Great story on trying to beat the big boys.https://ofdollarsanddata.com/when-they-start-to-lose-they-change-the-rules/
Excellent, thanks for posting. I know they are crooks but today IS different...its not one man vs wallstreet IT IS THE ENTIRE FUCKING WORLD.
Too bad there wasn't Reddit back then. If Reddit existed back then, Saunders would've told every single widow and orphan to buy and hold their shares instead of selling them to the short sellers and the shorts would have to pay them 100 times, 1000, 10000 times the price to those to cover just like what's happening today. Saunders would've won. Today the SEC can change all the rules they want, suspend trading even extend shorts delivery deadline, it's no problem. Everybody is buying and holding...until they ask for delivery via exercising calls. All Saunders needed was Reddit...
You guys know what the answer is... right? Robin Hood and all the others are going to be forced to raise margin requirements exponentially. Is that ok? You can't be a broker and face the public when you let some guy with a tiny account lose his life savings (and more) on something like GME. Sure, a few people are going to get rich but others will lose lots of cash they shouldn't have had in the account to begin with - which story do you think the media will run with? All those people advocating today for the freedom of letting people do this will be silent when that happens. You also can't be a broker when you have to cover giant losses because those little guys blew out their accounts and you can't collect the massive sum they now owe you, so you must fork over cash to make the trades whole after a nasty halt. Low margin requirements are great 99% of the time, but the broker has to protect themselves first and foremost. The "little guy" that everyone pretends to care so much about is going to be the one hurt the most when margin is 5X what is is today and he can't afford to trade any more.
That story reminds me of all the totalitarian governments around the globe, from the right and the left. Looks like we aren't far from the same, particularly as we consider the market as sacro-saint representation of our capitalist system.
Except this time the "little guy" will not be losing his life savings. It's the "Big Guy" that's going to be losing their entire capital. That's why the restricted trading, to protect the "Big Guy", not the "little guy". How many times have we read posts on ET of somebody losing their entire life saving, losing a large chunk of their trading capital, did they ever restrict the trading of the "Big Guy" to just 1 share to protect us? What's good for the goose should be good for the ganter. If they never restricted the trading of those "Big Guys" when they were happily taking money from us, they shouldn't be restricting the trading of us now that we are taking money from them. Robinhood is supposed to be for the "little guy", zero-commission trading, blah blah blah. At the end, it was just like the rest of them and even worse. Pathetic! They should cancel their IPO because if they are running out of cash atm, the company is no good. They will be shorted. In fact, all of the brokers that restricted trading should be shorted.
The only reason America hates these totalitarian governments is because they are stiff competition in a political sense. Trump loves Kim Jong-un's style. Hillary loved Franco style. Both Bush loved Colonel Gaddafi style. Bill a huge fan of Caligula.