From my new understanding, the reason Robinhood wasn't able to let anyone trade a collection of stocks was because the clearinghouse they use to actually buy and sell shares through where requiring them to have almost 100% collateral on hand to cover the positions and they couldn't fund the trades anymore. So, while the CEO was technically correct in saying "they couldn't meet the net capital requirements and the deposits the clearinghouses were asking for", that's really just a jargon way of saying, we ran out of available money to be able to continue offering those stocks to buy so we shut them down so people could still use the platform, just not those stocks. The bit about trying to protect their customers was again, technically true. If you let customers come onto your trading platform, don't verify their deposits before allowing to trade, allow them to pay $5 to trade on margin, and then they get wrecked before anything clears, yep, limiting that does help protect your customers. I'm sure it's not your business model you run on your platform that caused any of those things to exist in the first place where you felt the need to "protect" your customers.
I guess I don’t understand what the author’s ultimate point is. That stock trading, etc. is all fake? Well of course it is. So is the entire concept of “money,” for that matter. We just decided that it was a more efficient system than having to barter in every transaction.
I think the point dovetails with something from the 2008 crash (I rewatched The Big Short last night for obvious reasons): the insurance market on mortgage bonds was 20x the size of the mortgage bond market itself. I don't know where the line is exactly, but there is definitely a transition point between investing in such a way that assists capital formation, and just pure betting in a zero-sum virtual parlor room.
Interesting thread around the behind the scenes plumbing: https://twitter.com/compound248/status/1355274739351248898?s=10
Kind of interesting, with everything going on I started looking at silver because when the dollar falls, silver usually goes up. Apparently I'm not the only one with that thought, the big sellers of silver are all out of 10oz bars. I finally found a few at $3 an oz over spot. I'm hesitant to buy more because silver is already kind of high at $27 an ounce...and after taxes and the added charge for paying with a card I'm in at $34.
Yeah, gold is a little to rich for my blood too. It's a good hedge and long term investment, but the entry fee is quite a bit more than I want to deal with. Then again, maybe I'll sell off another $10k in cards while they're stupidly high and buy a few ounces. I think right now another good alternative is rural property...not a remote acre out in the middle of the desert, but usable property with roads and power. I'm going to pay off my CA property this week and start hunting another piece of land.
I was also thinking about land again too. I don't own any rural acres or anything, but even if I did, I wouldn't know what to do with it.
One of my friends has some silver in his bug-out bag in case of a natural disaster. Slightly paranoid, but not a terrible idea if power is out and access to banking isn't available, and it doesn't lose its value to inflation the way cash does.
Just let it sit there and pay the taxes. It's unlikely it'll lose value. My biggest worry with my CA property is forest fires, that would screw the pooch on it as any type of investment. My MO property is basically just a big field and that would be down right difficult to ruin.
Gold/silver is not a good long term investment. It's an okay hedge and as some diversity in your portfolio - partly because it's essentially negatively correlated with the market, so if the market goes down, it gives you some liquid assets to purchase those now-cheaper stocks. There's this theory that if everything goes totally south, precious metals will retain some kind of value, but I've always found that to be a little questionable: if the economy collapses, I think it will be a long time before there will be a meaningful exchange rate for precious metals. Food and survival comes first. Over long periods of time, gold just doesn't perform particularly well, which makes it a poor investment.
I have old Walking Liberty half dollars for that purpose (Fun fact: Right now the melt value of a silver half dollar is just under $10.) I doubt it will ever come to that, but they're neat to have anyways.
Yeah, both pieces were bought off e-bay. I haven't been to either (Though if the weather gets better I may drive up to the CA place, it's only 600 miles away.) I did, however, utilize google satellite and street view to make sure the properties were what they were advertised as.
Interesting... with all this talk about silver, there is a huge PR campaign going on to buy silver, etc. Turns out that Citadel, one of the major funds being squeezed right now with Gamestop, is the 5th largest investor in SLV. Sounds like they're doing some market manipulation in order to bump up the price of silver so they can liquidate to try and cover their GME position. (Of course, that's full on tinfoil-hat mode, but still...)
Doesn't one basically lead to the other, though? If the USD collapses, our economy collapses and takes a chunk of the global economy with it. Precious metals may still hold value on the global market in that case, but you're going to have a hell of a time trying to exchange it for anything - if the economy is in ruins, who is going to trade you food and ammo for a luxury commodity with no practical use? Are you going to take your chunks of silver up to Canada? I just have a hard time figuring out a scenario where the economic market has collapsed to an extent where dollars are worthless, but there are still people around who treat precious metals as valuable. Gold still has an interesting place as a small part of a portfolio, because as I said, it gives liquidity during downturns where stocks are cheap (and/or you need cash, but hopefully you aren't putting your emergency funds in the market).
It will never not be endlessly funny that people who call them stonks took 30 billion from hedge funds.