What does gambling mean? definition, meaning and audio ...

what does the word gambling mean

what does the word gambling mean - win

[Japanese > English] What does the word 賭ケグルイ mean and what does the phrase 賭ケグルイましょう mean? I understand it has something to do with gambling but translators have issues with it

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DDDD - How r/wallstreetbets Created a Financial Weapon of Mass Destruction

Inspired by the recent events in wallstreetbets causing $GME, $BB, and $BBRY, among other historically highly shorted stocks to surge just to spite some rich people in wall street, I've decided to come out of retirement from wallstreetbets and publish a new edition of DDDD (Data-Driven DD) covering the exact mechanics that made this possible. I’ll also introduce those of you that are unfamiliar how wallstreetbet’s favorite gambling device, stock options, actually work and how they can be used by this subreddit as a weapon of mass destruction against hedge funds like Melvin - all dumbed down to a fifth grade reading level so that the average person in this subreddit will mostly understand what I’m talking about.
Disclaimer - This is not financial advice, and a lot of the content below is my personal opinion. In fact, the numbers, facts, or explanations presented below could be wrong and be made up. Don't buy random options because some person on the internet says so. Do your own research and come to your own conclusions on what you should do with your own money, and how levered you want to be based on your personal risk tolerance.

Shorting

How It Works
Most traditional (i.e. boomer) investors usually try to make money by going long - i.e. “buy low and sell high”; this is when you buy a stock thinking it will go up in the future (bullish). Shorting is the opposite of this, you “sell high and buy low”, thinking the stock will go down in the future (bearish). This is usually done through the broker, where the prospective short seller would “borrow” the shares from them, and they would need to pay back these shares in some future date by “covering their shorts” - or buying back the exact same quantity of shares they owe the broker.
For example, imagine that there were only 10 Surprised Pikachu Pokemon cards in the world. Because nobody wants to deal with taking physical possession of these cards and risk losing their Pokemon card in their laundry or something, everyone pays a Pokemon card dealer a small fee to store it for them. Through their dealer, you can buy and sell these Pokemon cards as well. A 🌈🐻 realizes that maybe Pokemon cards are dumb and borrows 2 Surprised Pikachu cards (who has a prearranged agreement with some institutional Pokemon card hoarder to loan them out for interest) and sell them for $420 each, thinking that they're actually work $100 at most, and plans to buy the Pokemon cards back at that price to repay his Pokemon card loan (i.e. covering their shorts) - this is a short sale. Since no one actually wants to physically hold these Pokemon cards, these cards physically stay with the dealer who could then lend out these exact same Pokemon card if the buyer also has an agreement to allow them to do so. This means that you can actually have people owing more than the total number of Surprised Pikachu Pokemon cards in existence (i.e. short interest > 100%).
Replace “Surprised Pikachu Pokemon card” with stocks and “Pokemon card dealer” with “broker” and you have a short sale of shares. Interestingly enough, this also applies 80% to how banks work as well.
Short Squeezes
So when does a short seller need to cover their shorts? Well, either when a) The short seller wants to, either to take profit or to stop a loss, b) Their broker forces them to through a margin call, or c) The broker forces them to as the broker has recalled their loan, usually for a hard to borrow stock - they get “bought in”. Today, we’ll focus on C) because this is how short squeezes happen.
So, what does a broker recalling their loan mean? Well, to go back to the Pokemon card example, imagine that the dealer only has 6 Surprised Pikachu Pokemon cards that he’s legally allowed to loan out. Some more 🌈🐻 short sells all the 6 remaining Pokemon cards until the dealer has no more available on hand. So what happens when someone wants to buy a Surprised Pikachu Pokemon Card and doesn’t want the dealer to lend out their cards? He’ll have to force one of those 🌈🐻 to buy back the card that they owe them so the dealer can give it to the prospective buyer. But who can the 🌈🐻 buy back the card from? The dealer. But the dealer doesn’t have any cards to sell, so they need to force another 🌈🐻 to cover so that the former 🌈🐻 can cover their shorts. This vicious cycle repeats and leads towards a sudden surge in demand for Surprised Pikachu Pokemon cards and a spike in prices for it - a short squeeze.
The Institutional Factor
One thing alluded above was that shares can only be borrowed from *some* share holders, but not all. So who exactly can and does a broker typically borrow these shares from? These are usually margin accounts of either institutional and sometimes (although much less frequently) retail investors. Usually, when an entity signs a margin agreement, which allows them to borrow either cash or shares from the broker, they give permission to the broker to also lend out their shares in the process, and thereby also give up their voting rights - in case you’ve ever wondered who actually the share *actually* belonged to in shareholders meetings. Since almost every institution except Warren Buffet uses margin to a certain extent, and not that many retail investors do, especially given that retirement accounts are forbidden to use margin, and it’s much easier to “find” one big source of TSLA shares from one big institution with a margin account rather than find thousands of smaller margin retail accounts who hold TSLA shares, so most of the time, these shares are being borrowed from an institution (i.e. pension fund, hedge fund). This means that shares that are almost disproportionately held by retail investors are much harder to short because they’re harder to borrow from the broker, and retail-heavy stocks like HTZ, GME, NIO, and NKLA, which virtually no institutions actually hold, will demand high interest rates when shorting and the sellers can much more easily be forced to cover during a short squeeze.

Stock Options

What are Stock Options
A stock option is a contract between the writer and whoever holds it that gives the option holder the right to buy (call option) or sell (put option) 100 shares of the underlying stock on or before the expiry date at a specified strike price. So for example, buying a GME 1/29 $1000c gives whoever the holder of this contract is the option to buy from the writer of this contract 100 shares of GME at $1000 / share on or before 1/29. Obviously if GME is lower than $1000 before that date, the holder would be an idiot to exercise this option to buy GME shares for more than their current market value, so they expire worthless.
This effectively provides the option holder an immense amount of leverage, and provides the opportunity for them to 10x or even 100x their original investment if the underlying asset moves the right way - for example because a subreddit declares war on a hedge fund and pumps up a stock to make them go bankrupt, while limiting their losses to the cost of the option. The option writer will in return receive a premium for the option, potentially risking an infinite amount of money, but with a high likelihood of making a small profit. These writers would either be
  1. Theta gang - who are looking to generate a tidy income source from those option premiums and pray that the stock doesn’t move in the wrong direction too much
  2. A market maker - who writes the contract when they see an arbitrage opportunity between the market value of an option and the theoretical value of it, and hedging their contract they wrote by buying / shorting the underlying assets so they effectively don’t actually take a position in the market.
We’ll go over how 2) works and how this mechanism can be used as a financial nuclear bomb, but first you need to learn some greek.
The Greeks
The greeks in finance is a set of factors that can affect the price of a stock option / group of options
Delta - Change of the option price as the stock price changes
Gamma - Change in Delta as the stock price changes
Vega - Change in the option price as volatility of the stock changes
Theta - The decay in the option price as the expiration date gets nearer
Rho - Change of the option price as the interest rate changes; Most people ignore this
Looking at the greeks of the gambling tickets you buy is very useful to analyzing the ways you can make or lose money on them. Think TSLA will go up a modest amount? Buy a high-Delta call. Think GME is going to 🚀🚀🚀 1000% more? Look for a high Gamma call so your Delta gains accelerate as GME 🚀🌕. Do you feel like a vampire and want to have a steady income source from degenerate wallstreetbet gamblers on a stock you think will go flat (relative to historical volatility) over the next few months? Join theta gang and sell a high-Theta and high-Vega option!
Market Makers
The Black-Scholes model is a fancy mathematical model that describes a “perfect price” (a lot of caveats here) for a stock option. This is done by showing how every option written can theoretically be perfectly hedged by a series of purchases or short sells on the underlying stock. This means that theoretically, if there is a large gap between the theoretical price from Black Scholes and the actual price for an option, there is an “arbitrage” opportunity - this is where market makers come in.
Market makers are companies that provide liquidity to a market by offering to be counterparty to trades. This is especially useful in stock options, where a single ticker can have thousands of options, and there might be someone who wants to buy a GME 1/29 $1000c but no one is actually actively selling it. However, this option might be listed anyways and Citadel will sell you the call if anyone tries to buy it and then immediately hedge it. In fact, when you buy an option chances are you’re not actually buying it from its previous owner selling an option they already own, but from a market maker like Citadel (who is responsible for over 99% of all options volume in 3000 stocks).
So what happens when someone buys an option from a market maker? Since the market maker typically can’t (and probably don’t want to) take a position, meaning taking a directional bet if a stock goes up or down, they’ll immediately hedge the option they just conjured out of thin air by buying or shorting the equivalent number of shares such that the Delta of those shares is the same as the Delta of the option they wrote to remain Delta-neutral, so if the stock goes up or down their position value doesn’t change - this is called Delta hedging. Furthermore, as the stock price moves up (calls) or down (puts), they’ll need to buy or sell even more of those shares to remain Delta neutral since the Delta will change due to the option’s Gamma - this is called Gamma hedging.

Putting It All Together - How options can be used as weapons of mass destruction against short sellers

Now we have the tools to understand how these two financial concepts put together can make billion-dollar hedge funds go bankrupt. Through Delta and Gamma hedging of market makers, buyers can have the effect of buying shares dozens of times the value they actually spent buying their option; a XYZ 4/20 690c can cost only $100 in premiums but causes the market maker to buy $2000 in the underlying stock to hedge against it. If you get enough retail investors to do this, they'll have the impact of billion-dollar whales on the market despite their small stimulus-check-funded portfolios.
Now, you do this on a stock that is heavily shorted, and with very little institutions actually holding real shares of these - making it harder for brokers to find shares to borrow, and you have yourself a weapon of mass financial destruction capable of making billions of Melvin’s money disappear in a single day and potentially have GME 🚀🚀🚀 to a trillion dollar market cap.
How wallstreetbets Controls the Stock Market
The one thing that’s interesting about all of this is wallstreebet’s unique position in being able to facilitate this weapon of mass financial destruction because
  1. Most rich people or institutions too risk adverse to buy large amounts of out of the money options (unless you're Chamath or Elon)
  2. This can only really happen on stocks that very few institutions (i.e. rich people) actually own, meaning it needs to be held / bought on mass by retail investors
  3. In any other scenario where 1 and 2 happen to be true, this would be classified as market manipulation and be immediately shut down by the SEC
My Positions
wallstreetbets veterans may recognize me as the 🌈🐻 who wrote those long-ass 2000 word essays about how the stock market is in a bubble and loaded up on VIX calls last time you heard from me. Although I still stand by my thesis and stocks like GME, TSLA, and NKLA is just proof that we've reached the euphoria phase of it, I learned my lesson that I'm idiot trying to short it (for exactly the reasons described above) and got the fuck out of my position when VIX shot up back in Sept. Most of my "real money" has since been moved to gold and crypto, but because I'm a degenerate gambler, I still have a bit of money playing with /ES and a calls on highly-shorted stocks with meme-stock potential (i.e. vast majority held by retail investors). Now that I'm busy with work again, I probably won't be posting as frequently as I have had in the past, but you'll see me around from time to time :).
submitted by ASoftEngStudent to wallstreetbets [link] [comments]

