or additions are appreciated
Per requests, I added details of good and bad trades I made. Some painful lessons learned are now included. I also tried to organize this better as it got longer.
Here's what I tell options beginners:
I would strongly recommend buying a beginner's options book and read it cover to cover. That helped me a lot.
I like this beginner book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GWSXX8U/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_OxNDFb2GK9YW7
Helpful websites:
Don't trade until you understand:
Basics / Mechanics
General Tips and Ideas:
Profit Retention / Loss Mitigation
Trade Planning & Position Management Tips
-Advanced Beginner-
Spreads
Trading Mechanics, Taxes, Market Manipulation
-Intermediate / Advanced Strategies (work in progress)-
You’ll notice many of these strategies inverse one another.
Options Strategy Finder
This website is great for learning about new strategies, you’ll see many links to it below.
https://www.theoptionsguide.com/option-trading-strategies.aspx
Short Strangle / Straddle
Iron Condor and Iron Butterflies
Long Condor (Debit Call Condor)
Short Condor (Credit Call Condor)
Reverse Iron Condor
LEAPs
PMCC / PMCP
Advanced Orders
​
Disclaimer:
I’m not a financial adviser, I'm actually an engineer. I’m not telling you to invest in a specific stock/option or even use a specific strategy. I’ve outlined and more extensively elaborated on what I personally like. You should test several strategies and find what works best for you.
I'm just a guy who trades (mainly options) part-time for financial gain and fun. I don't claim to be some investing savant.
submitted by CompulsionOSU to thetagang [link] [comments]

For shills and new blood.

1st rule of wallstreetbets is that wallstreetbets is not an investment subreddit. 2nd rule of wallstreetbets is that wallstreetbets is NOT an investment subreddit
I've been subbed and unsubbed from this subreddit about a thousand times. I've lurked for years. I've posted. I've commented. The number of times that I've seen the term bagholder in the past 6 years I could count on one hand. The number of times I've seen the term bagholder in the past week would rival my loss porn in zimbabwean dollars.
Wallstreetbets is NOT an investment subreddit. Bagholding is what happens when you make a good investment, get greedy and miss the window of opportunity to cash in your investment. I can't be a bagholder because I wasn't ever investing.
I'm a gambler. This subreddit is for high risk high reward gambles particularly ones that occur with stocks, options, and trades. If I buy a stock and hold on to it as it falls to the ground, then plunges through the ground, then winds up in Satan's basement it's not because I was bag holding. It's because I made an epic gamble and the gamble lost.
This subreddit for the longest time has never had gains as it's highest priority. The honor has always been reserved for the highest %change. It's always been about taking risks. And it loves to see a high %loss just as much as a high %gain.
DFV isn't a hero because he put 13 million dollars into his pocket. He's a fucking hero because he dumped 50,000 into a deep OTM call. For months he lost money. Crazy amounts of money in fact. And you know what, he held. And this subreddit loved to see his losses. He's a hero because he held onto the ball long after most people would have sold.
But if the 4 million new people on this sub had logged in May of 2020, they'd all be talking about DFV as a "bagholder".
If you use the term bagholder, you don't understand this sub. Go elsewhere. Go to investing. Buy an index fund. Collect some dividends and set them up for reinvestment. But don't come here and pretend that you know shit about shit. You don't even know the fucking language, let alone the culture.
submitted by sputler to wallstreetbets [link] [comments]

My Options Overview / Guide

I spent a huge amount of time learning about options and tried to distill my knowledge down into a helpful guide, especially for newbies. My advice is not meant to be gospel, but a good starting point. I plan to keep typing up more info from my notebook, expanding this guide, and posting it every couple months. Any feedback or additions are appreciated, I want to keep improving this.
​
Here's what I tell options beginners:
I would strongly recommend buying a beginner's options book and read it cover to cover. That helped me a lot.
I like this book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GWSXX8U/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_OxNDFb2GK9YW7
​
Helpful websites:
https://www.tastytrade.com/tt
https://www.youtube.com/c/tastytrade1/featured
What is options trading? https://www.ally.com/do-it-right/investing/trading-options-for-beginners/?CP=EM2012111
Top 10 options mistakes: https://www.ally.com/do-it-right/investing/top-10-option-trading-mistakes/?CP=EM2012111
​
Don't trade until you understand:
​
Basics / Mechanics
​
General Tips (Save these for later):
​
-Intermediate / Advanced Strategies (work in progress)-
Iron Condor and Iron Butterflies
LEAPs
PMCC / PMCP
Disclaimebio: I'm just a guy who trades (mainly options) part-time for financial gain and fun. I've been pretty successful trading options, especially with theta (selling) strategies. I got heavily involved with options again in September 2020 after a long hiatus.
Edit: my first gold. Thanks options people!
submitted by CompulsionOSU to options [link] [comments]

Story Time: Silver short squeeze

How the Hunt Brothers Cornered the Silver Market and Then Lost it All

TL:DR: yes its long. Grab a beer.

