I am loving every minute of this. The "professionals" gamble on the market all the time, front run, high frequency trade, and relentless tactics to get rich at the expense of the "retail" investors. Now they are upset that apps like Robinhood has provided unprecedented access to the markets. Their exclusive access to insane gambling nonsense is being torn down in real time.
If Wall St can gamble and cause a global financial crisis, I see no reason why "retail" traders can't fuck around on Robinhood and cause some meme stocks to explode.
I think what is really going on here is that the "professionals" are bothered that the "idiots on WSB" are making a mockery of the market. Make no mistake, the market is already a mockery, what's happening now is that the public is finding out.
Yes, but retail is going to get destroyed in the end.
The power elite always get what they want. Right now there appear to be curbs on GME and AMC buy orders for TD Ameritrade and Schwab customers.
If you have to pull strings with your drinking buddy from Dartmouth to blow up a bunch of propertyless zoomers in order to prevent a margin call on the account you've leveraged to buy your house in the Hamptons, then that's what you're going to do.
This is absolutely fucking ridiculous. Someone is getting fucked by their own leverage, they got caught, isn't that what the market is supposed to do? Kill the overleveraged non-sense to redistribute wealth to more efficient investments?
It isn't a bank run to be blocked for the sake of society, this is just a bunch of rich people paying the price for risking too much... Boils my blood so deeply.
The hardest part of gambling is not coming up with the big winning bet -- it's getting whatever counterparty to pay you once you've won. It's always been this way, in sports, in horses, and on Wall Street. People come up with all sorts of reasons to not pay you and you have to shape your strategy around this.
Aaron Brown talks about how being a successful gambler is not about a few high-stakes wins, or a super-consistent record. It's about winning the right fraction of bets, so that nobody suspects you're a winner.
The Big Short talks about this too— people trying to figure out how to bet against subprime mortgages in a way that the entity on the other side of it will actually be in a position to pay out (and be able to be compelled to do so).
>The hardest part of gambling is not coming up with the big winning bet -- it's getting whatever counterparty to pay you once you've won.
Isn't that the truth. I know crypto is hated on here but just as an anecdote, I've traded on a lot of exchanges in the last few years and I almost wince whenever I make a really great trade that 5 or 10x's because as sure as the day is long inside of an hour my account will get frozen and I'll have to submit documentation, answer a bunch of questions, or whatever else to get my account unfrozen and access to the funds. It's almost like they're saying thanks for your business and we don't mind you getting lucky but don't get too lucky.
Business Adventures has the tale of the Piggly Wiggly short squeeze of 1923. The old boys of the NYSE changed the rules to help the shorts and undo trades after the fact.
So you think GameStop shares are genuinely worth $375? GameStop traded around $20 a share for the past couple of years. You think that right now the company is worth almost 20 times what it was worth two years ago?
Remember you can file a dispute for things like this. Gather as much evidence as you can that you attempted to exercise. If you win the dispute they have to exercise at whatever the price was during your attempt (IANAL, this is just my understanding).
Are you trying to do an early exercise, or do you mean that they won't let you sell your calls? If you are trying to exercise, do you have the cash to cover, or are you trying to use margin to do it?
Also they apparently have the "biden economic team" looking into the situation so it does go to show that lobbying dollars allows you to get your concerns addressed rather quickly.
Same stuff goes down on 4chan and several other sites. Not to mention the fact that the SEC has neglected to investigate insider trading for years now.
IMHO why the fuck is shorting legal to begin with. Short insurance should be mandatory for short trading.
Scale dictates enforcement priorities, obviously. Like a lot of people, they don't deal with issues until they are large and impact the market. They are ABSOLUTELY going to intervene here. First with some immediate action, and later they'll craft a new rule to guide social media on stock advice being not allowed on their platforms (IMO).
> why the f** is shorting legal
Short selling rewards investors who believe that certain stocks are overvalued or that the company is covering up fraud. They helped bring Lehman Brothers down, as well as Enron, Wirecard, etc... In those instances, the shorts were instrumental in reverting stocks down to correct (sometimes zero) prices. Without them, bubbles would rise higher and poop much bigger. That sort of volatility destroys liquidity and confidence in the market.
