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GIO, unfortunately the left-leaning are so full of unjustified hatred due to social/mainstream media propaganda/censorship, they will not hear or tolerate the other side of the argument, their minds are made up and they seem incapable of critical thinking. Even when indisputable evidence from the other side of the debate is presented to them, cognitive dissonance prevents them from accepting it. I will continue the fight, but think it is a losing battle.
Perhaps it was because he knew it was all bullshit and masks are scientifically proven not to stop the spread of viruses (it even states this on the box), let alone that people think wearing a bandana does anything but virtue signal. Fauci/CDC even stated early on that masks don't work (perhaps this is why Trump didn't recommend the mask early on). Wake the phuck up and stop believing everything you hear on TV and other social/mainstream media outlets and practice some critical thinking for once, do your own research and get educated on the subject before you continue spreading their lies.
The People Should Be Skeptical
No, really?
About 1 in 3 Americans say they definitely or probably won’t get the COVID-19 vaccine, according to a new poll that some experts say is discouraging news if the U.S. hopes to achieve herd immunity and vanquish the outbreak.
I wonder why they're skeptical?
Maybe it's because those so-called "experts" are lying right then and there.
We must use vaccines to have "hope" of achieving herd immunity?
We already have herd immunity.
Sure looks like herd immunity to me and it wasn't due to vaccines -- the peak occurred before any person had the shots and today we are just reaching the first people who have (1) had both shots and (2) waited the requisite 14 days for antibodies to build protection.
Yet the case rate is down by approximately 75% and hospitalization is down by more than half, with hospitalization peaking almost exactly two weeks later as expected. Deaths are reported late (not back-dated to "date of") and will shortly start falling as well.
Let's go down the litany of lies, because if you expect people to believe the vaccines are "safe and effective" when pronounced by these very same experts then they must account and pay for their previous lies and the harm those lies have done.
"15 days to slow the spread"; it is now nearly a year later and we have not released the alleged "mitigations" that were claimed would control the pandemic. The original two weeks turned into six of a near-complete lockdown in most of the nation.
"Asymptomatic transmission"; there is no science behind this. Never once in the history of an epidemic has asymptomatic transmission been of any material consequence. Oh, it happens, but very rarely. A peer reviewed paper in NATURE failed to find one such documented case with Covid-19 across 10 million people. Yet it is the entire premise of mass-actions including mask orders, lockdowns, mass-testing of those without any sign of disease, business and school closures. There is zero hard science supporting that premise; it is entirely made up based on computer models. In addition to there being no hard science behind it the premise is mathematically implausible due to viral replication being exponential.
"Its all droplets"; Yes, it most-certainly was "droplets" between apartments in Hong Kong and China separated by ten floors with people who did not know each other, but who shared sinks and toilets on the same vertical drain line without P-traps. The near-certainty that fecal transmission is part of the problem has been known since March of 2020 and deliberately ignored. Further, that aerosol transmission was implicated in a meat-packing plant where they were able to sequence and trace the index case in Germany has also been ignored on purpose for the simple reason that if either is in play then none of the "NPI" interventions can possibly work. Oh, golly gee, over time the data has proved that they don't work.
"Masks work"; No they don't -- the data is clear. But the previous lie is utterly essential to this one, so it was maintained. Never mind that the entire premise of masks can't work for anything other than gross (and very visible) sized spittle. We've known this for 40 years as hard science via random controlled trial and there are zero controlled trials that have found otherwise. An attempt to do so during Covid-19 had its publication deliberately interfered with because it did not show that masks worked (the Danish trial) with multiple journals refusing to publish the study not due to claimed problems with the study but because they did not agree with the results; specifically, the confidence interval spread raised the possibility that masks might actually increase infections. Again: There has never been a single random controlled trial that has shown statistical evidence that common cloth, paper or surgical masks interrupt transmission of viral disease and there are multiple such trials that show they're worthless or may actually be harmful. Oh, don't just believe me on the last three points -- read here too https://www.aier.org/article/masking-a-careful-review-of-the-evidence/
"Masks are better than vaccines"; Stated in sworn testimony by Dr. Redfield, the CDC's Director in September, with a plea for the people to wear them for 4, 6, or 8 weeks and the promise that if we did the pandemic would be under control. Virtually the entire nation was in fact under such a mandate at the time and compliance in most areas was 90%+. Less than one month after that statement was made the winter spike began reaching more than triple the case and hospitalization rate in virtually every state and locale irrespective of mandates. Obviously that statement was false. You now want people to believe that, given this recent and proximate false statement that anything else from the same organization about safety and effectiveness is true?
"The vaccines underwent extensive testing and are known safe"; Oh really? They were not tested in (1) pregnant women, (2) old, medically frail people and (3) those who previously had Covid-19; all three were excluded from the trials. Also excluded from the trials were children under 18. VARES says 453 people have died associated with one (or both) Covid-19 shots as of the end of January. The same query for seasonal flu vaccines (all of the sub-types selectable) from August of last year to now returns 20 deaths associated with flu vaccines. By the CDC's own data the Covid-19 vaccines are twenty times as likely to be associated with your death as the seasonal flu shot and that is with incomplete administration for Covid; this year's flu shot round has all been administered by now. Adjusting for a roughly 30% prevalence of flu vaccination, which is a decent guess, it appears the Covid-19 vaccines are somewhere between one hundred and two hundred times as likely to kill you as is the flu shot. The varicella (Chicken Pox) vaccine over its entire period of administration has recorded only 161 associated deaths over nearly 30 years of use with just ONE death in 2020. Does this, on a comparative basis, sound "safe" to you? Further, the CDC refuses to commit to these vaccines producing sterilizing immunity because they did not require it to grant the EUA at the FDA which is why they refuse to tell you that you can discard the masks and distancing after being vaccinated. Vaccines that do not produce sterilizing immunity are dangerous to the population as a whole even if they provide personal benefit. In short it is entirely possible we are jabbing people with something dangerous to others and we are deliberately giving those jabs without knowing if this is true.
