aws

Bought some NKE, M, and closed my short on NVDA. I will also get assigned on DIS, STNE, and META short puts that expired today.

Been nibbling at JACK JOE NAVI PROSY STNE VALE

I finally decided to do the math, and my returns came out to +26.9% for the year. That’s pretty much in line with the indices and, based on poll responses, seems to be a common result for the forum as well. This makes sense since I’ve put a lot of my investments on autopilot by DCA into the indices. When it comes to picking individual stocks, I’ve stepped back quite a bit. I’ve reached a point where I’m comfortable as long as I avoid doing anything reckless. The potential upside from taking bigger risks wouldn’t significantly improve my quality of life, so I don’t see the point in chasing it. I still dabble a little, but none of my individual positions resulted in a realized gain or loss of more than 0.5% of my total capital for the year.

Did Buffett have connections with him, or just with his father? His father was CEO of GEICO for a period, as well as other insurance companies. If so, hopefully they are long since severed. Seems like an intelligent guy who's life got derailed by conspiracy theories and a Russian honey pot.

Reminds me of Archie Karas who was in the news again since he just died last week. Went to Vegas with $50 and went on a crazy run in craps and poker and turned it into $40 million. Then gambled it all back. Later he tried cheating and was put in the black book barring him from all casinos. The people that make the kind of bets that can win so much so quickly don't suddenly realize they should put some aside for retirement.

You do it after you are assigned on the call, but you need the feature enabled in your account settings as well: https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/trading/early-settlement.php

If you use IBKR, they allow you to buy new shares to deliver against any assigned calls so you never face the tax hit from getting low basis shares called away. I'm not sure if other brokers offer similar but it's something you might want to look into.

You can't trust most overnight quotes unless you see a bid and ask around that price. Someone might have sold 100 shares and that's the only print. I checked and the bid/ask was 34.00/39.00 on BAC, so you could not buy it down 10%

It would be nice if there were bright lines for what's allowed in trading against your public statements or filings. Both for people with connections to get on TV, as well as just anyone with a big enough following to move markets. Obviously this is a pretty egregious example, where he's covering shorts two minutes after blasting off tweets, but this kind of crap happens all the time. It gets more attention since it's short selling and that's many people's favorite bogeymen, but I imagine the problem is 100x worse with pump and dumps in micro cap stocks and crypto. Apparently it's just straight up legal to pump and dump according to at least one judge as laid out by a recent Patrick Boyle video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqWHiMBBNGM

Is your objective to create trades that effectively work like straddles, but are not forced to be taxed as such (not being able to use the loss until the corresponding gain is recognized)?

There was almost 100k contracts of the 20c traded today, with huge blocks dumped on the bid near the close. Since DFV was the majority of the open interest it's not a big leap to assume he is dumping.

It's pretty impressive how quickly it they dumped all those shares on the market. 25% dilution in three days and so soon after the last sale. They should have about $10 of cash per share now. The only involvement I've had with GME has been shorting OTM puts, so good to know those will be a lot safer now.

The display bug convinced him to sell at the top. Lucky guy

The reporting indicated he went heavy into call options before returning. The stock went from 10 to almost 80 in a few days, so short term options gains could easily explain his $200 million score. I don't know how reliable the data is, but some reddit sleuths found opening trades worth $8 million that were closed for approximately $208 million. " Plugging all of that into a spreadsheet, I'm looking at these approximate numbers: Our mystery suspect traded at least 95,000 5/17 call contracts. Edit: He also had 25,000 5/24 calls! He bought in for at least $6,000,000 $8,000,000 (including the 5/24 calls). He sold for at least $168,000,000 for a profit of at least $162 million dollars for an average return of 2800% $208,000,000 for a profit of over $200,000,000 with an average return of 2550%. And two weeks later DFV shows up to reddit with a $205M portfolio

Some of them, probably not even jokingly, call the company Gameshire Hathaway, assuming Ryan Cohen will transition it into a conglomerate. I guess there are some similarities on the surface. Buffett did issue a ton of new stock when it was overvalued in the mid to late 90s. Both with the issuance of the B shares and of issuing stock to acquire GenRe. Good luck to them, but they need a miracle to justify paying between 4x-10x tangible book value for a dying retailer.