> Short insurance should be mandatory for short trading.
There are naked short limits already, but yeah, this issue with GameStop should have those rules re-evaluated, because they obviously didn't work in this case.
> "First with some immediate action, and later they'll craft a new rule to guide social media on stock advice being not allowed on their platforms (IMO)."
Well, the IRS doesn't go after rich people because they don't have the funding[1]; they only go after the people they can afford to go after[2].
I know the IRS is different from the SEC, Apples to Oranges. But like you said, they've neglected insider trading; it's probably for very similar reasons, because those being investigated just have too much power to take down. I'm sure the SEC will hammer these easy targets on WSB well before they even dare touch the Big Boys.
You are correct that they cherry picked information. However you are still incorrect on the original assertion that SEC is not in fact neutered. There have been more enforcement actions but insider trading enforcement has been the lowest in decades:
Could you note any major cases the previous administration pursued that didn't involve some lone scapegoat trader and/or a minority everyone could agree to dislike? Were there any actual cases after the 2008 mortgage/cdo/cds crisis, for example?
I don't know why you're being voted down here. These are legitimate articles in major publications that are broadly accepted by experts in the field. Sad!
I’m worried what will happen down the road. Robinhood is likely getting super valuable data on this. Combine that with correlating post activity on Reddit and you have a recipe for obliterating the arbitrage of retail investors. These hedge funds will also buy the data that Robinhood freely sells [1]. Sure, squeezes like this will still happen every so often, but on average the hedge funds will win more in the long run.
So, I think Robinhood needs to get some competitors, who charge $1-2 per month, while enforcing data privacy.
This all feels like a classic Black Swan at work, and I guess the main question is if you believe that the long term expected return justifies such risky short sells.
Really the only thing the hedge funds could do to "win more" in the long run is to stop shorting stocks en masse.
The more they short sell, the more this can be pulled off again and again.
Which is good IMO, I'd be happy in a market where short selling and negativity in general just isn't a thing. If you aren't optimistic about a company just stay out.
Hard no! I want scams and shady schemes uncovered. What a disappointment that Herbalife wasn't brought down by the shorts.
I'm struggling to even understand what a market with "no negativity" means. We want to evaluate firms with a critical eye. If they are mis-valued, that serves no one.
>I'm struggling to even understand what a market with "no negativity" means.
Just imagine basically... every single other market. The price of goods at Walmart is not based on your bet on supply and demand.
If there are more buyers than sellers, the price goes up. If there are more sellers than buyers, the price goes down. If a business wants to raise money by issuing new shares, supply and demand will dictate the price.
The market doesn't need uninvested third parties sitting outside the ring gambling on the supply and demand outcome in order to set a price.
I think you're arguing for a market with only direct investments and no secondary derivatives. If that was all the equity market was, we could be in the same zip code.
However, we live in this hyper-securitized world, where every part of the economic fabric has bets for and against, with insurance, leverage and information asymmetry baked in.
The only way to "discover" price is to provide instruments that provide "gravity" for both upward and downward price movements. The lack of supply on it's own is not enough, especially when malicious actors are pushing on the supply and demand levers.
> The price of goods at Walmart is not based on your bet on supply and demand.
This is a specious argument. You literally could go out, borrow your friend's crate of 10,000 bananas, sell them on the open market, then wait for the price of bananas to crash, and then buy them back (maybe even the same crate!) and give them back to your friend, plus whatever the banana margin costs. Effectively, if you were to do this at scale, you would directly be influencing the price of goods at Walmart. Mechanically, this isn't how it works, and I don't think there are banana futures and options, but thinking that all derivatives activity is speculation is simply naïve.
On the GameStop excitement, all I have to say is...
For better or worse, derivatives-based economies are incredibly resource-efficient. By creating a formal system for actually assigning universally-understood value to promises, we can do a lot more with a lot less.