A Look at the FDA Approval Process and How it Affects Your Investments

I’ve been wanting to do a post like this for a long time now. Now that healthcare has basically been the hottest thing for the last year (and somehow still getting even hotter), I thought it would be a good time. Many people try to buy into pharmaceutical companies around FDA approval targets without truly understanding what they’re getting into. Full disclosure, I am a doctor, but I will try to write this in layman’s terms as much as possible. If I get anything wrong, I’ll be sure to edit the post. To the best of my knowledge, everything I am about to say is researched (and therefore correct).
I’m going to go through the entire FDA approval process as a timeline, and then at the end, talk about other things to consider when investing in pharmaceuticals (i.e., more nuanced stuff that requires/applies healthcare understanding). One caveat here is people use “phases” in multiple ways. The way I will use it is the way I see most often being used in press releases and DD on pennystocks.
Preclinical: to begin, you must submit a proposal that basically states why you think a biologic compound will work. Without getting too technical, the preclinical is basically where you demonstrate a proof of concept.
Here is a very generic example: Let’s say that HIV binds to GME receptor on cells. I have been doing petri dish experiments on a compound I created that prevents anything from binding to GME (this is in vitro if you ever see that term tossed around). I submit this evidence to the FDA and say that I think my compound will work in theory. TONS of things work in vitro and never progress beyond that. At this point, the FDA says, “okay we think your compound might work too, you can start human trials.”
Investor takeaway: the results of this phase mean absolutely nothing. If a drug failed in this phase, that would truly mean the company is incompetent in both their ability to assess the science, and in their ability to provide meaningful news to generate investor buzz.
Phase 1: Anything that passes preclinical is ready for human trials. We are talking very small trials, like less than 100 people. For smaller companies, this is their chance to get some hype about their pharmaceutical. For anyone who understands the process, this is truly meaningless. Again, working in vitro does not (and likely will not) translate to working in humans. This phase typically lasts several months and is primarily designed to ensure that the drug is safe.
Here is a real life example, one that has already garnered a lot of attention: Atossa Therapeutics (ATOS) and their new breast cancer drug. Here is where medical knowledge (or solid research) can really help you. Their new breast cancer drug is called endoxifen. There are already multiple analogues (drugs that work in exactly the same way with minor differences in their chemical structures) on the market. Given the number of safe analogues on the market, it is likely (but not certain) this drug will be safe for human use. It is important to note here that phase 1 trials may be done on healthy participants without any disease, solely to test for safety. Accordingly, passage through phase 1 still may not demonstrate proof of concept on humans who have a particular disease.
Let’s say that ATOS had announced its intention to start testing breast cancer treatment and initiate phase 1 trials. Like I said, the likelihood of success is pretty high given the success of previous analogues. On the other hand the downside is huge. Companies can essentially go bankrupt at this stage if their “sure thing” drug or medical device fails. Always be sure to look at risk vs reward. A drug that enters phase 1 only has around a 14% likelihood of making it all the way to FDA approval. Certain categories of drugs like those that treat cancer have even lower success rates (3.4%). While FDA drug approval does appear to be increasing more than 80% of drugs that enter this stage will never see market.
Investor takeaway: the road from here is super long and passing this phase really can’t tell you anything about its success in further stages. Many drugs are analogues and breeze through this phase, it is important not to get too hyped on them for that reason.
Phase 2: Unlike phase 1 that focuses on drug safety, phase 2 tests the efficacy of the drug you are studying. This phase will typically have less than 1,000 participants, but they will all have the disease of interest. In this phase, we are looking to ensure that the drug works (provides statistically significant improvement) and is relatively safe as far as side effects. To limit research bias, sometimes we will divide the participants and give some the drug and keep some as the control group (they may get a placebo or no drug at all).
This is a pretty straightforward stage and lasts anywhere from months to years. It really depends on the drug being studied. I would never really expect a mainstream drug to get through this stage in under 6 months. The only conditions in which that would be logically feasible are either:
  1. COVID (solely because of the politicization of the process) or
  2. drugs treating conditions with extremely high mortality (because people won’t survive more than 6 months).
Lots of companies like to start releasing press releases close to FDA review of phase 2 results. Always be wary of those results. If my breast cancer drug was successful in 600 people and failed in 300, then while the numbers look good, the data may not be there. There is a lot that goes into statistical analysis and it isn’t quite as simple as more people did well than did poorly.
It’s also important to realize that side effect profile is really important. Let’s say the aforementioned breast cancer agent ends up prolonging life in 80% of the study participants that received the drug. However, there’s also this nasty little side effect of developing a pulmonary embolism in 15-20% of people. That’s not insignificant and it is up to the FDA to decide whether or not the risk outweighs the benefit. Sometimes the FDA will order companies to redo this phase if the data are inconclusive. With cancer agents, this is common because the drugs are so toxic to so many parts of the body, so it really is about risk/benefit analysis.
The important thing to look at in this phase when comparing the results of the treatment group to the control group is what is called the p-value. For those of you who took stats, you should know what this is. For those that didn’t, just know that in healthcare, results with a p-value >0.05 are considered insignificant. It’s also important to note that clinical and statistical significance are also key things to remember. Sometimes the benefit of the drug is so minimal that the side effect profile outweighs the benefits and the FDA will prevent the drug from moving forward. It’s also important to remember that if this is a drug entering a market where there are competitors, the FDA will look and see if this drug provides enough benefit over existing drugs before making a decision.
One more nuance that pharmaceutical companies love to do is change the primary target. In the statistics world, that’s a pretty big no-no. If my initial proposal was that the breast cancer agent would prolong the life of my patients, and then suddenly I start talking about how it actually increases their pain-free time, this is a huge red flag. You can deduce that they likely didn’t meet their primary target and pivoted to something else they could meet. In any study you can find specific characteristic that makes you look good.
Investor takeaway: this is the first phase that companies can really release “meaningful” information. Because of this, many companies try to raise funds at this time to capitalize on the hype, be wary of the words used in their press releases and marketing.
Phase 3: Phase 3 is basically a repeat of phase 2, but bigger. It’s used to determine real efficacy of a drug. In raw numbers, we are looking at about 300-3,000 participants and up to 4 years of data. Phase 3 looks at the exact same things as phase 2: efficacy and side effects observed among a treated group (and sometimes compared to a control group).
Statistical significance, that is, the thing that tells you whether the drug worked, is based heavily upon power. If you want to increase power, you can increase the sample size. In phase 3, the FDA is giving the drug a chance to sink or swim. They are once again looking to make sure you don’t discover any new, obscure side effects and to ensure that the phase 2 results were not a statistical anomaly/the drug really does work.
Beyond sample size, the biggest difference between phases 2 and 3 is that we are observing a longer period of time for adverse events. Note the maximum time differences: up to 2 years for phase 2, and up to 4 years for phase 3. There are side effects that don’t manifest within the first 2 years. A very simple example is, actually cancer agents that cause cardiac fibrosis or pulmonary fibrosis after years of use. These are things that may have been masked in the phase 2 study because the duration.
The other thing is that we may discover rarer, more deadly side effects in this phase. Let’s say in phase 2, we found that 2 of our 1,000 participants developed brain cancer. The phase 2 data may show that this was statistically insignificant and cannot be attributed to the drug (remember, sample size is very important). Maybe the phase 3 study will suddenly show that another 8 people developed brain cancer and it was due to the drug.
Investor takeaway: many drugs fail here, and not because they don’t work. They fail because they aren’t significantly better than what is available or the benefit is not enough to outweigh the risks. FDA approval isn’t simply contingent upon a drug working, there are many, many factors that come into play.
Phase 4: this is the big phase, thousands of participants, possibly multiple hospitals around the country/world. This phase further increases the power of the data and shows that the drug really, really does work and is actually safe. Getting to phase 4 is actually a pretty big deal.
At this point, the company will apply for FDA approval including all of the information they have gathered at this point. In this stage, we are considering not only efficacy and safety, but also simplicity of use, and drug abuse potential. Drug abuse potential is a pretty hot topic right now because, well, opioid epidemic. Many opioids in the last few years have not received FDA approval solely because they are too easily abused. This entire application process takes 6-10 months for the FDA to review all the evidence and decide what happens.
It is not uncommon for the FDA to request more data before approving a drug or further review. Many times they will request the company conduct a new study of x to determine y. This is normal but can seriously impede the approval timeline of a drug. This is where you have to remember opportunity cost. After approval it goes to market, yay!
Investor takeaway: you may think once the drug receives FDA approval that you are out of the woods in terms of your investment. You would be wrong.
Making it to market: When a drug finally hits market, there are two major things for investors to consider. Let’s start with the scary one, removal from the market. Remember how many times I’ve mentioned power, and sample size above? That becomes super relevant here. Depending on the drug, when it finally reaches market we may have many-fold more “participants” with which we can study the side effects of the drug.
Sometimes drugs are pulled from the market because certain side effects emerge that flew under the radar during clinical trial phases. Sometimes the FDA sticks a black box warning on the drug (which really makes doctors stop prescribing it unless they have to). In either care, share prices tend to drop. They will plummet, though, if the FDA removes it from market.
Market earnings: The last “opportunity” for investors in the approval process is the sales data after the first quarter of marketing. This is where the company shows their revenue from the sale of the drug. If you have medical knowledge, you can really thrive here. If you don’t, you are likely to get screwed because you probably won’t understand the nuances in what drives physicians to prescribe drugs and avoid others.
Just because a drug works super well doesn’t mean it will ever be used. Examples of that are ACRX’s new sufentanil agents. Those will likely see poor sales data because from a clinical perspective, even though they are approved, and work, they will almost never be used. You would not know that without understanding the specifics of post-operative pain management.
And finally, a disclaimer. Anything I said here, I can be totally wrong. Sufentanil could become the most popular agent on the market for reasons I don’t understand or couldn’t fathom. Maybe ACRX will have an insanely good marketing team. I am simply talking about making the best decision based on the available knowledge. Stock prices are fickle beasts and they don’t always respond the way we expect.
A message to those who tend to hold on to their bags to gamble on FDA approval:
Yes, this really is gambling. Look at the statistics of how often drugs make it past each stage. You lost 40% on ATOS, you know what would be worse? Somehow their drug fails and now you have lost 80%. You see a drug running before FDA decision deadline, don’t buy it. No one knows how the FDA is going to respond and you are just as likely to lose your money than you are to make it.
Honestly, you are more likely to lose money because there are three outcomes, and two cause you to lose money, one of which will potentially bankrupt your position. The FDA could either approve the drug (yay!), outright reject the drug (oof), or ask for more information. That last one is kind of misleading because it may not mean the drug has failed, but it definitely will destroy the hype built up and tank the share price. The extra information requested could take forever to get and you would, once again, have to consider opportunity cost.
If there is anything else you think I should have discussed, just let me know and I will try to add it.
If this was helpful, please let me know. If so, I can start posting regular medical-based DD on the trending healthcare tickers from this sub!
submitted by Aflycted to pennystocks [link] [comments]

