you'll believe anything if it fits your worldview and disbelieve it when it doesn't.

It looks like you're wilfully not wanting to understand what I wrote. It's not that unclear. Replace "screwed" with unlucky, for starters.

There's a wide variety of different reasons for such differences in price which don't constitute getting screwed, such as being closer to the source of a resource makes that resource cheaper for you. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, they're inefficiencies and traders would be people investing in infrastructure and distribution bringing local prices down. But it's not a good analogy because they cause other people to do this simply by adding their money to the market.

Yes there are losers here, the traders. The traders don't make any money in your scenario. — Metaphysician Undercover

What? The traders make money in the arbitration of prices. It's literally in my post.

The number of executive orders is not evidence of abuse. Using it to separate families as Trump did is an example of abuse. Which executive order that Biden passed is an abuse?

I already told you.

I know you make shit up as you go along. So you linked that article in support of a point that it doesn't support and then decide what's in there isn't true. Sure buddy.

Let me rewrite it for you so your tiny reptilian brain can process it:

For creating a task force, for instance? Sure buddy. — Benkei

In relation to your reply to

And while the numbers are large, these actions aren't barrier-breaking. They call for the creation of task forces, direct agencies to begin a regulatory process or explore a policy change. — Cnn

Oh I'm sorry, I forgot you're incapable of charitable reading anything I write even after I spoonfed you the relevant part from the article that you linked.

For creating a task force? Sure buddy.

The problem isn't Biden but that the US system allows it. Meanwhile

And while the numbers are large, these actions aren't barrier-breaking. They call for the creation of task forces, direct agencies to begin a regulatory process or explore a policy change. — Cnn

So, yawn for now.

Imagine the price for gold is 100 USD at the CME and (after currency exchange) 120 USD at SME. And this is weird in a sense because when it really comes down to it, 1 ounce of gold from SME is worth as much as 1 ounce of gold from CME. The price differences are the result of market inefficiencies and in an ideal world without inefficiencies your gold would be 100 USD on either exchange.

Now without a large segment of traders, as a US person you will only access the CME because brokers don't offer any alternative and certainly not at prices that would make sense for a retail investor. Good for you because price happens to be lowest at the CMEbut that's a matter of luck. But if you're a Singaporean, you're being screwed. And for the Singaporean to set up an investment account in the US is also prohibitively complex and expensive.

Here come the traders, driving broker and transaction prices down because they add transaction volume, your broker now sets up lines with both CME and SME because there's sufficient demand to do so, now let's assume they haven't been trading in gold just yet (but silver and copper). You're already benefitting from the market connectivity (well not you, but the Singaporean is since you were fine with just a connection to the CME). So while transactions costs for him will be higher, they won't be prohibitively high and the complexity has been reduced thanks to the work of the brokers.

Next, traders start trading in gold too. The inefficiencies are gone so if the price of SME gold is higher, traders will buy CME gold driving prices up and selling gold at the SME driving prices down. There are no losers here, the trader found a willing seller happy with the price he got at the CME, and they find a willing buyer happy to buy the slightly higher price at the SME. Without these traders, the CME gold seller didn't get rid of his gold and the SME buyer couldn't acquire his gold.

These don't work as an analogy. The benefit for you as a market participant is clear, you know you're not paying too much thanks to speculators and traders because any price differentials were already arbitrated by them. That's the "service" you're paying them for.

Both descriptions are off though. Pfhorrest, the function you describe is the function of markets and brokers, which allows buyers and sellers to find each other. You don't need other traders for that.

Traders that don't want to buy (and hold) do bring something to the market as well. They bring liquidity, which lowers risks for every market participant and it ensures the differences of the same stuff between different markets are as minimal as possible. So silver traded at CME is the same price as it is at SME, despite being traded in different currencies and on opposite sides of the world. That means you won't pay too much regardless of which market you or your broker happens to be connected too.

"price stability will prevent crises" we were told. It's really time to revise the charter of Central Banks.

It sucks that the only thing the English successfully exported since Brexit is a virus. I think the restrictions are necessary but like everything in the Netherlands too little too late. If 5,000 cases a day isn't good enough now, they never should've let it rise to 10,000 in the first place. If you worry about a more severe strain, you immediately should prohibit air travel. If numbers don't go down quickly enough, you immediately set a curfew. Instead every measure is taken a month too late. I don't see restrictions eased beginning of March either.

