There was a recent decision out of Texas that pump and dumps are legal if you do them without directly selling stock to the victims. So I guess that according to Texas what this guy did is totally fine!
Wouldn't that mean that you can have a friend do the pump, and you do the dump? Sounds like the guy in the original article did both and therefore wouldn't be saved by that Texas ruling.
The Texas ruling doesn’t (as far as the coverage I’ve read) require that level of separation. Rather just selling to “the market” is enough to insulate you from fraud charges.
i'll admit i was a little shocked when the case was dismissed. for anyone not familiar with Atlas Trading this page gives a bit of an overview: https://bullishbears.com/atlas-trading-lawsuit/
If you made half a million bucks doing something in high school, it'd be pretty hard to go the college route and hope to eventually get a job grinding $100k a year.
I checked a good few of the stocks he listed. I figured he would have struck a lucky score at one point but he seemed to have an uncanny ability to always pick losing stocks.
I was hoping for a happy ending like how many of the people I played Runescape with who hosted dicing games, speculated and flipped in-game assets became successful quants irl, but he sure did seem to just pick a gimmick and roll with it, never evolving or changing.
Not sure how it came to be that every article publishes this kids name, but I'm starting to find a tragic arc to this guy's life. Dead twitter account, no LinkedIn account, and apparently was booked for narcotics possession in 2016. All I found was an arrest record[1]. Maybe he was just on some bad meds and the police caught him before things got worse, maybe they made the whole thing up, but many citations from his Wikipedia page(!) 404 now, and I have my theories as to why.
If theyre working as quants now, they were probably around before RS3 as well. I remember daytrading the grand exchange personally. There were plenty of profitable patterns that were basically guaranteed to work. I can see how someone who could program at the time could get much higher volumes by automating multiple accounts. The problem was finding profitable new trades at different levels of wealth, what worked at one volume would have to be replaced eventually. I never got into clans and such.
I got scammed a few times especially memorable was a scam with a sort of party of social proof around the scammer and they would rinse repeat in every world, some things were so organised that you got really surprised by the intricacy of the scams.
If you were one of the rubes falling for Smoking Mils sure. But there was always plenty of money to be made from placing stink orders for high volume items though, to name one very basic strategy. When you have a big enough quantity for an in-demand, relatively unvolatile asset like prayer pots you can essentially just have orders in where you get paid by the spread from bigger orders and be the main market maker. There wasn't exactly a CLOB but it was pretty easy to figure out the spread by buying 100 then selling it back for max/min price.
Other players would treat the GE like an NPC where they'd dump items in mass at 1gp just to get it all sold - knowing and taking advantage of this was (and prob still is) free money.
There were some very fun strategies where like, you would submit a question for the QnA proposing some use for $item around high alch price (e.g. 'the dark bow used to be such an iconic weapon but now it's useless and feels pathetic selling for 70k. with the new boss coming out, could we see a new use for these? :((') and when it got read out and if they liked the idea, speculators would buy these in bulk and especially if they weren't a very liquid item you would cash in, with minimal downside if you don't get read. Jmods caught on to this though, lol.
I think the natural scepticism it teaches makes for a good quant too. I remember seeing a Twitter thread like, 'If I have a coin and show you the two sides, then flip 19 heads in a row, what price should you accept to bet that it would be heads again?' with the options all being well >50%. The comments were all like, 'Well based on Laplace's rule of succession...', '...based on a beta distribution with a uniform prior...', etc., all theoretically correct stuff if we live in a mathematically perfect world.
The Runescape-brained would give you the real-life most likely answer: 'That coin is rigged, dude. I'm going to find better value elsewhere.'
In seriousness though: are analysts allowed to have an interest in stocks they're publishing analysis for? It seems like a fine line between creating an obvious conflict of interest (see: TFA perhaps on a more subtle level) and wanting them to have skin in the game so they're incentivized to provide useful analysis (rather than YOLO: stock goes up/down and I don't care because it's other people's money on the line).
