financethrowaway [comrade/them]
Did you contact the IRS about your missing checks or do you mean you never got them and never followed up because you didn’t need them at the time? Or did you put that you got them on your 2020 taxes?
If you’re missing your refunds you also need to contact the IRS. Your state treasury should hold your money for state taxes if you didn’t get those either. So contact them as well. You’re going to have to spend a day on the phone or write a bunch of emails.
https://www.irs.gov/coronavirus/get-my-payment
Taking out a loan wouldn’t help unless you knew you could pay it back soon. They’re going to look at your credit utilization and see that you’re maxed out/underwater. Which means the loans you’re most likely to qualify for are bad loans. Talk to your bank and see what they can do. Stay far away from payday loan agencies and “i need cash now” businesses. They would stick you with an untenable interest rate and you might as well just eat some late marks on your credit score. Since rent is more important than paying off credit cards, when you talk to your bank, get enough to cover rent. Don’t try to borrow enough to pay off everything.
Are you still getting card offers? If your credit accounts are in good standing, and you’re getting offers for 0% interest accounts, transfer your balances to something with no interest.
It was because fintech companies didn’t have enough to cover the trades. When you trade, it’s not actually instant. Everything has to go through a clearinghouse. You buy it, the broker puts in a request to buy it, the broker tells you it’s been bought, but then it’s up to a series of brokers and clearinghouses to make sure the trade actually goes through on the back end. Robinhood, Webull, etc are tech startups, not long standing financial institutions with decades or centuries of capital/clout backing them. They simply didn’t have the money or credit to let people keep buying shares.
The SEC investigated this issue afterwards, it wasn’t the SEC that told them to do it or stepped in. Yes, regulatory bodies like the SEC are often captured by the industries they’re supposed to watch over. But that doesn’t mean the SEC is literally on the phone with every broker guiding their hand.
The problem was people was putting a lot on a relatively small and new company. But because reddit and internet it turned into a conspiracy that Robinhood had a grudge against their customers or the CEO had a personal grudge against GME.
Wow must be another short squeeze.
It’s just another distraction. I’m not going to moralize and say that someone shouldn’t throw $100 at a meme coin if it makes them feel better. But it is creating another safe arena to exert radical anger without actually hurting anything. In fact, I’m sure the hedges and Wall Street love that these people are posting all their moves on the fifth largest site in the world. They know that thousands of people are moving in a certain direction. And not only that but it’s also created a pool of marks for advertising. So it’s just ultimately a dead end for any real sentiments about changing the system. It’s not like we didn’t know that or the people here who do it have any allusions in that regard. But there are people who do.
They do this thing where they openly discuss why what they do won’t work but then use that as a reason to keep doing it.
These hedge funds have all these shorts in a company. Without asking why that may be we attach ourselves parasocially to that company. Because we got screwed out of $30 on a copy of Call of Duty once and that somehow translates to a fond childhood moment for some reason. Then we buy up that company’s stock, and hold it. That increases the value of the company which helps the parent company and the hedges who back it. We keep holding so that the other hedges can’t cash in their shorts for profit. Shorts expire but for some reason this one company is always shorted the most any company has ever been shorted. We know because some stranger online posted a spreadsheet of bloomberg terminal data and this totally isn’t a bunch of laymen trying to decipher financial runes. So we hold and hold and the price goes up because we’re the first people in history to learn about supply and demand.
The hedges then crash all of our plans to defeat the largest financial institutions in the world by using some arcane financial magics to bypass the squeeze. So the fact that what we said would happen by a certain date didn’t happen means we’re actually right. It only didn’t happen because the hedges we’re fighting had a trick up their sleeve. It’s not thousands of people playing telephone with hastily thrown together Robinhood screenshots and reading tea leaves through amateur technical analysis. It’s an underdog story and if you’re against the underdogs, then you’re an asshole. We still have this idea that when a group of internet nerds put their head together, it has to change the world. It can’t be a tremendous waste of time. If it is, then that means me spending all my life online means nothing. The underdogs have to win. We did it reddit.
