I wanted to get this out there as a PSA, so apologies for the extra GameStop content.
You may have noticed there was some consternation the other day when a smartphone app called Robinhood, as well as some other retail brokerages, restricted purchases of GameStop stock. By now the basics of what was happening with the stock are quite clear. A hedge fund, Melvin Capital, had a short out on GameStop. A group of Redditors decided that it would be fun to pump the stock up, likely in reaction to learning about this short. However, much confusion remains around what happened with the brokerages. Some here immediately decided that purchases had been halted because a shadowy cabal of hedge funds who had shorted the stock were demanding that the rabble stop pumping up the stock price for the lulz. AOC and Ted Cruz and many others also jumped on this train.
There was just one problem: the narrative didn’t really make any sense. Why would Robinhood torch their reputation for this? If this was a coordinated fuck-you to main street, why didn’t every brokerage participate? What about all the other hedge funds not named Melvin, many of which were doubtless making a killing in all this chaos? Life is rarely so Manichean.
As the dust began to settle, we learned that the real villain in all this was… obscure-to-me stuff in the financial system that is not at all nefarious: a couple of government- and industry-imposed regulations.
So it looks like Robinhood did not prohibit customers from buying GameStop or AMC as part of a conspiracy to protect short sellers. It did it because it literally couldn’t afford to let them keep trading.https://t.co/0uFya2zDjr
— James Surowiecki (@JamesSurowiecki) January 29, 2021
The more volatile the underlying stocks are, the more capital you have to post. GME’s (and AMC’s) stock prices have become incredibly volatile, which meant Robinhood had to put up more of its own money (and it has to use its own money, not client money).
— James Surowiecki (@JamesSurowiecki) January 29, 2021
The culprit behind the GameStop buying ban, in other words, seems not to have been a sinister hedge-fund cabal. Instead, disappointing as it is from a dramatic perspective, the culprit seems to have been government- and industry-imposed capital requirements.
— James Surowiecki (@JamesSurowiecki) January 29, 2021
Why do I keep harping on this? Because there are a lot of problems with our financial system, but what we have witnessed is not one of them. We will never solve the real problems if we believe in fake ones.
I will put a longer form excerpt from an interview below the fold, with the CEO of Webull, another free-trading service for small investors. Open thread, if you’d like!
Let’s bring in the CEO of Webull, Anthony Denier. And Anthony, your platform also among those that’s restricted trade for the likes of AMC, as well as GameStop. We were talking about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez now jumping in on the debate, saying that she would be for a hearing in this if it’s necessary. Why restrict the trade, and what led to that action?
ANTHONY DENIER: Well, it wasn’t our choice. Our clearing firm gave us a call and said we’re going to have to stop allowing new opening positions in the three names, AMC, GME, and KOSS. Highly volatile, and what happens is this is not a political decision. And unfortunately, it got political. I think, you know, I think it was once said that don’t let any good crisis go to waste. And that’s clearly what’s happening here.
And we’re seeing politicians jump on the bandwagon so they can get– so they can start trending on Twitter. But in reality, what’s going on is that there is a two-day settlement between if you buy the stock today, those brokerage firms that you bought that stock on have to fund that trade with the clearing central house called DTC for two whole days. And because of the volatility of stocks, DTC has made the cost of the collateral of the two-day holding period extremely expensive.
And we just can’t afford– well, we’re not a clearing firm, but our clearing firm simply cannot afford the cost to settle those trades. We cannot use customer funds to front that cost due to regulation. So the brokerages or the clearing firms have to go into their own pockets to do it. And they simply can’t afford the cost of that trade clearance. That is the reason why these stocks are coming off. It has nothing to do with the decision or some sort of closed room cigar– smoke-filled cigar room of Wall Street firms getting together to the dismay of the retail trader. This has to do with settlement mechanics of the market.
[…]There is no way that a customer would not be able to sell a position they hold. We are simply stopping opening of new positions. Liquidations can happen at any time. This is general market mechanics. We have customer protections in place. We would never stop a customer from being able to get out of a position. But currently, we are stopping customers from getting into a new position. And that has to do with it possibly.
Baud
Hmm.
StringOnAStick
Thank you for this! It’s easy to be resentful about hedge funds and heaven knows a bunch of then deserve it, but we do ourselves zero favors by believing stuff that isn’t true just because it feels comfy and righteous..
Major Major Major Major
@Baud: Hedge fund short stock, stock go up cuz reddit
Added an explanation to that paragraph though, thanks for the note!