"Vaccines have a long and successful safety record"; True in the general case and irrelevant to this specific case. The commonly used vaccines all have decades-long safety records and were fully tested in a process that typically takes at least five years -- and often more than ten years. The Chicken Pox (varicella) vaccine took nearly 20 years to be certified. Further, vaccines that use whole killed or attenuated virus are well-understood and produce the same immune response as an actual infection does, minus the nasty infection consequences because they are the same thing. This path was not used to produce vaccines for Covid-19 because coronaviruses have repeatedly proved to be unable to be safely vaccinated against via this path and in animal trials have killed the animals that received the shots when later infected by the same agent, likely due to natural mutations that potentiate ADE. We do not know if the approach taken with these shots is safe over the intermediate and longer term because we were in a big hurry to get them out there rather than fully test them and thus did neither the animal trials nor did we take the several years it takes to find out in small test populations in humans.
"There are no safe and effective treatments"; This is flat-out false. Both HCQ and Ivermectin (in particular the latter) are known safe having been used for decades in humans. Both are also effective although once again Ivermectin appears to be wildly superior. Then there's budesonide, which a Texas doctor claimed to have near-100% results with and also wasn't looked at because once again -- it's cheap and now has a study out in peer review that showed it was 90% effective. These have been intentionally not trialed over the previous year by public health authorities and the state of both being safe has been lied about repeatedly by physicians and health officials because the EUA process for vaccines or any other drug requires that there be no safe and effective alternative. In other words hundreds of thousands of people in the US were intentionally denied safe and likely effective treatments so as to make possible the accelerated rollout of these vaccines and roughly 300,000 of the 400,000+ dead expired as a result of intentionally-withheld treatments with decades-long safety records that might have prevented said deaths. You now want to tell people after killing close to half a million in the US that your "alternative" is safe and effective and expect to be believed?
"The death reports are honest and the vaccines will stop it"; Oh really? The CDC illegally changed the means of recording death causes in March of 2020 after using the previous methodology for decades including across multiple epidemics and pandemics. As a government agency the OMB, PRA and APA legal requirements all apply to the CDC; all require written justification and a comment period. These very requirements are why many of Trump's E/Os and unilateral changes were struck down in court; it was not that he did not have the authority but that irrespective of an E/O no agency can sidestep those requirements in implementing the changes. The same is true here yet the CDC deliberately tampered with death certificate reporting without going through that procedure and by doing so made disentangling their change impossible as you cannot compare the two methodologies. Are all 400,000+ of these deaths actually from Covid19? We know that claim is false since there are over 14,000 deaths by suicide, poisoning and accident claimed in their own data set to be "caused" by Covid! How many more are not really caused by Covid19? We do not know; the CDC deliberately destroyed the very basis of public health reporting by changing the rules just for this specific condition. The Florida House of Representatives investigated this set of circumstances and found that a huge percentage of alleged "Covid" deaths were not factually classifiable as being caused by Covid-19. While is is clear that there was more death in 2020 what is not clear nor separable as a direct consequence of these reporting changes is how much of it was actually from Covid-19 and how much of it was caused by government mandates in the form of suicides, drug overdoses, deferred medical care and similar.
How much more do you need?
Were I at specific risk might I find that the vaccines, despite the lack of testing, intermediate and long-term data and the fact that they are using an approach never before attempted in humans to evade a known risk with coronavirus vaccines that might kill me, to be worth it for myself in an individual capacity?
Perhaps.
But for people without specific morbidity factors there is no way you can justify the shot on a comparative risk basis. VARES says 453 people are dead associated with these shots as of the end of January. The CDC claims that roughly 13 million Americans have received at least one dose as of the end of January. That's a death rate of 0.00003, or statistically identical to the risk of dying from Covid-19 if you do not have any of the listed specific co-morbidities. Note that while VARES reporting does not prove that shot is the cause of the result neither does being called a Covid-19 death prove that Covid was the cause of the result either by the CDC's own admission in their own data.
May I note again for those of you who can't be bothered to read that Chicken Pox, which in children has a death risk approximately equal to Covid-19, that is, roughly 4/100,000 (Covid-19 is about 3/100,000), has a vaccine that took roughly 20 years to be certified. Over the last roughly 30 years of use the varicella vaccine has recorded a total of 161 associated deaths in VARES with just ONE DEATH in all of 2020. Yet in less than two months for a disease with the same risk profile in healthy individuals the Covid-19 vaccines have recorded a stunning 453 associated deaths which is NEARLY THREE THOUSAND TIMES GREATER RISK OF DEATH ASSOCIATED WITH THE COVID 19 VACCINES THAN THAT FOR THE VARICELLA SHOT OVER A COMPARABLE PERIOD OF TIME.
The pharmaceutical industry would never be able to get a vaccine for any other condition through "full approval" in non-morbid individuals if the risk of dying from the vaccine was equivalent to the risk of dying if you got the infection. If the Chicken Pox vaccines killed 3,000 kids a year there would be an uproar and the CDC would have been sacked and the earth on which it stood salted with diesel fuel years ago. Yet that is exactly what the data from the CDC's own databases show for these Covid vaccines if you do not have any of the specific known morbid factors.
It is abundantly clear that these shots are not approvable for other than at-risk population segments on the basis of the CDC's own data known and published alone and in addition are several thousand times as dangerous as the shot for Chicken Pox and roughly 100 times as dangerous as a flu shot. What's worse is that unlike the Chicken Pox shot these shots are presumed to be an annual thing so the risk is not taken once it is taken once per year.