The diamond hands have won and regrouped. The price is going up again after the crash. Here’s 30 stickied theads full of memes and theorycrafting about why what we said would happen will happen this time for sure. Sure, every two weeks our story changes a little. Since it’s different people doing it we just listen to the last person who said something. The person who said the the thing before this last one was just wrong, not us for gilding them 600 times. But hey, we’re right this time for sure. The squeeze is happening again.
Oh no, it looks like the hedges are striking again. The price spiked but didn’t go to the moon and reach $1000 so I could buy my mom a new kidney. We were so right on our DD so that can’t be it. It must be hedges pulling their tricks again. We’re not going to stop and ask why are we doing this if the hedges can easily defeat every squeeze attempt. Nope. It’ll work we just need to keep buying stock and holding it. Which totally only makes us money and not all the financial institutions between our stock that we don’t technically own because lolretailbrokers. And even though we realize that nobody can deliver millions of outstanding shares, we’re going to keep buying shares that don’t exist. We need to keep telling our enemy hedges exactly when we’re buying and selling and what we’re thinking on this public website.
Also because this is my first and only experience with finance, everything is a squeeze. Bitcoin? Squeeze. Doge? Squeeze. A stock that’s shorted 7%? Squeeze. Pennystock moonshots? Squeeze. Everything is GME. Everything works exactly how people on r/wsb and r/superstonk and r/doge works. That’s how you understand a complex economic system ruled by powerful people, reading posts.
And that’s why people on the left, including myself, sometimes fall for these arguments. Because people of all political tendencies, who are online, think you learn through posting. That’s how they were exposed to their politics and given the vocabulary to express it. So naturally a tunnel vision develops and these message boards become the center of everything. The real hot take for GME, that I’m warming up to, is that reddit had overall a very small impact. It actually wasn’t DFV or r/wsb that caused the squeeze. It was going to happen anyways and they stumbled onto it. Just like the VW squeeze wasn’t about small individual stock holders. The media picked up on it because they chase any internet meme shit. This is all a bunch of online people convincing themselves of a history that never happened. And they’re writing themselves a new one as time goes on. I’m not fully committed to that idea but it’s very tempting. If this shit doesn’t go to the moon soon, then it’s going to feel a lot more real than the version where reddit was right about everything.
You should get an idea of that when you do your DD before buying. I know people are jumping on meme stocks because it’s fast and easy. But you should still do some kind of DD on your own.
Set aside a maximum amount of money to invest. It can be $50, it can be $100. Just realize that with anything that low, it’s very hard to manage risk. It locks you in to penny stocks if you want to also properly handle risk on every trade. You set up a floor for every share, a maximum amount you’re willing to lose. For example, if you have $100 to invest and you buy a stock for $1, you set up a stop-loss at $0.95. That means the stock will automatically sell if it hits $0,95. So you know that, at worst, you’re losing $0.05 per share. If you’re willing to lose $2 (2%) of your total amount to invest, then you can buy 40 shares. That’s $0.05 per share * 40 shares = $2. You have risked 2% of your account. You should always, no matter how much you have, keep your risk around 2%, go to 1% if lower. So you buy 40 shares at $1, that’s $40. 40% of your total money is now tied up in one play. If it hits your stop-loss then you get back $38. You lost $2.
This works the same way for taking profit. You decide what amount of profit is acceptable. I think the safest long-term stock investments make 8% annually? So making 10% on a single trade is pretty good. You invested $40 so that means you should start looking to exit when it turns into $50. People don’t want to do that because it’s too slow. They want to turn $40 into $200. That’s much riskier and unlikely to happen in an acceptable time frame. It’s like crawling through a minefield. You can do it inch-by-inch, the safer way, or you can YOLO and just prance through it. But I think the official stats are that even the best traders only win 55% of the time, at most. So even when you’re careful and get lucky, you’re still going to lose almost as much as you win. Therefore turning $40 into $50 looks a lot better. If you do that then you now have $110. Do it again and you have $120. It won’t be long before you have a real shot at doubling your money. You’ll have setbacks for sure, not every trade will pay off. You might gain 10% and then lose 3%. Then gain 5%. Then gain 3%. Then lose 2%. etc. But as long as you can win a little more than you lose, you make money.