I think his portfolio peaked at about $950 million yesterday when it hit 68 in after hours trading. Now it's down to 28, so for his 17 million share equivalents that's about a 680 million swing in less than a day. Probably the fastest evaporation of such a large amount of wealth (in percentage terms at least) since Bill Hwang's blowup.

There's no reason for the company to do an unscheduled report except to be able to cash in on the pump yesterday after the DFV hype. It's like a battle between Ryan Cohen and DFV to see who can be fastest to extract the money from their delusional followers.

Some very annoying people will be extra insufferable until this over.

It is bizarre that these meme stock communities have made DFV and Ryan Cohen into almost messianic figures, while both have pumped and dumped and cost their fans boatloads of money. Ryan Cohen bought 10% of BBBY and made it seem like he was going to take an activist role, but then when all his fans jumped in and pumped the stock up from like $5 to $30, Cohen dumped his whole stake in a couple of days and cashed in like $70 million. The GME pump last month probably netted DFV almost $200 million, plus allowed the company to issue $1 billion in new stock. A new crop of bagholders were born while they got richer. Given how terrible the economics of the business are and the massive premium to tangible assets, it's hard to see how this ends without more pain for retail. But it's not like anyone is holding a gun to their head and forcing them to buy.

I've always treated gold miners like trading sardines. They can have some great runs but you don't want to hold them, and so I tend to find it ok to use the 3x leveraged ETFs as you won't hold them long enough for the compounding decay to hurt you. Back in 2016 JNUG went up like 1500% in 8 months which was a good time, and a couple of good runs on the inverse ETF JDST.

Yeah it does sound unlikely but, based on how you described the options, the buyers gave up a fair amount of options value by exercising early. You can probably re-enter at a better price on most. Except for things like short calls into a dividend payment or short calls on hard to borrow stocks, it's usually to your benefit to be assigned early.

The broker has no say in who gets assigned on short options. I was going to write up my understanding of how it works, but I decided to be lazy and have ChatGPT do it for me: When a buyer of a stock option exercises the option early, the process of determining which seller is assigned the option is typically handled by the options clearinghouse, such as the Options Clearing Corporation (OCC) in the United States. The clearinghouse uses an automated random assignment process to decide which seller (writer) of the option will be assigned the exercise notice. Here's a step-by-step overview of the process: Exercise Notice: The option holder (buyer) notifies their brokerage firm that they wish to exercise the option. Broker Notification: The brokerage firm forwards the exercise notice to the options clearinghouse. Clearinghouse Assignment: The clearinghouse uses a random assignment process to select a seller who has written (sold) the same option contract. Broker Notification: The clearinghouse notifies the brokerage firm of the seller who has been assigned the exercise notice. Seller Notification: The brokerage firm informs the assigned seller (writer) that they have been assigned and must fulfill the obligations of the contract. This random assignment process ensures fairness and transparency, distributing assignments across all potential option writers who have open positions in that particular option contract.

The only way I see legal troubles for DFV is if he colluded with other parties before starting the scheme. Either financial backers who also jumped in and amplified the effect of his return, or social media stock promoters who hyped the implications of it. If it was just the organic result of his followers, where is the crime? I'm sure it would be a fun case for the lawyers to argue in court.

The trades that were obviously erroneous should be busted. I do wonder about the trades that were within the realm of fair value. Will this guy get bailed out? 648k is just 3% off a reasonable fair value, but that's still 17k instant loss because of entering a market order for 1 share. There were prints up to 742k.

I'm aware of that dynamic and I'm sure some trades will get busted, but it wouldn't be the first time large trade volumes went through at erroneous prices. On the flip side, the snap back to a real value is biting some not so savvy people who placed market orders during the halt. The top trade was 742k when fair value was more like 630k. I have no idea how many are full shares, but I've seen at least one screenshot of a market order fill for 648k a share by a guy who had nowhere near that amount in his account, but his broker allowed the trade.