Cheryl Rofer
Thanks for this clarification!
Also an object lesson in not just retweeting whatever sounds logical or good. Try to understand what something’s about before you retweet. And if you don’t really understand it, don’t retweet.
RobertDSC-Mac Mini
Kind of sad because GameStop is the only place I go to for used games that have some kind of guarantee against defects.
Major Major Major Major
@Cheryl Rofer: I won’t pretend to understand it all, but this seems like a perfectly reasonable explanation, and given by voices I trust, which sometimes is the best you can do…
Walker
I saw this earlier. The question remains why couldn’t RobHood have been more transparent about this. Saying nothing lit their reputation on fire.
kindness
That’s a good reason why Robinhood shut down Gamestock trading. I still support those capital requirement rules though.
Major Major Major Major
@Walker: I mean, that’s not really a question about whether it happened, but rather why a small startup might have bad rapid response PR and be lousy on TV.
Immanentize
@Baud: Exactly.
Funny how the finance guys are saying “nothing to see here, move along.”
Webull is the Chinese version of Robinhood. Also will be checked into.
Immanentize
@Major Major Major Major: Robinhood raised over a billion in one day. If the margin call was “automatic, nothing to see here” then the billion could have been raised before the call. But it wasn’t.
Major Major Major Major
@Immanentize: oh no, not china!
If by “the finance guys” you mean like, every finance person, every commentator on finance, every finance journalist, lots of non-finance journalists, other people who probably know what they are talking about. This conspiracy is getting big! When does Soros come in?
BruceFromOhio
That is … an unfortunate last name in this particular context.
BruceFromOhio
@Cheryl Rofer:
Oh, Cheryl, you are totes adorbs.
apocalipstick
How can we believe this? The CEO of Webull is named Denier; literally, deny-er.
I am not a crank. ;)
BruceFromOhio
@Walker:
They probably had no idea what to say, or how to say it. Crisis management takes practice and leadership.
Major Major Major Major
scav
I suppose it is nice that new and different shiny chewtoys are available to bat around the memosphere. Has anyone put Bernie’s mittens on it? Maybe that plus his mangled chair is what gummed up the financial series of tubes.
Immanentize
@Major Major Major Major:
Who made the margin call? That must be widely known. By everyone. Please tell me!
Also, my guess is that the fact that Webull is a Chinese Company will end up being a very important part of this story going forward. Boo!
By the way, argument by “authoritative consensus” is a fail methodology. Facts please.
Matt
My prediction: when the dust settles, we’re going to find out that a couple people helped fire WSB up on this, and they all made millions of dollars. Meanwhile, most of the Greater Fools from Reddit will be HODLing their now-underwater GME shares all the way down to zero.
Major Major Major Major
@Immanentize: Oh no, not China!
To answer your question, it is in the article I linked to, and if you’d bothered to read some of the actual reporting on this before flapping your fingers, you might have known that.
If you’re going to play the logical fallacy game I’m not going to talk to you.
@Matt: Oh the main instigator is absolutely some guy who bought $50k of gamestop two years ago, this is known.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
what I don’t get is, if people like King and Tester have hinted they’d be willing to nuke the filibuster if McConnell tries to go back to his ’09 full obstruction strategy, wouldn’t it make sense to talk Manchin and Sinema into some kind of filibuster reform? It could be as simple as requiring the old school talking format, to (as I understand it) changing the rule from 60 votes to get cloture to 40 votes to stop it.
John S.
Except Robinhood isn’t the only platform that shut down trading of GME. TD Ameritrade, Schwab and others halted trading as well. I’m not sure the liquidity argument holds up as well for those others as it does for Robinhood.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major:
The Q of Wall Street.
BruceFromOhio
@Immanentize:
Never underestimate the power of stupid when people act as a group.
Major Major Major Major
@John S.: GameStop is, I believe, one of the most traded stocks in history, so it makes sense that some (only some! why only some? conspiracy theorists won’t say) other retail brokerages chose to restrict it that afternoon. The capital requirements were getting ridiculous and it would have been a multiple-day float. They reopened trading the next day once they’d secured the capital.
Ken
Soros has been in from the beginning, by definition. Or at least by axiom.
yellowdog
Robin Hood may have been correct in their stopping purchases, but weren’t there also forced sales of their clients holdings? That sounds very hinky.