​
Until his dying day in 2014, Nelson Bunker Hunt, who had once been the world’s wealthiest man, denied that he and his brother plotted to corner the global silver market.
Sure, back in 1980, Bunker, his younger brother Herbert, and other members of the Hunt clan owned roughly two-thirds of all the privately held silver on earth. But the historic stockpiling of bullion hadn’t been a ploy to manipulate the market, they and their sizable legal team would insist in the following years. Instead, it was a strategy to hedge against the voracious inflation of the 1970s—a monumental bet against the U.S. dollar.
Whatever the motive, it was a bet that went historically sour. The debt-fueled boom and bust of the global silver market not only decimated the Hunt fortune, but threatened to take down the U.S. financial system.
The panic of “Silver Thursday” took place over 35 years ago, but it still raises questions about the nature of financial manipulation. While many view the Hunt brothers as members of a long succession of white collar crooks, from Charles Ponzi to Bernie Madoff, others see the endearingly eccentric Texans as the victims of overstepping regulators and vindictive insiders who couldn’t stand the thought of being played by a couple of southern yokels.
In either case, the story of the Hunt brothers just goes to show how difficult it can be to distinguish illegal market manipulation from the old fashioned wheeling and dealing that make our markets work.
The Real-Life Ewings
Whatever their foibles, the Hunts make for an interesting cast of characters. Evidently CBS thought so; the family is rumored to be the basis for the Ewings, the fictional Texas oil dynasty of Dallas fame.
Sitting at the top of the family tree was H.L. Hunt, a man who allegedly purchased his first oil field with poker winnings and made a fortune drilling in east Texas. H.L. was a well-known oddball to boot, and his sons inherited many of their father’s quirks.
For one, there was the stinginess. Despite being the richest man on earth in the 1960s, Bunker Hunt (who went by his middle name), along with his younger brothers Herbert (first name William) and Lamar, cultivated an image as unpretentious good old boys. They drove old Cadillacs, flew coach, and when they eventually went to trial in New York City in 1988, they took the subway. As one Texas editor was quoted in the New York Times, Bunker Hunt was “the kind of guy who orders chicken-fried steak and Jello-O, spills some on his tie, and then goes out and buys all the silver in the world.”
Cheap suits aside, the Hunts were not without their ostentation. At the end of the 1970s, Bunker boasted a stable of over 500 horses and his little brother Lamar owned the Kansas City Chiefs. All six children of H.L.’s first marriage (the patriarch of the Hunt family had fifteen children by three women before he died in 1974) lived on estates befitting the scions of a Texas billionaire. These lifestyles were financed by trusts, but also risky investments in oil, real estate, and a host of commodities including sugar beets, soybeans, and, before long, silver.
The Hunt brothers also inherited their father’s political inclinations. A zealous anti-Communist, Bunker Hunt bankrolled conservative causes and was a prominent member of the John Birch Society, a group whose founder once speculated that Dwight Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent” of Soviet conspiracy. In November of 1963, Hunt sponsored a particularly ill-timed political campaign, which distributed pamphlets around Dallas condemning President Kennedy for alleged slights against the Constitution on the day that he was assassinated. JFK conspiracy theorists have been obsessed with Hunt ever since.
In fact, it was the Hunt brand of politics that partially explains what led Bunker and Herbert to start buying silver in 1973.
Hard Money
The 1970s were not kind to the U.S. dollar.
Years of wartime spending and unresponsive monetary policy pushed inflation upward throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. Then, in October of 1973, war broke out in the Middle East and an oil embargo was declared against the United States. Inflation jumped above 10%. It would stay high throughout the decade, peaking in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution at an annual average of 13.5% in 1980.
Over the same period of time, the global monetary system underwent a historic transformation. Since the first Roosevelt administration, the U.S. dollar had been pegged to the value of gold at a predictable rate of $35 per ounce. But in 1971, President Nixon, responding to inflationary pressures, suspended that relationship. For the first time in modern history, the paper dollar did not represent some fixed amount of tangible, precious metal sitting in a vault somewhere.
For conservative commodity traders like the Hunts, who blamed government spending for inflation and held grave reservations about the viability of fiat currency, the perceived stability of precious metal offered a financial safe harbor. It was illegal to trade gold in the early 1970s, so the Hunts turned to the next best thing.
📷
Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; chart by Priceonomics
As an investment, there was a lot to like about silver. The Hunts were not alone in fleeing to bullion amid all the inflation and geopolitical turbulence, so the price was ticking up. Plus, light-sensitive silver halide is a key component of photographic film. With the growth of the consumer photography market, new production from mines struggled to keep up with demand.
And so, in 1973, Bunker and Herbert bought over 35 million ounces of silver, most of which they flew to Switzerland in specifically designed airplanes guarded by armed Texas ranch hands. According to one source, the Hunt’s purchases were big enough to move the global market.
But silver was not the Hunts' only speculative venture in the 1970s. Nor was it the only one that got them into trouble with regulators.
Soy Before Silver
In 1977, the price of soybeans was rising fast. Trade restrictions on Brazil and growing demand from China made the legume a hot commodity, and both Bunker and Herbert decided to enter the futures market in April of that year.
A future is an agreement to buy or sell some quantity of a commodity at an agreed upon price at a later date. If someone contracts to buy soybeans in the future (they are said to take the “long” position), they will benefit if the price of soybeans rise, since they have locked in the lower price ahead of time. Likewise, if someone contracts to sell (that’s called the “short” position), they benefit if the price falls, since they have locked in the old, higher price.
While futures contracts can be used by soybean farmers and soy milk producers to guard against price swings, most futures are traded by people who wouldn’t necessarily know tofu from cream cheese. As a de facto insurance contract against market volatility, futures can be used to hedge other investments or simply to gamble on prices going up (by going long) or down (by going short).
When the Hunts decided to go long in the soybean futures market, they went very, very long. Between Bunker, Herbert, and the accounts of five of their children, the Hunts collectively purchased the right to buy one-third of the entire autumn soybean harvest of the United States.
To some, it appeared as if the Hunts were attempting to corner the soybean market.
In its simplest version, a corner occurs when someone buys up all (or at least, most) of the available quantity of a commodity. This creates an artificial shortage, which drives up the price, and allows the market manipulator to sell some of his stockpile at a higher profit.
Futures markets introduce some additional complexity to the cornerer’s scheme. Recall that when a trader takes a short position on a contract, he or she is pledging to sell a certain amount of product to the holder of the long position. But if the holder of the long position just so happens to be sitting on all the readily available supply of the commodity under contract, the short seller faces an unenviable choice: go scrounge up some of the very scarce product in order to “make delivery” or just pay the cornerer a hefty premium and nullify the deal entirely.
In this case, the cornerer is actually counting on the shorts to do the latter, says Craig Pirrong, professor of finance at the University of Houston. If too many short sellers find that it actually costs less to deliver the product, the market manipulator will be stuck with warehouses full of inventory. Finance experts refer to selling the all the excess supply after building a corner as “burying the corpse.”