Again note that this death rate for the disease itself is without widespread use of Ivermectin or HCQ in the United States. With it the death rate may be materially lower. Additionally Israel apparently has uncovered a compound that has no serious side effect risk in their trials and is 100% effective. They are proceeding to Phase III trials with this compound, and since it's not a vaccine mutations will not evade it unlike vaccines which will likely be evaded by natural viral mutation. But what is clear thus far is that for people without any such co-morbidity the vaccinations are approximately equally dangerous as infection, if you the take the shot the risk is certain but infection is not certain and as a result the shot is more dangerous than the risk of exposure to the disease in persons without one or more of those comorbid factors.
Skepticism is, in other words, quite-clearly warranted on nothing more than the CDC's own data, and that ignores all of the previous lies told by government and other public-health agencies back to last March.
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=241569
It's pretty funny watching the impeachment trial live with Trump's attorneys exposing the left's hypocrisy and lies over the past 4 plus years, playing hundreds of video clips using the left's own violent, inflammatory rhetoric, exposing their hypocrisy, shoving all their words right back down their bile filled throats, it's about phucking time!
I'm sure JD and starboy both have spare rooms, "put you money where your mouth is" I always say.
Democrats Caught Using Fake 'Evidence' At Impeachment Trial
Oh really, what does it take to expose these shameless, projecting, cheating, lying, hypocrite, phucks for what they are ????
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/democrats-caught-using-fake-evidence-impeachment-trial
One dollar spread at kitco spot silver right now....that's not normal.
Looks like gold can follow silver, hmmmm.
ironwill, my post timed out before I could finish so, here is the complete post:
Hi ironwill, I'll chime in on that one, I only buy producers (gold or silver) with revenue. These are some other stats to consider; minimal debt, positive cash flow, low AISC, safe jurisdiction, and longer mine life, for me I prefer undervalued juniors. These juniors carry more risk, but the ROI can be multiples higher than safer mid and top tier producers, I hope this helps. My two largest positions are Karora Resources (KRR.TO/KRRGF) and Galane Gold (V.GG/GGGOF)
You can do okay with explorers to, but generally, since permitting, mine construction along with a huge capex can take years, risk is higher and ROI can be years away unlike a current producer's quarterly profits.
The best way to make money with an explorer is if it is bought out. Wallbridge mining (WM.TO/WLBMF) is a good candidate.
Hi ironwill, I'll chime in on that one, I only buy producers (gold or silver) with revenue. These are some other stats to consider; minimal debt, positive cash flow, low AISC, safe jurisdiction, and longer mine life, for me I prefer undervalued juniors. These juniors carry more risk, but the ROI can be multiples higher than safer mid and top tier producers, I hope this helps.
Unfortunately, gold and gold stocks no longer appear to be hedges against a market collapse, I fear this next collapse will take gold stocks down with it, timing an exit has been made so difficult with all the manipulation in this sector.
Laws? Only For You. Bend Over
The snicker factor of a bunch of hedge fund and other Wall Street folks screaming about GameStop (GME) and others is astoundingly funny.
Let's start with the law: It is illegal to "manipulate" a stock or other security -- that is, it is unlawful to express an intent to sell or buy for any other reason than to actually sell or buy, and it is also illegal to intentionally mislead others about your reasons for doing so.
This is why "spoofing" (although almost-never prosecuted) is against the law. "Spoofing" is the practice of laying in a bid or offer you have no intention of being filled on for the express reason of making other people think you want to sell or buy something, when in fact you want to do the opposite. They attempt to follow your claimed "expression of intent" only to find your offer or bid has disappeared, the price moves and they come in on the other side. It sounds like picking up pennies in front of a steamroller and it is, but it can be very profitable especially if your connection to the exchange is fast enough that the risk of getting filled is extremely low in that you can cancel your order before anyone can hit it.
This could be prevented on a trivial basis by the exchanges through a simple rule: All orders must remain valid for enough time for the signal to travel around the globe twice (once there and once back) or until executed and you may not have more open orders at any given instant than you can clear (e.g. margin capacity.) Now if you try to "spoof" you will get filled and the scheme fails. But note that despite this being blatantly obvious not one exchange has implemented such a rule and neither has the SEC demanded it. Gee, I wonder why not? Might it be that they really don't give a **** so long as only the "right" people cheat?
Spoofing is an extremely common practice that I've raised Hell about for years, a practice that especially screws small retail traders such as myself because we are nowhere near as fast with our fingers as a computer and also not sitting next to the exchange either and a number of years ago one particular idiot was dumb enough to do it when the futures market was open over a holiday weekend. I caught it on video from a retail trading terminal (mine), and put it on Youtube, which got the CME very pissed off at me claiming that I should have called them first. Uh, no, if they gave a **** they should have stopped it before I could catch it, but they didn't. Ultimately, and to my great amusement, the person responsible was actually prosecuted and I was asked to come to DC and talk to some very nice government people and explain in detail on a tick-by-tick basis the video that I had recorded, since it was evidence. Go figure.
Oh by the way, they never have gone after the "big guys" doing the same thing nor changed the rules on order validity.
Given how simple it would be to instantly stop this crap does that tell you everything you need to know?
But there is nothing illegal about bidding up (or shorting) a stock for a transparent and truthful reason that has nothing to do with its underlying value. The only requirement is that you not lie; witness firms like Tesla that have crazy valuations for which there is no rational justification, or Amazon, or similar. They're everywhere and always on the exchanges and always have been. Fundamentally a company that pays no dividend has no value beyond the liquidation value of its assets in the free market when it comes to common stock. Therefore, if you want to get down to it every single stock that pays no dividend trades on nothing more than hype since there is no discounted cash flow to you as a holder, ever, and no expectation there will be.
That's the dirty little secret that nobody wants to talk about when it comes to the stock market, and is why you can have a market that trades at 666 one year and a few years later trades at 3,700. Did the economy expand by a factor of five over that period? Did it even double? Not even close.
This by the way is why they got pissed off at Musk and his "$420" claim. It wasn't that he believed that was a reasonable number; it was that he claimed to have the deal in the bag when he in fact did not.