Ken
Rotating tag nomination. Though some might argue “as a group” is not needed.
oldster
If I understand your update, then Robinhood’s suspension of trading was the result of federal laws/regulations designed to guarantee good order in the market — in this case, guaranteeing that a trader has enough cash on hand to execute their client’s trades.
This is part of the government regulation of finance that I and others support — the sort that Liz Warren supports, and has spent a lot of her career designing and implementing.
If that is how the story goes, then I hope that Liz Warren will step up and repeat what you are saying in your post. I think she would have a lot of credibility for calming people like me who automatically suspect the markets of bad behavior
[eta: of course it won’t convince all the crazies, and certainly won’t convince the Warren-haters. But it might convince some of the Wall-Street haters, who tend to see her as an ally.]
Immanentize
@BruceFromOhio: That is why that the unique is easily upset in debates or legal arguments.
But I am stealing your line -+ it’s perfect.
BruceFromOhio
@John S.:
In the case of TDAmeritrade, this is incorrect. TD made it very clear I could still buy and sell whatever I wanted. Read the bulletin for details, certain types of transactions were forced to brokers, as an individual I was free to buy shares outright, or sell shares that I owned.
Major Major Major Major
@oldster: I think it’s telling that she has chosen not to jump in on the conspiracy theory. Here are her only tweets on the topic. Her concern is the casino and pump-and-dump nature of these market moves, she has nothing at all to say about the trading restrictions.
Unless she’s in on it too!!!!
Martin
Yep. I got this one wrong. Turns out if you’re going to try and raid wall street, you need to pick a well capitalized broker. My guess is that adding to the problem was that some of the big windfalls by traders selling high didn’t help their liquidity as they almost certainly got those funds frozen by the SEC pending investigation.
Azhrie139
This explanation is not at all believable for a number of reasons, one of which not all trading was stopped. Only purchases were stopped. The exact thing that would lead to the price falling to hopefully bail out the hedge funds. It only ended up sort of working though.
Major Major Major Major
@Azhrie139:
That’s… did you read any of this? That’s the entire point.
Immanentize
@Major Major Major Major:
I did read the article. There was some speculation that Citadel might have been the clearinghouse but a lot of pushback on that.
Look, my position is skeptical uncertainty. Your position is credulous certitude.
I am looking for facts to better understand this. You are telling a tale you wish to believe. Fine.
And yes. China is an issue — they are a strategic competitor willing to work almost any angle, legal or not, to get economic and military advantage. It seems that allowing people to freely day trade on a government intertwined platform (as Webull is) is a fine way of capturing usable strategic information about both systems and individuals. No?
Baud
@Major Major Major Major:
Aha! So you admit it!
Immanentize
@Major Major Major Major: I recommend you take a walk, clear your head, medicate if necessary.
Major Major Major Major
@Immanentize:
I mean paragraph three literally names the clearinghouse.
BruceFromOhio
@Ken
@Immanentize:
Thank you both, I am honored, but I am also a thief.
WhatsMyNym
There are issues with Robinhood and others of it kind, but it’s related to the inexperienced traders who are given access to trading products which require some knowledge to use.
ETA: link to Guardian article about the death.
Major Major Major Major
I’m glad they fixed the pie filter to work for admins.
Baud
Found this WSJ explainer on clearinghouses.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/how-clearing-demands-grounded-the-wallstreetbets-stocks-for-a-day-11611966092
BruceFromOhio
@Major Major Major Major:
She is TOTALLY IN ON IT.
BruceFromOhio
@Major Major Major Major:
Who ya gonna pie this time, Cole? Watergirl? LOL
Martin
@oldster: It’s actually a provision of Dodd-Frank, so safe to assume that Warren supported it.
The regulation that I think is needed here is to constrain short selling. Shorting a stock has the potential (not always, but under the right circumstances) to create a positive feedback loop that can’t be broken out of without regulatory intervention. That’s arguably what took down Bear Sterns. Gamestop is a different, but related positive feedback loop that can’t happen without the short interest.
Positive feedback loops in a market are bad because they distort the desired function of the market.
Major Major Major Major
@BruceFromOhio: i have two people in my pie filter and i’ll never tell
lofgren
I don’t think we can blame laypeople, i.e. me personally because that’s what I’m really concerned about, for being suspicious of Robin Hood’s actions. The appearance of impropriety is very strong. AOC probably has a responsibility to get somebody who really knows about these things on the phone before she calls for an investigation on twitter. She’s not a private citizen anymore. When she calls for an investigation, it means something.