“That is when the price collapses,” explains Pirrong. “But if the number of deliveries isn’t too high, the loss from selling at the low price after the corner is smaller than the profit from selling contracts at the high price.”
📷
The Chicago Board of Trade trading floor. Photo credit: Jeremy Kemp
Even so, when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission found that a single family from Texas had contracted to buy a sizable portion of the 1977 soybean crop, they did not accuse the Hunts of outright market manipulation. Instead, noting that the Hunts had exceeded the 3 million bushel aggregate limit on soybean holdings by about 20 million, the CFTC noted that the Hunt’s “excessive holdings threaten disruption of the market and could cause serious injury to the American public.” The CFTC ordered the Hunts to sell and to pay a penalty of $500,000.
Though the Hunts made tens of millions of dollars on paper while soybean prices skyrocketed, it’s unclear whether they were able to cash out before the regulatory intervention. In any case, the Hunts were none too pleased with the decision.
“Apparently the CFTC is trying to repeal the law of supply and demand,” Bunker complained to the press.
Silver Thursday
Despite the run in with regulators, the Hunts were not dissuaded. Bunker and Herbert had eased up on silver after their initial big buy in 1973, but in the fall of 1979, they were back with a vengeance. By the end of the year, Bunker and Herbert owned 21 million ounces of physical silver each. They had even larger positions in the silver futures market: Bunker was long on 45 million ounces, while Herbert held contracts for 20 million. Their little brother Lamar also had a more “modest” position.
By the new year, with every dollar increase in the price of silver, the Hunts were making $100 million on paper. But unlike most investors, when their profitable futures contracts expired, they took delivery. As in 1973, they arranged to have the metal flown to Switzerland. Intentional or not, this helped create a shortage of the metal for industrial supply.
Naturally, the industrialists were unhappy. From a spot price of around $6 per ounce in early 1979, the price of silver shot up to $50.42 in January of 1980. In the same week, silver futures contracts were trading at $46.80. Film companies like Kodak saw costs go through the roof, while the British film producer, Ilford, was forced to lay off workers. Traditional bullion dealers, caught in a squeeze, cried foul to the commodity exchanges, and the New York jewelry house Tiffany & Co. took out a full page ad in the New York Times slamming the “unconscionable” Hunt brothers. They were right to single out the Hunts; in mid-January, they controlled 69% of all the silver futures contracts on the Commodity Exchange (COMEX) in New York.
📷
Source: New York Times
But as the high prices persisted, new silver began to come out of the woodwork.
“In the U.S., people rifled their dresser drawers and sofa cushions to find dimes and quarters with silver content and had them melted down,” says Pirrong, from the University of Houston. “Silver is a classic part of a bride’s trousseau in India, and when prices got high, women sold silver out of their trousseaus.”
According to a Washington Post article published that March, the D.C. police warned residents of a rash of home burglaries targeting silver.
Unfortunately for the Hunts, all this new supply had a predictable effect. Rather than close out their contracts, short sellers suddenly found it was easier to get their hands on new supplies of silver and deliver.
“The main factor that has caused corners to fail [throughout history] is that the manipulator has underestimated how much will be delivered to him if he succeeds [at] raising the price to artificial levels,” says Pirrong. “Eventually, the Hunts ran out of money to pay for all the silver that was thrown at them.”
In financial terms, the brothers had a large corpse on their hands—and no way to bury it.
This proved to be an especially big problem, because it wasn’t just the Hunt fortune that was on the line. Of the $6.6 billion worth of silver the Hunts held at the top of the market, the brothers had “only” spent a little over $1 billion of their own money. The rest was borrowed from over 20 banks and brokerage houses.
At the same time, COMEX decided to crack down. On January 7, 1980, the exchange’s board of governors announced that it would cap the size of silver futures exposure to 3 million ounces. Those in excess of the cap (say, by the tens of millions) were given until the following month to bring themselves into compliance. But that was too long for the Chicago Board of Trade exchange, which suspended the issue of any new silver futures on January 21. Silver futures traders would only be allowed to square up old contracts.
Predictably, silver prices began to slide. As the various banks and other firms that had backed the Hunt bullion binge began to recognize the tenuousness of their financial position, they issued margin calls, asking the brothers to put up more money as collateral for their debts. The Hunts, unable to sell silver lest they trigger a panic, borrowed even more. By early March, futures contracts had fallen to the mid-$30 range.
Matters finally came to a head on March 25, when one of the Hunts’ largest backers, the Bache Group, asked for $100 million more in collateral. The brothers were out of cash, and Bache was unwilling to accept silver in its place, as it had been doing throughout the month. With the Hunts in default, Bache did the only thing it could to start recouping its losses: it start to unload silver.
On March 27, “Silver Thursday,” the silver futures market dropped by a third to $10.80. Just two months earlier, these contracts had been trading at four times that amount.
The Aftermath
After the oil bust of the early 1980s and a series of lawsuits polished off the remainder of the Hunt brothers’ once historic fortune, the two declared bankruptcy in 1988. Bunker, who had been worth an estimated $16 billion in the 1960s, emerged with under $10 million to his name. That’s not exactly chump change, but it wasn’t enough to maintain his 500-plus stable of horses,.
The Hunts almost dragged their lenders into bankruptcy too—and with them, a sizable chunk of the U.S. financial system. Over twenty financial institutions had extended over a billion dollars in credit to the Hunt brothers. The default and resulting collapse of silver prices blew holes in balance sheets across Wall Street. A privately orchestrated bailout loan from a number of banks allowed the brothers to start paying off their debts and keep their creditors afloat, but the markets and regulators were rattled.
Silver Spot Prices Per Ounce (January, 1979 - June, 1980)
📷
Source: Trading Economics
In the words of then CFTC chief James Stone, the Hunts’ antics had threatened to punch a hole in the “financial fabric of the United States” like nothing had in decades. Writing about the entire episode a year later, Harper’s Magazine described Silver Thursday as “the first great panic since October 1929.”
The trouble was not over for the Hunts. In the following years, the brothers were dragged before Congressional hearings, got into a legal spat with their lenders, and were sued by a Peruvian mineral marketing company, which had suffered big losses in the crash. In 1988, a New York City jury found for the South American firm, levying a penalty of over $130 million against the Hunts and finding that they had deliberately conspired to corner the silver market.
Surprisingly, there is still some disagreement on that point.
Bunker Hunt attributed the whole affair to the political motives of COMEX insiders and regulators. Referring to himself later as “a favorite whipping boy” of an eastern financial establishment riddled with liberals and socialists, Bunker and his brother, Herbert, are still perceived as martyrs by some on the far-right.
“Political and financial insiders repeatedly changed the rules of the game,” wrote the New American. “There is little evidence to support the ‘corner the market’ narrative.”
Though the Hunt brothers clearly amassed a staggering amount of silver and silver derivatives at the end of the 1970s, it is impossible to prove definitively that market manipulation was in their hearts. Maybe, as the Hunts always claimed, they just really believed in the enduring value of silver.
Or maybe, as others have noted, the Hunt brothers had no idea what they were doing. Call it the stupidity defense.
“They’re terribly unsophisticated,” an anonymous associated was quoted as saying of the Hunts in a Chicago Tribune article from 1989. “They make all the mistakes most other people make,” said another.
p.s. credit to Ben Christopher
​
submitted by theBacillus to wallstreetbets [link] [comments]