The sort of short squeeze that we've seen occurred due to fraud -- but not by the people causing the squeeze. And don't get your panties in a wad about this either; yes, the "at home" trading cadre has materially expanded with the pandemic lockdowns and such, and we're sending "stimulus checks" to a lot of young adults with nothing to do with their time, so staring at a trading terminal attempting to make money sounds pretty good, especially if you win a few times. But that's not the whole story -- not even close.
If you want to short a stock you are supposed to first borrow it. That is, ordinary people cannot sell what they don't have, so if you wish to short you must first borrow that which you want to sell. This is one of the ways brokers make money; they keep all the stock their customers have in "street name" and keep track of who has what. They can (and if supply is limited do) charge you to borrow that stock. There's nothing wrong with this, provided the stock borrowed is real. It's one of the things you agree to allow if you have a margin account; as part of the "price" of that privilege the broker can loan your stock to others for the purpose of shorting it. However, since you own it if you demand it back because you wish to sell it the broker either has to find some other set of shares to replace what he lent out of yours or the short-seller is forcibly bought-in at the market because they have to return your shares. If that causes to take a loss, tough crap.
Yes, I've been forcibly bought-in before. It's a risk of the game.
There is an exception to this rule: If you are a market maker then you can short naked, that is, without borrowing first. Why? Because a market maker's job is, as the name implies, to make the market -- that is, to take the other side of whatever the customer wants to do. If I want to be long something in order to do it someone else has to sell it. Now in the physical security market this is easy; there either is or is not what I want to buy out there on the sheet offered by someone else. But in the options market there is no physical security; the entirety of it is synthetic. This means if someone wishes to buy a CALL someone else has to sell one. The MM's job is to, when necessary, be that other person.
Well, that's dangerous because naked short options positions are obligations to deliver. Specifically if you are short an IBM CALL @ $100 (for example) then you are obligated to deliver 100 shares of IBM stock on demand at any time before expiration for $100 each. It does not matter what IBM's stock is worth; if the holder of the CALL exercises their option you must deliver them. If the shares cost $500 at that time you're ****ed.
Likewise I can buy a $20 PUT on some stock. This gives me the right to PUT that stock on the other person for $20/share up until expiration. IF the price is under $20 I of course have every reason to do that -- I can buy the shares for $10 and make you pay me $20! Who doesn't like that deal? Likewise, the market maker never wants that directional bet either since on the short side of an options trade you're obligated to perform if demanded by the long side.
Nobody would stay in business being a market maker if this sort of thing could happen to them, so as soon as they take the opposing side they execute a balancing trade on the other side. In short if you're a market maker you always want to be neutral on every security you make a market in; you make a (very) small profit on each transaction but you never, ever want to be exposed directionally because the amount you get paid is tiny compared to the risk, and one mistake will bankrupt you.
Therefore if you're a market maker you can short without locating first for this explicit reason. This doesn't lead to a problem generally because nobody in their right mind as a market maker wants a directional exposure, ever. As a result the failure to locate is transient and does not accumulate; you will lay that risk off and remove the imbalance if you have to since you can construct synthetic positions that perform financially the same as real ones.
So how do you get 130% of the available shares short? It would seem impossible and is unless someone cheats.
There are some players in the market who have "market maker" status but also trade their own books or have cross-interests with those who do. Allegedly there are "Chinese walls" between those pieces (or interconnected entities.) Quite obviously that is a load of crap because otherwise what you've seen would be impossible but it clearly not only has happened before but is still happening to this day. These entities are how you wind up with short sales where the locate and borrow hasn't happened first and the position remains open across time. This is supposed to be illegal but other than a few hand-slaps in the futures markets for physical commodities I'm not aware of any criminal prosecution for doing it.
And let's be clear here: This practice is counterfeiting.
There is nothing wrong with borrowing a share of stock from someone and selling it, provided that if the person who you borrowed it from wants it back you are forced to deliver it. That is, if there are 100 shares of stock in the world the only entity who have the right to control how many total shares there are is the company itself. Provided there are 100 shares who loans them and on what terms is nobody's business; that's a private transaction and it's perfectly legal. If I own something I have the right to lend or sell it to someone on whatever terms I choose.
But if you sell something without locating it first you are counterfeiting because you are now representing that there are 110 shares in the marketplace but the company never authorized the other 10. You thus are in fact diluting every one of the existing and real shares by 10% and pocketing the money from those sales. In short you are stealing by partially destroying the value of everyone else's holdings in that stock.
Counterfeiting is a criminal offense -- always and everywhere.
So now you have some folks who have discerned that in fact there is more than 100% of the public float out short. This cannot happen through lawful trading activity, but it leads to an interesting conundrum: If you drive the price up you force those who committed that offense to cover their bets and there aren't enough shares to do it. Oh, someone will eventually fork up their shares at ever-increasing prices to unwind the fraud but in the process the people who shorted naked get a telephone pole up their ass in terms of losses.
There is nothing illegal about targeting people who do this; you are not lying about your intentions and ramming someone's criminal conduct up their ass is not only legal it's what they deserve to have happen to them. Remember that no company stock is actually worth anything beyond liquidation value at any instant in time when it comes to hard valuation; the entire remainder of the price is speculative premium -- that is, the expression of belief in future prospects.
Further, the folks on Reddit aren't the whole story of the pressure either. There appears to be a "gentleman's agreement" among hedgies that they don't go after this when done by their "friends." The practice would never survive a day otherwise; competition is like that if it's honest competition. The reason we ban collusion generally is because it destroys honest competition and that is bad.
But as with any thieves guild breaking ranks can make you a lot of money and when something like this gets going you can bet there are folks with lots of money happy to jump on the bandwagon and add a few telephone poles -- or a few hundred -- to the pile being shoved up the short side's ass. Why not if they can profit from it especially if they don't get identified to the other guild members as the ones who broke ranks?