The Mods of WSB & A Coordinated AMC Pump

Going to be editing this with info as I come across it. Please DM me if you have anything to add. Many of you have reached out and I've complied a lot of evidence. I realize now that these pumps originated in Discord groups, but this is something I am still actively looking into and won't be including here.
Users of wallstreetbets (and also places like Stockwits, amcstock, and Youtube chats) attempted a coordinated pump on AMC (& GME) today, Feb. 3rd. These comments are still avaible. The fact they are still up and that I found them very easily means that the mods are not able to moderate their community well enough to stop coordinated pumps. There is not evidence that shows the mods were in on coordinated pump, but the fact that they were unable to stop it taking place shows that the subreddit has grown far too big to be managed by a team of 35 mods.
There is evidence that some mods owned both AMC and GME, and it is possible they held these shares while the coordinated pump was happening in threads they were supposed to be moderating (proof of GME ownership at the bottom).
Coldcutcombo69 was mod on WSB during the AMC coordinated pump. Here is them claiming that they were a mod on WSB. This image of mods before and after the day of the pump confirms they were a mod during the AMC pump-and-dump.
Coldcutcombo69 posted a picture of them having a sell order on their AMC stock that never hit, making it possible they owned AMC shares during the coordinated pump.
Coldcutcombo69 also posted some kind of DD thread about AMC two days ago, promoting the stock here. The content of this post has been removed. This post promoting AMC was made while Coldcutcombo69 was a moderator.
Coldbutcombo69 was a moderator during the AMC coordinated pump. They are no longer a moderator as of the time of this post, only a few hours later. They confirmed this here. A WSB mod was posting comments and threads promoting AMC while possibly still holding AMC shares, and a pump-and-dump occurred in the daily threads that they (along with others) were supposed to be moderating.
turdled is currently a WSB mod. They said, "We don't comment or promote trades. That's up to the subscribers and their upvotes/downvotes to decide." View it here.
turdled's claim was false. Coldcutcombo69 had been a moderator for 25 days. During that time they posted comments and threads promoting AMC, while providing evidence that they actually owned AMC shares. A moderator (who may command more respect in a community of 8.5 million people) promoting a stock is wrong, and the mods clearly believe that is the case since they said they don't do it. But at least one of them did. It could be that Coldcutcombo69 was removed because they were promoting AMC, but they had been doing this for days and were only removed a few hours ago.
ZJZ (a well known moderator) posted this today and was removed as a mod. The head mods also removed more mods, cutting the number of mods from from 62 mods to 37. Coldbutcombo69 was cut from the mod team at this time. It seems very suspicious to me that the head mods removed a bunch of mods from their positions after the events of today, especially because one of those ex-mods had been promoting AMC so much while being a mod.
Note: there is some kind of extended purge happening within the mod team right now. The mod team started at 62, then was cut with ZJZ to 37, then 36, now it's down to 35. EDIT: Two new mods have been added, bringing the count back up to 37. One of them tried posting something in a WSB thread, but their comment was deleted by the auto-mod because they have never posted in WSB before. Here is some proof of what's going on there.
ZJZ has exposed that there are bad actors on the mod team, using their power on the sub to try and make cash off movie deals and crypto scams. This at least adds weight to the points im raising in this thread.
EDIT: There was a thread on WSB by a moderator trying to explain what happened with the mod team. You can see that thread here. There is a lot of push back in the thread. The mod's claim is that the profit from the movie deal would have been given to charity. This may not be true, as Discord logs show another mod asking what their profit will be from the movie deal, asking "What's our cut.". Infighting with the mods seems to be a continued issue with a mod changing the subreddit description from the classic "like 4chan found a bloomberg terminal" to this. This change was instantly reverted.
MOD UPDATE 2/4: It seems that the moderator team has changed again. 23 mods now remain. OPINION_IS_UNPOPULAR is now listed as the most senior mod, and they have allowed this thread to stay up. The mod reports that the Reddit admins have stepped in.
Statement from Reddit admins, according to OPINION_IS_UNPOPULAR: "After reviewing this situation based on input from both current and past moderators, we have decided to remove several moderators at the top of the list that were creating instability in the community." Source.
NEW INFO: I've also been sent a good amount of evidence from multiple people indicating these types or coordinating buying and selling schemes were happening on places like Youtube, Twitch, and Discord. All of these groups seem to be composed of WSB/WSB spinoffs users. These users would spam hash tags, spam and raid Twitch channels, and coordinate these social media pushes with timed buying and selling of GME/AMC/BB/NOK. It is possible (and looks likely to me) that the timed pumps you see below were organized by a Discord group. I have collected a lot of evidence on this front, but this evidence of the real organizers of the pump is something I might have to pass along to someone who is more experienced at dealing with this stuff.
The AMC Pump
Here is evidence of the coordinated pump by users on WSB. The coordinated pump effort occurred in the daily thread, but also spilled out into some posts. Note: I have yet to see any comments/posts that moderators made showing them participating in the coordinated pump effort. It is not known if they knew about these comments or not.
"AMC 1 pm LET FUCKING GO" - WildPhoenix55 58 upvotes. Posted around 12:00 PM CST. Not removed as of 8:40 PM CST.
"AMC 2 DA MOON @ 1PM EST" - OutlandishnessOk4137 Posted around 12:00 PM CST. Not removed as of 8:40 PM CST.
"watching that 1pm movie"
At 1 PM, we’re going to the Moon! Get ready! 🚀 🚀 🚀Discussion *Note that this thread was 6 days ago. Still strange that it was not taken down
Comments in this thread talking about 1 PM pump
EVIDENCE THE 1 PM PUMP WORKED: 1 PM seems to be the main time that was set. You can actually see the coordinated pump spike the price of AMC up to $9.70 right after 1 PM. You can also see the massive amount of volume increase during that time as well. Volume between 1:00-1:05 shot up to 8,725,700. This was the highest volume for a 5 min period all day. Check it out here.
It was also reported to me that some users received DM's about the pump. If you are reading this and received any kind of DM like this, please message me. After seeing the first pump work successfully, they tried it again 1 hour later. Here are a swarm of comments made coordinating the pump for 2 PM.
"2 shares at 2 pm AMC!!" EDIT: This account has been deleted. You can view a picture of this post here.
"Everyone buy 2 shares of AMC and 2pm let’s rush these heggies 💎💎💎💎🚀🚀🚀" "AMC at 2 !!!!" "2 AMC shares @2pm rush" "AMC at 2. Let’s give them some payback🚀" "do i buy now or at 2" "Buy AMC at 2pm Eastern, 11am Pacific. 2pm is when it’s happening."
The 2PM coordinated pump was not as successful. It could be that some users were confused with the time differences. Either way, there was still a marked increase of volume during the 5 min period of 2:00-2:05 which also resulted in the stock re-testing its daily high. Check it out here.
You can actually watch a Youtuber Trey's Trades see the pump at 2 PM in action. He is reading comments on a WSB spin-off subreddit amcstock. You can see people spamming chat for people to buy at 2 PM. Here is the video. The fact that this guy's stream chat is filled with a pump-and-dump scheme and he did nothing about it is pretty telling.
I've backed up the comments and info here. If you find anything else suspicious about this, please DM me. I want to make it clear that there isn't evidence that the mods participated in the pump. But the pump-and-dump (which is illegal) happened under the watch of the mod team. They may have tried to stop it, but 8.5 million people is a lot. If they didn't think they could keep the place running without illegal things happening in the comment sections, they should have set the sub to private and put in proper pre-cautions first.
EDIT: This pump also occurred for GME and users in the GME thread were able to comment about it. None of these comments are removed and they exist in very large numbers. They are mostly heavily downvoted, but the fact they are able to stay up means the mods failed at their job.
Comment 1 Comment 2 Comment 3 Comment 4 Comment 5 Comment 6 Comment 7 Comment 8 Comment 9 Comment 10 Comment 11
The volume spikes do show an uptick in volume around 1PM and around 2PM, but they are not as strong as the AMC boost in volume. The volume during these times were high, but they weren't the highest points in the day for GME.
EDIT: I want to make it clear to people who are saying "those are just bot accounts." Bots are still controlled by humans. If bot spam cannot be caught and deleted, that means 8.5 million people are exposed to pump-and-dump schemes run by bots. It does not reflect any better on the mods if the comments are made by humans or made by bots controlled by humans. It is now a day later, and still none of the comments have been removed by a moderator or moderator bot.
UPDATE: Wall Street Bets has completely removed any post talking about ZJZ and his post about the head mods trying to engage in crypto scams and strange movie deals. (EDIT: This has changed, see above.) The rising sections is now completely filled low-effort, small text posts that are only pushing $GME. Here are those threads. Low-effort threads like these are explicitly against WSB rules. Why are mods letting rule-breaking, ticker spamming posts stay up?
Example 1 Example 2 Example 3 Example 4 Example 5 Example 6
WSB mods are banning users for mentioning ZJZ and his post. (EDIT: This has changed, see above.)
Mods Removing Negative GME Posts
I started digging into this when I posted to Wall Street Bets with a post containing some information about GME. The post pushed back against some of the "GME revolutiuon" talking points. It was a pretty tame post, meet all the guidelines for posting, and contained enough content to warrant staying up. The post was removed by the mods, but you can still see it up here. The content of the post was a combo of these two comments I made. This comment here and this comment here. Somebody in the comments recommended I make the contents of the comment into a separate post- which I did until it was removed.
The moderators removed this post, the removal states: "Moderators remove posts from feeds for a variety of reasons, including keeping communities safe, civil, and true to their purpose."
I sent a DM to the mods asking why exactly the post was removed. I have not been given a reply. Does the content of the post I made (pt.1 / pt.2) break any of their rules? Why would the mods remove a post containing that info?
Even worse, the exact contents of the post I made exist in comment form and are still up. If the info somehow breaks their rules, why leave it up in the comment section? Why haven't they removed the comments that contain the EXACT wording I used in my post?
It seems very strange to me that a post I made that contained some research to counter act the "GME Revolution" narrative would be singled out removal for "keeping communities safe, civil, and true to their purpose."
The front-page of Wall Street Bets is FILLED will positive memes and DD that supports GME. There is not a single negative post about GME on the entire front page that I can find. Why not leave up some negative DD and let the community downvote/upvote it?
The mods will let the comment section of threads get filled up with misinformation (GME SI being 226% is a common one that is easily debunked, yet is posted every 5 min in daily threads). People are gambling their life savings on outdated information yet when I make a post to push back against some of the common GME arguments, it gets removed.
Mods removing negative GME posts is unethical because WSB mods own GME shares.
jamsi is a mod on WSB. They left this comment: "I just received this e-mail from Robinhood. I am no longer using Robinhood for any of my purchases. Only keeping my $GME - not selling." Here is the comment.
Swedish_Chef_Bork_x3 is a mod on WSB. They left this comment: "Another $2k locked and loaded to buy in tomorrow. Feels like fucking Helm’s Deep in here. I have tomorrow off work, gonna get drunk and hope I don’t sleep through my alarm.". Here is the comment.
rawbdor is listed as a mod under the Moderators section of Wall Street Bets. rawbdor posted a comment saying: "The price is going to plummet hard no matter what we do. The real question is, will they be able to steal our shares in the process. They can drop the price all they want on low volume. But they'll never be able to buy it back unless you sell it to them."
A link to that comment is here.
This comment makes it pretty obvious that rawbdor owns some shares in GME, right? Saying things like our shares implies they own some.
ITradeBaconFutures is also listed as a mod. They made it clear that "Mods did not trade GME". You can find that comment here.
turdled is listed as a mod. They said, "We don't comment or promote trades. That's up to the subscribers and their upvotes/downvotes to decide." View it here.
One mod claims that mods don't trade GME, when its obvious from the three examples above that they did. Another says they don't comment or promote trades, which is also a lie. Other mods have been doing that. They also "promote" trades when they remove content that argues the other side of GME. If the only content they allow on the front-page is GME Positive content, they are promoting that content.
WSB has a mod team of 35 accounts moderating 8.5 million people. CNBC gets about 200k viewers at peak hours, while WSB has almost a million viewing it at a time when the market is open.
The mods could simply send me a DM and explain why my post was removed. They haven't. Market manipulation is bad. It's bad when investment firms do it and its bad when retail investors do it. The mods could DM me right now and say "Hey, here is the reason the post was removed." They haven't. If they do send me a DM, I will post an update here.
TL;DR
Now-former WSB mod ZJZ, in a removed & locked post, accused dormant top mods of coming back to siphon media coverage, potential movie rights, and springboard a cryptocurrency, while suppressing other mods
Coldcutcombo69, a moderator on WSB, was posting comments and threads promoting AMC. A coordinated AMC pump happened in the daily threads and comments that this moderator (and others) were tasked with moderating. This mod was removed as a moderator after this thread was posted. Coldcutcombo69 held AMC stock before the pump, but it is unclear if they held or sold that stock around or after the time of the coordinated pump.
Today, several users, but no mods, in a discussion thread attempted to push buys of AMC at 1 & 2 PM EST. Those times would later coincide with high volumes of stock trades for the day. Similar coordination was attempted by users (no mods) for GME.
WSB's front page is filled with only positive coverage of GME (here's a snapshot), while they removed my post containing negative GME DD with no legitimate reason given.
Mods are holding GME contradicting another high level mod's comment that "mods did not trade $GME". Mods made a false statement that they don't promote stocks, as one of them clearly did. You can also see the other mods comments about GME as also promoting stock.
Tervia's comment here has good info on Reddit moderation.
submitted by brave_potato to gme_meltdown [link] [comments]