It's taking it's toll mentally and emotionally and it's not good for relationships to be in each other's face basically 24/7 for months on end.

That's some cynical shit. The upside is their readers might start to take masks and social distancing seriously.

Philosophers have the worst humour. Nerds.

I've been involved in the Dutch existing perpetual bonds actually and my advice was shelved due to COVID because now there's no time to deal with them. Had a major row with the legal department of the ministry of finance for being stupid uncooperative dicks (after my research showed they were giving the wrong advice for 15 years) which played a large role in me changing jobs. Good times!

Unitary theory of government! Or in other words a dictatorship.

Depends on your risk appetite and the interest rate. There's nothing inherently wrong with either approach. But paying cash means you can't do anything else with it, so if you can finance through a loan and can make a higher return with your cash elsewhere than the interest you pay on the loan, then from a "maximize your profits" point of view, you're better off borrowing. If you think the risks of investing elsewhere are too high, you're probably better off buying real estate. Or you can spread your risk by putting money into both.

:rofl: It's funny how your ego expresses itself through victimhood every time.

Having reading comprehension problems again? Primary point :

as opposed to families being forcefully separated — Benkei

From the article you linked, the secondary point:

Unaccompanied children who cross the border are taken into custody by the Department of Homeland Security and referred to HHS, though a Trump-era policy also makes them subject to expulsion. — Cnn

You won't read about it because this is a facility for unaccompanied children as opposed to families being forcefully separated. Instead of being expulsed, they try to find a sponsor. But nice try at the moral equivalence where there is none.

Yes, so since we know I have all the shares, we could dispense with transactions and you simply pay the fee related to the SBL transactions if I wanted to be nice. Or if you want, I can sell 60 shares to you and you deliver them back and then you ask 60 again and you give them back. Or 100 and 20, if you prefer, in both cases it will be costly for you.

But this once again illustrates the importance of total transaction volume and the shares of short sales part of that transaction volume. If what you describe is a typical day in the market, shorting is an extremely bad idea. If there are lots of players and transaction volumes are a multitude of issued shares, 240% short interest doesn't raise any concerns.

Shorting by a large company would send a signal to the market that the target stock is expected to decline. The market runs on moods, right? So the stock declines because it's expected to, and the target company now has a diminished ability to pay for marketing, securing talent, planning for the future. — frank

Come now Frank, as if everybody is really taking account of who has which short position all the time. Normally, nobody gives a shit. This whole GME debacle is just hyped. It's actually really not that interesting and it's not interesting what Robin Hood did. I find the reactions of people interesting though. A lot of the comments remind me of 2008.

I think the issue is that two people are contractually obliged to buy a share but there's only 1 share available. And assume that you buy back this share from the person at the bottom of the chain and return it to the original owner. Now the person who borrowed the share from you owes you a share, but there's no share left to buy. — Michael

Oh there's definitely a settlement risk. But that's always there. One reason the naked short is prohibited. At least the short seller has a locate for his initial sale. He might get squeezed when buying it back. But that's why it's an issue of transaction volume and not how big the interest in short sale is compared to the outstanding number of stock. If that one share is normally traded 500 times during a day, buying it back twice on the same day (assuming the stock lending agreements end on the same day) isn't an issue.

To be clear, I was responding to the point that overshorting is not a problem since it is equivalent to the same stocks being bought and sold in succession (volume-based). But if it were just that, there would be no situation in which someone pays for 1.4 stocks and ends up with 1 stock.

If someone bought a share at $10 dollars, sold it for $5 dollars, then bought another at $10, we'd say that person was a bit dim for paying $15 dollars for a share worth $5. The problem that person would be creating for themselves is the problem inherent in shorting that the trader risks meeting. — Kenosha Kid

I'm not sure I follow what you're saying. First of all, let me say that we were discussing shorting as actually affecting the livelihood of the people employed by the shorted company. I don't think that view is correct.

But let me try to follow what you're trying to say. Nobody has paid a price of 1.4 to then end up with 1 merely as a result of "shorting". "Overshorting" just isn't a thing. Taking the example of a company with a single share again. I borrow the share, I sell it, the person I sold it too, lends it out too, and that borrower sells it again. We now have two short sales with only one issued share and no regular transactions. Is it "overshorted" because I know have a 200% short interest? I can make a chain of 100 short sellers if I want and I still don't see an issue with the activity of short selling itself.

While true, not related to what we were discussing.