Sometimes bad things happen, but you can be sure we'd have none of the niceties of modern society without a derivatives-based economy.
Immediate cash just has a ceiling for what it's capable of supporting.
Well the general discontent with the financial system stems, I believe, from it being perceived as mostly a walled garden in which professionals have built a complicated and highly self-referential system few control (Blackrock cough) that makes and keeps them disproportionately wealthy.
To anyone in the working population it must seem like an instrument designed to keep the pressure on and not serve general society or those providing actual tangible things of value to the market, like goods and (non-financial) services.
I actually tend to agree but it's pointless to battle the market's cold logic (which often does make sense to me from what little I know) or existing power structures.
Solutions/counterforces need to come from society and civil institutions. If those are weak, gotta fix that first and the market would depict a more equitable society without prejudice. It's the same old rich vs poor repainted with complicated terminology and systems, really.
Another thing to improve would be transparency and education about what's going on in finance like with personal accounts of people working there for instance, making it less of a stranger and showing some of its internal logic and the things it does well or not so much.
> We want to evaluate firms with a critical eye. If they are mis-valued, that serves no one.
Hard disagree here. Sometimes mis-valuing firms serves a LOT of people. There are many firms who could create value if only they had more capital to work with. As an example, it's very possible that a company hard hit by COVID could recover if they got fresh capital and used it to explore new business models that are quarantine-friendly. I'm all for kicking out non-believers from being involved in their equities in any way.
You can't short sell most early stage startups. If you don't believe in them you just don't invest in them. It's that simple.
As for companies who do bad things, like laundering money or misusing funds, we don't need to short their stock, we need to take them to court and get them punished.
You know which firms are really mis-valued? Hedge funds. They sit in armchairs in high rises on Wall Street and do nothing for me.
Exactly! from who the short are getting their money when they crash a company stock like Wirecard? Not from the company management who did it but from other shareholders, and most of the time "retail" shareholder.
They are running to the ground company that may survive with a fresh injection of capital, and destroying company that suddenly cannot raise more capital or have no more collateral for a loan.
Moreover they are this hedge fund are manipulating information to the level of a troll farm. I was a shareholder of AMD when they where starting to release the Zen architecture. Every other week, they were sending report of "problems" with the new architecture, or even basic feature behaving normally. Hedging is ok, but betting as they do is not. And when they get burned I celebrate!
> You can't short sell most early stage startups. If you don't believe in them you just don't invest in them. It's that simple.
I'm not sure the world would have been a worse place for it to have been profitable to point out the failings of say, Theranos.
And the unlimited downside means that shorting startups that are merely unlikely to succeed wouldn't be worth the effort.
Shorting public companies that can survive COVID perfectly well by raising additional funds would be a terrible strategy too: their ability to raise funds won't really be dependent on their share price (they'll be raising debt funding instead) but every time they find a lender the share price will rebound.
Short sellers are incentivized to uncover scams and overvalued equities, as a few other folks pointed out. There are firms like Muddy Water doing the hard work of finding companies swindling investors and using publicly available data to make a case against them. Without short selling, they lose the incentive to do that.
Scams can be uncovered by CUSTOMERS and plenty of other people than short sellers, and I don't think overvalued equities is actually a problem. Many times overvalued equities leads to faster adoption of EVs and solar and better GPUs and other nice things, which are more important to my personal life than maintaining the sanctity of capitalism.
Overvalued equities lead to market crashes that tend to wipe out the retirement funds of unsophisticated investors and bankrupt otherwise viable companies. Has everyone forgotten about the dot com bubble of 2000? If so I think we're headed for a reminder.
I believe you are far off the mark here. Retail investors are well within their rights to drive up a stock to what could be above fair market value....some may well lose money in doing so. The whole narrative around retail vs. hedge funds/wall street is naive to say the least...people in financial services are worried that retail investors may lose a lot of money here which may dent confidence in the market.