Were I the CEO of one of these firms that was targeted in this way such as GameStop I would file immediately for a shelf registration and issue stock into the ramp. Now I have lots of cash, legally acquired -- and I get to do that at the short-sellers expense. That this hasn't happened already astounds me, to be frank -- I'd be all over this as it's a perfectly legal way to exploit a speculative frenzy and stick a big fat wad of cash in the corporate bank account which both makes the firm money and screws the shorts.
After all the shorts thought I was going to run out of cash and go bankrupt -- oops, now I have a big pile of cash and they're double-****ed.
So cry me a river, hedge fund mavens and screamers like Cramer -- who, by the way, admitted on video many years ago how he used to manipulate markets before he had his own TV show. He never went to jail for that, did he?
What's the difference?
These folks on WSB are telling you exactly why they're doing what they're doing -- they intend to shove a telephone pole up some cheater's asses and break it off, making a profit at the same time, which is the truth. That's legal. There's no deception at all; every one of their "buy" orders is in fact a bona-fide intent to purchase and they're being entirely transparent as to why.
That their intent has nothing to do with their view of the underlying company's value in its present state means nothing; basically zero of the stock and option trades on the market, ever, are about today's state of a given firm -- they're all about tomorrow's beliefs which by the very nature of that being tomorrow are speculative.
Now one more thing: Why would Robinhood and others halt buys in a stock?
Not crank margin to 100% (or some multiple of it for a short), stop it entirely irrespective of cash in your account?
The broker does not care what the buyer and seller transact at and further, if there is no margin involved the broker also does not care if you grossly overpay and wind up with zero. He loses nothing and this was your own self-directed decision, not his recommendation. All an actual broker does is match buyers and sellers; they are not involved directionally. Well, not legally anyway.....
Further, there are claims that people not on margin were force-liquidated. On what basis? Legally, maybe you signed something saying they could liquidate you "if they believed you were placing at risk" or even "if they're at risk" (without you being the cause.) However the question still stands: Why did they liquidate the accounts if in fact they did?
National Review claims Robinhood and IB were "adults in the room." Bull****. Let me quote some of their nonsense:
Robinhood makes money by routing trades from its platform to large brokers, who compensate the company for its order flow. The larger the trading volume, the better for Robinhood. But Robinhood also makes money through various forms of lending, primarily margin lending to customers.
Which is immaterial, as they had already set margin to 100%. In other words, there were no margin loans on GME stock. You put up cash before you buy, or you don't buy. If you have an existing position you can't borrow against it. That's perfectly legit and brokers do that all the time when things get volatile.
That generates no exposure for the brokerage.
From Robinhood’s perspective, the GameStop rally is beneficial insofar as it generates revenue from increased trading activity, but it is also extremely risky, because the brokerage platform is lending millions of dollars to retail investors buying a world-historically volatile stock. As more and more buyers have flocked to GameStop, Robinhood has lent out more and more money.
That's a lie since they had already set margin to 100%. They're not lending money against those positions; those are cash transactions and, allegedly and if nobody is cheating, all Robinhood is doing is matching buyers and sellers.
It’s unclear how much GameStop stock Robinhood has lent to hedge funds, but whatever the amount, they’ve been lucrative, commanding as much as 80 percent in interest due to the massive amount of money betting against the stock.
Ah.... now we're getting somewhere. You see, brokers do that; they lend out stock and, in cases of hard to borrow shares there is often a fee that can get quite steep. The brokerage would lose that income stream if the short was closed. But.... so what? There's no existential risk here -- just lost opportunity. Which doesn't explain the clamp-down, does it?
NR goes on to try to excuse this as being the "adults in the room." Nope. Once you have margin set to 100% of a long position (and, I remind you, if there is no available float then you can't short without breaking the law) then there is no risk to the brokerage. If the bubble pops, it pops. Your job is to match buyers and sellers and so long as you're doing that and not doing something you shouldn't be there is no problem. The customer may lose his or her shirt but in a self-directed account with no margin loan outstanding against the position there is no risk to the firm provided everything you're doing on the up and up.
THERE ARE ANSWERS TO THE "WHY" QUESTION and I'd love to hear one that doesn't implicate criminal activity. National Review is, to be blunt, playing cover for people; their "explanation" makes no sense. So why publish it at all until and unless they can get the answer to the actual question: Why?
This I can tell you -- I was logged into multiple trading platforms as I have accounts in a few places, all with "real" brokerages. While I did not buy any GME, AMC or the others today, I could have; none of the ones I was on were blocking orders in those names. All had margin at 100% for longs and 200 or even 300% for shorts (!!) and during the day one of them even went ETB (borrowable, in other words) to short GME -- had I wanted to.
So why did certain platforms do what they did?
I'll bet there's a common thread and you won't like it if and when it comes out into public view -- and that's being kind.
PS: There are rumors the White House was directly involved. If that proves up -- and so far it's a claim of an alleged whistleblower -- whoever you voted for you damn well better demand and enforce an immediate impeachment, removal and barring from office for life for both Biden and Harris. No ifs, ands or buts.
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=241454
As usual nothing will ever come of this, on to the next distraction and it will be forgotten about. These criminals and traitors should be afraid, very afraid, Nasty Pelosi is.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/pelosi-declares-enemy-within-house-representatives-call-more-security
And we all know how honest and above board market makers are...
OMG, gold slammed AGAIN, over $20 straight down, wiping out hours and hours of hard fought gains, how much is this costing these the criminal banks and cartels to paper slam this every f**king day. Its no wonder they are 34 billion in the hole, absolutely disgusting!!!
You could be right about that, I didn't get what you were saying until I read this:
"I think what will come out of this is that Robinhood isn't buying the stocks for account holders as directed. It is the only reason they would panic at a major market move up, that should have left its GME holders with a strong equity gain that would've been no risk to Robinhood. But if Robinhood didn't buy the stocks, they are in the same position as shorts and they were squeezed".