I work at a crooked casino. You don't gamble with money here.

Hi, everybody. My name is Sid, and I’m an addict.
It took me a long time to accept that. But when you take a job in a casino just so that you can be there all the time and try to gain an edge, you’re an addict. It’s obvious even to me. More so to my family and friends, who I barely see anymore.
It’s not pills or coke, booze or heroin that I’m hooked on. I’m addicted to gambling.
The casino that made me so obsessed is not an ordinary one, though. It’s far from ordinary.
You don’t play for money at Fantasy Casino. You play for your dreams.
I hear you laughing.
But have you ever had a really, really great dream? One that got so good you snapped awake the second it started to get really excellent?
Well, imagine that times a thousand. Times a million.
A dream so real and so perfect that all of your fantasies become reality. Time stretches out. You feel like you are there forever. A lifetime passes before your return.
Infinite wealth, the ability to fly like superman, you’re surrounded by sex and beautiful people all day as you relax in a palace built to your mind’s most exacting specifications of perfection.
But then you wake up, and in an instant it is gone.
The power, the wealth, the endless sex and supernatural powers.
Everything is suddenly NORMAL again.
And so you go back to the casino.
I went back to the casino.
But the problem with gambling is that you don’t always win. And when you lose, suddenly the winnings are gone as well, vanished without a trace. All I knew was that I had to have that feeling again.
So I went inside the giant building and then followed the secret signs which led to a door that led to a staircase going downwards.
I went down the stairs and knocked on the door marked “Private” and waited for an answer.
“Password.”
The voice on the other side of the black door waited for my response.
“Seramth Gin.” I said the unnatural words carefully and deliberately, still not knowing their meaning.
A friend had told me the password, a fellow gambler who I would later find dead in his apartment. His corpse white, bloated, and maggot-infested.
His eyes were black and filled with blood which streamed from his eye sockets like tears. He had bit his tongue clean off and his fingernails were found lodged in various surfaces throughout his apartment. Like he had been trying to claw his way out of a steel box that only he could see.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. That was later. At this point I was still hopeful for another wonderful dream. Still thankful for his advice to seek out the place.
The door opened and I walked inside. It was the same as it had been the day before, only less busy at this time – still early afternoon.
I approached the table I had been sitting at the night before.
Poker – Texas Hold ‘em: Ten dream limit – the sign read.
The rules were simple. You got a stack of chips. If you doubled them, you received a dream. If you lost them, you lost a dream.
I wasn’t concerned about losing dreams yet, I still didn’t understand exactly what that meant.
When I lost my first stack of chips, I quickly bought in again. And again. And again.
Pretty soon I realized I had lost eight dreams with no winnings whatsoever. I was in a slump. A losing streak.
I decided to go home and count my losses. Literally, since I had no idea what that even meant.
As I got up to leave the table, the dealer looked at me. His eyes were remorseless and cold.
“See the cashier on your way out,” he said, handing me eight black chips.
I gulped and walked over to the glass window where the cashier sat waiting. Handing him the eight chips, he raised his eyebrows and clicked his tongue.
“That’s a shame. Hold out your hand please.”
Two men in black suits came up behind me suddenly and stood on either side of me, intimidating in their stature and demeanour.
I did as he asked and held out my hand with the palm facing up.
The cashier pulled out a strange-looking device from beneath the counter. It had a vial of vermillion-coloured liquid at the top that was attached to the rest of it which resembled a gun with a hypodermic needle at the end.
I screamed and tried to pull away, but the two men grabbed me and held my arm through the window. Thrashing and elbowing them, I tried to get away but it was useless.
The cashier injected the stuff into my veins quickly and it felt cold and slimy going through my system. I could feel it suddenly in my heart, turning it cold and then up into my mind and my lungs and all extremities causing me to shake and violently seize. I writhed on the floor, blood pouring from my ears and my eyes.
Finally the feeling settled down into a numbness that prickled the insides of my blood vessels. It wasn’t until later, once I realized what the casino really was, that I found out what they had done.
I went home with the certainty that they had injected me with something. If winning had resulted in the greatest dream I had ever had – essentially an almost never-ending fantasy – what would happen after a loss?
Nightmares. That was what it would be. I was sure of it.
I settled into bed that night and closed my eyes, drifting off to sleep quickly after such an emotionally exhausting afternoon.
As soon as my eyes closed, they opened again and it was morning.
It felt as if I had not slept at all. My mind was fuzzy and it was difficult to focus. My eyes wanted to close again but my alarm was telling me that it was time to get up for work, so I hit the “dismiss” button and hopped in the shower.
I threw on my clothes and went out the door. At work I noticed a few people looking at me strangely, but I didn’t realize until someone pointed it out to me that my shirt was on inside-out. At this point I was still working in an office doing commodities trading and such lapses were frowned upon.
If you couldn’t focus enough to put your shirt on properly in the morning, how could you focus enough to get the work done in such a demanding environment? Millions of dollars changing hands with each transaction meant that such trivial things were put under a magnifying glass and coupled with other subsequent mistakes each following day after that, I found myself in the boss’s office by the end of the week being handed my walking papers.
Desperate for rest after days of not feeling any benefit from sleep, I went back to the casino.
They knew just by looking at me how to dig their claws in further. After a couple hours I had managed to win myself a dream.
They handed me the complimentary cocktail as they had the time before. I hadn’t realized the significance of it and still didn’t, despite the unusual vermillion colour of the drink. I swallowed it in one gulp and went out the door practically dancing and clicking my heels, ready to go home and feel rested again.
My dream that night was wonderful. Everything I had hoped for in many ways.
But not as good as the first time. I wanted that feeling back again.
Knowing that it was a dream the whole time and realizing that it was going to end seemed to shorten the fantasy, made it seem hollow and manufactured.
If I could win again maybe it would be like that first time, I thought.
The casino drew me in again and again. I found myself a zombie most days, exhausted, at my wit’s end. Ready to call it quits for good and say goodbye.
But then I would win again and it would all seem to be alright for a while.
My debt kept growing and growing with nearly every trip. The hypodermic needle would be plunged into my skin and every time they had to hold me down. Every time I would feel a little more empty. A little more hollow.
Waking up every day began to feel the same. Nothing had definition or purpose.
“You’re here all the time,” one of the goons whispered to me as they shot the needle into my vein the time after that. “Haven’t you figured it out yet? You should just get a job here and then at least you’ll be in on the secret.”
I applied the next day and got an interview with the boss. I would find out later that if you got someone to apply there you got a one dream bonus.
In his office, the well-dressed man was sitting behind a massive polished ebony desk. The room was adorned with paintings, sculptures, and other high-priced artwork. He had photos everywhere of himself shaking hands with world leaders, new and old, for hundreds of years.
His face never changed. Never aged.
“So, you want to work with us? Tired of dreamless nights without end? You want to have some relief, is that it?”
“Yes. Please. Anything. I’ve been coming here for so long and it’s an endless cycle. I want back what I’ve lost but I keep finding myself more and more in debt with each visit.”
“Ah, so do you understand it now, then? What the ‘injections’ are?”
It finally dawned on me, sitting there. Not injections at all. They weren’t putting something in us. They were taking something out. The vermillion-coloured liquid in the vials – our dreams.
“If I take a job with you, will the same rules apply? Will they still take my sleep, my rest, every time I lose?”
“Yes. We can’t have the employees living by different rules than everyone else. But we will give you an alternative injection, so that you feel well-rested when you come in for your shift.”
“I’ll do it. I need to rest. I need to get some meaningful sleep. My life has been miserable ever since coming here.”
“Well, I can’t promise that this will help,” he said, getting up from his desk with a hypodermic gun in his hand. The vial of fluid sitting atop this one was jet-black and looked evil and poisonous. He rolled up his sleeves as he primed it and I watched a few beads of it drip oil-like out of the tip of the needle.
“What the hell is that!? I don’t want that stuff in me!”
“But you need to sleep, my dear worker. I can’t have you passing out at the blackjack table like a narcoleptic! You agreed to this, after all. You wanted to rest, and the only way for that to happen is for you to have SOME sort of dream. Not everyone is as lucky as you, you know. To have that wonderful vermillion fluid in your veins. Some people come to us begging to take it from them. Some of our employees for example, the ones who do the recruitment for us, are full of this black stuff.”
“What?” I had gotten up from the chair and was backing away from him towards the door. But I found it was locked as he approached.
“First you have to tell me the password, Sid.”
“Seramth Gin.” I said the words that I had said every time to gain access to the casino, only this time I pictured the letters and rearranged them in my mind.
“Nightmares.”
He smiled as he injected me with the vial of black hate, and it went into my veins feeling hot and unpleasant. I began to sweat and the beads of it turned cold on my skin as I shivered.
I’ll sleep tonight. I might even wake up feeling rested. But as long as I live and work at that casino, I’ll be afraid to dream again. Because now my unconscious hours are occupied by the most terrifying experiences imaginable. Nightmares beyond imagining in their awfulness. That is my fate.
Unless… Just maybe, I can win one more time.
JG
TCC
submitted by Jgrupe to nosleep [link] [comments]

With the recent influx of new users - I decided to post a guide to Pump and Dump schemes - what they are, how to avoid them and how to move on from them

TLDR: Following the recent DOGE and XRP situations, and our influx of new users - I have decided to put together a quick guide on what a pump and dump is, how to spot it, how to avoid it, and what to do should you fall for one. This is just my thoughts on the issue and by no means exhaustive. I welcome comments and my biggest recommendation if you fell for one of these schemes is to accept it, address your emotions, seek support - either by those around you or here if you feel more comfortable, then commit to educating yourself.
 

