Given the hype, the most likely scenario is a > 2X price spike in the first few minutes of trading regardless of the initial market cap ($100B+?). For those of us who believe that, what is the best strategy for purchasing shares ? It's doubtful brokers will allow market orders the previous night since the ticker might not yet exist, and if one places a market order during the first few minutes the cynic in me predicts a retail trader will get the worst deal.
I think generally you can place an order before the market opens, maybe even the day before, but that doesn't really give you any pricing power. It will still pop at the open and your order may not clear until it does. But that may still put you ahead of the Robinhood masses.
Better option might be to try a pre-IPO trading platform like EquityZen.
"Shares that are the subject of investment through EquityZen are generally subject to a lock-up period of up to 180 days after the effectiveness of a company's IPO filing, during which time shareholders are restricted from selling their shares."[1]
The 180day lock-up period could EquityZen poorly suited for investors with a short time horizon.
Could you do what Mark Cuban did and work with your brokerage to do sell calls & buy puts around the strike? That would lock in your price for a given amount of time.
If you had a sizable fortune at stake, you'd go to a major financial firm like Goldman Sachs, which handled the collar for Cuban, and they'll build you something custom. Almost any arrangement can be worked out, with a fat fee to go with it.
That only applies to IPOs. In a direct listing the shares start trading at the published reference price. There is no underwriting or other ceremony around it.
For a direct listing, does that mean Coinbase could conceivably charge any price they want for a market order given they are the only seller when it is first listed ?
Other existing shareholders can sell as well (there's no lockup), and I guess short sellers could sell immediately? But yeah issuing a market on open order for a new stock would be a "courageous" move (but IMO that's true of any market order - don't use a market order instead of a limit order unless you're genuinely willing to buy at $999 / sell at $0.01).
What you probably want is a snap to market order meaning that if you're buying, it will snap to the ask, selling, to the bid. I use snap mid orders, usually get decent fills without getting retail'ed.
Not entirely true - since people had to enter a single point on their demand curve as a price and quantity of shares (instead of their entire demand curve) the market clearing price was artificially low. Hence the price pop on day one. To think about it more in depth - assume I enter a bid of 100 shares at $100. If the market clearing price is $50, I’ll be awarded 100 shares at $50. However, I was willing to buy far more than that at a higher price, so I’d go buy more shares on the open market, driving the price up.
No, you’re wrong. You’re not taking a bidders budget into account. If I enter 20 points on my demand curve ans they’re all above the clearing price, I’ll end up being forced to buy the quantities of all my bids. That may totally bust my budget. There are no stop limit orders in these auctions...there’s only a buy order with a quantity and a price.
That’s a contrived example though. Say you put 200 shares at $50. If the clearing price is $50, you’ve won 300 shares at $50 - $15,000 total. What if you only have $10,000?
I’m saying it’s difficult to a) allow bidders to enter a demand curve b) respect their budget limitations c) keep it easily understandable for bidders.
Why would you put 200 shares at $50 and 100 shares at $100 if you only had a $10,000 budget? That's misrepresenting your actual demand curve.
Are you saying that an auction of this kind is a bit complicated, and it's possible to make a mistake? I suppose that might be true, but that is a very different assertion from your original position:
"since people had to enter a single point on their demand curve as a price and quantity of shares (instead of their entire demand curve)"
You can issue your whole curve as orders, can't you? Something like: buy 50 shares limit $200 on open, buy 50 shares limit $100 on open, buy 100 shares limit $50 on open.
The limit is the price. With the "at open" I was thinking about direct listings where you'd need some way to prevent your order being filled after the opening auction (and potentially at a different price), but with an IPO that's not an issue at all. So you should definitely be able to just put your whole curve in.
If I am willing to buy 100 shares at $100, I may be willing to buy 300 shares at $60. So just because my bid got filled doesn't mean I won't be buying more.
All the shares in the auction are sold at the same price. If the market clears at 60, a person entering the bids I described would buy 300 shares at 60.
I’m not sure there are big pops on OTC listings, as the pop on an institutional listing is the difference between what they sold shares at to raise money the previous night and what the market values them at in real life.
Since you’re not raising money in an OTC listing, trading should begin roughly at market price, no?
I could be wrong I don’t really play IPOs. Well, SPACs, haha.