The trick here is to have more capital to begin with. All this talk people do about meme stocks lifting people out of poverty doesn’t really jive. More people are going to lose than win, especially when working with such low amounts of initial capital. Because they can’t manage risk and are relegated to pennystocks, as I said. But if you start out with $5000 or $50000, you can do a lot more. Now you can afford higher-priced stocks that may be more stable and have better payouts. Plus turning $100 into $110 is different than turning $5000 into $5500. You can do a lot more with that $500 than $10, even though it’s 10% on both. So starting out with more money makes it easier to win. This is something we know intuitively because it’s capitalism. But still, it’s important to write out why.
You might know all this already, and are asking a question specific to AMC. But on the chance you’re asking a general “when do I pull out?”, I thought I’d try to answer in a technical way. If you don’t have a take-profit point in mind already, I’d say cash out when you look at your account and the first reaction is “that’s a pretty nice return.” Because from personal experience, waiting until after that point pretty much means the stock will go down and you lose that opportunity. The second best time is when you realize you messed up and waited too long, before the price gets too low. The kicker is that if you do sell now, and tomorrow it hits $100, you’ll be mad at the money you could have made. But it’s important to not take the future for granted and to realize everything is simpler in retrospect. You’ll never have as a much money as the amount you could have had. If you get too caught up in “I should have waited” and then wait too long on your next trade, you lose again. It messes with our brains because we’re pattern-seeking animals and we expect the future to follow directly from the past. So of something doesn’t work on one trade, it must work on the next trade. But that’s not how it works. Waiting too long on one trade doesn’t mean you shouldn’t wait as long or longer on the next one. Even when it’s a trade on the same stock. Waiting on GME in March is different than waiting on GME in April, for example. In March, you were slightly ahead of the curve and waiting was good. In April, the price fell and waiting just meant losses if you sold.
AMC is up because of the holiday weekend and people seeing movies again. It was predicted months ago that it would go up if vaccination went well and covid restrictions were removed. Reagal reached all-time high recently, but has dropped a little since the beginning of May. It’s a more expensive stock (~$150) and hasn’t been memed all spring. But, at least where I am at, Cinemark closed down their theaters for good. That leaves AMC and Regal to split the market. If people keep going to the movies and the box office blueballs gets released into record-setting opening weekends, it’ll probably go up more. I don’t think it has anything to do with a short squeeze though.
GME is up because r/superstonk has been hitting r/all several times a week for a while now. No doubt that when people buy up a stock in bulk and few sell, the price will rise. I still think a lot of r/superstonk’s DD is dubious though. Everything isn’t a squeeze, which is the problem that has arisen out of the GME thing. Every new retail investor thinks everything is a squeeze. And every time the price falls it’s shorts manipulating the market. Stocks go up, stocks go down, lots of things are always shorted to some amount. When buyers are in control, price goes up. When sellers are in control, price goes down. It’s not a conspiracy.
No idea why BB is up, I haven’t looked into it. I thought everyone dipped out on it in April. Though BBBY is up too so I guess the old memes are still around.
People are finding stocks that are shorted, hyping them up, buying massive amounts, and then not selling. Regardless of the shorts, that alone is enough to raise the price. You can do that with unshorted stocks as well. You have to ask why this “short squeeze” thing works on everything from a company shorted less than 10% to one over 100%. It turns out that when thousands of people jump on a stock and then refuse to sell, the price goes up. It’s almost like when buyers dominate the market, the price rises.
The market as a whole should do better in the next two months. We’re still hitting all-time highs in the Dow and S&P. Hospitality and any in-person entertainment should do well. I’ll be curious to see how long it lasts. It would be funny for everyone to anticipate the moment when thing are back to normal and then the boost from that only lasts a week or two.
I have no idea what the exact methods are. The bonds themselves are traded between banks and individuals (companies/investors) and between the government and the banks, and between the government and individuals. There are different kinds of bonds with different features because at the end of the day they are products for sale. I’m sure they’re often bundled into something else because that would make sense. But they could just sell some of them in bulk too.
I wish I knew more specifics but I weighed depth of knowledge with time watching dry financial videos.
I’m going to try to Liz Franczak this.