Speaking further as a layperson, it still seems to me that there is enough shady dealing in the Gamestop situation that an investigation may still be warranted even if the trading shutdown turns out to be legit. Selling off their users’ stock to prevent losses when the app has frozen trading, as they apparently reserve the right to do, might make sense in many situations. According to a few folks on WallStreetBets, who would be biased the opposite way generally, this is actually a good power for Robin Hood to have in most cases. But they knew what was going on here! I honestly can’t say yet if that creates an ethical obligation to change their policy, but it might be worth it for lawmakers to investigate. How could it be beneficial to our economy or anybody except for rich gamblers for a hedge fund to be able to short sell 140% of the existing shares of a company, which they don’t even own yet? That just feels intuitively hinky. If there is a good reason that it should be allowed, I’d like to see a hedge fund manager explain it to a politician under oath, because then it would probably be simple enough for me to follow too. A hearing would be focused on what people actually did, how the system is actually working in practice, rather than abstract economic theory. Theory is great but it needs to be tested against the real world. Is this what economic theorists envision when they argue for the benefits of short selling? If not, they may need to adjust their theories.
Martin
@WhatsMyNym: That’s a huge issue with Robinhood. I’m not a huge fan of gating escalated trading privileges behind wealth, but there really needs to be some reform here. RH hands them out like candy.
different-church-lady
The juxtaposion of those two names in this context really ought to create pause for thought.
Baud
@Martin:
I don’t know for sure, but capital requirements probably to back much further than that.
Martin
@Major Major Major Major: Not BruceFromOhio. We’ll figure this out by process of elimination!
Spanky
@BruceFromOhio:
Or as Despair.com puts it “None of us are as dumb as all of us.”
Major Major Major Major
@lofgren: I fully support hearings and an investigation! And I was definitely thinking of people like AOC and not, like, my friend Tim on Facebook, who doesn’t have her access to expertise and who follows her lead.
@different-church-lady: yes!!
different-church-lady
@Major Major Major Major: For them, or against them?
different-church-lady
@Martin: Hey, I bet I’m gonna lose on the deal…
WhatsMyNym
@Martin: When I started active trading about 25 years ago, you had to ask for permission to start using options or shorts. They wanted to know how many years experience you had. Doesn’t seem to be a requirement with Robinhood and the like.
Baud
@Baud:
To = go
different-church-lady
@Major Major Major Major: It disconcerts me that our side can be just as susceptible to imbalances in the heat/light ratio as theirs is.
Baud
@different-church-lady:
That’s not news.
different-church-lady
@WhatsMyNym: Do you have an email address and a mobile device? Well that’s all the experience you need to do anything at all today.
Baud
Short selling = commenting on Balloon Juice, when it comes to the need for experience.
ETA: and the potential for harm.
different-church-lady
@Baud: A lot of people don’t read the news.
Martin
@Baud: They do, but Dodd-Frank increased them, so it’s probably safe to say that they ran up against a specific Dodd-Frank provision.
I don’t recall the specific number (because it’s larger than I would ever consider), but my broker requires advanced notice if I want to place a trade larger than a certain amount, presumably for the same reason.
Major Major Major Major
@different-church-lady:
As @Baud notes this isn’t new, but it can drive me up the wall sometimes too. Unlike with the GOP, though, it actually hurts our causes.
BruceFromOhio
@different-church-lady: Disconcerting, yes, I’ll balance it with a willingness and ability to stop, consider, and possibly change direction once facts are established, versus blind doubling- or tripling-down.
Eunicecycle
@different-church-lady: it did lead to a Twitter war between the two. I think he agreed with and retweeted her tweet, and she said she didn’t want support from someone who supported those who tried to kill her. It went downhill from there.
BruceFromOhio
@Spanky:
“A few harmless flakes working together can unleash an avalanche of destruction.”
A good friend and former manager had the sunken ship poster, Mistakes, up in his office for many years.
different-church-lady
@BruceFromOhio: It’s less of a problem on our side (in the sense that any interger you pick is less than infinity) but it’s still a problem. It’s the reason I get the heebie-jeebies when people talk about AOC as the future of the party.
Martin
@WhatsMyNym: RH doesn’t give it out immediately, but the requirements are much less than when you and I got it. And even then, I was shocked at how readily ETrade gave me the right to sell naked calls. I thought that was pretty irresponsible, and RH hands it out even more readily.