Summary:

A pump and dump scheme is where a group of people pitch a coin (or stock) to other people to spike short term volume, and therefore the price, in order to profit from selling their own supply at the higher price to the newer investors.
 
How to spot a PnD:
  Tips to avoid - see below but the main two for me are:
 
 

What is a Pump and Dump scheme?

  A Pump and Dump scheme (PnD from here on in), is where an investor, or group of investors promote a coin they already hold (or are purchasing) in order to cause positive sentiment and the price to rise. At this point these investors will then sell their coins to the newer investors, causing the price to crash and leave the people who fell for the PnD with a large potential loss, or coins which are now worth a lot less than the price they paid for them.
These are not new and were traditionally done via phone call. If you have watched the Wolf of Wall Street, or similar films about penny stocks, you have seen this stuff in action. If you are buying, you are the retail investor who gets taken for a ride.
With the recent influx of new users to this site, and following the PnD schemes surrounding Doge and XRP, lets take a look at how to spot a PnD scheme
 

How to spot a PnD scheme?

 
  • Promises of huge gains, in a short amount of time. If it sounds too good to be true, it is. In crypto (and stocks) if someone is talking to you about something, they are selling you their position. If it is positive - they likely own it, if it negative - they either want prices to fall or they hold a competitor. Ask yourself, why someone would be going out their way to tell you something is a once in a lifetime opportunity? If it was, they would be keeping it secret and accumulating themselves. These people are salesman, and you are the one buying the bullshit
  • Linked to the above there is often a time element - 'get in quick, or you will miss it', they are relying on your impulsive decision making to jump in - they are manipulating you to over ride the logical part of your brain which makes decisions based on information and context
  • There is no discussion of any potential risks or downsides, and you are removed from groups or harassed for asking basic questions - this is a hive mind at work, and you are being censored from raising any concern or legitimate question.
  • There may be reference to 'how this time is different', or it plays on recent successes which are in no way comparable - e.g Game Stop - anyone who paused for a second would realise why not only was financially the short squeeze on GME completely different, but also the moral stand point was too. XRP, for example, is a centralised system which enriches the founders beyond belief. Yet these groups tried to ride the sentiment of GME to convince others to join - as a show of rebellion and alliance.
  • Social media storms are cooked up, it seems like out of nowhere this is all anyone can talk about - when has this ever proven a successful decision? Once everyone is talking about it, you are already too late. You may not lose money, if you are lucky, but you are still the one being duped. Again this is feeding on emotion and Fear of Missing Out. There will be groups created and ran by mods who run them like cults - no talk of anything but price going up is accepted.
  • There is a time or plan attached - e.g. Pump and Hold at 8:30. For the love of god, if this is the case, sell before then. All the leaders of these groups will have done. All of these public announcements are done again to create legitimacy and make you feel at ease - as a collective.
  • Generally any concept of 'we are in this together', coming from a group trying to actively push up the price of something short term = PnD. You are not in this together, markets are competitive - they are survival of the fittest whether you like it or not. They want your money, when you listen to them - you are basically offering to hand it over. People invest to make money, especially when the entire premise is pushing a price up to get rich. They do not want what is good for you, they are using you and they will take your money if you allow them to. They are telling you, because you are the opportunity - not the coin.
  • Be aware, people telling you to hold and buy more, are using you. They want you to push the price back up so they can sell. If you are in these groups - on social media, be aware you may be talking to bots, or at the least people who are trying to dump on you. When it drops, get out.
 
 

How to avoid PnDs in future

 
  • 'Why are they telling me this?' - this is the first and main question to ask yourself. What does the person sharing the information have to gain from telling me? In this case - you invest and push the price up, allowing them to make greater profit. Understand why they would be sharing details with you - if it such a great thing, why are they sharing it?
  • if it is a friend telling you, ask for more information - why it is doing well, what the plan is etc - if they can't explain it properly, this is a big red flag and they likely have fallen for it too.
  • Look out for how someone talks to you about it - is it emotionally driven, does it make you excited? scared to miss out? - This is exactly when you need to step back, breathe and ask yourself if you are thinking correctly. Emotional decision making is not a good thing here, and then ask if they are intentionally trying to get an emotional reaction out of you? (see the above - FOMO, get rich quick etc)
  • Is there any room for nuance? Are you able to discuss the potential cons or risk? If you are laughed at, or harassed, others are told to ignore you (he won't be getting rich, weak hands, pathetic seller) - this is a huge sign that you are investing in something where no other thoughts are allowed. The reason for this, once you are out the bubble - logic returns and you see the smoke and mirrors for what they are. PnD groups work like a cult, only one form of thinking is allowed, everything else is censored.
  • Did this come out of nowhere, do I even know anything about this? If you don't know anything about it, except it makes money, don't invest in it. This is a terrible decision for two reasons. Firstly, and most obviously, you have asymmetric information - you have no idea why and what you are buying, therefore can't make an informed decision - only an emotional one. Equally, this kind of thing pushes panicked, emotional selling. When you don't know fundamental reasons why you invest in something, when the price dips you will sell. Why? because when your brain asks you the question 'shit it is dropping, what do we do?!' - your logical brain won't have an answer, because you never gave it the information to form one. This second part is more relevant to regular investments, not PnDs of course, but is worth bearing in mind before you invest in anything.
  • Was the coin relatively stagnant, or has it dipped recently? PnDs typically target coins which haven't moved much recently, or have lower trading volume, this allows for a much easier spiking of the price due to a small change in demand equalling a big change in price. If you look at the charts and it was doing nothing until this big flurry of activity - you are being taken for a ride.
  • Look for the news, if it is pumping, don't listen to people inside the group - search for reasons why something is pumping. If you can't find anything of value, there probably isn't anything, and you are gambling on emotional decisions.
  • The opportunity finds you, you don't find the opportunity. Getting rich off 'undervalued' coins, or finding a hidden gem is not easy. They are hidden for a reason. If someone is coming to you with this, remember they are selling. You are buying.
  • If someone does approach you, talk to someone else outside of the bubble - find another group e.g. CC, or other investors - talk to them, get outside perspective before investing.
  • look for examples of populist sentiment. Do you hear things about an other? - e.g. haters, those missing out who are jealous. Are you made to feel like you are part of a special group? The ones with insider information? This is a lie, it is very very common manipulation within populist movements, cults etc - to create a narrative of an other to entrench tribalism within the group. This is done to make you switch your brain off, to rule on emotion.
  • is there a recent comparable story that was successful? e.g. GME (yes this isn't the same at all in reality, but the story being sold is - or at least plays on the hype of GME). If there is, you are being played. The real opportunity, just like the hidden gem, is the first one. When people tell you this is happening again, they are simply using the positive news from one case and applying it to their own - often because it lacks any actual, real, tangible reason for succeeding or being a good investment.
 