In general, it seems like a hard problem to compensate an analyst without either creating one of the above scenarios or generally setting up a scenario where they'd be better off trading for themselves on the basis of their analysis rather than providing a service to other investors.
At virtually all banks, equities analysts are banned from trading in their coverage. Banned as in, if you, your spouse, your dependents, etc. have an interest you didn't proactively disclose and dispense with you're fired on the spot.
FINRA regulation states that registered equities analysts (i.e. the ones working at banks) at a minimum cannot trade against their ratings [0]. At most / all banks there are further restrictions that ban trading in coverage.
For both stock analysts and other types of analysts like IT industry analysts, it depends on the firm as far as I know and the rules may be more or less strict depending upon how involved they, or their fund, are with the given company. Generally, rules lean towards avoiding both conflicts of interest and the appearance of conflicts of interest.
> The messages that Lebed posted would predict marked increases in the stocks value [...] In response to Lebed’s messages, trading volume of these stocks would soar
I'm so confused reading the comments here. How in the world is anyone defending this?
He was acting without any special knowledge, so the only thing he was taking advantage of was the gullibility of the general public. That's usually legal, no?
> What should actually happen to him for posting messages on message boards?
If the problem was "posting messages on message boards" we'd all be just as guilty, but obviously that's not the case. That's like saying that someone who stabbed a person to death got punished for "using cutlery". People who intentionally hurt others for profit should be treated as such, no matter if they're mugging their victims or scamming them. He's no better than a Nigerian prince who uses email or the "pig butchers" who use SMS/MMS/social media.
> People who intentionally hurt others for profit should be treated as such, no matter if they're mugging their victims or scamming them.
Mugging and scamming are definitely not the same. Being robbed is not the same as giving your money away voluntarily. But I also don't think muggers should be "tarred and feathered and run out of town" either. They should be tried for theft, because the money/goods weren't handed over voluntarily.
> He's no better than a Nigerian prince who uses email
I'm not saying he's better or worse than anyone. I'm asking what tarring and feathering should actually mean.
You can argue semantics, but if I convince you that the beans I have for sale are magic and you voluntarily pay me for them only to find out that they aren't magic, it'd be fair to say you've been robbed.
> But I also don't think muggers should be "tarred and feathered and run out of town" either. They should be tried for theft
The specifics don't matter all that much. I'd also prefer that justice be handled in courtrooms, but what actually matters is that victims are made whole where possible and criminals who prey on others are punished. Society has always had ways to deal with parasites that hurt people by scamming them.
Yes - absolutely. Semantics is about meaning, and meaning is central to discussion.
> if I convince you that the beans I have for sale are magic and you voluntarily pay me for them only to find out that they aren't magic, it'd be fair to say you've been robbed
Colloquially yes, but not really robbed. Possibly a victim of false advertising. But to establish that you'd have to prove they aren't magic, first. The problem would be that if you think beans can be magic, or stock picks can be guaranteed, then things will go wrong. No one can protect you from yourself as well as you can.
> Society has always had ways to deal with parasites that hurt people by scamming them.
This is an odd and unnecessary thing to say, though. Just like the tarring and feathering.
Suppose you're an ordinary trader who likes high risk bets. You find a stock you like, you buy some. Now you go on message boards telling everyone you think the stock is going to the moon straight away. This is your sincere belief. Soon the stock goes up 300%. You thought it was going to go up 1000%, that's what you said before, but hey, it still went up 300%, that's still a tidy profit, so you sell.
Whether this is fraud or not basically hinges on whether you were being intentionally dishonest, right? But now how do you distinguish between malice and stupidity?
> Whether this is fraud or not basically hinges on whether you were being intentionally dishonest, right?
No.
Do you mean legally? or morally?
Legally the offenses include things beyond what might strictly be "fraud" (see "fraud or deceit" as one example, but there are more [1]). IANAL, but failing to mention that your posts are with the hope of raising the price because you have a vested interest in that... seems like a material omission, if nothing else.