The SPAC would have to convince Coinbase that it's in their interests to go public via reverse merger rather than direct listing. This seems pretty unlikely, given that they've already filed their S-1, announced the direct listing, and presumably have done all the paperwork related to being a public company.
There's a bit of an adverse-selection problem with SPACs: not only do they need to find an undervalued asset that the public markets will value for more than the acquisition price, they need to convince that asset that the SPAC adds value and can take them public easier than doing the process themselves would. Big tech companies like Coinbase, AirBnB, and Roblox have plenty of money to hire the lawyers, accountants, and investment bankers that going public themselves requires.
You can trade Coinbase shared pre-IPO on FTX (unfortunately, not available to US users). The stock trading infra seems weird but makes sense under the hood and is reliable (happy to answer any questions people have).
(this was mostly informational, but if anyone actually decides to use the platform and wants to get 5% off trading fees, also happy to share a referral link)
Coinbase isn’t the only game in town fortunately. Arbitrage and the decentralized nature of crypto makes it impossible to stop. RobinHood just removing the buy button hopefully opened some eyes today to how rigged the traditional system is. It is free market when it benefits the powers that be. When it goes awry, they are always bailed out.
Bernie put it best today- “The business model of Wall Street is fraud.”
Anyone that wants out of this system, come over with me to where the crypto is. It has its flaws, but not like this.
I want cryptocurrency to succeed long-term, and it has some genuine advantages (and some wrinkles to be ironed-out long-term), but protection from the puppet master cabal secretly pulling the strings of high finance isn't one of them.
There are much more mundane explanations for Robinhood's actions[0][1] than a high-finance cabal hiding in plain sight.
Is there some institutional conspiracy theory version of Hanlon's razor, something like "Never ascribe to a secret cabal that which is ascribable to finite resources and inflexible regulations"?
Disclosure: currently short to the puppet master lizard people cabal from Nibiru a double-touch knockout option on my soul ;-)
They have already paused trading during periods of high turmoil. When bcash was announced, for instance. I think that actually set their standard for "open the market in 'post only' mode for a period before actually starting trading".
Perhaps, if it wasn't a fork of Bitcoin. If was originally called Cash Coin and rebranded to Bitcoin Cash, then it would seem likely that group is trying to capitalize on the name. That's not the case here. This name came naturally, just like similar names occur in other forked software.[0]
Bitcoin Cash came from a minority group (big blocks) in the Bitcoin community.[1]
They'll just block all users from logging in when they see fit, continue to claim it's because their servers can't handle the load, in fact it's a weak cover story of them trying to prevent impulse selling when Bitcoin et al start skyrocketing - e.g. market manipulation; it's what, happened at least 4 times now?
The AirBNB listing showed that banks favor their friends and clients in an IPO, when the price surged well before the debut allowed us Little People to buy. A direct listing would be cool and I hope they pursue that.
Alternatively - Airbnb selected investors that they knew would hold the stock and support their long-term vision for the product/brand.
Those investors being inclined to hold, did not sell, yielding a relatively small float that was massively outstripped by demand, causing the price to skyrocket.
Maybe some of those investors were friends of the bankers and cashed out but that would only be (a small) part of the story
In keeping with the grand theory that cryptocoins allow the rediscovery of financial regulations and procedures from first principles, the following could happen:
* Coinbase uses the funding to get to the point where they can release a "dual currency" set of stock. One set of stock based on being traditional shares purchased with USD, one set based on being a tied to a "share token" purchased with whatever people choose to exchange (but initially sold by Coinbase for bitcoin). Presumably they would have voting rights per share tied to the conversion between bitcoin to usd.
* The normal shares are regulated in the boring SEC way.
* The share tokens are regulated according to wild west tech rules. Tokens are stolen, token private keys are lost, exchanges rediscover circuit breakers on facilitating token trades, etc.
I think there is also a second story if Coinbase were to release share tokens: Many scamcoins are essentially a way to buy shares in some service that does not fully exist yet, but has great upside potential. If this super simplistic description sounds like investing in stocks, then watching Coinbase share tokens toe the line between "scam coin" and "real deal Wall St. asset" will be an interesting experience.
Because there's already a lot of network effects built in to the existing exchanges and crypto infrastructure for trading securities is still immature, albeit promising.