"I think I've lived long enough to see competitive Counter-Strike as we know it, kill itself." Summary of Richard Lewis' stream (Long)

I want to preface that the contents of this post is for informational purposes. I do not condone or approve of any harassments or witch-hunting or the attacking of anybody.
 
Richard Lewis recently did a stream talking about the terrible state of CS esports and I thought it was an important stream anyone who cares about the CS community should listen to.
Vod Link here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/830415547
I realize it is 3 hours long so I took it upon myself to create a list of interesting points from the stream so you don't have to listen to the whole thing, although I still encourage you to do so if you can.
I know this post is still long but probably easier to digest, especially in parts.
Here is a link to my raw notes if you for some reason want to read through this which includes some omitted stuff. It's in chronological order of things said in the stream and has some time stamps. https://pastebin.com/6QWTLr8T

Intro

CSPPA - Counter-Strike Professional Players' Association

"Who does this union really fucking serve?"

ESIC - Esports Integrity Commission

"They have been put in an impossible position."

Stream Sniping

"They're all at it in the online era, they're all at it, they're all cheating, they're all using exploits, probably that see through smoke bug got used a bunch of times"

Match Fixing

"How many years have we let our scene be fucking pillaged by these greedy cunts?" "We just let it happen."

North America

"Everyone in NA has left we've lost a continents worth of support during this pandemic and Valve haven't said a fucking word."

Talent

"TO's have treated CS talent like absolute human garbage for years now."

Valve

"Anything that Riot does, is better than Valve's inaction"

Closing Statements

"We've peaked. If we want to sustain and exist, now is the time to figure it out. No esports lasts as long as this, we've already done 8 years. We've already broke the records. We have got to figure out a way to coexist and drive the negative forces out and we need to do it as a collective and we're not doing that."

submitted by Tharnite to GlobalOffensive [link] [comments]

The next BTC crash could be something to behold

Also on my blog with better formatting, cute footnotes and inlined images.
Note that not much here is new material, mostly rehashing existing points.

Disclaimer

This article started out as research for my betting against Bitcoin on the stock market. This isn't financial advice. As a matter of fact, I encourage all readers you to not buy or short crypto, through any market or derivative. Use your money for productive uses.
Here's a TL;DR:
  1. The current parabolic price increase in Bitcoin is a bubble that has started popping.
  2. A stablecoin called Tether is either one of the largest frauds or money laundering operation in history, and is providing most of the liquidity in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
  3. A BTC bubble pop, incoming regulation on stablecoins or the current NYAG investigation into tether will expose tether's insolvency to the crypto market. This is bigger than it sounds.
  4. (Speculative, but one can hope) Current prices to mine BTC could end up higher than BTC market price, exposing BTC to a 51% attack.

A Recap: Bitcoin is useless and should go away

Bitcoin serves no purpose. Let's just rehash that by quickly debunking the major claimed uses over time as seen here
The stupidest version of the "uncorrelated asset" argument I hear is "Bitcoin is a great hedge for inflation!"
You know what's a good "hedge for inflation"? Literally anything. The definition of inflation is "the price of money". If the price of money goes down (inflation) then everything else has a positive return by comparison.
People who say "bitcoin is a good hedge for inflation" shouldn't be trusted to manage their own money, let alone give financial advice to anyone.
I already went into detail into this, but BTC is a terrible store of value because it's volatile. Assets that can lose 20% of value overnight don't "store value". BTC is a "vehicle for speculation".
The only way price is sustained for BTC is that you can find some other idiot to sell it to. Just as a reminder, 50% of Gold is used for things that aren't speculation, like Jewelry, so you'll never have to worry finding a seller there.
Here are some real uses for bitcoin:
Reminder: BTC is an ecological scourge
The current cost to mine a BTC is around $8000 in electricity. This electricity mostly comes from subsidized coal in China.
And given the current amount of BTC generated each day, we're using about equivalent to the electricity from all of Belgium, largely in coal, to keep this going.
I don't mind wasting time on intellectual curiosities, but destroying our planet for glorified gambling is not something I'm happy about. I want cryptocurrencies to go away entirely on this basis, philosophically.

Current BTC prices are a bubble

Before we go into tether, reminder that at the time of writing, the plot of BTC price against the S&P500 looks like this
BTC price has increased by ~800% since March. Still, no one uses it for anything useful since the last bubble in 2017, or the other one before that in 2013. This is another bubble however you put it.
BTC is not "new technology"
10 years the internet became popular, Google and Amazon already existed. We're 8 years after the popular emergence of deep learning and it has already revolutionized machine translation, computer vision and natural language processing in general.
You could argue that deep learning and the internet existed before their emergence, but so did cryptocurrencies. Look up b-money and hashcash for instance.
Bitcoin has existed since 2008 and emerged in popularity around the same time as deep learning did, yet we're still to find actual uses for it except speculation and criminal uses. It's a solution waiting for a problem.
Institutional investors are also idiots
The narrative this time is that "institutional investors" are buying into BTC. This doesn't mean it's not a bubble.
Many of the institutions were buying through Grayscale Bitcoin Trust. Rather, many of them were chasing the premium over net asset value that hovered around 20%. Basically, lock money in GBTC for 6 months, cash out and collect the premium as profit. Of course, this little Ponzi couldn't last forever and the premium seems to be evaporating now.
Similarly, totally-not-a-bitcoin-ETF-wearing-a-software-company-skinsuit Microstrategy (MSTR) trades at a massive premium over fundamentals.
There will always be traders chasing bonuses from numbers going up, regardless what is making the number going up. The same "institutional investors" were buying obviously terrible CDOs in the run-up to 2008.

Tether is lunacy

Tether is a cryptocurrency whose exchange rate is supposed to be pegged to the US Dollar. Initially this was done by having 1-to-1 US Dollar reserves for each tether issued. Then they got scammed by their money launderer, losing some $800M, which made them insolvent.
Anyway, now tether maintains their reserves are whatever they want them to be and they haven't gotten audited since 2017.
You know, normal stuff.
There's a problem to backing your USD-pegged security with something that isn't US Dollars. Namely, if the price of the thing you're backing your US Dollars against goes down, you're now insolvent. If you were backing $10B in tether with $10B of bitcoin, then the bitcoin drops by half, you're insolvent by $5B.
And then this spotlessly clean company they somehow added $20B to their balance sheet in the second half of 2020
Reminder: one side of that balance sheet is currently floating around the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Cryptocurrency traders own it as an asset and sell it to others. The other half of the balance sheet is whatever tether wants.
There are only two possibilities that explain tether's growth:
It could also be a happy mix of both.
One particularly interesting date is 30/8/2020, where tether added $3B to its balance sheet overnight. This is interesting because it predates the subsequent movement in bitcoin price and large movements in other cryptocurrencies.
The story from tether and tether's bank's CEO is that this money largely comes from foreign nationals through an OTC desk which implies the transaction goes as following:
  1. A foreign national sends money in a foreign currency to an OTC desk. This is exactly as clean as you'd think -- often raw cash transactions in the millions.
  2. That OTC desk converts the money to USD and sends it to tether's correspondent US bank. The OTC desk gives tether to the foreign national.
  3. Wait tether has a correspondent US bank?
Oh, I forgot to mention, no bank wants tether as a customer because they obviously break KYC/AML compliance. So tether first bought invested in a bank called Noble which then lost its relationship with Wells-Fargo when they realized tether were lying to them about AML. Poor tether lost its legal access to USD.
Tether has been banking in the Bahamas with a bank called Deltec since. First they had a money launderer called Crypto Capital Corp to send funds to customers, who stole the $800M from them and subsequently went to jail.
But worry not! Tether found a way to get banked in USD afterwards. Curious coincidence, an executive at Deltec was randomly blogging about buying small US community banks in 2018. You know, that thing money launderers do.
So tether's story is that in 2020, they took in roughly twenty billion USD of shady foreign money into the small community US bank their deltec bankers bought. These transactions are necessarily breaking KYC/AML. The foreign parties to those transactions wouldn't take such a rickety route to convert billions into cryptocurrencies if they weren't laughed out of the room in serious banks.
But of course, Deltec will say it did KYC on tether. Really solid KYC, clearly, since they're the last bank on earth taking tether's business. Tether says they do KYC on their customers (the large OTC desks). And I'm sure the OTC desks would be shocked, shocked if the cash money they get in Russia and China turns out to be dirty. So everyone can pass the buck of responsibility down the road and claim "We do KYC on our customers".
Sure you do, tether. If you did such great KYC, you wouldn't have such problems finding banking relationships. I mean when even HSBC is not doing business with you you're apparently more obviously moving criminal money than fucking drug cartels.
And, according to tether's people, this money is what's backing tether's reserves. Money that will get frozen the instant a prosecutor even looks at it.
Reminder: the above is the charitable, positive case for tether.
The less charitable case is that they took crayons and added zeros to their balance sheet, and that there's a couple billions waiting to burn a hole in the crypto ecosystem.
Anyway, the $25B garbage fire that is tether will make a great book/netflix series at some point and their hilariously stupid CTO going on podcasts while flinching on questions about how BTC ended up on their balance sheet will be a fun part of it.
But I'm not here to write a book, I'm here to make money by shorting all of this. For my purposes, even in the positive case tether is a ticking time bomb waiting to burn a hole in the crypto ecosystem, because...

KYC and AML are coming for cryptocurrencies

If you listen to "crypto news", all incoming crypto regulation is just great, because that means crypto is becoming legit. However, companies investing in crypto are very angry about them.
This is because crypto transactions break the FinCEN travel rule, where KYC information should "travel" along transactions, to prevent money laundering obfuscation schemes.
Of course, according to the crypto industry this is "stifling innovation". A more reasonable take is that by being leaving the crypto industry outside normal financial regulations, we're enabling a "race to the bottom". As we saw with shadow banks in the 2000-2007 era this leads to "creative banking". I don't want my bankers to be creative, I want them to be solvent.