Morally (and I'd expect legally based on the text, but IANAL) what matters is what he expected to happen as a result of his posts on the message board. If he knew people would likely buy the stock in response to his posts, and he intended to take advantage of that influence to make money off those sales, that's the end of the story. Whether he sincerely believed the stock would actually rise regardless is beside the point.
> But now how do you distinguish between malice and stupidity?
I'll assume you mean good faith because stupidity isn't in the picture here. Someone who's genuinely predicting the stock market correctly isn't stupid.
Do you sincerely believe this person didn't expect his messages to raise the stock price, or that he didn't intend to take advantage of such a rise to make money off the stock sales? I sure don't.
> failing to mention that your posts are with the hope of raising the price because you have a vested interest in that... seems like a material omission, if nothing else.
And if you run around telling people that you just bought some of the stock you think is going to the moon, is that supposed to make them less inclined to buy it, or do they now just think you're putting your money where your mouth is?
> what matters is what he expected to happen as a result of his posts on the message board.
Which is the problem. How do you prove what's inside of someone's head? Especially if they are malicious and know what not to say out loud.
If you think the stock is going up 1000% and it only goes up 300%, you were wrong, and your pick was wrong, and the people waiting for it to go up 1000% before selling are the people who lost money when it went back down. But as far as I know, being initially wrong and then changing your mind before you lose your money isn't illegal.
FWIW, there are other examples of where securities laws where intent (which is difficult to prove) is needed in order to demonstrate a law has been broken. e.g. Spoofing.
Intent is often not that difficult to prove. It isn't murder if you were just sitting in the bell tower innocently cleaning your sniper rifle and it accidentally went off and put a round through the head of your sworn enemy, but you're entitled to reasonable doubt, not preposterous fabrications.
The problem here is that the innocent behavior and the prohibited one are basically identical and neither of them is particularly implausible.
I don't have the energy to dissect all this, but you're completely conflating legality, enforcement, and provability. We have juries for a reason. Most would a priori find it hard to believe that someone who found a winning strategy would repeatedly post it on random message boards with altruistic intent.
Juries need some basis on which to make a decision. The law is ridiculous if it only turns on whether you had a lawyer ahead of time to tell you what not to say while operating the identical scam.
It's not clear why telling people you think a stock is going to go up after you've already bought it would require altruism, and more than that you would benefit by building a reputation as someone who makes accurate predictions if you turn out to be right, independent of whether anyone acts on your statement by buying the stock.
> The law is ridiculous if it only turns on whether you had a lawyer ahead of time to tell you what not to say while operating the identical scam.
You'd be very shocked...
... but that's essentially what criminal defence is about :-/ In a sense half the value of having a defence lawyer is having somebody to remind you not to say stupid things to the police/investigators/prosecution.
Of course it's not really as simple as that, but you'd be surprised at the number of convictions where the prosecution relied on something stupid the defendant said. If (say) 50% of convictions "turns on whether you had a lawyer ahead of time to tell you what not to say", is the law ridiculous? Because that's what it generally is like (not just for securities fraud cases).
PS: for cases where it's particularly easy to feign ignorance/innocence, sometimes the law specifically states that the mens rea requirement is waived (i.e. the intent/knowledge does not matter, or does not need to be proved beyond reasonable doubt). This in turn gives opportunity for defence lawyers to argue this infringes on the right of the defendant to be presumed innocent..
> If (say) 50% of convictions "turns on whether you had a lawyer ahead of time to tell you what not to say", is the law ridiculous?
Yes.
It's entirely believable that at least 50% of laws are ridiculous.
> for cases where it's particularly easy to feign ignorance/innocence, sometimes the law specifically states that the mens rea requirement is waived (i.e. the intent/knowledge does not matter, or does not need to be proved beyond reasonable doubt).
But that's not the issue.