BruceFromOhio
@Eunicecycle:
It was epic. That dumb schmuck Cruz stepped on a rake while walking into a buzz saw.
L85NJGT
That’s some catch, that Catch-22…..
different-church-lady
@Eunicecycle: I saw that and big props to her on that facet. But that level of skill at righteous shade can mask a lot of fundamental flaws.
BruceFromOhio
@different-church-lady:
I totally get this. I counsel you to consider that a lack of experience in our younger leaders may be fundamental to your discomfort, and the only cure for that is time.
Besides, nothing kills idealism as effectively as experience.
different-church-lady
@BruceFromOhio: I’m not nearly as worried about her as I am about the worship of her. I know she’s smart enough to learn her way out of early mistakes. The question is will she get addicted to the star power and decide heat feels better than light.
Major Major Major Major
@different-church-lady: so far she’s on the right path I think but man, yeah, her fans…
Martin
@different-church-lady: That’s why I generally don’t like political parties. You have to understand that the first priority of a party is building a 50%+1 constituency, and the party leaders job is to use policy and culture as tools to build that constituency.
What we’re witnessing with the GOP is what happens when that 50%+1 is far off and slipping away and so they have to double down on that kind of manipulation, and with the Dem party what happens with 50%+1 is well in hand and growing organically, freeing them to not have to do that.
But turn the demographic tables (and they will at some point) and the Dems will resort to the same tactics. Maybe in a different form, but the same basic concept. Always be skeptical of what party leadership is telling you.
That said, I switched from no party preference to Democrat in 2016, because almost everything is acceptable in opposition to fascism. Plus, the Democrats are clearly more liberated to pursue the moral good over the politically expedient right now.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I was just about the age AOC (!) is now when a bunch of her political ancestors (Nader) and still fellow-travellers (Moore, Sarandon) tried to tell me there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Bush and Gore, and anyway four years of Bush would make the people see that Dennis was the only answer. I was able to figure out that was bullshit, even though I was but a callow youth. In my early thirties.
Subsole
@apocalipstick: I thought it was like, French. Y’know, like, den-yay, or something.
206inKY
Trading was briefly blocked on Merrill Edge, backed by BofA, before shifting to a 100% margin requirement. I use Merrill and strictly trade with settled cash, but Robinhood and Merrill and all the rest allow people to trade on margin. These retail traders, especially the youngest generation, get massively over-leveraged since they’re basically buying stocks on borrowed money, and if the value of the equity plunges they’re screwed. The brokerages are okay with wipeouts that ruin smaller handfuls of traders. But with GME or AMC, buying a stock on margin at 1500% its appropriate value means a whole other scale of losses when the music stops, with the brokerages eating the losses from the catastrophically dumb choices of this mob.
AOC’s involvement should tell you everything you need to know about democratic socialism. They don’t give a shit about black voters in the South. It’s a white identity politics movement for the children of the affluent. They resent their failure to reproduce the class status of their parents and are drawn like magnets to the greed of options trading. They ruthlessly mock the practice of using settled cash to buy actual shares of “boomer stocks” with strong fundamentals, and then whine about losing money when their options expire worthless. They are not liberals.
Subsole
@Ken: Second.
Benw
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I was in my early 20s and fell for it hook, line and sinker. Ugh
@Major Major Major Major: I think AOC’s doing fine and is gonna be great, but see my reply to Jim above :)
Jinchi
Doesn’t that undermine the entire culture and purpose of Twitter?
J R in WV
@BruceFromOhio:
That isn’t the same thing as puting a short position, which is neither buying nor selling shares.
I got very near a major in econ, and we have been investing our savings in equities for 45+years now. With the same advisor/broker for maybe 30 years, at least.
She won’t deal with options, margins, or shorts at all, as a trained stock broker to her the risk is too large. She won’t even do it for her clients using their money. I think that’s wise. I also don’t gamble at casinos and have no desire to visit Las Vegas NV at all.
PS, from the thread concerning the insurrection, impeachment, and John Roberts not sitting as presiding judge of the impeachment trial, if he isn’t willing to do the hard parts of his job, he should resign or be impeached! Sorry/not sorry to wander off topic!Y
I’m getting used to using the Text form for commenting, kinda. Don’t think I’ll ever prefer it, but I do like having both options — whenever we get the WYSIWYG Visual tab back.