The irony here is that you believe the market is a mockery which most of the time it isnt but at times it can be irrational. This is clearly one of those times....as an investment professional.....I look at this and see the irrationality of the price which is not underpinned by cash flow or a fair valuation close to the price...which is called fundamental investing and not trading like what is happening here.
value of a stock is what the market dictates is the value of the stock, not what an analyst wants the price to be. It is laughable to say that Hedges were using purely "fundamentals" for the past 10 years.
Were people in the financial services worried about retail investors when Melvin was shorting GME into the ground at $5 a share? Intentional manipulation to quickly bankrupt a company. How about with the 2000s derivatives bubble?
The only thing they are worried about is that they are getting the shitty other side of the game they made for the first time.
Price is what you pay in the market and value is what something is worth...clear difference.
Some people with in a group who hold a view does not mean the entire group holds that view.
In this game, I believe retail investors feel like they are winning now but ultimately many will lose money when the price comes down. In my view the price is not sustainable....
how much is a $20 USD bill worth to you? Its a penny or less of cotton.
obviously its not sustainable, we are entering a short squeeze. But capping at $4 a share shouldn't have been either, I think $60-$80 is a really reasonable assessment, it will spike, and rightly so, as the too greedy naked short sellers get screwed over and forced to cover their positions
A $20 USD bill is worth US$20 to me. That one is easy. My point still stands with regards to price vs value and that is how I invest. I buy stocks I think are undervalued and hold.
On GME, I have read r/WSB and the most of the posts/comments are emotional in terms of reasoning. When I’ve lost money investing it has been because I made decisions based on emotions. Often I wanted something to be true and I wasn’t able to face up to reality.
I believe short selling has a place in the market if done correctly. Don’t get me wrong, I’m against market manipulation. the buying or selling of shares by rational parties allows for true price/value discovery. My fear for WSB retail investors is that they are not rational and eventually the price of GME will come crashing down to a more realistic level in line with its future prospects and cash flow/earnings yield.
Under all the WSB bravado, I believe there is greed in that they all want to make big bucks. In that sense they are no different to the hedge funds. It’s really many small greedy fish vs a few large greedy fish....who will win? .... I’d rather avoid this fight and play a game where I’m more confident of winning.
Well I work in financial services and I care about people including retail investors which disproves your point. Everything is not black and white. There are of course people in the sector who dont care. There are a mix of views.....
Agree - and glad to hear that. I think the statement should have been posted along the lines of a majority of people who are in positions of power in the financial industry barely care about retail.
But what they're trying to achieve here (AFAIK) is a short squeeze. The whole point of this move is that there's massive short interest in GME, and the WSB crew (and anyone else long on it) can take advantage of it until those positions are closed.
After that, if people hang around, sure they'll likely lose money if they bought at the top, but until those big positions close, there's money to be made.
So from what I read, the shorts were (at least at one point) at 140% of the available float. If that's true (AFAIK) that means at least some were naked.
Agree 100%. I think the smartest bet here is buying put options that expire far out. Currently, the price of the $320 GME PUT expiring in Jan 2022 is $240. That's free money...
I've been keeping an eye on the far-out-dated put options, and I haven't seen anything that's more compelling than simply leaving money parked in an index fund. The expectation that GME will drop back down to Earth over that timeframe remains priced in.
The main takeaway from this incident is that margin-call-constrained short selling is even more dangerous than previously understood.
>The expectation that GME will drop back down to Earth over that timeframe remains priced in.
Yea, it does seem largely priced in, but perhaps not completely. If share price is $60 in 1 year, the ROI on that contract would be 9% -- so slightly better than what you'd reasonably expect an index fund to return. A $60 share price is higher than GME's all-time high prior this fiasco.
So you're paying $24,000 to bet that the stock will fall below a breakeven price of $80. Even if we assume that that's likely to happen, your maximum upside (i.e. if the stock goes to zero) is only $8,000.
THe price of that put is $240 .
So GME has to fall to 320-240 = $80.
Also the cost of that put is twenty four thousand dollars. Not exactly chump change.
> Make no mistake, the market is already a mockery, what's happening now is that the public is finding out.
Pretty sure that was about a century ago and resulted in the Great Depression.