1. Coinbase raises money from the IPO.
2. Coinbase takes some of that money and gives it to Grayscale.
3. Grayscale uses the money to buy cryptocurrency... On Coinbase!
Not only do Coinbase shares appreciate from the increased value of assets on their balance sheet, but they earn some of their money back from fees, too. Just make sure that steps #1 and #2 have some delay, after any lock-up period.
And since Grayscale can only divest from its funds for fees and doesn't allow redemption, more cryptocurrency tokens get "locked" in the funds indefinitely, unable to affect the spot price.
Traditional stock market buys tons of coinbase cash -> coinbase uses said cash to market-buy BTC with bots driving the price up -> BTC/their crypto of choice is now worth far more.
If the market follows their run they end up making far more than they reinvested.
Ostensibly not enough faith in security tokens as a method of managing shares. Still surprising from a strategic angle considering an acquisition of a platform like Carta could have given them a head start.
This is still a highly debated thesis. Just using BTC to store value away from a volatile fiat currency and eventually exchange for a different, more stable currency, is another candidate for the underlying valuation model, no widespread medium of exchange beyond currency trading needed.
If you live in Venezuela, converting to BTC even if you cannot buy anything with it but perhaps Columbian or Brazilian currency at a slight loss, is a hugely valuable capability, with significant advantages over both traditional fiat currency exchanges and custodial stores of value like gold.
What is the total global demand for cryptocurrency for this use case? Certainly not anywhere close to the total market cap of first world fiat currencies, but also probably still much higher than today’s total market cap of BTC.
This stands in contrast to smart contract and d-app marketplace currency like ETH, which has a completely different hypothetical valuation model.
My point is more that I find it a bit sad that 'just buying bitcoin' rather than doing work paid better than basically any work anyone has done since 2012, even building insanely successful startups.
So if coinbase was open source, and you had forked it to add BSV support, that’d mean coinbase was decentralized?! Open source/forkability != decentralization. The whole point of decentralization is no particular entity gets to decide something for everybody, and that’s precisely why it’ll take a long long time for regulators to be okay with it.
Are you familiar with the work of Michael Hudson? I just learned of "...and forgive them their debts" [0], and looking forward to reading it.
While I'm generally in favor of debt forgiveness for 2021 America, in his talks he's primarily described jubilees in the context of regime change: a new conquering emperor, or an aspiring revolutionary leader, cancels the debts to secure the loyalty of workers and soldiers, and the nobility has to acquiesce at the point of a sword.
What I can't figure out is how this could be done on a predictable timetable (as per the Biblical jubilee concept: every 7 or 50 years). In a conquest scenario, a lender might only withhold lending if the current power structure looked weak; but if debt forgiveness was institutionalized, why wouldn't they just cease all lending on Year 6 or Year 49? (Or, more likely: fold the probability of forgiveness into a usurious interest rate, so they collect the same income on average.)
As it stands, I think debt forgiveness can only be done as a one-time solution to gross inequality and/or social instability; and that institutional reform (to not need jubilees) has to be done upstream (such as public banking, Georgist land trusts, etc). But I'm very open to being convinced otherwise.
I am aware-ish of that and (edit, forgot the "and") Graeber's book but haven't read either.
The Geiger counter randomized debt jubilee is a bit of a play on the scheduling problem.
I do agree debt jubilees only make sense as a emergency post-hoc fix. If you think about it, UBI + good confiscatory taxes at the margins is basically a nice smoothed amortized debt jubilee. That's much better.
Ha, Graeber's debt book is a different one [0]. I can vouch for its excellence, but I don't recall him discussing jubilees much.
A cursory search isn't turning up much, do you have any reading material for the Geiger counter idea? Or is that something you're spit-balling just now? :)
Agreed on UBI, etc. One thing I've been thinking a lot about is the Ultimatum Game [1], and what it would look like to scale up that concept to a society. In a sense, that's the realpolitik of every state: if the peasants are sufficiently unhappy, they show up with torches and pitchforks, even at the cost of their short-term interests. The modern peaceful version is "vote the bums out", but that's always been of dubious efficacy; and it feels especially toothless today, given the scope of regulatory capture and "manufactured consent" in the two-party system. The next closest thing (without resorting to violence) probably looks like a General Strike, but that's one hell of a coordination problem.
Yes, I forgot the "and". "that Graeber" lol. Pity there is no more "that graeber" :(. To think Chomsky outlived him...crazy...