206inKY
@Martin: I think short selling has a much more rational economic role to play than options trading, which is a cancer on our economy. Now that there’s a clearly elevated risk to excessive short selling, it has become an even higher conviction signal about where capital should not be allocated. For example, reddit seems to love equities like MVIS and LOOP, which are total scams identified by the excellent Hindenburg Research: https://mobile.twitter.com/hindenburgres
These sham companies do not deserve the capital flowing their way, and it’s better to pop bubbles sooner than later when there’s less collateral damage.
Subsole
@Eunicecycle: Ted does tend to have that effect…
Subsole
@Major Major Major Major:
“Parasocial relationships were a mistake.”
Another Scott
@Baud:
Obligatory: Gonna = Going To.
Cheers,
Scott.
Subsole
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Alas, I did not spot the holes in the garbage bag of their logic…
In fairness I was quite literally just out of high school. But yeah, I spent the next several years doing a LOT of rueing…
That shit pretty well took the bloom off the Greens for me. They have not improved.
@206inKY: If I read this whole deal right, a bunch of interwebnet socialists are doing battle with Wall Street by handing their money, car, mortgage, credit cards, last shirt, retirement fund, and school loan payments to…Wall Street?
Is that pretty much it? All I can tell is that they’re basically playing poker on a craps table with chips that periodically change value.
J R in WV
@206inKY:
First, you connect Ocasio Cortez to some ill-defined group of potentially incompetent stock traders with no evidence whatsoever. Not how that works in the real world, you need evidence to make serious accusations!
Second: AOC is a working class Puerto Rican woman of color — why do you think the white supremacists hate her? Clue: Not because she is liberal.
Your comment is poorly argued and fact free…
BruceFromOhio
@J R in WV:
That is correct, it isn’t the same thing. My comment was a response to “TD Ameritrade, Schwab and others halted trading as well” by@John S.:
And interesting that you haven’t re-pie’d me after the upgrade. I thought I was persona non grata.
bluehill
IMO there are a number of drivers behind GME. I don’t think it could have happened 10 years ago without commission-less trading, near-zero interest rates, social media, etc. Plus central banks around world have been pumping money into the financial system to prop UP the markets because of the pandemic. I am also guessing that rules and regulations have been more concerned about limiting panic selling or a market meltdown rather than a melt up in a particular stock.
Tough to regulate human behavior because it’s hard to plan for every situation that we get ourselves into especially if an underlying assumption is that we are rational actors.
bluehill
@J R in WV:
Options are a tool and can be used well or poorly. If I was a speculator who thought GME had a better chance to turn things around than the “market” because it was changing its strategy and had new management. I could buy call options which cost less than the outright shares. It limits my potential loss to the premium of the option and offering the upside if the turnaround is successful.
That said, probably not what was going on GME over the past few weeks.
Jon Marcus
I believe that in addition to limiting purchases, Robinhood also forced users to sell (i.e. users received notices that sales had been carried out “for their own protection.”) How would that fit into this? Seems to me that’s a lot more questionable than “We don’t have the $ to back these trades until clearance.”
Major Major Major Major
@Jon Marcus: at least some of those were margin calls. Lots of users didn’t understand they were trading on margin.
elm
@Major Major Major Major: Soros conspiratorialism and antisemitism were there from the very start.
The subreddit involved advertises as “Like 4chan with a bloomberg terminal” and looking at their *chan inspiration, it’s super easy to find exactly why they want to punish hedge fund owners and especially the founder of Melvin Capital.
catclub
This. This . This. Deserves bold AND italics.
Why does the Qanon conspiracymongering jump to mind?
catclub
@BruceFromOhio:
The best pie-ing or banning is silent. Poster still sees their own posts. Nobody else does.
elm
@catclub: Probably because this coalesced on Reddit as soon as Qanon folks were disappointed with the failed coup, the Biden inauguration, and Reddit banning their big remaining Q/Trump cult subreddit.
It’s the same people and same cult in new clothes.
Origuy
Something good came out of the Gamestop affair. A ten year old boy had been given ten shares of GME as a Kwanzaa present in 2019. When his mom heard about the company’s rise, she discussed it with him and he decided to sell, his $60 present yielding $3,200.
Major Major Major Major
@Origuy: oh neat!
lofgren
@Major Major Major Major:
Conspiracy theorists have to explain why not everybody is in on the conspiracy? That’s a pretty weird demand. It’s kind of definitional to conspiracies that not everybody is involved.
lofgren
@Origuy:
Unfortunately his politics are different from mine so I hope he dies.
No One You Know
@different-church-lady:
Nailed it.