But we're not talking about transaction volume. And I didn't say it was a 'problem' - only that it was this situation that created an opportunity for the attempt at a squeeze that's happening/happened. Take a read:

https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/01/28/yes-a-stock-can-have-short-interest-over-100-heres/ — StreetlightX

Errr... this is still about transaction volume because shares that were borrowed were sold to another investor who then lends it to another. The locate requirements are met because the underlying stock is available because of multiple sales of the same stock. That the borrower is doing the selling really doesn't change anything.

Sure, but again, the point is still that the expected profit banks on the company going out of business. — StreetlightX

I don't see the problem. Why is expecting a company to go bankrupt fundamentally wrong, or indeed, worse than expecting it to do just worse than other people think it will do? Once again, going back to the beginning, market capitalisation is expectation of future performance. All these trades have exactly no bearing on the likelihood of GME surviving except for possibly the fact that GME might hold a lot of its own stock as @BitconnectCarlos mentioned and even then just having a ton of money with a shitty business is still not really improving things for any employees.

I see fundamental problems with the stock markets how they operate and how financial institutions dominate the economy and society nowadays but this isn't the issue here. Speculators add liquidity and lower risks for every investor active in that market. That they make money off of that is only fair as the lower risk for others is basically the result of that risk being transferred to speculators. And that's still true even when speculators expect a company to go bust.

GME had been shorted to the tune of about 120% of its available stock - there was more stock that had to be covered (bought) than actually exists. — StreetlightX

That's no problem though. If only one share is issued and it's sold twice in one day, the transaction volume was 200% of the outstanding stock. In this example we understand these are consecutive sales.

One of the reasons this happened was because, again, people were hedging on the company to go bust, so that no stock would ever have to be bought back, — StreetlightX

This isn't the case though. If a company goes bankrupt its stock continues to exist and would still have to be delivered back to the lender. The stock no longer represents an equity ownership after bankruptcy but a subordinated claim.

Stop wasting everybody's time. You were given some of the reasons why the article wasn't published. We don't care what you think of the reasons why it wasn't accepted or why you think it's necessary to argue against them. You can either fix the article along the lines @fdrake set out and resubmit or drop it.

Right, but the play here - as with so many of these predatory hedge funds - was specifically to never have to cover their short positions on account of whatever overshorted company going out of business. In this case GS. This isn't just hedging - this is weaponized hedging, with profits indexed to the literal destruction of companies. — StreetlightX

I'm not sure what you're saying here. What do you mean with covering a short position? And what is an overshorted stock?

It is in a very real sense bad, because it gives the experienced traders, and those with access to specific tools, unfair advantage over the inexperienced and honest investors. The honest investor believes that the rules which govern speculation are in in place to create a fair market place, when actually the rules are strategized to create the illusion of a fair market while providing better predictive capacity to those with the desire to speculate and trade. Predictive capacity in the market, which the rules create, is nothing other than the capacity for traders to take advantage of investors. — Metaphysician Undercover

Your picture of the honest investor is that of an investor who doesn't understand markets. Back in the 17th century Dutch traders would post horseback riders at the southern tip of Holland to look out for incoming ships. These horseback riders would ride all the way back to Amsterdam and inform whoever hired them of what ship was returning and how deep it was running in the water. I don't see a fundamental problem with investing to have an information advantage over other investors. There's nothing unfair about the practice.

You think that this is good, to allow speculators to hoard the necessities of life, only to dole them out on principles of who's willing to pay the most for them, with complete disregard for any consequences of these actions, other than how much money I can make? — Metaphysician Undercover

I think my description was clear about the effects on economic behaviour on other buyers that speculation has. It has nothing to do with hoarding. The speculator introduces price changes earlier and quicker than which would come about if the market is only entered by buyers and producers. It improves efficiency in use and production which actually results in more price stability in the long run because they add liquidity. Liquidity lowers volalitiy which lowers the risk of surplusses and shortages negatively affecting buyers and producers. So in fact, speculators avoid faminine and bankruptcies where it concerns "necessities of life".

How could this deal with the problem of short sellers who actually hold the stock for a negative period of time, in the attempt to drive down the prices for the sake of personal profit? — Metaphysician Undercover

As is clear from my previous post I'm not adverse to short selling. The bullshit I'm talking about is the insane amount of money invested in making "markets" more efficient to the extent it's detrimental to society at large. We don't need high speed trading or tick sizes a fraction of a cent.