> Or is that something you're spit-balling just now? :)
Pure spitball. If predictibility causes bias, try randomness. PRNG is fine except one could exfiltrate the hidden state maybe? So try something even more black-box like a hunk of radioactive something.
> Agreed on UBI
:)
> One thing I've been thinking a lot about is the Ultimatum Game [1], and what it would look like to scale up that concept to a society. In a sense, that's the realpolitik of every state: if the peasants are sufficiently unhappy, they show up with torches and pitchforks, even at the cost of their short-term interests. The modern peaceful version is "vote the bums out", but that's always been of dubious efficacy; and it feels especially toothless today, given the scope of regulatory capture and "manufactured consent" in the two-party system. The next closest thing (without resorting to violence) probably looks like a General Strike, but that's one hell of a coordination problem.
There is the quote "I have found out what economics is; it is the science of confusing stocks with flows". I had some crude thoughts in my own head, but with some friend's advise on putting in that terminology, it seems both that the stocks are are more fictions and the source of the economic problems of society. I question the ultimate game example then because it seems very "stocks first", dividing up some amount one off. I would much rather see "capitalism without ownership" or "rents all the way down".
Then eventually things implode, society collapses, a dictator takes over after claiming they will help the starving masses and so on. Starving masses who have lost their life savings do not make for a good place to live even if you avoid being one of them. Society should be protected from the fallout of capitalism to a reasonable degree.
I don’t know what the alternative is are you in favour of propping up private companies and keeping this status quo? That’s alternative of free markets. Right now they aren’t free. AOC and Ben Shapiro of all people agree for once. This is a stage 7 brundlefly economic system.
"Free markets" are never perfectly free or even close to it. Only the writers of utopian libertarian science fiction think that.
The question is how you manage that lack of freedom and to whose benefit you try to manage it. I prefer it be managed towards the general stability of society. Of course it will be managed in an imperfect way but I prefer the goal be a stable society.
edit: The government intervening will never really make the market more free but it wasn't free to begin with (see robinhood today). So you lose a bit more freedom but you shift the benefit of the overall loss of freedom from "a bunch of rich people get richer" to "society as a whole get's richer and more stable." Not fully but a bit further.
While i agree with you in principle, there's a difference between "this market is regulated" and "this market will be bailed out at random on the whims of politicians, while this other market or firm won't" in which case we start to have issues.
My argument is government intervention is the problem. You can’t fix the problem with more of the problem. Say your house was on fire do you add more fire until it burns down and call that problem solved.
Governments also commit mass murder on behalf of the interests of private capital, ranging from feudal land enclosures, to the United Fruit Company in Honduras [0], to modern oil interests and the military-industrial complex.
> Governments are the cause of mass starvation and murders, please see China, USSR, Germany, and on and on.
Organised groups of people do these things, governmental or not - private corporations are responsible for plenty of similar occurrences, and so are NGOs (e.g. religious groups). Centralisation of power is bad, absence of checks and balances is bad, lack of accountability is bad - but insisting that limited-liability corporations be allowed to grow arbitrarily large is the opposite of avoiding those problems.
>Governments are the cause of mass starvation and murders, please see China, USSR, Germany, and on and on.
All caused by revolutions caused by massive economic issues and societal issues. In other words, capitalistic collapse of society leads to dictatorship which leads to horrible things. Like I said in the post you replied to. So thank you for making my argument for me.
If you lost your life savings on GME, you deserve to starve
edit: the only way you could be losing your life savings on GME is with a dumb, arrogant short position. yes, you should starve...isn't this what a short sale is anyway? A bet that someone else will starve?
Personally I prefer to not be stabbed to death by a starving person who lost their life savings on GME so they can steal $10 from my wallet. Massive societal implosions tend to have a large blast radius.
I think you don't appreciate how angry people on WSB are. It's pure distilled anger. They want to relieve that anger somewhere and do it nonviolently. A handful of people losing money is the perfect pressure valve.
If you deny them this opportunity to vent their anger then they are highly likely to stab you, not because they wanted $10 from your wallet, nah it's because they are still angry and want someone to pay for it and going by the events that lead to WW2 a lot of them considered a life to be an equally valid price.