That could be why they drew down their credit facility by several hundred million dollars today.
It's already in motion.
They need to change their name to "Sheriff of Nottingham".
I don't care who they bought it for or sold it to, that is not the point, if your being sarcastic, I get it.
Robinhood who is affiliated with the hedge funds taking a bath in this GameStop forced covering, today restricted buying GME only to allow selling, and on top of that without consent, liquidating GME stock in private accounts leaving messages similar to this:
"In light of recent volatility we are restricting actions for certain securities to position closing only. However, due to the unreasonable risk in brokering your position, we have closed your 4500 shares of GME for an average price of $118.93 on January 28th, 2021 at 11:24 AM".
OMFG, I am beside myself with disgust!!!
I agree, our fearless leaders have also made it impossible to survive starting a small business with all the uncertainty created by the overreach of federal and local authorities any damn time they please, with all this covid nonsense, they have proven that people will just lay down for it. This is all part of the plan by both parties, to destroy the middle class and create a nation of debt slaves. It is not D or R, although republicans will slow it down a bit, it has now become us and them.
After all the legalized and illegal fraud these parasites have perpetrated all these years, destroying companies and lives with naked shorting, spoofing etc, etc, finally the people find an edge and legally stand up against it and it is now being called pyramid scheming and shut down.
And the games continue in the PM sector, gold just smacked down from 1865 right back down to 1840 with zero rationale other than fraud...flat for the day, probably going lower.
Yup, I'm making plans in that direction as well, at 62, I just want to get far, far away from any large cities and become self sufficient.
In other news, the insanity continues...
I Told You So - We Are ****ed @mayorwaters
No, not just here.
NW Florida, you're ****ed.
All those VRBO and AirBNB rentals in this area, and the crazy price-ramps in little cottages and such with no storage?
You're triple ****ed.
Dollywood, Gatlinburg, etc? You're ****ed and done.
Why?
DETROIT – General Motors wants to end production of all diesel- and gasoline-powered cars, trucks and SUVs by 2035 and shift its entire new fleet to electric vehicles as part of a broader plan to become carbon neutral by 2040, the company said Thursday.
Not a single "drive-to" destination survives this. Electric vehicles do not have the range and take too long to charge. Not one hotel can manage to charge a parking lot full of EV overnight -- they do not have and cannot acquire the electrical capacity. An EV cannot be parked outside in sub-freezing temperatures without being on charge as it must use energy to keep the pack from freezing, which will destroy it at a cost of $10,000 or more and as such it must be on charge when temperatures are below 32F. At temperatures below 10F or so you need a high-amperage charging connection if outdoors in any sort of wind because you cannot sink enough current down a 120V 15A plug to keep the pack acceptably warm say much less charge it.
The Destin/Ft. Walton Beach area is a drive to destination with a huge percentage of the money driving the real estate there in condos, rentals and such coming from Atlanta, which is about a 5 hour drive.
Ditto for Traverse City MI and surrounding areas, Mackinaw City, virtually everything west of the Mississippi when it comes to parks and other tourism-dependent areas and more.
Nothing over 200 miles, and realistically nothing over 150 or so miles from someone's "home base" survives this change.
Why?
Because you can't safely make a trip at more ~60% of your rated capacity; one wreck and you're screwed in the summer as you can't sit there not moving with the A/C running for a couple of hours without winding up with a dead battery. You must therefore plan that reserve -- there is no other option.
Folks, we are talking about a collapse of the drive-to tourism economy in the United States -- which will especially rat**** places like the Grand Canyon (forget it; it's all gone), Yellowstone (ditto) and others. Northern Michigan? Forget it; even Detroit is too far, say much less Chicago with its infamous traffic.
Between this and the attempt to destroy commercial aviation (currently with "Covid tests" but the real target is carbon emissions from airplanes) the economic destruction that is on tap will be catastrophic. We are talking tens of millions of jobs and trillions of dollars of real estate value, along with the tax revenue from same, that is about to go "poof."
This is what you voted for and are going to get. It is Biden's "new economy."
I warned you folks that what you were getting was a Carter-style move and while it would take a decade or so to really screw you it would screw you with certainty.
Here it is, and here it comes; either stop it by whatever means you must or prepare to lose your jobs, your tax base and your economies.
They're gone.
PS: No, technology improvement will not solve this. It's a physics problem that you cannot overcome; a battery must carry its oxidizer inside the case. The energy density available thus will never be sufficient to solve that problem and thus both size and mass limit the advancement available, just as the realities of thermodynamics limit improvements in fuel economy for a gas or diesel engine. Charge acceptance rates and thus recharge speed, even if you had the grid capacity for very rapid recharges (we don't) are limited by internal resistance and thermal dissipation which are also hard physical limits you cannot get around. We have gotten most of what's possible already, just as we have with internal combustion engine economy. Physics and thermodynamics are not The 10 Suggestions!
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=241445
MUX is up 25%....haven't seen that kind of a gain in years, Rob McEwen and long time holders must be doing handstands, MUX has been held down by the shorts for sooo long.
I hate to say it because I have a big problem with social media (Big Tech Media) and the damage its doing/has done to our society through censorship, but this is positive and it couldn't happen without it.
This will raise all silver boats if it continues.
On my watch list AG, MUX, EXK, HL, CDE, NAK, PAAS are all up double digit percentages.
I made it about 1/4 way through, then read the comments, not impressed.
Kool, it's about time these greedy, company/value destroying shysters got what they deserved, if the SEC and authorities won't do their job, Reddit and the people will, jump you mutha f'ers jump!
With this kind of oversight/repercussions, maybe they'll think twice about being so greedy and unethical in the future.
GME still on fire!
That was a well deserved rant!
You better put in a sell order right now, because it will be gone in the first 15 minutes or less of trading tomorrow morning.
