rb

Touche guys!

More MO. I'm sure eventually the BTS crowd will figure out it's undervalued but it'll probably be one of the last ones. Until then I'll just clip the divvy.

Well they only allow personal, and non-professional, accounts, so that obviously excludes anything you named. But yes, I am certain I am saving money with the trades I do at Robinhood. I have accounts at IBKR and a couple of other brokers and I execute only certain orders there, after using my other accounts to get market data. But getting back to the question... Is it really a risk if you kept 7 figures worth of long stock positions there? It sounds like it's not a risk if they are doing everything they are supposed to be doing with asset segregation, but it could be a risk if there were fraud and somebody were dipping into client assets. Yes it is! That's why custody accounts exist. Big boys (even medium and smaller boys) don't keep their assets with their brokers. For sure some do stupid shit because of greed. Ask Fortress about their experience with holding their assets at Lehman and whether it was worth the savings. There are tons of people with 7 figure accounts that have custody accounts and don't keep assets at brokers. They pay more than zero though.

Only if Lewis writes the book and Sorkin writes the screenplay!

If one has 7 figures why risk it for 5 figures? That's dumb! Also are you sure that you really saved that money? I wonder why PIMCO or Bridgewater doesn't trade with RH? They would save a lot more than 5 figures. You pay zero commission, you get what you pay for.

+1. Yeah why would anyone have over 250k in a robin hood account. And if one does then one should be very worried. More about their decision making abilities though.

This should be illegal. This whole system is so messed up. I don't get it. Why should it be illegal?

Bear Stearns...Lehman Bros. It's not that two parties are making a trade. If the parties are large enough or have enough fire power, they could take down a major financial institution...and then dominoes fall. Now when I say two parties, I'm not referring solely to the WSB crowd, but even rogue hedge funds, private equity funds or any other fund of size. If parties are acting together, they should be filing their positions together...such as proxies, 13D's, etc. Personally, I'm pleased that hedge funds got a taste of their own medicine, especially anything involving Cohen, but the system has to have disclosure, transparency and rules to create a fair playing field. Cheers! I guess what I meant to say was. Say 2 parties: a retail investor at TD Ameritrade and an Hedge fund client at Goldman make a trade. The retail buys $10,000 notional value of calls from the Hedge fund. So now the fund has a $10 k liability which may be naked or hedged against the stock. At this point, why are either of the brokers involved or have any risk? Doesn't the risk belong to the investor on either side? Granted, assuming the brokers require decent margin requirements of their clients. But why does trading need to be restricted at this point? Why can't the brokers just ensure that the margin requirements are aggressive enough? I noticed a bunch of them raised the margin req to 100% for these stocks. At that point, what is the risk to the system? Now the step I never appreciated was that there is a market maker in between all of this. They sell you the option to make the market and then find a party to take the other side. In order to lower their risk, they buy stock. So the way I understood the gamma squeeze was that a whole bunch of retail piled on buying calls that the market makers sold way too much risk that they couldn't sufficiently offset just because 1) there aren't enough shares available and 2) the float is so thin that the stock needed to hedge just shot up 50%. Because the position only gets bigger as it works against you, the Market Maker's liability kept growing which contributed further to the squeeze. Is this a good description of the risk to the MM? But again,, even in that case, why can't the MM just stop selling calls? Or why can't they just limit the amount of risk they take? What you're missing is that they don't really just buy some stock to lower their risk. They buy stock to hedge the delta on the calls. As the delta goes up, they need to buy more stock in order to keep their hedge. Now here's the thing, black scholes assumes something like continuous delta hedging. But desks don't hedge continuously. That would be impractical They do it once maybe twice a day. Now if you have an explosion in the stock price like with GME then that's gonna hurt the MM. I agree that the MMs screwed up and took too much risk with this one. I don't know why they didn't pull back.

I haven't run the exact numbers but I'm somewhere just shy of 50%. Overall a really good year. But there wasn't anything too bright on my end to achieve that. In fact I consider 2020 the year without too many ideas. Luck played more of a role. Here are the highlights that helped: 1. I had a very heavy AAPL position. This was from back in 2018 when they were giving it away. 2. I have a longstanding large position in MSFT that continued to perform well 3. I built a heavy position in EQR basically at bottom tick shortly before it shot up. Hat tip to the pupil for all the help around that name. 4. I bottom ticked hard REI.UN. That one was easier to do. 5. I took a MASSIVE short position against the USD when it was the obvious thing to do. I also did other trading around FX that added a few points of performance. FX trading is really not what i do. But in recent opportunistic trades helped with performance quite a bit. 6. I bought a fair amount of BRK around 160-170 range. Gotta think what to do now with the position size. 7. Bought some financials pretty cheap Those lucky evens did they best to offset the negatives: 1. I was quite heavy financials WFC was a large position that got hit hard. 2. The Rolls-Royce position got obliterated. 3. I guess I didn't buy TSLA ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Didn't Mr. 'Chuck' Prince say something similar, at some point along the way? I didn't say that there will be no effects from Fed actions. The Fed is obviously doing what is doing because it wants to obtain some effects, not because it's bored. All I was saying is that if the Fed wants to lower long term rates it is totally in its power to do it.