I don't think the solution to the crock that has been going on is to "do it back". Setting one or two hedge funds back a year or so, or even to close completely, isn't going to do anything resembling justice.
It starts to look more and more like just more pigs rolling around in the mud together, if you ask me (saying nothing of the collateral damage along the way).
> You know why front running isn't illegal? Because it keeps happening and companies keep getting fined for it.
This is not a logical sentence. They are obviously getting fined because it's illegal. The traders involved are also terminated, fyi.
All banks are required to submit automated reports on Front Running detection algorithms daily to the regulators. Every trade is evaluated by the compliance systems.
If you think the fines are not big enough or that the algorithms are missing things, then make that more logical argument.
Stay away from hyperbole because it discredits you.
> Which is why the fines are always greater than the net gains.
The $3 billion in fines Wells Fargo paid versus the multiple billions it made from 2002-2015. The bank has almost $2 trillion in assets as of 2020.
> Do you think the SEC is full of morons?
No, worse. Cowards. Entirely too many see the SEC as a pathway to a high-paying job on Wall Street. You learn the ins and outs of compliance and go from a GS-8 - GS-13 making $70,000 - $150,000 a year, to making $1 million a year helping these banks, hedge funds, and other investors sidestep regulations by the most narrow of line-toeing.
I’m sure the SEC is full of extremely intelligent and well educated people. I’m equally sure that most of them are corrupt and are part of the revolving door.
There's a lot of victimhood mentality going on right now. Everything is being blamed on Wall Street and market makers 'ripping off the little guys'. I believe you 100% but sadly you're not going to get through to them.
Ha! Not only does front running happen all the time, but high frequency trading is de facto legal front running. Just beat them on a shorter or faster wire.
Front Running is when you receive an order from a large client and you yourself trade in the same stock before them, and then sell the stock to them, or allow the spread to narrow and pocket the difference.
High frequency trading is not front running unless it illegally takes data from the client trading desk - which would be both obvious and highly illegal.
There is a reason high frequency trading is typically referred to as legal front running. Sure, it's not front running by legal definition, but in practice it is absolutely front running. Beating trades to the market and making micro-gains on a mass scale.
> There is a reason high frequency trading is typically referred to as legal front running. Sure, it's not front running by legal definition, but in practice it is absolutely front running. Beating trades to the market and making micro-gains on a mass scale.
It's only referred that may by people who have no idea what they're talking about.
Front running isn't about "beating" anyone to anything. It's about stealing non-public information about an actor's intent to trade and using it to make trades before that information becomes public, and specifically before that trade executes. It's the theft bit which is the reason it's illegal.
What HFT firms are doing is simply rushing to execute as fast as possible on generally available information. They're not acting on information that's not legally available to everyone else, because that would be illegal misuse of that information. This sort of thing is pretty easy to detect, and the SEC comes down pretty hard on it.
I'm also really loving that there are a whole bunch of Redditors donating part of their gains to charity, something that those hedge funds would never do.
In my eyes those hedge funds never did anything good for humanity, and I too am loving every minute of this and how some of the big money is being siphoned into the hands of people that actually need it more.
> Now they are upset that apps like Robinhood has provided unprecedented access to the markets. Their exclusive access to insane gambling nonsense is being torn down in real time.
This is such hilariously clueless nonsense, the fact that it's expressed with such smug confidence and upvoted to the top of the thread is really emblematic of HN's complete ignorance of any topic outside of programming.
When retail volume goes up there a plenty of "professionals" (brokerages, market makers) that make a killing off executing the retail flow. I assure you the industry is loving the fact that everyone and their cat is FOMOing into trying to day-trade on Robinhood. If you really want to stick it to Wall Street put all your money into a low-fee index fund.
Whilst most of Wall street may like this, I'd guess there's at least some parts (the hedge funds with large short positions in GME) who aren't having a good time today.
The WSB thing could just be cover for them. There were more shares shorted than were outstanding, so it's a great opportunity for a trader/raider with a pile of cash.