The comment I replied to was "Good free markets should be free. No government bailouts no problem." Not "no bailouts for hedge funds doing shorts." See the distinction?
No they can't. That's the entire point. If you short almost all shares of a stock then you are the one who is doing crazy things and other people are just giving you a reason to dance like a crazy monkey.
What does this mean for people investing small amounts (~1k) in crypto with Coinbase?
Is there additional risk (beyond crypto prices dropping) like Coinbase deciding to simply close accounts in order to get funds in times of trouble due to the stock market acting up?
Does anyone know how long these kinds of reviews last until passed? Getting into this will be a bloodbath, and I wonder if it'll be with or without notice.
LOL
Isn't the whole point of cryptocurrency to produce an alternative to the current financial system?
Coinbase entering the traditional stock-market is a flat-out rejection of that; They're just another bank, except they trade in ponzi schemes rather than government-backed currency. Awful
I mean, Coinbase offers a service to customers. Sure the service is selling cryptocurrency but that's beside the point. Just because Levi's sold jeans to gold-rushers doesn't mean they had to believe there was gold. Just selling a service/product to those who do believe.
> LOL Isn't the whole point of cryptocurrency to produce an alternative to the current financial system?
Coinbase is basically a bridge between traditional and decentralized finance.
> Coinbase entering the traditional stock-market is a flat-out rejection of that; They're just another bank, except they trade in ponzi schemes rather than government-backed currency. Awful
My guess is they debated internally whether to do an IEO but ultimately decided it was not worth the regulatory risk.
Coinbase customers aren't just the consumers, but the investors that expected a market entry for return. They are adding more of those customers as well.
Cryptocurrency is more an alternative to banking, Coinbase is like a bank but more like a wallet collection and connector from currency to other digital currency. Some see it as securities/speculation as well including the IRS.
Part of the reason they are going into the market is big money returns but another is normalizing digital currency as part of the overall market, it also helps with marketing to new users that would never trust it previously, new channels. No doubt it will affect some of what happens as regulations come down, they are inevitable as money/market caps grow in anything.
Traditional banks have lots restrictions _when_ you want to withdraw cash. Try moving more than $10000 between borders of countries that are not friendly with eachother, and you'll find those restrictions. You can travel with a hundred million dollars of BTC in your head (or a hardware wallet) and meet up random people if you want to buy something with it.
As an example Michael Saylor could change aegentin peso to USD in an argentin bank ($1M), but the surprise came when he wanted to move it to US.
Got it. You didn't clarify in your OP. The only issue w/BTC is its volatility, usability and its (in)ability to liquidate it as widely as other currencies... other than that, it's great ;)
Yup but coinbase and binance regularly stop trading to stop pumps in the crypto market. The thing is in crypto there’s DEXs and DEFI. Coinbase and binance are doomed long term. If you haven’t look into uniswap and 1inch.
No and this is a problem. My own personal opinion is that once enough value is ramped then it grows and grows. I think once you see payroll in crypto at a Fortune 500 it’ll be a truly transitory moment.
I do not believe there are currently any dencentralized onramps for exchanging fiat for any crypto directly. Though I would wager this is an issue with banks not supporting smart contracts in a way that would allow automated withdrawals and deposits from/to the crypto networks.
Shows how much they trust what they're selling I guess.
If BTC and ETH are just a replacement for visa and mastercard, they've done a good job, in that they've driven visa and mastercard to be so fast and cheap that it's essentially impossible for any blockchain based solution to be faster or cheaper per transaction.
Heck, my visa card pays me 0.3% nowadays.
So what's the purpose of crypto if it's centralized by a company like coinbase that's regulated by the SEC and all other US law ?
I'm not trying to be a crazy anarcho libertarian here, I'm just saying that the only person for which crypto makes sense is fundamentally, in this day and age, and anarchist or libertarian, or both.
But either of those are not holding crypto with a company that wants to be listed on a public us exchange... so who is !?
Does your visa pay the merchants too? If banks/cards are are still charging merchants 2-3%, then some of that is passed on to us users as well (just not explicitly)
That being said, I do have a business accepting card payments and the 2-3% for me is closer to 0.1% past bank fees.
But you're right that from the merchant's perspective, depending on country (e.g. the US) things can be worst.
Then again, from the merchant's perspective cryptos seem to have much larger downsides, after all there's a reason why they aren't widely used, and lack of good supplied for crypto is larger than lack of people willing to use them.