 

I fell for a PnD, what next?

 
Have you sold yet - No? Are you in profit? Sell. Whilst you still can. Greed will tell you not to, and perhaps you can eek out a little more money. But you are gambling, and gambling extremely high risk against people trying to take all your money.
 
Yes, you have sold. Did you make a profit? Yes - great. You are still a an idiot, just a lucky one. Tell yourself that. There is a difference between opportunist traders taking advantage of PnDs and someone getting lucky and getting out before it collapses. Do not confuse the two. The first group know what they are doing (and they may still lose, but they are aware of the real risk). You are fucking lucky. Don't do it again. So count your blessings, go through the same process of learning about PnDs and begin to understand why you fell for it, how to avoid it in future and realise you are up - you won. Don't go back in, you are asking to lose.
 
Yes you have sold? Did you make profit? No? Ok, this is normal - 90% + of people doing this will end up in the same situation.
 
  • Recognise and accept your mistake. Do not feel ashamed of it, it is ok. You were played, it happens to all of us in our lives at some point.
  • Step away from whatever device you used to invest. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO WIN IT BACK RIGHT AWAY. You will most likely make things worse, investing again on emotions - even worse emotions now, shame, anger, disbelief.
  • Talk to the important people in your life if you feel comfortable, if not, come here or to other anonymous groups for support. It is important to share what happened, to vent emotionally whatever it is you feel.
  • Realise it is only money, even if gambled way more than you should have done, long term you will get out of this. Focus on other areas of your life for the time being - emotional investment, fulfilment and development - seek out things which may centre to your emotions again, whatever that may be - getting out in nature, cooking, reading, adrenaline sports - whatever the shit you need, do it.
  • Consider who, if anyone needs to know. Did you borrow from you and your wife's joint account? Accept a loan from a mate? These people need to know the truth. Do not hide it and hope to win it back. Tell the truth. They deserve it.
  • Do not repeat the same actions, if you want to win long term from this - you need a different approach. Step away from the high stakes casino and figure out long term strategies to make money.
  • Learn to diversify and manage risk. You are taking a huge gamble going all in on something - even if it isn't a scam, you need to protect yourself through diversifying your investments. Get rich quick schemes are the fastest way to lose money.
  • Educate yourself on these behaviours - I would recommend 'Thinking Fast and Slow' by Daniel Kahnemann as a personal favourite. This book helps to look at and address the biases that make up our emotional decision making, and learn how to recognise these and instead 'think slow'. You won't regret reading it.
submitted by Anhowa123 to CryptoCurrency [link] [comments]

Debrief From My Third Annual 100 Hearts in 30 Days Challenge. (127!).