> I see no reason why "retail" traders can't fuck around on Robinhood and cause some meme stocks to explode.
It's called 15USC78i "Manipulation of security prices" [1]. It is unlawful to transact just for the purpose of forcing others to transact. Going through a fund's 13F filings, and deliberately driving up the prices of put options they sold should fall squarely into that area. And there are more than enough posts on reddit of people stating that this is exactly what they are doing. At the scale this is happening now, there is no doubt that there are going to be legal repercussions.
Steve Cohen and Gabe Plotkin both traded on inside information at SAC (Gabe was cc'ed on several of the communications). Why are they not in jail? Ohhhh because the justice system only impacts the 99%.
That's some nice whataboutism, but that doesn't mean this isn't exactly the kind of market manipulation for which the Securities Act of 1933 was written.
I think that only works on co-ordinated activity. Everyone on their is so small and not working in co-ordinated way. There is considerable discussion in the thread about the legality of it.
Also - what do you think short sellers like Citron do all the time. Put out fake reports about companies to make money off their short positions.
The sentiment on the trade is eff those short sellers and their sketchy tactics.
> I think that only works on co-ordinated activity. Everyone on their is so small and not working in co-ordinated way. There is considerable discussion in the thread about the legality of it.
There are entire threads and Discord channels dedicated to coordinating this. It will be extremely difficult to convince a court that there is no coordination or market manipulation, especially when there are people who are spelling that fact out. And reddit have all of their IP addresses.
> Also - what do you think short sellers like Citron do all the time. Put out fake reports about companies to make money off their short positions.
If you can prove that those allegations are indeed fake, then they can be held liable for that. But Citron's influence stems from the fact that they have published a large number of reports that were indeed correct, e.g. Valiant.
> The sentiment on the trade is eff those short sellers and their sketchy tactics.
What sketchy tactics? Expressing their view that a company like Gamestop is not worth very much on account of their outdated business model that relies on physical retail in a sector that has been going fully digital for the last 15 years?
In Citron's case they cast super sketchy dispersions about companies and hope that they influence investors who don't understand how the companies operate. It's right at the line and the cost of proving them wrong is not worth the effort... plus the SEC has bigger fish to fry when they have a mandate to enforce.
There's a pretty simple defense here. "I saw the posts on reddit and wanted to get in on the upward swing". Efficient markets at work. Unless you can tie real identities to the reddit posts there's not much to be done.
I don't think what they're doing violates the law[0], but they could easily subpoena Reddit and find out who the users are if they wanted to.
[0]: too complicated to get into here, but basically my interpretation of the law is that you need to be making trades that you intend to cancel or revert immediately in order for it to apply to you, and what these traders are doing is instead speculating on the price going up and hoping to cause the shorts to liquidate their positions, thus further driving the price up. Not spoofing to create fake demand.
In theory. I'm not sure if Protonmail or the VPN provider would respond to a subpoena, but I wouldn't rule it out. But realistically most of these people are using their home IP address and their gmail account.
Yes, but it can't be more than a few percent of people who go through the effort to set that up right? I know it's not hard to do (I've done it), but I think most people on reddit are using either their personal email or a throwaway gmail account they use from their home IP.
You actually still don't need an email address to create a Reddit account.
Reddit has stayed true to their word of maintaining the old design, and it's free of the dark patterns in the redesign. Go to https://old.reddit.com/register and just leave the email field blank or if you use the pop-up menu (the thing you get when you click login/register in the top right of the old design), you can click skip on the first screen where it just asks you for your email.
Indeed. In many cases, you can get far just by looking at post and comment history. You can tell what town they live in and see screenshots of their texts and FB posts (albeit with names and faces blurred).
There are some base requirements for market manipulation that are not met here. Namely, lying. You're allowed to tell your "friends" they should buy a stock.
Yes, but some of them also manage funds that are people from Mainstreet's retirements.
So while, yeah fun to stick it to the wealthy elite, I feel the law of unintended consequences is going to rear it's head much like crash of the housing market in 2007.