If someone's retirement hinges on putting people, say, Gamestop employees, out of a job, then they can die hungry and cold. — StreetlightX

But they'll go or not go out of business regardless of what investors think the market value of the company is. If I short sell a stock because I think it will do badly, my short sell has exactly zero effect on company performance.

Speculation actually fulfils an important role in market function leading to a more efficient allocation of money between borrowers and lenders and better "price" discovery. There's nothing bad about it and it actually serves an important function. It's more obvious in a market for goods, like say grain. If we imagine a bad harvest, a speculator will buy up part of the harvest to profit from the expected shortage. This drives up prices and means consumption of grain will become more rationalised (do more with less, don't buy more than you need, buy alternatives, etc.). The producers are stimulated to invest in more production as a result of the rising prices. Similarly, if then prices rise to a point that a speculator considers too high, he will start selling, leading to lowering prices that will avoid a surplus.

What's really the issue is how much efficiency a market really needs. Do we need to be able to trade stock in a fraction of a millisecond up to .0001 USD? There's a tremendous amount going into making markets efficient but I don't think it benefits society at large. My simple and blunt solution to all this bullshit is to reintroduce liability for shareholders. That limitation of liability originally was only granted to corporation with a public goal and for corporations with a temporary charter - so once the goal was fulfilled, they ended.

A hedge suggests the original asset continues to be held. You either buy a negatively correlated other asset as a hedge in addition to the original asset, thereby limiting losses depending on the level of correlation and how much you buy of the second asset, or you buy an "insurance" through buying a derivative that covers the (for your position) negative movement of the asset. If that movement doesn't materialise, then the hedge is just a cost. So if they divest and reinvest, it can't be considered a hedge.

The rise in silver is mirrored by a rise in the other precious metals. Precious metals are seen to function as a hedge in volatile market conditions, so if people are buying into precious metals all it means is that either investors have no fucking idea what is going on, that they're trying to avoid the effects of a crash, or both. — fdrake

This is in most cases not a hedge. In these situations people usually divest stock and invest in precious metals and AAA bonds, a "flight to safety". To the extent these assets are inversely correlated to stock value and precious metals are bought as a strategy of diversifying risk, then it is a hedge.

That's a debt equity swap which is common for start ups and scale ups.

Do they own the stock or is it non—issued stock? I can't find anything in their website because for some reason that's blocked. In any case, they could have some stock at hand that they can sell in the market or put up as collateral. Obviously a high market price is then beneficial to them. I would be surprised if they do though because a company doing bad usually doesn't have done any buy backs or would've sold the stock off before the share price tanked.

Thank you for obsessing about me. :heart:

Where's the insult? I didn't call you anything, I said you act like a denigrating asshole and then apparently feel it's necessary to whine about it when you're called out on your obnoxious behaviour. Get a spine.

Well, I found some time to look up the contract with the EU. https://globalnews.ca/news/7607304/eu-astrazeneca-contract-vaccine/ (there's a link at the bottom, which opens a pdf which links to the contract at the bottom).

So it seems the UK production sites were in scope to deliver to the EU as well and Astrazeneca gave a representation they did not have any obligations to another party that would impede the complete fulfilment. Unfortunately, the timing and language of the delivery of the initial 300 million doses is partially blacklined and it's not clear what the latest date is for delivery.

The best reasonable efforts for astrazeneca allow for considerations of efficacy and safety. But that's not general efficacy but efficacy related to performance under the contract. Governing law is Belgian law. So you don't have a too literal interpretation and adjustments for reasonableness and equity by a judge if it would go to court. My estimation is that the representation is what screws Astrazeneca if this goes to court.

Why is it a perpetual loan rather than a one-time loan when the stock is issued for the first time and sold to the public? — BitconnectCarlos

It's not a loan it's like one, which I just used to describe a specific aspect of the relationship between the company and investors. I call it perpetual because the company is not obligated at any time to repay the notional on its outstanding equity.

While I understand that a company's market cap may not reflect its fundamentals or its actual performance, I find it hard to swallow that market cap just apparently doesn't matter to the company as you seem to be implying. — BitconnectCarlos

That's indeed what I'm implying. A bank offering loans because of a high market cap in lieu of its own risk assessment isn't doing it's job well. A company can have a low market cap while having a stable and sustainable business model, simply because it offers a low yield to investors and the reverse is possible too where a company attracts a lot of venture capital but isn't sustainable (yet), like most start ups and scale ups.