Hi, I’m sharing data from my recent 30-day a20 heart kill challenge. I was able to kill 127 hearts in 212 runs, a substantial increase both in total hearts killed (previous best was 102) and winrate (don’t remember previous but it wasn’t very close to 60%).
This is my third time attempting the challenge. It’s mostly just a ton of fun. It isn’t intended to be a competitive category and I’m sure that it’s possible to go much higher still, especially with strategies that sacrifice winrate, for example forfeiting at the end of bad act ones.
Runs are played rotating through characters. I started on Ironclad and ended on Watcher.
These runs can mostly be interpreted as me trying to win as often as possible, with the obvious caveats that I’m also trying to complete runs in <1.5 hours and playing 8+ hours a day without a day off for 30 days. Quite a few runs in the dataset were lost to simple calculation errors because my brain was melting, or to not pursuing lines which would trade time for marginal advantages like a better number on Ink Bottle. On a more macro level I tended slightly toward taking high-risk/high-reward lines in runs which were falling behind in order to either get them over with or give myself a higher chance of winning if I continued - stuff like taking more Act 2 Elite fights, fighting Double Orb Walkers, etc. - I don’t think this had a large effect on my winrate (mostly I did this in spots where both options seemed very close in value anyway) but it’s worth noting because it is different from how I’d play when trying to purely maximize my chance to win.
You also may want to ignore the runs where I bought Prismatic Shard or took early Signature Move and tried to kill every enemy with it if you’re interested in analyzing “serious” play xD. But I think there are only three of those or something like that. I have been known to meme a little at times.
Link to Folder of Run Histories
Link to IMGUR album of in-game Run History screens
Overall thoughts on the attempt:
It took me a while to switch into 1.5-hour run mode. I’d been playing 2-3hr runs for the last 4 months, and the first few days involved a LOT of calculation errors and turns where I spent a long time looking for very specific lines, which works if I’m giving myself a comfortable amount of time to play but fails when I’m time-crunching myself. There were turns where - for example - I’d look for lethal for five minutes when it was immediately obvious that I could just full block and kill next turn, or spend five minutes trying to work out a good reshuffle that was only ~5% likely to be doable to begin with, and spending mental energy on these lines compounded into making mistakes when I didn’t make time to spend mental energy on the things which were more generally important in the run.
To give you a numerical idea, I started the challenge 39w-41l over the first 80 runs. Variance definitely exists in a dataset of that size, but that is a LOT worse than how well I was doing once I settled in.
Once I dialed in I started doing much better. Especially in the middle of the challenge, lines felt effortless to find and maximizing the minutiae of the game (Ink Bottle on right number types of things) was often automatic. I also started to vibe very well with the limits of each run - there were very few runs where I was dying to elites I could have avoided, or building decks which ultimately couldn’t handle the late-game boss gauntlet. Some of the wins in this period were VERY good wins which I’d be proud to have played even in a non-challenge settings.
I managed 52w-26l rotating during this period, including holding 75% winrate for 50+ runs, an 11-0 rotating winstreak (new world record at the time - congrats to Baalor and Terrence, who managed 11-0 and 13-0 respectively later in the same week! Completely insane!, and to CrimsonBlur who managed 10-0 last year on a much harder patch), a 12-0/18-1 Watcher streak (new personal best), and a 9-0 Defect streak (one run short of my previous best from late last year). My Silent and Ironclad did quite well here too. I’ve had moments when I’ve been sharper on calculations or more dialed in on specific characters, but in terms of overall rotating play this is the best period of play I’ve ever managed.
Then there was the decline. Turns out doing this involves some mental fatigue. I put a ton of my remaining mental energy into my 11-0 winstreak and never got back to full. I closed out the challenge with 23w-17l, including MANY losses to extremely simple mistakes. Things like not resting before an elite when it was very obvious I was taking 30+ against Gremlin Nob, or entering Wrath with no way to leave it on the turn before the Heart attacked me.
What was most interesting to me during this final “exhaustion” period was how many runs I lost on Defect and Watcher to misevaluating my deck’s ability to perform in important fights. I don’t usually have to think at all to be able to have a good idea of whether my deck can win a fight like Book of Stabbing or Time Eater, but at this point in the challenge I was often getting things like that completely wrong, or my brain just wasn’t even registering that it needed to consider them. These mistakes were accompanied by building some quite bad decks which leaned heavily into trying to do things that weren’t actually good enough to overcome the challenges they faced, and an uptick in calculation errors didn’t help at all.
I finished the challenge VERY tired but very glad to have committed to it. One of the most enjoyable months of my life, and there were times in there where Slaying the Spire felt like seeing the Matrix. I can’t wait to do it again.
Ironclad-specific thoughts (25w-28l):
I was 15-5 over my last 20 with Ironclad before the challenge and was expecting to win a lot with him, but I ran poorly and played poorly for a lot of the challenge. Probably the simplest way to describe it would be that I had a string of runs with poor Act 1’s, which led to me overcompensating and putting too much stuff into my deck for Act 1 and Act 2. Then I died a lot to Act 3 and 4, whoops. I adjusted properly for the middle of the challenge, then fell off a cliff when I started getting exhausted. I think the fact that he got played after Watcher runs, which are often calculation-heavy and also which often impose a sense of invincibility on the player, didn’t help much.
I relic-swapped the vast majority of these runs, which I found to be less good than it used to be with the buffs to self-damage synergies. Toward the end of the challenge I was only relic-swapping if there wasn’t a very good other option. I still find that Ironclad performs very well on 4 energy, but it’s rough that his character-specific relics aren’t great and that the sustain from his regular starter relic matters a bit more now that Rupture and Hemokinesis are so much better, since you're often taking extra damage in hallway fights in order to have extra power in boss fights.
Most of my Ironclad wins are built on strong Act 1 relics and boss relics. His synergies mostly don’t feel strong enough to win on their own, unless you assemble a Corruption or Barricade exodia and/or get multiple Offerings to get everything online. It’s hard to draw cards with him to accelerate your deck, and it’s hard to deal damage without taking damage and hard to block while achieving anything else.
It also lowkey tilts me that several of his best cards don’t get better in multiples. If Defect gets offered a second Echo Form it massively improves the deck, but if Ironclad gets offered a second Corruption or Barricade it’s like… maybe you take it to get it in play earlier, sure, but it definitely doesn’t let you play your first three cards twice every turn.
General advice: just get Snecko Eye and Corruption every run, ideally with Reaper and Feed alongside. Failing that, the best ways to combine damage and survivability are usually going to be Strength + Reaper with some passable Block cards and good Max HP or Block + Anything; Body Slam isn’t the be-all end-all here, if you have the ability to survive turns with copies of Shrug It Off+ and Exhaust + Feel No Pain you have enough time to kill enemies with a variety of things.
Silent-specific thoughts (34w-19l):
Not a fan of the Blade Dance buff. Prior to it Silent was possibly my favorite character. The tension between generally needing attack-based damage to survive Act 2 but having difficulty scaling it enough to defeat the endgame gauntlet often led to runs where every floor felt challenging (with the exception of Wraith Form runs. Imagine having a card just make the player invincible for >50% of the game).
Now it feels generally easy to not only demolish Act 1 and 2 with attacks, but also scale them into a lategame deck. By the end of the challenge I was building a deck around an attack-generating common that I sometimes hadn’t even gotten one of yet instead of picking Crippling Cloud+’s I was offered, which was not a good feeling at all. I don’t think there’s ever been a common that dominated a character’s strategic space this heavily before.
Keep in mind that this is alongside other buffs as well. It used to be that a deck that dealt damage with a lot of attacks needed creative solutions to Time Eater and the Heart and stomped everything else, but now it’s often the case that it just stomps everything full-stop.
It doesn’t help that Silent’s starter relic plus Acrobatics and Calculated Gamble were already so strong at accelerating. Now you can play your attack common on turn 1 and discard four Shivs to draw four more cards toward your copies of Adrenaline and Footwork etc., so not only does it deal 16 for 1, count as five cards for Ink Bottle, play four attacks for Shuriken, and have the ability to be targeted at separate enemies, but it can also combine with a strong Uncommon to be Skim+. This is too strong :/.
General advice:
Take enough damage cards/relics to kill things and then make sure you can survive 40 incoming damage on the turns you need to - relics and potions are sometimes all you need, but damage options are also so strong that you can get away with dedicating a significant portion of your deck to mitigation.
Also: don’t Relic swap unless the other options are incredibly bad. Bag of Preparation is insanely good and with this character you can get two.
Defect-specific thoughts (29w-24l):
Defect is a beautiful character right now and often provided the most entertaining run of the day. The general yin-yang pull of needing to be able to survive vicious fights in Act 2 and 3 but also needing to be able to scale into a deck that beats the lategame gauntlet compartmentalizes into lots of interesting decisions about when it’s okay to add so-so orb-scaling cards to your deck, and how exactly you’re going to throw together a combination of 25 atrocious attack cards, Ball Lightning, Doom and Gloom, and Electrodynamics to deal damage to things. (My advice is to just get offered Ball Lightning, Doom and Gloom, and Electrodynamics so you don’t have to think too hard. Static Discharge does okay sometimes too).
I love the way runs “typically” revolve around fairly normal attack-based clears of low-hp enemies into fairly normal block-scaling to survive lategame fights long enough to kill them however you’d like, but sometimes completely go off the rails. I got to play a ridiculous 3x Hyperbeam/3x Meteor Strike run (without Snecko Eye), for example.
I also love being offered Stack. Hello World + Stack scaling led to a couple of other immensely enjoyable wins. It’s very funny to me to have a Defragment+ and Glacier in my deck, be thinking “oh yeah, I have premium uncommons that block super well!”, and then be offered Stack and be forced to admit that an unupgraded common usually blocks better than they do.
I think Defect is the best-positioned character in terms of Whale Bonus balance right now. I’ve found it to generally be correct to relic swap unless there is a very strong alternative or a path which allows me to get a lot of value out of my Lightning Orb.
General advice:
Kill early and midgame stuff with whatever option gets in the way of your lategame scaling least. Compile Driver and Sweeping Beam draw cards, Electrodynamics and Static Discharge remove themselves from your deck (also Static is OP with Frost Orbs against multiattacks), Ball Lightning and Doom and Gloom are 2+ attacks worth of damage in one card, etc.
Then make sure you scale and can accelerate into that scaling. Fission, Seek, Skim+, Turbo+, Bag of Preparation, Bottles, etc. to get your deck to a point where it’s outputting 40+ block per turn and the run is over.
Watcher-specific thoughts (39w-14l):
The great thing about Watcher is that almost every run you lose is entirely your fault. Probably somewhere between one and three of these runs were lost to an unlucky result of close-to-correct play, and every other one was me building my deck wrong for a fight, piloting it wrong, picking the wrong potion or relic, etc.
I haven’t generally enjoyed Watcher in the past, and have mostly not been playing her for the last year (or when I have I’ve been occasionally forfeiting Act 3 because I’m bored of clicking on Cut Through Fate and Tantrum over and over again), so I felt like I actually learned a significant amount about the character in this challenge.
My general Watcher-heuristics right now are:
Pretty much every type of synergy draws cards, makes block, and some of them even make energy, so it’s fine to have lots of different synergies in the same deck as long as they aren’t too awkward to get rolling. If you just take the best card offered to you every time you should still easily be winning 70+% of your runs. Getting better at Watcher seems to largely be about first realizing that Talk to the Hand, Mental Fortress, Tantrum, and Rushdown are obscenely overpowered, and then realizing the ways in which every single other card is obscenely overpowered as well. (Except Pressure Points, lol).
Hexaghost can kill you if you don’t take enough damage cards, Act 2 Elites can kill you if you don’t have enough health banked for them or didn't take attacks properly, Time Eater can kill you if your deck is very bad at dealing damage or very bad at blocking, and the Heart can kill you on turn 2 or 3 if you are bad at accelerating your synergies. Other than that it’s unclear that Watcher can ever die unless you click the cards wrong or get incredibly incredibly incredibly unlucky AND don't have potions available to compensate for it.
I actually quite enjoyed Watcher this challenge and look forward to playing her more. The lategame gauntlets were sometimes a lot more interesting than I thought they would be, with my win to go 10-0 in my 11-0 streak being one of the coolest Heart fights I’ve ever played.
It’s just a bit unfortunate that like, her cards are so strong that I take Pandora’s Box over anything, the most interesting thing about most fights she plays is working out how to Lesson Learned with Ink Bottle on the right number, and the times that you do legitimately lose are to ridiculous things like drawing three copies of Omniscience in your opening hand. (And that she’s so strong that you find yourself questioning if that was your fault and you should’ve not taken the third Omniscience so that this couldn’t happen when that happens to you).
I personally tended to avoid Boss Relic swap on her because it didn't seem like I needed four energy to win anyway, and the upsides that the Boss Relics turn off often seemed more impactful than the bonuses they were providing, but you can certainly win almost every run with her by Relic swapping too.
Overall Takeaways:
The game is a bit easier than I’d like right now. It seems hard for the devs to add more ascensions, but balance is starting to break a bit at a20 and I hope they go very easy on the buffs in the future. The Blade Dance buff was a massive correction to a problem that I don’t think was actually a problem.
I don’t like that Boss Relics are so strong that trading Boss Relic is a common start, and don’t like that the cardpools have gotten so strong that Transforming cards is generally correct. Balancing such that high-variance options are correct leads to an increase in the frequency of runs where the balance breaks very quickly. I'd personally prefer if these options were usually slightly -ev, so that they were available for runs where you needed a chance to highroll but incorrect the rest of the time.
Last challenge I felt like I was engaged ~80% of the time, with ~10% of the time I was unengaged being because the run was completely won already and ~10% of the time I was unengaged being because the run was almost certainly lost and I was treading water until something killed me. This time those numbers were more like 75/20/5.
Game is very very good though, and I hope you enjoy this set of runs if you decide to check them out!
<3, jorbs
submitted by JoINrbs to slaythespire [link] [comments]