The conventional wisdom is that the FED affects short term rates. That is because historically the Fed has dealt in short term instruments. But technically the Fed can target any point on the yield curve it damn well pleases. That is the point of QE. Take a real market example. Say that the market rate for 30 year funds is 4%. But then a new lender shows up (lets call him Fed) and for one reason or another is willing and able to lend unlimited amounts for a 30 year term at 2%. What's going to be the new market rate for 30 year loans? It's going to be 2% The Fed can do this because it can crowd out anyone out of the market. You can say that I'm a hard core capitalist and I refuse to participate in this madness. Well guess where your money ends up then. At the Fed. Btw, this is purely a domestic affair. The international angle is purely a story for people that don't know how international monetary economics works. Chairman Xi does not have a dog in this fight. He is merely a spectator. Whether he likes it or not, there is nothing he can do about it.

The thing with monopoly money is that it's all monopoly money unless you're willing to exchange it for real money. So the bank pumps out monopoly money. Your house value goes up. Your house value is also monopoly money unless you're willing to sell it (convert to real money). I'd wager that you're not willing to do that. What you're talking about is really about interest rate arbitrage. More about whether rates are priced or not in assets. I've made really good money on that bet when it was pretty clear that lower rates were not priced into assets earlier on in the decade. That was pretty standard economics stuff. You could measure it and figure it out without having to be a genius. Now I fear that a lot of what gregmal says is true. If it is, then the real risk is that rates move up. What that means for asset prices is a bit of a mixed bag. A rising tide lifts all boats but a lowering one is more tricky and its effects will depend on the type of boat you have. Stocks could do well but their valuations are already stretched so they're a crapshoot. Bonds are going to get murdered. Your house will definitely do badly. This is definitely the point where I'm looking to get some swaps. The only question is how much to get and which part of the yield curve to target (likely the longer end).

As soon as I can buy it!

If they're listed they need to have an audit. Check who the auditor is. If it's not one of the big 4 then I wouldn't touch it. Also pay close attention to the cash flow statement.

https://quickonomics.com/different-types-of-money/ You're describing #2. Yeah... I'm gonna go with the actual definition of money and not the one from quickonomics.com

As I said nice hustle. As an aside isn't it funny how we know the prices for lady jewelry while my watch is in some drawer somewhere?

People are shelling out more for the platinum settings. Plat $890: https://www.bluenile.com/build-your-own-ring/petite-solitaire-ring-platinum_19010 18k gold $750: https://www.bluenile.com/build-your-own-ring/petite-solitiare-ring-18k-yellow-gold_44709 Platinum: $971 per once Gold: $1,783 per ounce Nice hustle for jewelers

well then it's not money

Can I go to the store and buy a beer with it?

That flight to USD also happened in the GFC panic. Yeah. That's why I don't buy the whole gold is a good disaster asset theory. It doesn't really stand up against empirical evidence.