So a bunch of millennials got together through Reddit, Discord and WallStreetBets, deciding to target and "group buy" GameStop GMI, one of the most heavily naked shorted (illegal) stocks in existence (140% of existing shares) to generate a short squeeze, (totally legal). They were massively successful taking the stock from roughly $16-$347 in 2 days and the greedy hedge fund bastards got what they deserved, and rightly so, put wall streets panties in a bunch today.
At the height of trading today wall street illegally restricted retail trading of GMI, AMC, BB and others under the guise of hate speech and other trumped up charges to protect their buddies at the hedge funds. Now Discord and WallStreetBets have both been illegally shut down. Tomorrow 1000's of retail investors will take it up the rear due to this illegal action.
Just another example of "do as I say not as I do" and the SEC, media and wall street protecting their own.
Thanks, Celente was on fire!
You cannot disagree with Rand Paul earlier today unless you are completely uninformed, incapable of critical thinking and suffer from cognitive dissonance.
How Many Lies In The First Days?
Let's do a short list.
I respect all women. This is why your teen-age daughter now has to look at a dick in the high school locker room while showering. Oh, you weren't paying attention to that? Biden, on his first day, signed an E/O mandating that boys who "feel like girls" may not only use the locker and restroom facilities that match their professed feelings but that female sport teams must allow them to play "as girls" too under penalty of loss of all federal funds. If and when schools reopen, that is. How "woke" of you to force, under government mandate, your teen daughter to stare at a (likely erect too given all the***** said boy will get to see in full view) penis when attempting to take a shower after gym class never mind her inability to enjoy a fair athletic competition in the first place. This has destroyed all girls athletic sports - cross-country, track, softball, tennis, soccer, basketball and more. Every sports scholarship currently available to girls has also been destroyed as said "equal opportunity" means a physical boy will win all of them. I wonder how all the millions of "soccer moms" who voted for Biden feel about their daughters starting at dicks in locker rooms, say much less the annihilation of fair competition and scholarship money that occurred on the literal first day of Biden's Administration?
I will not ban fracking. Except -- he not only banned all fracking permits on federal land he banned all regular drilling permit issuance too. Remember, Biden was directly challenged on this during the campaign and said he would not do it and those who claimed he would were lying. Less than 24 hours after being inaugurated he did exactly what he said he would not do and between that and the Keystone pipeline he screwed tens of thousands of people out of their jobs in one day. Several states, including New Mexico and Pennsylvania, both of which were critical to Biden's win in the Electoral College, will have their residents get it in both holes. Multiple unions -- including those representing pipeline workers -- supported Biden. You have to love the stupidity of voting yourself right onto the unemployment line literally on the first day of a new Administration!
I have a plan to beat Covid-19. So was the claim. But one day post-inauguration Biden admitted on national television we cannot change the trajectory of the disease. In other words he admitted that all the mandates, lockdowns, mask orders and similar did nothing and will do nothing. The Democrat Governors and Mayors "coincidentally" reopened indoor dining and similar in their states on a mass-basis within 72 hours of the inauguration. Biden repeatedly said he had a plan to stop Covid-19 during the campaign, accusing Trump of intentionally letting people die. He lied and while that admission only took 24 hours it did not come with an E/O to demand that all mandates, restrictions on business and such be immediately lifted since he declared they have no value; quite the opposite, he signed a "federal property and interstate transport" mask mandate on all federal lands and property which both he and members of his staff immediately violated, repeatedly, both at the Lincoln Memorial (Federal Property) and in the White House (Federal Building) with this stated excuse being that he was "celebrating" (!!) at the Lincoln Memorial and thus did not have to follow his own order.
I will rejoin the WHO immediately. He did -- the same WHO that deliberately worked with China to conceal the outbreak of Covid-19 and has refused to label China as having done so. This is also the same WHO that knew about the NIH gain-of-function research funded at the Wuhan lab -- the lab where, it is suspected, Covid-19 was accidentally released from. Worse, he appointed Fauci from the very same NIH that funded the research at Wuhan that likely created Covid-19 in the first place, as his emissary to the WHO! To rub salt in the gaping wound of the fear porn all have created over the last nine months the WHO also, on the very day of the inauguration, released guidance pointing out what the inventor of the PCR test himself, for which he won a Nobel, said long before Covid-19 (sadly, he has passed away): It is incapable by design of diagnosing disease and thus absent symptoms a PCR test cannot be used to call someone "infected." The WHO clearly knew this all the way back to the start of the pandemic and thus their timing is transparently political. The implication is quite clear: The WHO and NIH were all in on the creation of Covid in the first place in the Wuhan lab, in fact the NIH funded the work and neither, nor any of the people in either organization, have been or will be held to account for it.
Vote blue in the Georgia runoffs and $2,000 checks will go out to everyone immediately. A blatant, in-your-face offer of a bribe to the voting public in exchange for votes for specific candidates and arguably a felony for that reason. He wasn't telling the truth, but do you really expect those who are breaking the law by explicitly promising money in exchange for votes to keep their promises? There will be no $2,000 check; maybe $1,400, but not the $2,000 that was promised.
Biden immediately destroyed even more international travel, both business and leisure; specifically all international air travel. All international flights, starting January 26th irrespective of where they originate and irrespective of your prior infection or vaccination status will require you to have a negative current Covid-19 test paid for at your own expense and processed within the prior three days before arrival back into the US. If you can't get one for whatever reason you cannot fly. This renders all international business travel virtually impossible and will drop leisure international travel to an effective zero since you can trivially get stranded overseas for an indeterminate amount of time and, if it occurs, its at your expense. That's another few million jobs down the ****ter, on purpose.
I'll raise the minimum wage. Ok, that one he apparently will actually try to do through legislation. But -- since the cheapest price for labor is zero, and there are multiple places where zero is the minimum wage -- that is, where literal forced labor and slavery are legal such as China -- this will simply force more labor overseas and cost millions of jobs. There was not announced (and will not be) any sanction on China, DRC or anywhere else related to forced and child labor to prevent this exploitation and millions of lost jobs here in the US as a consequence.