Tether's effect on the crypto ecosystem

When tether implodes, it's taking most of the crypto industry along for a fun ride. Tether can implode in one of a few ways:
  1. A BTC price crash triggers it. If
  2. Regulators decide they've had enough of AML avoidance and regulate them.
  3. The NYAG investigation, which is waiting for an update in a few weeks, finds something and shuts them out.
Let's assume tether falls to $0 for simplicity. The analysis is the same directionally if tether significantly "breaks the buck".
This doesn't happen instantly, but it happens quickly. The peg breaks, and most people holding tether will try to sell it for other crypto (BTC, ETH, etc.). This puts downward pressure on the price of tether, incentivizing even more people to "pass the buck". Automated inter-exchange arbitrage bots might try to exploit emerging gaps in bid-ask spreads, only to end up with worthless tether instead, as their operators rush to pull the plug.
Then, we have a small village of cryptocurrency enthusiasts being out some $24B. With the trading bots turned off and the trading lubricant (a dollar pegged asset) gone, the bid-ask spreads blow up. You get a predictable flight to safety -- that is, to real money. This puts downward pressure on BTC.
While all of this is happening, there are all sorts of fun second-order effects happen. A lot of DeFi derivative products are priced in cryptocurrencies, so having normally stable prices shuffle around (eg. USDC price moving above $1 in a flight to safety) triggers a tsunami of margin calls. Some exchanges might insolvent (they're the ones redeeming tether for USD after all).

If BTC price drops below $8000, fun things happen

Currently, the price to mine a BTC is roughly $8000. Most of the mining comes from huge mining farms using subsidized coal in China, and mining costs more the more hardware there is to mine it.
Since the price of BTC hasn't substantially dropped below cost to mine we're in for a fun experiment if the price drops below this threshold. Most of these farms should turn off so that the price to mine comes back to breakeven in a case of prisoner's dilemma.
But if too much hardware turns off, this leaves mining hardware idle and the door becomes wide open to a 51% attack. It's not clear at what price below breakeven cost to mine a 51% attack becomes a serious threat, but once this threshold is crossed, we're in the "irreparable harm to BTC" risk zone.
And for a person like me, who just wants to see crypto disappear forever this is very exciting.
Maybe those mining farms could be replaced with nice forests soaking up all the carbon they emitted for posterity. One can hope.

How do I bet against all of this?

Microstrategy (MSTR) is, at this point, a bitcoin ETF wearing the skinsuit of a dying software company.
Michael Saylor, MSTR's CEO, is quite the character. I wrote a lot about his lack understanding of what a currency is, but it's on another level to look at the early stages of a bubble pop and decide this is a good time to buy $10M more of the stuff, as seen here
However, this bubble is tame by Michael's standards. Look at the historical stock of his company
What's happening on the left is that Saylor pumped the numbers with accounting fraud then the SEC took issue with the fake numbers. The stock dropped 90% practically overnight. Their accountants, PWC, paid $51M in fines. Saylor and friends paid fines, partly with company stock.
You could also short GBTC, but when Mr. Saylor provides you with an options market instead, why not use it? Shorting on crypto exchanges that might become insolvent in the very event you want to happen with this bet is a bad idea, on the other hand.

Mike can't cash out

The bitcoin market is illiquid and leveraged when it comes to real money coming in and leaving the ecosystem. Buys in the $10M-$100M seemingly move the price of BTC by upwards of $1000 in the last weeks. This means hundreds of millions of real money means tens of billions in movement in BTC market capitalization.
Now imagine what cashing $1.1B of BTC into real money would mean for the price. And this is purely in market terms, before the PR damage from bitcoin's demigod abandoning ship would have second-order effects.
Saylor has painted himself into a corner. Even if he wanted to cash out, he can't.

MSTR fundamentals: Why it should be valued below $10

In early 2020, MSTR was a slowly dying business. The EBITDA has been rapidly evaporating in the last 5 years
At that point, MSTR a stock price of $115 meaning a market cap of $1.1B. This included some $560M of cash they were sitting on. I presume the remaining $550M was an implicit sales premium for the inevitable private equity firm investors expected was going to relieve them of this stock and make the business profitable again.
Of course, they didn't sell.
Instead, they took the $560m they were sitting on and bought $400m of BTC at prices $11k and $13k in late summer 2020. Then, in early December, they took on $600m of debt to buy BTC with at $23k. They also bought $10m more in January at a price of $30.5k.
At this point, we can mostly value MSTR like a trust.
GBTC's 20% premium-to-NAV is a joke compared to the MSTR premium.
submitted by VodkaHaze to Buttcoin [link] [comments]

A Look at the FDA Approval Process and How it Affects Your Investments

I’ve been wanting to do a post like this for a long time now. Now that healthcare has basically been the hottest thing for the last year (and somehow still getting even hotter), I thought it would be a good time. Many people try to buy into pharmaceutical companies around FDA approval targets without truly understanding what they’re getting into. Full disclosure, I am a doctor, but I will try to write this in layman’s terms as much as possible. If I get anything wrong, I’ll be sure to edit the post. To the best of my knowledge, everything I am about to say is researched (and therefore correct).
I’m going to go through the entire FDA approval process as a timeline, and then at the end, talk about other things to consider when investing in pharmaceuticals (i.e., more nuanced stuff that requires/applies healthcare understanding). One caveat here is people use “phases” in multiple ways. The way I will use it is the way I see most often being used in press releases and DD on reddit.
Preclinical: to begin, you must submit a proposal that basically states why you think a biologic compound will work. Without getting too technical, the preclinical is basically where you demonstrate a proof of concept.
Here is a very generic example: Let’s say that HIV binds to GME receptor on cells. I have been doing petri dish experiments on a compound I created that prevents anything from binding to GME (this is in vitro if you ever see that term tossed around). I submit this evidence to the FDA and say that I think my compound will work in theory. TONS of things work in vitro and never progress beyond that. At this point, the FDA says, “okay we think your compound might work too, you can start human trials.”
Investor takeaway: the results of this phase mean absolutely nothing. If a drug failed in this phase, that would truly mean the company is incompetent in both their ability to assess the science, and in their ability to provide meaningful news to generate investor buzz.
Phase 1: Anything that passes preclinical is ready for human trials. We are talking very small trials, like less than 100 people. For smaller companies, this is their chance to get some hype about their pharmaceutical. For anyone who understands the process, this is truly meaningless. Again, working in vitro does not (and likely will not) translate to working in humans. This phase typically lasts several months and is primarily designed to ensure that the drug is safe.
Here is a real life example, one that has already garnered a lot of attention: Atossa Therapeutics (ATOS) and their new breast cancer drug. Here is where medical knowledge (or solid research) can really help you. Their new breast cancer drug is called endoxifen. There are already multiple analogues (drugs that work in exactly the same way with minor differences in their chemical structures) on the market. Given the number of safe analogues on the market, it is likely (but not certain) this drug will be safe for human use. It is important to note here that phase 1 trials may be done on healthy participants without any disease, solely to test for safety. Accordingly, passage through phase 1 still may not demonstrate proof of concept on humans who have a particular disease.
Let’s say that ATOS had announced its intention to start testing breast cancer treatment and initiate phase 1 trials. Like I said, the likelihood of success is pretty high given the success of previous analogues. On the other hand the downside is huge. Companies can essentially go bankrupt at this stage if their “sure thing” drug or medical device fails. Always be sure to look at risk vs reward. A drug that enters phase 1 only has around a 14% likelihood of making it all the way to FDA approval. Certain categories of drugs like those that treat cancer have even lower success rates (3.4%). While FDA drug approval does appear to be increasing more than 80% of drugs that enter this stage will never see market.
Investor takeaway: the road from here is super long and passing this phase really can’t tell you anything about its success in further stages. Many drugs are analogues and breeze through this phase, it is important not to get too hyped on them for that reason.
Phase 2: Unlike phase 1 that focuses on drug safety, phase 2 tests the efficacy of the drug you are studying. This phase will typically have less than 1,000 participants, but they will all have the disease of interest. In this phase, we are looking to ensure that the drug works (provides statistically significant improvement) and is relatively safe as far as side effects. To limit research bias, sometimes we will divide the participants and give some the drug and keep some as the control group (they may get a placebo or no drug at all).
This is a pretty straightforward stage and lasts anywhere from months to years. It really depends on the drug being studied. I would never really expect a mainstream drug to get through this stage in under 6 months. The only conditions in which that would be logically feasible are either:
  1. COVID (solely because of the politicization of the process) or
  2. drugs treating conditions with extremely high mortality (because people won’t survive more than 6 months).
Lots of companies like to start releasing press releases close to FDA review of phase 2 results. Always be wary of those results. If my breast cancer drug was successful in 600 people and failed in 300, then while the numbers look good, the data may not be there. There is a lot that goes into statistical analysis and it isn’t quite as simple as more people did well than did poorly.
It’s also important to realize that side effect profile is really important. Let’s say the aforementioned breast cancer agent ends up prolonging life in 80% of the study participants that received the drug. However, there’s also this nasty little side effect of developing a pulmonary embolism in 15-20% of people. That’s not insignificant and it is up to the FDA to decide whether or not the risk outweighs the benefit. Sometimes the FDA will order companies to redo this phase if the data are inconclusive. With cancer agents, this is common because the drugs are so toxic to so many parts of the body, so it really is about risk/benefit analysis.
The important thing to look at in this phase when comparing the results of the treatment group to the control group is what is called the p-value. For those of you who took stats, you should know what this is. For those that didn’t, just know that in healthcare, results with a p-value >0.05 are considered insignificant. It’s also important to note that clinical and statistical significance are also key things to remember. Sometimes the benefit of the drug is so minimal that the side effect profile outweighs the benefits and the FDA will prevent the drug from moving forward. It’s also important to remember that if this is a drug entering a market where there are competitors, the FDA will look and see if this drug provides enough benefit over existing drugs before making a decision.
One more nuance that pharmaceutical companies love to do is change the primary target. In the statistics world, that’s a pretty big no-no. If my initial proposal was that the breast cancer agent would prolong the life of my patients, and then suddenly I start talking about how it actually increases their pain-free time, this is a huge red flag. You can deduce that they likely didn’t meet their primary target and pivoted to something else they could meet. In any study you can find specific characteristic that makes you look good.
Investor takeaway: this is the first phase that companies can really release “meaningful” information. Because of this, many companies try to raise funds at this time to capitalize on the hype, be wary of the words used in their press releases and marketing.
Phase 3: Phase 3 is basically a repeat of phase 2, but bigger. It’s used to determine real efficacy of a drug. In raw numbers, we are looking at about 300-3,000 participants and up to 4 years of data. Phase 3 looks at the exact same things as phase 2: efficacy and side effects observed among a treated group (and sometimes compared to a control group).
Statistical significance, that is, the thing that tells you whether the drug worked, is based heavily upon power. If you want to increase power, you can increase the sample size. In phase 3, the FDA is giving the drug a chance to sink or swim. They are once again looking to make sure you don’t discover any new, obscure side effects and to ensure that the phase 2 results were not a statistical anomaly/the drug really does work.
Beyond sample size, the biggest difference between phases 2 and 3 is that we are observing a longer period of time for adverse events. Note the maximum time differences: up to 2 years for phase 2, and up to 4 years for phase 3. There are side effects that don’t manifest within the first 2 years. A very simple example is, actually cancer agents that cause cardiac fibrosis or pulmonary fibrosis after years of use. These are things that may have been masked in the phase 2 study because the duration.
The other thing is that we may discover rarer, more deadly side effects in this phase. Let’s say in phase 2, we found that 2 of our 1,000 participants developed brain cancer. The phase 2 data may show that this was statistically insignificant and cannot be attributed to the drug (remember, sample size is very important). Maybe the phase 3 study will suddenly show that another 8 people developed brain cancer and it was due to the drug.
Investor takeaway: many drugs fail here, and not because they don’t work. They fail because they aren’t significantly better than what is available or the benefit is not enough to outweigh the risks. FDA approval isn’t simply contingent upon a drug working, there are many, many factors that come into play.
Phase 4: this is the big phase, thousands of participants, possibly multiple hospitals around the country/world. This phase further increases the power of the data and shows that the drug really, really does work and is actually safe. Getting to phase 4 is actually a pretty big deal.
At this point, the company will apply for FDA approval including all of the information they have gathered at this point. In this stage, we are considering not only efficacy and safety, but also simplicity of use, and drug abuse potential. Drug abuse potential is a pretty hot topic right now because, well, opioid epidemic. Many opioids in the last few years have not received FDA approval solely because they are too easily abused. This entire application process takes 6-10 months for the FDA to review all the evidence and decide what happens.
It is not uncommon for the FDA to request more data before approving a drug or further review. Many times they will request the company conduct a new study of x to determine y. This is normal but can seriously impede the approval timeline of a drug. This is where you have to remember opportunity cost. After approval it goes to market, yay!
Investor takeaway: you may think once the drug receives FDA approval that you are out of the woods in terms of your investment. You would be wrong.
Making it to market: When a drug finally hits market, there are two major things for investors to consider. Let’s start with the scary one, removal from the market. Remember how many times I’ve mentioned power, and sample size above? That becomes super relevant here. Depending on the drug, when it finally reaches market we may have many-fold more “participants” with which we can study the side effects of the drug.
Sometimes drugs are pulled from the market because certain side effects emerge that flew under the radar during clinical trial phases. Sometimes the FDA sticks a black box warning on the drug (which really makes doctors stop prescribing it unless they have to). In either care, share prices tend to drop. They will plummet, though, if the FDA removes it from market.
Market earnings: The last “opportunity” for investors in the approval process is the sales data after the first quarter of marketing. This is where the company shows their revenue from the sale of the drug. If you have medical knowledge, you can really thrive here. If you don’t, you are likely to get screwed because you probably won’t understand the nuances in what drives physicians to prescribe drugs and avoid others.
Just because a drug works super well doesn’t mean it will ever be used. Examples of that are ACRX’s new sufentanil agents. Those will likely see poor sales data because from a clinical perspective, even though they are approved, and work, they will almost never be used. You would not know that without understanding the specifics of post-operative pain management.
And finally, a disclaimer. Anything I said here, I can be totally wrong. Sufentanil could become the most popular agent on the market for reasons I don’t understand or couldn’t fathom. Maybe ACRX will have an insanely good marketing team. I am simply talking about making the best decision based on the available knowledge. Stock prices are fickle beasts and they don’t always respond the way we expect.
A message to those who tend to hold on to their bags to gamble on FDA approval:
Yes, this really is gambling. Look at the statistics of how often drugs make it past each stage. You lost 40% on ATOS, you know what would be worse? Somehow their drug fails and now you have lost 80%. You see a drug running before FDA decision deadline, don’t buy it. No one knows how the FDA is going to respond and you are just as likely to lose your money than you are to make it.
Honestly, you are more likely to lose money because there are three outcomes, and two cause you to lose money, one of which will potentially bankrupt your position. The FDA could either approve the drug (yay!), outright reject the drug (oof), or ask for more information. That last one is kind of misleading because it may not mean the drug has failed, but it definitely will destroy the hype built up and tank the share price. The extra information requested could take forever to get and you would, once again, have to consider opportunity cost.
If there is anything else you think I should have discussed, just let me know and I will try to add it.
submitted by Aflycted to investing [link] [comments]