If you go out to the parking lot and your key fob unlocks someone else's car of the same make and model, e.g. because the manufacturer screwed up and made any of the keys open any of the cars, and then you claim that you thought that car was yours when you drove off in it, the prosecution now has to prove that you intended to steal someone else's car. Which they may yet even be able to do, if there is other evidence that implies you knew what you were doing, but it's completely reasonable that they have to prove it.
Whereas if you went out into the parking lot and broke the window of a car and then hot wired it, your actions are evidence of your intent. And, importantly, it's generally difficult to avoid actions that signal your intent while perpetrating a car theft.
The actual problem for this type of securities laws isn't just that the prosecution has to prove your intent, it's that their only means to do that is effectively a confession. There is no plausible way to operate a chop shop such that hiring a lawyer ahead of time would keep you out of prison when you get found out, but for parts of the financial industry that's what happens, which is absurd. There is no justice in a law that can only be enforced against people without effective counsel.
> Most would a priori find it hard to believe that someone who found a winning strategy would repeatedly post it on random message boards with altruistic intent.
That doesn't make it right, though, at least in my mind. There's accountability on both sides in these cases. People reading message boards and treating the contents as financial advice are not taking sufficient care, particularly when they click past / agree to the statement on their trading platform that says that their money is at risk. Their money was at risk, and they did it anyway.
My impression is this would come down to the jury's bias in either direction, when it should be pretty clear cut: you buy random stuff hoping to get rich, be it stocks picks from an Instagrammer, or NFTs, or whatever, and it is you choosing how to gamble your money.
If I were in a casino and a guy was holding a sign saying I should put all my money on number 8 on Roulette, it wouldn't matter if he were the casino owner, and stood to gain, or was just a random guy. It's up to me to decide what to do with the advice.
yup, especially if they are not including the standard: "Disclosure: I have positions in this security."
This could be interpreted as (and/or variously written to indicate) "this person is just talking up his/her book" or "they like it so much they have skin in the game".
Plus the factor of how much noise there is to any signal in the social media & message boards, how much attention can one reliably actually get for your shilling?
I think you misunderstood. The guy bought the stock, posted on some forum that he got the stock and it was going to the moon, and then he saw a 300% increase in whatever period they said. At the time they posted, they believed there would be a 1000% increase in price. But now they’re seeing 300%, and thinking they should get out now instead of trying to chase the high point, 300% is still a good profit.
> Lebed professes that he did nothing wrong – he did nothing different from Wall Street analysts
Except analysts usually can't trade stocks. Short sellers can. In theory, libel law makes that safe, but when it's a 15-year-old playing the penny stocks, the company won't notice or have the legal firepower to chase down a /r/wallstreetbets user.
When I googled it, it was a little murky on if it's allowed, and sometimes it was the analyst's employer that banned it. What is legal is different parts of the same ~bank not being as independent as they should be, so the kid's argument that the big boys do the same thing wasn't entirely wrong.
Michael Lewis wrote about this story in his book “Next”. Also in the New York Times magazine. The articles and book have some pretty interesting discussion and opinion about this case.
This was a long time ago in a galaxy far far away.
Also the article mentions these were thinly-traded stocks.
I assume the argument would be that today this sort of thing is happening because it's Tuesday. i.e. it's normalized and if you get burned, it's almost someone's civic responsibility to part you from your money.
Scammers who think it's their "civic responsibility" to dupe their fellow man with intentional fraud should think two or three times before committing to that logic.
If they want to value someone's worth to the human team based on their gullibility to professional liars, it's not reaching very far for other like-minded logicians to value the scammers' worth based on their ability to navigate any other man-made stressor, like their ability to dodge a bullet.
I didn't suggest that. Just illustrating how the incredibly moronic logic of "weeding out people who don't meet my standards of fitness is a civic duty" can be easily extended to non-financial areas of life.
Only difference is he was doing this in the 90's. Today you will find telegrams pumping/dumping and manipulating the price of small stocks, crypto, etc.