Gold is an element and therefore fungible and investable at scale (central banks and large institutions can trade gold and, absent chicanery, know precisely what they’re buying / selling), not so with diamonds (or art or air cooled 911’s or whatever) I do not know this for sure but I’d expect the above ground gold supply to be far less volatile than diamonds (ie I think there are big diamond discoveries that can be large relative to existing supply). This has happened with gold several times in history, but is probably less likely to happen today than with diamonds; someone more knowledgeable than I can opine) I think diamonds are a really bad example here. That's due to many issues: price control by cartel, ability to crate them by industrial process, huge difference between retail and wholesale value, small and tightly controlled wholesale market which is very hard to get into and that's just off the top of my head. Basically the only thing diamonds are good for is if you need to take off quickly you can shove them up your ass and go through an airport metal detector then take a large loss on redemption. The thing with gold like pupil said is that it's fairly liquid and has transparent pricing. How do the markets for platinum and gold compare on those qualitative terms of liquidity and transparency? Poorly. Gold is really liquid. You can walk into any neighborhood jeweler and sell them an ounce of gold at a small discount to market. I wouldn't even know where to go to sell an ounce of platinum. I don't know what the rate is in the US, but in Canada these sell your gold/we buy your jewelry types charge a 5% discount to the market price of the gold. That is crazy cheap when you consider that jewelry gold is of lower quality and has to be smelted/purified to turn it into financial gold. Or maybe they just use it to make new jewelry, i don't know. Either way it's not bad. I imagine if Atlanta has a place, other cities do to: https://www.rkcojewelers.com/advice-on-how-to-sell-gold-silver/ But I see far more "we buy gold" signs in what feels like every mall. However, I was thinking (for our purposes) of just people like us buying a platinum or gold ETF. There is enough liquidity there? Well the physical liquidity for platinum is lower than gold. But I would say that for our purposes of buying a gold or platinum etf there's ample liquidity. 1 Because we don't have that much money and 2. Because there is liquidity provided by financial intermediaries marker makes/ETF sponsor. That being said I'm weary of ETFs for physical commodity as these usually hold derivative and not the physical and things can go wrong. See the USO incident earlier this year. As for jewelry as far as I know platinum is cheaper than gold. Maybe that's why it's more popular these days ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There are certainly a lot of people who believe gold is a pet rock including our fed reserve chairman and treasury secretary in waiting. Why do you think the US government has any gold at fort knox? Some people say they should sell off the reserve because gold is worthless. Despite how much they would probably like to do that, the gold is one of the few liquid assets on the U.S balance sheet (an asset held by central banks around the world), and the trust in the dollar would be crushed in they sold off all of the gold. So even though the U.S. dollar is not backed by gold, in a way trust in the dollar is partly maintained by our gold reserve; that and our military. LOL! you think that the US gold reserve which is worth around 0.5T give or take is what provides confidence in a county with 20T GDP and a currency with 19T of supply? You may remember that in times of crisis like when shit was hitting the fan back in march nobody wanted gold and everyone wanted US dollars.

I agree with pretty much all you said. You could say that gold is the best of the greater fool items due to its properties which make it liquid, easy to store/transport, and the fact that there's plenty of it (that probably circles back to liquidity). Platinum and palladium are nowhere near as liquid as gold. You can make the argument that there are better stores of value but those come with various negatives depending on the eye of the beholder. For example one can easily make the argument that from a store of value standpoint agricultural land is superior. But to the gold bug who's always ranting about the incoming "guvmant" invasion that land is crap whereas he can take his goldbar and run into the woods at any time.

Gold is an element and therefore fungible and investable at scale (central banks and large institutions can trade gold and, absent chicanery, know precisely what they’re buying / selling), not so with diamonds (or art or air cooled 911’s or whatever) I do not know this for sure but I’d expect the above ground gold supply to be far less volatile than diamonds (ie I think there are big diamond discoveries that can be large relative to existing supply). This has happened with gold several times in history, but is probably less likely to happen today than with diamonds; someone more knowledgeable than I can opine) I think diamonds are a really bad example here. That's due to many issues: price control by cartel, ability to crate them by industrial process, huge difference between retail and wholesale value, small and tightly controlled wholesale market which is very hard to get into and that's just off the top of my head. Basically the only thing diamonds are good for is if you need to take off quickly you can shove them up your ass and go through an airport metal detector then take a large loss on redemption. The thing with gold like pupil said is that it's fairly liquid and has transparent pricing. How do the markets for platinum and gold compare on those qualitative terms of liquidity and transparency? Poorly. Gold is really liquid. You can walk into any neighborhood jeweler and sell them an ounce of gold at a small discount to market. I wouldn't even know where to go to sell an ounce of platinum. I don't know what the rate is in the US, but in Canada these sell your gold/we buy your jewelry types charge a 5% discount to the market price of the gold. That is crazy cheap when you consider that jewelry gold is of lower quality and has to be smelted/purified to turn it into financial gold. Or maybe they just use it to make new jewelry, i don't know. Either way it's not bad.

Gold is an element and therefore fungible and investable at scale (central banks and large institutions can trade gold and, absent chicanery, know precisely what they’re buying / selling), not so with diamonds (or art or air cooled 911’s or whatever) I do not know this for sure but I’d expect the above ground gold supply to be far less volatile than diamonds (ie I think there are big diamond discoveries that can be large relative to existing supply). This has happened with gold several times in history, but is probably less likely to happen today than with diamonds; someone more knowledgeable than I can opine) I think diamonds are a really bad example here. That's due to many issues: price control by cartel, ability to crate them by industrial process, huge difference between retail and wholesale value, small and tightly controlled wholesale market which is very hard to get into and that's just off the top of my head. Basically the only thing diamonds are good for is if you need to take off quickly you can shove them up your ass and go through an airport metal detector then take a large loss on redemption. The thing with gold like pupil said is that it's fairly liquid and has transparent pricing.