The Next Black Swan: REEEEEEEtail Crushes Funds and Causes a Market Selloff

I will present some facts. These facts are all kind of similar, and arguably all say the same thing in different words. This is a good thing, because your smooth ass brain needs all the help it can get. You should read all of this, unless you can't read, in which case just 🚀ALL IN GME 🚀.
After, I will present the logical conclusion, and what you can do about it.
Fact #1: Hedge funds are getting REEEEEEEEEEamed by the rotation into memes
See: https://twitter.com/CGasparino/status/1354571801767116801
Lots of big funds are 'long-short'; they'll look at all of the stocks in a sector, like say retail or real estate, and rank them from best to worst. They'll go long the best one, and go short the worst one. You can probably already see where this is going: the 'worst ones' have gotten way too shorted and way too beaten up, and now they're being squeezed.
Oh, and the 'best stocks' haven't done much since August. That means the gains don't come close to cancelling out the losses. And god help the funds who are short-only; they are getting absolutely ass-blasted, and you know they're not enjoying it cause if they did they'd be hanging out here posting fat loss porn with us.
Fact #2: Shorts getting destroyed causes deleveraging and selling elsewhere in the market
See: https://twitter.com/chamath/status/1354646282678149127?s=21 and https://twitter.com/DowdEdward/status/1354508826725085185
If there's one thing we know here at WSB, it's that you're a toilet paper handed bitch if you're not levered to the tits at all times. The biggest funds know this too, and being the biggest funds, they have access to way more leverage than you and I do. This is a bit of a problem for shorts though: shorts need liquid capital to close their positions. If you've ever been in a situation where you sold a covered call or spread and got money for it and then immediately used that money to buy another call or something, but then you wanted to buy your spread or your covered call back, but couldn't close it because you just spent the money on something else....now you know what is going on at these hedge funds. They collected a bunch of money a long time ago when they shorted the stonk, and then immediately spent all that money to juice their returns, and now they need to have a fire sale just to have enough liquid capital to buy back their shit at a massive premium.
If you imagine the case of your typical long-short fund, that means they're being forced to sell their 'best' stocks. If you imagine a short fund, that means they're asking for bailouts and you're probably gonna find some of them behind Wendy's next week.
Fact #3: The extreme volatility and volume in some stocks is causing a minor liquidity crisis.
see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25951475
Let's say you're broke but want to YOLO on GME, so you need to raise some money. You go to a pawn shop and pawn them your graphics card for $1000, because they know they can go sell that fancy RTX3090 super duper titanium RGB hentai edition for more than $1000 on ebay if they need to.
Well, the next day, imagine people start speculating on graphics cards, and the prices go crazy: some start selling for 10$ and some start selling for $5,000 and every price in between. If you try to pawn that graphics card tomorrow, the pawn shop is gonna look at it and say "hell no, we have no idea how much we can sell that for, we're not gonna take that risk."
This is basically what's happening with loads of stocks right now. Ordinarily it's not a big deal; everyone knows how much a stock is worth right now, and it's extremely extremely likely it will be worth about the same price (+/- a few percent with 99% probability) tomorrow and the day after and the day after. So they're happy to take it as collateral. But right now, some stocks are going up and down by 100%+ within minutes. A stock could literally go from hundreds of dollars to next to worthless within a day or two. So nobody is gonna take that as collateral. If you own that, for all intents and purposes, you have zero dollars.
If you want to use your positions as leverage, or if you were ALREADY using your positions as leverage, this is a huge problem. You need to find some different source of collateral. If you can't, you need to sell shit so that you have good 'ole USD. It's not just hedge funds that are feeling squeezed: it's the clearing firms and banks and...basically anyone that uses stonks as collateral for any purpose.
By the way, this is what caused most of the selling back in March last year; folks needed to raise money RIGHT NOW, which meant selling all their shit RIGHT NOW, which meant stonks went down, which caused a cascade of margin calls and liquidations for folks that were levered to the tits.
Fact #4: Indices are at all-time-highs, every sentiment indicator is at MAXIMUM EUPHORIA, but volatility is rising
See: any fucking chart
As one of the greatest autists of our time once said, "be fearful when others are greedy."
Everyone and their mother is levered to the tits; why wouldn't you be, the fed is handing out free loans to anyone with a pulse! That's great cause it makes stonks go up really fast, but if stonks start going down, they're also gonna go down really fucking fast too. Any selling will get further amplified by option gamma, the same forces that are propelling Gamestop in every direction simultaneously, and the same forces that propelled the markets upwards (particularly the big tech stonks) after the march crash.
Conclusion: We are set up perfectly for a deep, violent correction.
If you're a hibernating 🌈🐻 , starving for some 🌈🐻 porn, I have just the thing for you: this could turn into a full-on market crash if it really, really gets going.
The more volatile the memes get, the more volatile the market is going to get. The more volatile the market gets, the more selling has to happen. The more selling, the more volatility, and boy does this escalate quickly (For those of you budding autists and retards that were literally born yesterday, just know that this feedback loop has happened many times before, like this time almost a year ago).
HOWEVER, I would also like to note that this is 1000% divorced from the actual economy. Any dip will be violent and short-lived. Do not panic and BTFD, you smelly bundle of sticks. There's a lot of dry powder on the sidelines that missed the dip in march and are still pissed about it (such as yours truly, who was too busy being a 🌈🐻), and they would LOVE a chance to buy back into the market at a low-ish price.
My recommendation: Do NOT be levered to the tits right now. Maybe toss a few dollars into way OTM spy puts a few weeks out, or longer, as a hedge against your long positions. Do NOT go all-in poots, cause stonks only go up and wall street is actively working on ways to defuse this bomb.
But be ready for stonks to go down VERY quickly for a little while. It can happen, and if it does, it's gonna get ugly.
My positions: ALL-IN GME, except for a bunch of March spy puts I'm gonna buy tomorrow cause I'm a gambling degenerate.
NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE.
submitted by TRENT_BING to wallstreetbets [link] [comments]

How to read DD on WSB.