I was doing some market research for a penny stock company in 2000 and made my way over to a stock discussion board devoted to the company at one point. The amount of scaminess, cheerleading, and ignorance (feigned or otherwise) was unreal.
No, Lewis argues that SEC is a protection racket! They make a bunch of rules and regulations with the input of Wall Street so that Wall Street can pump and dump legally!! Congress will not touch this radioactive protection racket because they are doing insider trading on legal changes which should also be illegal...
The difference is merely the essential part of meme stocks that make them meme stocks and not just a pump-and-dump scheme executed by some guy. Other than that, though, totally the same thing.
I'm on a phone, apology for lack of citation. I ran across an article that found it was mostly memers bidding the price up against each other. The short squeeze aspect did come un, but not as often and not to the extent that is commonly claimed.
Speaking more about pump and dump not so much about penny stocks or near worthless stocks. The larger users certainly pumped up GME, one guy was even on the news channels when he made like $11 million. 100s of people would buy based on these types of super users suggestions.
> the kid had bought stock and then, ''using multiple fictitious names,'' posted hundreds of messages on Yahoo Finance message boards recommending that stock to others
If A16Z are allowed to buy thousands of their own crypto-hype essay in order to get it listed on NYT best-seller and drive shitcoin prices up, I don't see why random netizens could not do the same kind of things…
Rookie mistake. Always got to add in the fine print: "Not financial advice" and disclose current positions. You don't even need to say the exact positions (ie, long call option, X shares, ...).
This is how the "stock analysts" on TV get away with it. When those credits role at the end of the segment, it will say something to this effect. Or TV show will disclose it at the bottom of the screen.
Some people say with a straight face: "Hey if someone is stupid enough to believe something I say, it's not my fault, even if I say something I know is false."
And enough other people like being able to cash in at that same well that they avoid working towards making it officially illegal with significant penalties.
It's that John Oliver piece on timeshares all over the place in essentially every arena.
> Depending on who you talk to, Lebed was either viewed as a person who knowingly abused the system and broke the law, or someone who acted no differently than Wall Street analysts acted
Both of these statements can be true at the same time.
> Depending on who you talk to, Lebed was either viewed as a person who knowingly abused the system and broke the law, or someone ... actually performing no wrong-doing.
Funny how selectively quoting a bit differently makes that appear far less so.
It all comes down to selective enforcement by the not-actual-real-judges at the SEC.
You have to go through their kangaroo court with an ALJ, and arger likely getting a judgement against you, can you actually go to a real court.
And this is combined with different rules for different income classes.
Kid from middle income family gets smacked down hard. Whereas billionaire employees doing work on wall street either get low scrutiny, or pay 2% of what they made (Read: cost of doing business).
The "rights" of the rich are not for the rest of us.
If you read the article, it looks like he got punished pretty lightly - had to pay back some of the gains, got to keep others, and had no further repercussions.
The Supreme Court is considering if Administrative Law Judges (ALJ [1]) are unconstitutional. SEC v. Jarkesy.
Fun fact: adherence to law is not required in an ALJ court. If one loses in ALJ, then one may proceed to appeal in a regular court where law must be considered.
Being an employee of a billionaire matters because the billionaire, and by proxy their employee, is held to a different standard than everyone else.
They didn't say anything that implied this applied to every single emoyee of a billionaire, so the janitor who happens to work for a billionaire and happens to buy a stock doesn't change anything or invalidate that point.
The employees being referenced are the ones employed to do trades for investors or for the company itself or for the billionaire themself (which might be a person or a group or a company).
> Lebed professes that he did nothing wrong – he did nothing different from Wall Street analysts. He states that he learned how people react to the stock market and acted on that knowledge.
So you trick people by lying to them, and it's ok because you take their money indirectly via the stock market. And because some analysts also do this (often suffering legal consequences), then it's definitely not wrong?
Shameful. And the father getting the kid an E-Trade account after the mother closed his other account? Sounds like the father should be sanctioned too.