The government provides several financial products which they sell to fund stuff. One of the ways, for example, are bonds like the kind grandparents used to buy for their kids. There are other types of bonds and securities too. These sort of act like little loans. You buy it, the government agrees to buy it back at its full price and with interest or some kind of appreciation value later on. I suppose if you’re dealing in bulk, you can make some money off the right kind of bonds so it’s in your interest to do it. Unlike stocks or private investment they’re almost zero risk since the government has to buy it back. The only way they couldn’t is if the government didn’t exist (:party-sicko: or some other major catastrophe like the government runs out of money and simply can’t afford to pay them back.
Another thing that happens is the people who buy government bonds will sell them to other people. You buy thousands of really good bonds, nobody else gets them because they’re not an infinitely abundant product, so now you can do a little retail markup on them and sell them to other people. If you never sell them, you still make money. Or you could sell them for an immediate return and the person buying them will make money too once the bonds reach maturity.
What bond dealers will do is sell the bonds quickly under a repurchasing agreement (repo), and buy them back quickly for a higher price. Some of the bonds have a periodic payout, kind of like taking dividends on stocks, so people buy it to collect that payout and then sell them back to the dealers. Now, I’m not totally sure the exact working or profit motives for this. I guess that the dealer is okay with doing this if the bonds are the kind that also come with interest so the government will pay them more money for them once they reach maturity.
The reverse can be true as well. When someone buys from a dealer they also enter a repo, but it’s a reverse-repo where they agree to buy it now but sell at a later date. The big takeaway is that people use the way these bonds work to make money. If you time transactions right, there is profit to be made on all sides. It’s kind of like exploiting game mechanics in a video game. You’re not cheating, just using the features provided by the devs. And this is how it’s supposed to work. It’s not even an exploit really, just playing the game. This is why high finance people smell their own farts so much. They go get a job where they dig through these esoteric financial rules and instruments, then learn how to spin enough plates at once so they make millions.
Where the actual cheating comes in is that large investors or companies can use the repo market to hide how shitty their business is. This happened around 2008 with Lehman Brothers. They traded certain bonds in order to cover up their over extension on subprime loans. There were/are also problems with how the repo market works, that was never fixed because, as far as I can tell, it’s how it’s supposed to work. It’s like a shitty market that shouldn’t exist but it does because other markets exists and the wealthy need it to exist so that other things can exist.
The three-party repo market is basically the wild west. Since the repo market works on the very short term (48 hours) it’s hard to actually keep up with transactions. Transactions take time anywhere. Even with the internet. Things have to go through clearing houses. This was one of the issues with $GME. It revealed that there are tons of transactions happening with retail investors (and even normal large-firms) that aren’t basically backed by anything. Because when you make a trade it’s done on credit, the idea is that they’ll accept the trade right now with the understanding that the funds will actually get to where they’re supposed to go, and the investments will also get to where they’re supposed to go. However that doesn’t always happen because it’s an imperfect logistics network, not magic. And when there’s an extra balance in the network, where someone never got their goods or someone didn’t get their money, there’s a crisis. The greater proportion of transactions where this happens, the more of a crisis it is.
Regulators stepped in after 2008 and tried to fix some of these issues in the repo market, by acting as a throttle. They could step in and back transactions with cash so it was assured that people got their money even if the transaction would fail otherwise. Or there wasn’t enough credit to back the transaction to begin with. They also paid banks to not do play in the repo market at all. This has cut the repo market in half. However, the Federal Reserve itself has had to dabble in the repo market increasingly because it’s how they compensate for banks not having enough money to loan out to people/businesses.
So, in summary, the Fed is buying back bonds or selling them because banks have too much money on hand that aren’t being handed out as loans. By taking back $351M from the market, they’re forcing banks to give loans to people (mainly giant corps and investment firms) to fill that hole. The issue here is that nothing is done in a vacuum and this is just them basically trying to keep things in a precarious balance. The might have to throw all that back in next week if something goes the other way and banks suddenly have too little reserve.
I think the moral of the story here is that the wealthy are throwing around tons of money so fast that the market can’t really keep up with it even with computer technology. The Fed is trying to hold it together but who knows how long that will last. Two of the wealthiest men on Earth are also “getting divorced” and moving a ton of their assets around as well. I can’t tell if there’s more money up in the air right now compared to normal, but I feel like there’s something going on. The rats are scattering.