So you've found a post, and it looks damn good - nicely formatted, seems to have a lot of fancy words, and you don't know how to even begin evaluating their theories. So, what do you do?
Analyze their analysis!
First, is the user reputable/legitimate, or is it a bot post? Check their user history - if they've been around for a while, and post to other forums, and have no massive gaps in their online-time, they're probably real.
Second, if it's a real user, are they trying to shill something for market manipulation or pump&dumping? If so, they'll usually be banned/deleted very quickly, but if you're browsing /new DDs you'll need to be vigilant. Avoid penny stocks or anything where the goal is specifically purchase->effect-oriented. If the OP has proof of positions, and it doesn't look like a pump&dump, then at least they're buying into their own theory - and I trust theories people are willing to bet on as they posit them more than theories that are just like, "I don't wanna but good luck all".
Third, the actual content of the post! Do you understand what they're pitching? If not, do the comments explain anything that might be confusing? Make sure you actually understand the theory you're buying into. If you understand it, the next question is, "how reasonable does this seem"? If it's something that's blindingly obvious even to a layman, it's possible that the market's already priced it in and no movements will be made based on the information. If it's totally far-fetched, like banking on a specific individual dying or lottery-level odds, probably worth skipping. The sweet spot, the ideal, the diamond in the rough, is finding DD that invokes new thoughts that no one has had, but are totally reasonable and likely. Read comments, see what the consensus is, and pay special attention to dissent - dissent is way more useful than agreement for furthering a theory. Read their sources, or do independent research - see if other factors support their theory, see how well-known or popular the theory is already, and evaluate based on that.
Now if you decide that you like the DD, and may act on it, you have to choose how you act on it. And this is the very, very hard part - opportunity cost and cost-benefit analysis. Is buying into this new theory superior to any existing theories you're currently acting on? Does it match your risk profile? Is it a stock DD, or an options recommendation? How much are you willing to gamble? What is your exit strategy? Can't help much here, that goes into actual financial advice, and I am not a financial advisor, just a "how to judge random idiots on the internet" expert.
Let's say you don't like the DD - you're not gonna buy in. But what if you think that the person's crazy? What if you think their theories are not just baseless, but are actually wrong? You may choose to bet against the DD! And yes, you can do this with anything you read - you can decide that they're stupid, fuck em, and bet against them. Their loss porn becomes your gains, and vice-versa. Investing in inversing bad DD is a valid option - they're buying up options, you can sell some options, or buy puts below their calls, or so on.
Retail trading is mostly treated as noise by hedge funds - but just because it's not your day job to trade doesn't mean you can't do research that hedge funds may miss. As retail investors, it's extremely difficult to have a superior trading strategy or more general market knowledge than the professionals, but we can figure out niche opportunities that the higher-level analyzers miss. If you intimately know an industry, or have a theory that you think financial institutions would miss, or think you're just smarter or more well-informed than them, absolutely develop a DD post (aka a market theory) and share or act on it.
tl;dr: If you're the kind of nerd that scrolls to tl;drs and makes decisions based on that, then all the other shit I said is irrelevant, :rocket: :diamond: :ape:
submitted by Kwahn to wallstreetbets [link] [comments]

My sister dumped me last night - they never take my side. Fully estranged.

Last night, I (f30) got the text from my little sister (f22) who I was still speaking to which explained that she was done speaking to me. That she was siding with our mom and our other sister (f25).
It really sucks.
My mom grew up under extreme abuse - she was physically, emotionally, and sexually abused. She lived in poverty and starved. They moved around a lot so she never got to settle in. So guess what! When it came time to be a parent and raise me, she was wildly unequipped. She psychologically abused and terrorized me growing up. I believe that my mom has BPD based on her behaviors but she has never been diagnosed as such.
I could tell you many things about her. She is a gambling addict who earns 6 figures but will often cry that she doesn't have enough money to pay for gas to drive to work. She is always in a lot of unspecified debt. I have a different dad from my sisters who saved his social security checks when I was growing up into a college fund for me. My mom and he divorced when I was very young. As a teen, when my mom felt too much pressure from her debts, she would scream and cry at me, "I am going to go out and drive my car into the ocean!! You sit on your golden gilded fucking nest egg and you refuse to help your mother!!" ...all because I wouldn't convince my dad to turn over my entire college savings account so she could blow it on her debt (and then immediately accrue new debt as she always does).
That's just one aspect of her personality. Another is constantly stomping on boundaries and then shitting on me when I tell her to stop. "You have a very real problem with BOUNDARIES," she will text me, then tell me that when I tell her no and ask her to stop behaviors that are upsetting, that she gets suicidal ideation. Makes me out to be the bad guy.
My mom always suggested to me that I get a certain kind of ground cover for my back yard. I think the suggestion she made is ugly and have told her no many times and have told her to stop talking about it. But she is the kind of person who - if I hadn't made some extremely hard boundaries - she would have already gone and snuck into my back yard and planted whatever she wanted in there and then gotten angry at me when I wasn't pleased about the "favor" she had done.
Okay? Like, I have tried for my entire 20s to have a relationship with her that preserved my mental health and I found that I could not have it no matter what, so I decided to go NC.
I fucking TRIED!!!! I had her walk me down the aisle at my wedding in 2019 in place of my dad who died, okay? I fucking tried!!!
And then comes my sister Liz yesterday. We have had our own shitty relationship and decided to try to get along because our sister Rachel betrayed both of us last year over relatively simple disagreements and started telling vicious lies about our homes and our partners. Rachel did some extremely bewildering and potentially dangerous lying which could have had police sent to mine and Liz's houses last year.
Rachel lived with me first, betrayed me and moved in with Liz (who took Rachel's side and didn't believe me!). Then - only after Rachel betrayed and lied about Liz to everyone in the same way - Liz came crying to me and apologizing for not listening and taking the wrong side. The lies Rachel told were not trivial I am no fool - I haven't spoken to Rachel since she did that.
But apparently now Liz and Rachel have made up. Liz has taken mom's side. And she sent me a text where she chastised me for not being understanding of everyone's mental health issues and for not having an, "open, honest, and candid" relationship with all of them. Puh-LEASE!!
What about my mental health issues? What about how just because someone has mental health issues doesn't mean you should tolerate abuse from them? What about all my efforts to include and care for everyone?
Also of note in her message, she said she loved our mom and sister twice. But she never said she loves me in these parting words. Not even to say goodbye.
So I feel pretty sad, like a giant stone is inside my chest.
They can all have each other and stew in their intergenerational trauma. I am getting the fuck out.
I really hope this message from my sister means they have all sided against me and cut me out and made me the bad guy - because maybe then they will fuck off and leave me alone!!
It still sucks.
Thanks for listening.
submitted by AssMaster6000 to JUSTNOFAMILY [link] [comments]

TO ALL AMC AND GME SHARE HOLDERS.

Just a heads up to any GME or AMC holders, do not expect the report tomorrow to be any good. Most likely the hedge funds will try to fudge the short % to make it look like they have exited their positions, Just to be clear it is *impossible* that they have exited all of their positions meaning they is still a high %. What is that number? it's hard to tell. They are going to fudge those numbers and just deal with the fines that they get for doing so. It will be a lot cheaper for them to do that then to cover all their shorts. **EXAMPLES**
FINRA fines NOMURA $300,000 for violations of short interest [3]
FINRA fines Barclays Capital Inc. $125,000 for failure to accurately report short interest positions[4]
FINRA fines Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC $2 million for short interest reporting and short sale rule violations [5]
FINRA fines Oppenheimer $275,000 over short-interest reports [6]
FINRA fines Albert Fried & Company $27,500 for failing to report 28 short positions, totaling 8,757,100 shares [7]
How does this relate to GME?
After the weeks of battles between the hedge funds and retail investors what makes you think tomorrow these billionaires will come clean and tell the actual %? They would much rather pay these fines instead of actually closing their positions fucking them over more that a 300k fine. A lot of new investors have been hearing rumors that Feb 9th is the “make or break day” meaning that if they report that they have exited their positions people are going to sell because they thought that was the end of it. If you are currently holding GME or AMC please hold and buy at the dip. But also note, this is gambling. Not investing. So please only put in money you are willing to lose.
Finally, why have they not covered their position already?
If you want to find out an in depth read about why they haven't covered their position please read this. https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/le235t/gme_institutions_hold_177_of_float_why_the/
Majority of this information was already written in different posts but I wanted to spread the word.
https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/leorks/evidence_points_to_gme_shorts_not_having_covered/
https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/le235t/gme_institutions_hold_177_of_float_why_the/
https://web.archive.org/web/20210208143828if_/https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/lf5tkc/dd_how_the_short_interest_report_for_gme_and/ **PLEASE READ THESE TO BETTER UNDERSTAND**
submitted by wishp0ds to Wallstreetbetsnew [link] [comments]

Shanks is the yakuza of the underworld

Credit to Arturrcantspeakjapanese on worst gen
TLDR: shanks is the underworld boss. That’s why he has connections to the gorosei. It ties into things like his famous “guns are for actions” and his crew referring to him as boss. Read it for a lot more info.
Yakuza cut their left pinkie finger. Shanks lost his left arm. Traditionally, like from medieval times, the finger-cutting is meant to cripple your swordsmanship, as the pinky finger grips the handle the most tightly. We know Shanks is a swordsman and lost at least some level of ability in this skill because of Mihawk refusing to duel, and from how he uses it in flashbacks, his left arm was his dominant arm. And actually, even earlier than the yakuza, finger-cutting comes from medieval japanese gamblers. Losing a finger was seen as a way to resolve a bet if you didn't have another way to pay. This really makes that "I bet it on the next generation." line come across a different way to me. It's not the focus of this and ive posted it before, but in my opinion, Shanks losing his arm was an intentional act to cement his influence over Luffy, because Shanks could see what Luffy's future might hold.
The marines don't call him "captain" by the way, they call him "ogashira/大頭", or "big boss". like he's the head of a criminal organization. His crew just uses "kashira/頭", a more informal "boss". the yakuza organization structure IRL places the "wakagashira"/"young boss" right under the oyabun/kumicho, so shanks' title is alluding to the yakuza without being one of their real titles. rather than the group leader, hes the head of the family. same idea, different phrasing.
we also have the fatheson cups sake ritual. the yakuza use the sakazuki cups to cement organization structure and loyalty. the grand fleet start calling Luffy "ogashira" after it, even though they don't do the "real" exchange of cups. Kyoshiro's family in Wano use it to swear loyalty, so it even has explicit ties to the yakuza within the world of One Piece. I imagine Shanks and his crew did the same fatheson cups ritual as any other yakuza family when forming the red hair pirates, considering their deferment to his rank and level of respect. Also, Shanks is from the West blue, where the best sake comes from, and he's always got a supply. Coincidentally, the west blue is overrun by underworld mafia figures under the Five Families of the West, and any importing of booze probably goes through them, so Shanks probably has ties to and influence with the Underworld. How far does it actually go? Well, we know the Underworld business goes all the way to the top of the government. We know Shanks can just walk into the holy land and discuss whatever he wants with the 5 Elders. We know the underworld is acting as a go-between for the WG, the yonko, and other weapons dealers and criminals across the world. Everyone called Doflamingo the most influential man in the Underworld, but he was just one broker. After Dressrosa we find out that the underworld is much bigger than just one country's exports, and see guys like Giberson the Hider the warehouse kingpin, "god of fortune" Du Feld, "shipping king" Umit, Big News Morgans, etc. But even these guys most people dont know about specialize. The organization structure has to lead up to something, right? Who's pulling the strings?
Akagami (red hair) is written like this "赤髪" but if you say akagami and write it like this "垢神" it means something like "dirty god" or like "god of filth". akagami no shankusu. What if Red Haired Shanks is also Shanks the Dirty God, the man at the top of the underworld?
i started looking for more puns after this and figured Oda likes doing stuff with bounties. shanks is 4,048,900,000. its got 489 (shi-ya-ku) in it and this led me in some wild directions. first off 師役(shiyaku) could mean "playing the role of teachemaster", like the example wiki gives is saying something like "suzumiya haruhi-yaku, aya hirano." so, playing the role of teacher, shanks. (or playing the role of Death, ooh spooky) then theres a bunch of gambling references! yaku means your hand in mahjong, for one. but then the other one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oicho-Kabu , a japanese gambling card game literally called "89". turns out its the origin of the word yakuza.
so i wanted to see if there were any notable connections between the syllable "shi" and the yakuza and got https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shimizu_Jirocho - most famous yakuza in history - adopted - life has no recorded notable incidents between the death of his father and becoming a young adult - became a gambler and criminal and started building a private navy - played the revolutionary army and the government against each other - swordsman - folk hero/robin hood figure in japan - famously made sure people were buried properly after a war and defied the government in doing so - was known to be able to settle major conflicts without casualties
"The pistol is cold. The pistol is a mechanism. There is no personification in it, and the sword is an extension of the human hand, human flesh, and I can convey the entire depth of hatred towards the enemy when the blade of my sword pierces his body, plunging the hand-sword into the body of the enemy. Then there is no greater pleasure to say: "Shinde moraimasu", that is, "I ask you to die." Shimizu Jirocho
"its dangerous to point guns." Shanks
submitted by Sensitive-Tree-6145 to OnePiece [link] [comments]