> That being said, I do have a business accepting card payments and the 2-3% for me is closer to 0.1% past bank fees.
Are you saying that you only pay 0.1% in fees for accepting credit cards? Is this in the US? If so, please tell me whom because that's an insanely good deal, and they are surely losing money.
Some other pieces you aren't including - credit cards are prone to fraud. Despite paying 2-3% in fees to banks, merchants have to build systems to limit this, and pay to refund any fraudulent charges. Crypto allows for a basically instant settlement that looks very much like a cash transaction.
> Crypto allows for a basically instant settlement that looks very much like a cash transaction.
Which customers don't want. Customers like paying by credit card because they know that if your product/service was fake, the credit card company will make sure they get their money back.
This will be the main mechanism positively correlating BTC price with Coinbase's stock price. The correlation will be weaker than that with MARA and RIOT though.
Well real world gold is also limited. The California mountains used to be rich with huge veins of gold and now while you can still find some in these places it is very rare compared to the 1800's.
Slightly off topic but can anyone explain to me why a massive company like coinbase uses Medium as a blogging platform/software? Why are they not hosting the blog within their own ecosystem/site?
From a technical point of view yes, your own hosted static site is way more efficient, you have more control over the stack, scaling, better metrics, security etc, etc.
From a business point of view it's more like...who the f*ck cares what you use? Did they read it? Yes? Good, move on.
Usually companies use blogs as marketing tools to drive traffic to their websites. I might be wrong, but in the case of Coinbase I have never really seen anything they wrote that was precisely intended at selling a product. It's usually more informative, and shows they are trying to be more of a positive force in the industry compared to a dominant one. Kudos on them if it is the intent, and I guess it would explain the choice of platform instead of investing time and assets in developing their own.
Sure. Because if you're a startup hiring SWEs, which are a scarce resource, why would you want them implementing something that exists and isn't part of your core business?
Also, the customer is the PR/marketing department, not the engineering department. The marketing people already know how to use these platforms well, so just let them use those.
Its distracting to have extra things that engineers have to look at every once in a while. Its cheaper when accounting for employee time to just outsource random non business critical things.
Look at the dns entries for lots of big company's blogs. Many of them are just CNAMEs for wpengine or some other third party host.
I could imagine coinbase have critical cookies containing user sessions attached to coinbase.com.
If they have a wordpress blog at blog.coinbase.com, then any xss attack in wordpress can steal customer accounts.
Sure, it's a fixable problem (by moving high security cookies into login.coinbase.com or something similar), but that's a big migration, and probably nowhere near the top of the engineering priority list.
So instead they point the domain at Medium and any XSS attack on Medium can steal their customer accounts.
I highly doubt either WordPress or Medium are susceptible to an XSS attack, but if I had to bet on one being safer I would bet on the open source software already used to power thousands of high profile websites.
The vast majority of the population is not at all like HN readers and doesn't even know what Coinbase is. Blogging on Medium gives them much better exposure and reach to non-crypto people who might become interested in them because it popped up on their Medium feed vs. on the Coinbase blog.
I kinda wonder about that. I've been INUNDATED by Coinbase advertisements on mobile apps and etc talking about incentives for learning what they do and etc.
They seem to really be pushing to get the general public on board.
Perhaps true, but conversely you could also argue that the sheer number of scams and frauds in the Cryptocurrency space that had medium blogs might also put people off!
Because blogging platforms are not their core competency, so it's worth outsourcing however big you are, and medium offers a better service than any alternative?
From what I recall, it's more like they said they aren't going to take public stands on divisive political issues, and they offered generous separation packages to anyone who had a problem with that. No one was discouraged against getting politically active on their own time, and no one was "removed".
As someone who has never lived in the bay area, it was kind of surreal to see employees expecting their company to get involved in amplifying their own personal political preferences. I've always been reasonably politically active, and had fairly liberal coworkers who, even if not politically active, at least believe similarly. I've always thought that work hours are for working though, and political activism has always seemed like more of an "after hours" activity.
It's nice when a company says they're in support of one thing or another, but it doesn't really mean anything without human boots on the ground willing to put in the work to make positive change happen. Corporate PR press releases always seemed really insincere anyway, so I don't get why people would be upset when some company decides that they're not going to do them.