what counts as gambling losses video

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Gambling Loss: A loss resulting from games of chance or wagers on events with uncertain outcomes (gambling). These losses can only be claimed against gambling income. the date and type of gambling you engage in; the name and address of the places where you gamble; the people you gambled with; and the amount you win and lose; Other documentation to prove your losses can include: Form W-2G; Form 5754; wagering tickets; canceled checks or credit records; and receipts from the gambling facility Gambling losses were allowed, but in an amount less than claimed by the taxpayer. In justifying its findings, the court stated, “We are convinced, on the whole, that petitioner…was a truthful and candid witness.” In Doffin, 43 the court estimated and allowed IRS-rejected gambling losses. The court looked at the taxpayer’s lifestyle and If you’re taking the standard deduction, you aren’t eligible to deduct your gambling losses on your tax return, but you are still required to report all of your winnings. Where do I file this on my tax forms? Let’s say you took two trips to Vegas this year. In Trip A, you won $6,000 in poker. Reporting gambling losses. To report your gambling losses, you must itemize your income tax deductions on Schedule A. You would typically itemize deductions if your gambling losses plus all other itemized expenses are greater than the standard deduction for your filing status. If you claim the standard deduction, Yes, scratch off tickets can count as gambling losses - but there is a catch. First, you cannot deduct them without claiming any winnings. For tax purposes, you can only deduct losses up to the amount of your winnings. 5 of the Biggest Gambling Losses of All Time. Nobody likes losing, but it's something we've all experienced at some point in our lives. Whether it was a sports game, a competition that we entered, or our middle school science fair, losing can mak There are unique considerations when it comes to disclosing gambling wins and losses on your tax return….modified recently under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). If you gamble, make sure you understand the tax consequences. First off—what counts as gambling in the eyes of the IRS? Gambling income includes (but is not limited to) Winnings from Gambling losses are deducted from the winnings as an itemized deduction. You are leaving ftb.ca.gov. We do not control the destination site and cannot accept any responsibility for its contents, links, or offers. Review the site's security and confidentiality statements before using the site. Whilst in court in 2013 charged with multiple counts of fraud, Ms O’Connor’s losses were laid bare, and reached a little over $1 Bilion. Harry Kakavas £990m / $1.5b In a little over a year, Australian Harry Kakavas gambled away a little over $1.5b, mostly playing high limit blackjack , and the high rollers favourite; baccarat.

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Can You Net Gambling Wins With Gambling Losses on Your Tax ...

What is the limitation on Gambling Losses? TaxPoint CEO Kevin Hopson provides the answer to assist you in filing your 2014 Tax Return. https://www.taxpoint.c... Cousin Sal talks about our 18th anniversary, his very funny new book “You Can’t Lose Them All,” playing BINGO with his grandma Edith, gambling with Aunt Chip... From losing millions to billions at a plethora of casino tables, we count down 10 Biggest Gambling Losses Of All Time.Subscribe to MindChop by clicking here:... Celebrity handicapper Steve Stevens from CNBC's original series "Money Talks" provides simple explanations of sports betting terminology. Today's topic: acce... From the statisticians forecasting sports scores to the intelligent bots beating human poker players, Adam Kucharski traces the scientific origins of the wor... Even if you've practiced card counting for hundreds of hours at home, your first time counting in a casino can be a jarring experience. In this video, Colin ... Our Original Post https://taxattorneyoc.com/blog/2019/12/11/can-you-net-gambling-wins-with-gambling-losses-on-your-tax-return/ Disclaimer The use of this vid... A rough day of gambling can always be paid for with beer cans and liquor bottles! The 5 points in this youtube clip are based on my experience and might not work for all. But at the very least could be worth a try. Setting up a spreadsheet... Sometimes the risk is worth the reward, and sometimes it’s just dangerous. Join http://www.WatchMojo.com as we count down our picks for the top 10 gambling m...

what counts as gambling losses

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