Why Dogecoin to $1 is Only a Matter of Time

Why Dogecoin to $1 is Only a Matter of Time
​
The Bubble
It’s February of 2021, and let’s be completely honest: We’re in a bubble. It’s kind of like 1999 but not the same. In 1999, interest rates were much higher. Today, they are nearly zero. In some countries, they are even negative. From a long-term perspective, this is very bad.
The Federal Reserve is completely to blame for this. Their policies are entirely reckless, and officials refuse to acknowledge what is going on here. The Coronavirus hysteria caused by the media and enabled by officials made the crash last summer the worst man-made disaster in the history of our financial system. The Great Depression was caused by over-speculation and a lack of regulation in an emerging financial system. The Great Recession was caused by greed and fraud (strangely, no one is in jail for this). This market collapse was caused by elected officials and the fed, who got trigger-happy and cut rates to zero back in the spring of 2020.
Whatever we wind up calling the burst of this bubble is to be determined. It will, however, be entirely manmade because the fed refuses to acknowledge the speculative behavior currently going on in SPACs, Cryptos, Penny Stocks, and anything else that serves as a legal Ponzi scheme for inflating the bubble. Even real, dividend-paying stocks have gotten way overvalued in some sectors. Also, since the fed has no plans of raising rates within the next two years (so they say for now, at least), if you’re searching for yield, you have nowhere else to look than the equities markets or one of these legalized forms of Ponzi schemes. It’s extremely unfair to conservative or retired investors looking for an honest return on their savings. This all is actually why it is a great time to look at Dogecoin, as I will get to in a moment. So long as rates are near zero, the bubble will continue to go on for longer and longer. And while it continues, people will constantly look for the next big thing.
For How Long?
Now, this may sound all doom and gloom, but that’s not my point. One day the bubble will burst, but I’m not making a prediction of when that will happen. Anyone making up dates for when the bubble will burst is either clueless or a con artist. No one knows when this bubble will burst. It could be weeks, months, or even years. One thing is for sure, the bubble will not burst just because things are overvalued. That’s not how bubbles work.
There needs to be a catalyst to burst the bubble. A major military conflict. An unexpected move or comment by the fed (raising rates, calling out the bubble for what it is, etc.). Another nationwide lockdown. I can go on with examples, but a little selloff here and there (August 2020) that causes the financial media to lose its mind is not enough. Just because you claim the bubble is bursting isn’t enough either. If you follow the media, you will get burned over and over again. That’s how it works. They want you to go to their sponsors for help, and once they burn you (sell you gold, overcharge you for poor investments, etc), you’ll come back to them hoping to figure things out. It’s a shell game. When the bubble burst, it will happen extremely fast and unexpectedly. There’s nothing wrong with playing the bubble, but you need to be mindful of when it ends because once the music stops, there will be a mad rush for the exits. You don’t want to be stuck holding the bag because everything will get crushed when the bubble burst. Even the blue-chip stocks that pay solid dividends will get hammered.
Fundamentals Don’t Matter (For Now)
In this bubble environment, fundamentals don’t make sense and, quite frankly, they don’t matter. You can argue back and forth all day long about whether something has a practical future or whether something is overvalued. I’m not here to do that about Dogecoin, Bitcoin, or any other crypto. The same could be said about Penny Stocks right now. (Hint: virtually all of these companies are way overvalued). You can find tons of articles of that nature, and I’m not likely to change your preconceived notions anyway. If we look at all the irrational bubbles that have occurred lately, you are a complete fool if you believe that TSLA or BTC is worth nearly a trillion dollars. It’s worth nowhere near that valuation.
How do I determine what something is worth, and who do I mean? It is called the market cap. In layman’s terms, that is where you take all the stock shares and multiply it by the share price. And I’m not recommending buying or selling TSLA or BTC, I’m just pointing out that these valuations are absurd. Does that mean they will not pass 1 trillion dollars? Of course not. There’s a very reasonable chance they do pass a $1 trillion market cap. That sounds absurd to write but it’s true. When the bubble bursts, you better believe fundamentals will be back in play. This disconnect can’t last forever. But it can go on for a while. And while it lasts, we all want to make some money
A Quick Word About ALL Cryptos
While I don’t believe Cryptocurrencies are going anywhere (as in, people will always buy and sell them), I also do not see any APPLICABLE future in them other than trading with other people. In fact, the biggest use I see of Cryptocurrencies is for illegal and untraceable transactions. The government will do all they can over the next several years to bring in lost tax revenue and track transactions better, but that’s the extent to which Cryptos will have relevance. How do I know this? Because the federal reserve, which is backed by the taxing authority of the US Government and the might of the US military, isn’t about to let some alternative currency usurp the US dollar. How do you think we can afford to provide all this government stimulus to fight Covid? If you think about this, you will see why other countries are much worse off. They must play by our rules, while we get to export our inflation to other countries because they must use the USD to buy commodities on the international exchanges (look at what happened when Saddam tried to circumvent this). If they print more money, their currency gets devalued. That’s why as bad as things look, relatively speaking, the US isn’t in terrible shape compared to the rest of the world.
If your financial future is so married to Bitcoin, ask yourself this: what happens if your account gets hacked? Who will you call? Who will make you whole again? If you have a brokerage account with legitimate stocks, there are regulations in place. There is the SIPC which protects again brokerage failure. With Bitcoin, you are completely gambling. This lack of regulation and lack of price stability means that there is no viable path to Bitcoin being a legitimate currency. Does it mean people can buy and sell it? Of course. But if you are in the cult of believing that Bitcoin is the future world reserve currency, you need to get your head examined.
Gold and Silver con artists have been trying for decades for people to get on this alternative currency train. At least gold and silver have some practical industrial applications. And hundreds of years of history on its side. Crypto isn’t anything but something people agree upon as having value. Why do I point this out? Because the one thing you need to do is separate yourself from what you think you know about Crypto and Blockchain, etc. While it all sounds cool and revolutionary, it really doesn’t matter. The US government could easily create their own form of Crypto that gives them more control. The decentralized part just doesn’t jive with our current global hegemony. If you don’t understand this, you should think more and read less. Once you accept this, you can start to see all Crypto as fundamentally worth the same: virtually nothing. The technicals, however, are why we want to look at Dogecoin.
Relative Valuation of Dogecoin
Now that you understand a little more background into where we are, I believe Dogecoin is extremely undervalued. Why? It’s simple. Relative valuation. This is one of the easiest and most efficient ways to compare investments. Ok, so maybe this isn’t really investing anymore; it’s gambling. Still, we can apply the same concept. Imagine two companies: they are in the same industry and have similar margins, earnings, growth prospects, etc. One company is valued at $50 billion and costs $120 per share, and one is valued at $85 billion and costs $80 per share. Which one would you invest in? Of course, you would invest in the one that is worth $50 billion at $120 per share. The cost per share means absolutely nothing. It is psychological.
Now, you say Dogecoin isn’t on par with Bitcoin and that where I’m going with this isn’t a fair comparison. Go back and read the last section. That’s why I wrote about the practical applications of Cryptocurrencies in general. None of that matters. The only thing that matters is the general sentiments shared by people that buy and believe in Cryptocurrency. So, let’s look at the current valuations:
Bitcoin – Price $40,500, Market Cap $755B (estimated as of 2-6-21)
Dogecoin – Price $.05, Market Cap $4.4B (estimated as of 2-6-21)
(Source: Yahoo Finance)
Now, I’m not saying Dogecoin is worth what Bitcoin is. I’m not even saying it's worth half or a third of Bitcoin. Who really knows? No one does. You certainly cannot say for certain that one is better than another. One is more “established” and has more name recognition. What I am saying is this: if Dogecoin goes to $1, it will have a market cap of just over $85 billion. Even at Bitcoin’s current market cap, that’s just over 1/10 of its value. And that isn’t even pricing in more appreciation of Bitcoin’s value over time. This means I see tons of room for Dogecoin to run. (I know some will mention dilution via minting of new coins, but that’s another discussion and not entirely relevant to the points I am trying to make in this piece.)
Could Dogecoin match Bitcoin? That sounds absurd, but let’s look just for fun: if Dogecoin were to have the same market cap as Bitcoin, that means it would have a current price of $8.55. So, what am I saying here? You must know the range of possibilities (within reason, if that even exists anymore) before you start thinking about price targets. To say Dogecoin is going to $100 is just absurd; things need to be put in the proper context.
Why Dogecoin?
Using relative valuation, I believe you could make a case for any Crypto. Will they all run to Bitcoin’s level? Of course not. The last question is why Dogecoin? This is the most important one that we have to answer before deciding on buying Dogecoin. The answer is simple: hype and name recognition. If I look at the most valuable cryptocurrencies by market cap, Dogecoin is number 12. I have taken an informal survey of probably 100 people over the last two weeks. I showed them the top 15 Cryptocurrencies by market cap to see which they were familiar with: Stellar, Binance Coin, Cardano, Polkadot, XRP . . . almost all of these were completely unheard of. But, somehow, they have valuations of 2-3 times Dogecoin.
Dogecoin has a few things going for it. First, hype. Elon Musk and many other prominent celebrities are pilling in. Mark Cuban has said he’d buy it over a lottery ticket. That alone can help aid a very quick lift off. Second, the name Dogecoin is very easy to remember and a trendy thing. What the heck is Cardano anyway? XRP? I mistakenly called it XPR before I edited this piece. And if you are still hung up on the practical use of Dogecoin or other Cryptos, you are missing the point of this piece entirely. Look at the story behind Bitcoin. An anonymous person online created a decentralized platform for money movement or something like that. What? How in the world did that idea ever take traction? It’s just like people online arguing over which Penny Stock is the next big thing. Neither person is right, but the perception is really all that matters.
Third, stimulus checks will be hitting within weeks or months. This naturally promotes price inflation when people have more dollars chasing few goods. People will inevitably pile into whatever they think is the next great thing. Dogecoin has momentum right now. And this brings me to number four.
Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, FOMO is very powerful right now. There are people all over the world that know people who have won big money in this bubble. Penny stocks, GameStop, Bitcoin, and many others that you can name. How many people do you personally know that have won big in the lottery? Probably none. This is a unique time in history. People have won big in this market and are looking for the next thing.
Dogecoin is something that could pick up steam quickly. It could blow up overnight. It may not, and that is the risk you take. At the end of the day, it’s just money that you can always make more of. Life-changing money is worth the risk when you find the right risk-reward ratio.
Do your due diligence, but also think ahead to a scenario that you could imagine. Would you be that surprised if Dogecoin reached $1? And if it did, would you be surprised if it started running towards multiple dollars? $1 is a psychological number that typically leads to a further breakout. The current market cap suggests this is all very possible. Now imagine getting in at four or five cents.
Disclosure: Long Dogecoin with Diamond Hands. No positions in any other things mentioned. -BJ
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what does the word gambling mean video

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