> the "professionals" are bothered that the "idiots on WSB" are making a mockery of the market
I think it's deeper. if they get forced by a margin call to purchase stock people that shorted without a lend will quickly come under scrutiny from sec, which will be quite interested to know which broker(s) allowed to reach this ridiculous float volume without securing the shares
they're not just covering their losses, whose whom will remain with uncovered short can get fines and or jail time.
Retirement funds are a scam: when prices go up, funds manager take their bonus, when it goes down, the funds shareholders (that is, everyone) swallow up the loss. It even a double-edge scam, because now people are supposed to stand up for the finance behemoth because they holds their retirement hostage.
Within the United States, you will have a hard time finding a company with a traditional pension system. Almost all use 401(k) or similar retirement systems. If it is a scam, it is a well-supported scam.
Companies switched to 401ks from pensions precisely because it's a scam. With a traditional pension, the company needs to guarantee the availablity of funds for retirees. With a 401k, each individual employee is required to gamble their life savings on the stock market.
The result is that the company doesn't need to give a damn about long-term stability, they can focus on short-term gains for a carousel of owners that each demands a quick return and cash out. As a bonus, the 401k system forces the government to bow to the whim of the stock market because every citizen is now clinging for dear life onto the same mechanism the owning class use to grow their hoards.
It's a win-win-win for the rich:
* they don't need to pay retirees
* they can squeeze more money out of companies at the expense of customers, workers, future owners, and the environment
* they can get leverage over the entire society by credibly threatening the lives of millions of retirees dependent on their table scraps
No, they can't. In a bankrupcy, pension funds get first dibs on all company assets, before lenders, shareholders, or any other interested party. A company has to be really, really fucked for their bankruptcy to not produce enough money to fund the pension.
And in the rare event that that happens, pensions in the US are required to hold pension insurance, which continues to pay benefits when a pension loses income and their coffers run dry.
My grandpa is still getting pension checks of around 40k/yr from the Pullman Car Company, which went bankrupt in 1968. Pensions are, very literally, guaranteed retirement income.
> In a bankrupcy, pension funds get first dibs on all company assets, before lenders, shareholders, or any other interested party.
No, they aren't; funds already in the pension fund are separate and can't be taken in bankruptcy; wages owed have the kind of high priority claim you reference, but earned pension obligations do not. A bill was put forward in Congress in 2019 to alter this for Chapter 11 bankruptcies (to eliminate the “strategic bankruptcy to cut pension contributions” practice that explored the fact that it is not true), but died.
Plans are typically terminated by a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, and can be terminated or modified in a Chapter 11.
> And in the rare event that that happens, pensions in the US are required to hold pension insurance, which continues to pay benefits when a pension loses income and their coffers run dry.
Aside from the fact that the PBGC multiemployer fund is itself underfunded, PBGC has an age-based maximum benefit guarantee, which will often be significantly lower than what a pensioner would have been entitled to under their original pension plan:
Pensions funded by current workers towards the pensioners are also very widespread worldwide, doesn't mean they aren't an unsustainable practice.
The same can be the case for 401(k)s and similar systems. And I say that living in Sweden where the majority of my pension will consist of funds that I can manage myself the split, so I should believe in this system for my own sake.
Seriously those guys claim they are holding companies accountable and the market efficient. They are just sleazy stock traders. Grinds my gears people try and defend them through efficient capital markets when you see the garbage reports they put out there to manipulate the market for their positions.
It shouldn't unless those funds are invested in hedge funds (some are, but usually only a few percent of their total assets). Day-to-day volatility shouldn't affect them that much.
The gravedigger always has a job, and it's plenty honest. No need to direct misdirect your ire at the killer towards the gravedigger for the existence of the corpse.
If Wall St can gamble and cause a global financial crisis, I see no reason why "retail" traders can't fuck around on Robinhood and cause some meme stocks to explode.
I think what is really going on here is that the "professionals" are bothered that the "idiots on WSB" are making a mockery of the market. Make no mistake, the market is already a mockery, what's happening now is that the public is finding out.