We must add to the "help" for consumers due to Covid-19. Except that dollars in-hand don't matter, only what dollars buy matters. Do you care if you get another $1,400 one time if your power bill goes up by $2,000/year, gas is $7/gallon, your grocery bill doubles and mass-transit used by many of said people in the cities skyrockets in cost-per-ride by 100% or more? Think it won't? Oh yes it will; the cost of energy translates into everything and shutting down production of energy here means prices will rise -- a lot.
We must protect renters from eviction through (more) forbearance. That's nice. How does the landlord pay property taxes when he has no rent coming in? What do you think funds all that local and county government "stuff" you like? How is it provided when the property taxes can't be paid? How does the landlord, many of whom are small business people with families, put food on their family's table when there is no money coming in? What happens when the moratorium inevitably ends and the rent money -- now nearly a year's worth due all at once -- was spent on other things? Oh, and those jobs that will be sent to China and taken by illegals in the interim? They're the jobs renters need to be able to ultimately pay said rent.
"Build Back Better." Unfortunately Biden signed an E/O on 1/21 that directs OSHA to strictly enforce all regulations relating to Covid-19. This, if OSHA actually does it, completely destroys nearly all manufacturing and employment in the United States for the duration of Covid-19. I happen to be well aware of OSHA rules when it comes to respiratory protection and the regulations are clear and unambiguous. Only an NIOSH-approved respirator tested and approved (which means no Chinese or other supply without said approval) for the specific hazard in question (a virus in this case), properly fit tested and used strictly within the parameters of the label, is legal under OSHA regulations to protect a worker present in an atmosphere where that specific hazard is present in concentrations sufficient to cause possible harm. No worker may be allowed to enter a place with such an atmosphere without said protection. This means at minimum NIOSH-certified N95s with proper fit testing and verification, including record-keeping, worn only within the labeled exposure limits (typically no more than 2 or 4 hours) after which they must be replaced and no re-use after being removed is permitted. What's worse is that it is conceivable that under the regulations you would be required to segregate any contaminated items and prove proper disposal since once worn they are hazardous biological waste. Documentation of compliance down to serialized items consumed from the point of issue to proper disposal may be required for inspection on demand. Thirty years ago my company wrote software to track this stuff for an asbestos abatement company; the record-keeping requirements are unbelievable standing alone. I hope OSHA tells Biden to pound sand on this or find some way to make it not-ridiculous but the text of the regulations is clear if one accepts that potential presence of Covid-19 renders an atmosphere in a workplace hazardous.
We're not even getting to that which hasn't been proved to be a lie yet -- these are just the lies in the first 36 hours that Joe Biden himself proved through his own actions.
So about hating the Orange Man so much you voted for the other guy, even though you knew he was a senile, lying dirtbag, had a 40 year record of ****ing you up the ass as a lawmaker, including screwing people of color with so-called "criminal justice reform" and who has a son that loves hard drugs and, it appears, may like abusing kids too including ones in his own family yet instead of turning him into the cops and sending him to the slammer, justly so, he apparently used him as a conduit to get rich.
Your vote was repaid by immediately screwing your daughter out of fair athletic competition and forcibly exposing her to boy's genitalia in locker rooms, destroying tens of thousands of jobs in one day and millions over the next couple of months in the energy sector, forcing higher over the coming months and years the cost of heating fuel, electricity, diesel fuel and gasoline, all of which you will pay for in the cost of everything you buy, causing the price of essential medications for low-income diabetics and those with severe allergies to skyrocket, further destroying and in fact intentionally bankrupting small landlords (most of whom are families reliant on said rental income), deliberately destroying millions of international hospitality-related jobs in the United States, issuing Covid-19 related mandates that he has stated himself are worthless and admitting that he never had a plan to do anything about Covid-19 in the first place; that it was simply beyond his or anyone else's ability to fix and would play out as has every other respiratory virus in the history of mankind.
Oh, and let us not forget that he also militarized the Capitol, an unprecedented act even in wartime, fencing it off and putting nearly three divisions of troops there while demanding "purity tests and investigation" for every member of said National Guard while issuing no magazines against the alleged "threat" (which was a paranoid fantasy, by the way) because, it is claimed, he was afraid his own troops would frag both of them.
All of this in 36 hours -- and you gave this five-alarm ******* and his self-admitted ***** of a VP who sucked-and-****ed her way to political power four years. May I remind you that if and when he is removed under the 25th Amendment for blatant incapacity, has another stroke or chokes to death as a result of Covid-19 she will screw you even worse, treating you with the very same "respect" she showed black people who were prosecuted by her and tossed in jail for smoking weed while she was toking on a joint herself.
Now you know why you don't vote "against" people and you do not put up with this sort of **** -- ever -- from people who run for any office, say much less President and those of you who are members of a political party have a solemn duty to stop said party from posting up such dirtbags before they can ever get on the ballot.
You now get to learn the hard way the price of being stupid.
Look up "Mr. Hands" for what all of us -- and our families -- are about to get.
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=241405
rmepilot, srm4u, This is for you guys, enjoy!
I just signed the COS petition to commence my participation. There are the 15 states plus another 8 that are real close, possibly this year.
"We Want Revenge": Antifa Anarchists Activate After Biden Inaugurated
"We Don't Want Biden"
"We Are Pathetic Crybabies And Want Our Diapers Changed!!! WAAAAAHHHH!"
Anifa still not happy, I'm sure BLM isn't far behind.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/we-want-revenge-antifa-anarchists-activate-after-biden-inaugurated
I am unfortunately in the Dictator Whitmore State of Michigan, I'm retired in the lower peninsula, in the country, am well armed, own my home and am somewhat prepped and self sufficient.
I'm familiar with the Convention of States, I'll have to delve back into it a bit deeper.