> The 2007–2008 financial crisis, or Global Economic Crisis (GEC), was the most severe worldwide economic crisis since the Great Depression. Predatory lending in the form of subprime mortgages targeting low-income homebuyers,[1] excessive risk-taking by global financial institutions,[2] a continuous buildup of toxic assets within banks, and the bursting of the United States housing bubble culminated in a "perfect storm", which led to the Great Recession.
(from wikipedia)
> In total, 47 bankers served jail time as a result of the crisis, over half of which were from Iceland
One example of countless that could be found, that legal consequences are the exception, not the norm.
Well done Iceland. I would like to see ratio of jailed bankers to total bankers in country. Because now it looks like GES was mostly caused by Icelandic bankers :)
I recently read a comment by an icelander saying that they're basically just the same as the rest of the world, incapable of punishing bankers and rich people. Just that on this occasion, the banking sector being so small, something like 90% of it failed, so they really had no choice but to jail some people.
That sounds about right. It's a small homogeneous country and the situation really was dire. Much more so than in many other countries, including the US, in general. The US had some big failures but the system largely held together (with the help of the government of course).
Others getting away with similar (or even worse) isn't a strong argument that such fraud is OK. Plenty of voices rose up during that fiasco, and rules were changed.
Rephrasing the Arthur C. Clarke statement “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I would say "Any sufficiently advanced scam is indistinguishable from genuine trading advice.".
> So you trick people by lying to them, and it's ok because you take their money indirectly via the stock market
No one was arguing that it was indirect; the people who lost money took advice from an anonymous user on a forum on tiny companies they'd never heard of. The morality question is still interesting because it hinges on whether or not people knew they were playing a game with deception.
It's not though. Greed isn't involved for all the well meaning naifs who are just wiring cash to bail out their wayward grandson after he called them on facebook, or received mail indistinguishable from a bill and sent back a check.
The entire trading industry is a zero-sum game bro. For someone to win someone else has to lose. As is the advertising industry and surveillance capitalism industry that powers the “free web”. (Only at the edges is new value created. Most of it exists to have large institutionals take money from the small newbs, you’re the fish at the poker table.)
And more broadly, capitalism exploits people.
This is like blaming Andrew Tate for exploiting women but throwing up your hands when Amazon Nike and Apple were running sweatshops and warehouses at scale, exploiting people in general.
Technology just made it easier to extract the rents (eg tax the uber drivers and passengers to pay the shareholder class of Uber).
And generative AI just automates that further. Thanks for all your creativity, judgment and input, humans. You can be fired now thanks!
Hey, if you look at the man behind the curtain, you’ll see all your favorite stuff needs it to even function. For example for Sam Altman’s ventures we have:
>The entire trading industry is a zero-sum game bro. For someone to win someone else has to lose.
Traders add liquidity. That liquidity allows me to easily buy and sell stocks without waiting long periods or worrying about getting ripped off by the spread. And since the economy isn't zero-sum, it's possible for everyone to end up better than before.
> Does trading stocks somehow cause an increase production of actual stuff?
Sure it does. If the price of a stock changes, it becomes easier/harder for that company to raise money relative to other companies. If it's a good company then making their shares go up can increase production of actual stuff because they can afford to build more factories etc. If it's an inefficient company and its shares go down then the people who sold it can go invest that money in something else. There is a net increase in production if the company who gets the money is the one more efficient at using it to make stuff than the alternative, i.e. share price becomes "more accurate" as a measure of the company's market efficiency.
People are saying that pump and dump schemes are unethical even if they're not always illegal. I would assert that investing for short-term gain is always unethical and the only way the stock market really benefits retail investors is when people invest and hold for long-term gains.
> The entire trading industry is a zero-sum game bro.
It isn’t in utility terms, which are the only terms that matter for whether something is actually zero sum.
Under certain assumptions, it is in (e.g.) dollar (or other specific commodity) terms, but the whole reason markets work at all is that the no specific commodity (including any fiat currency at any point in time) has a consistent relationship to utility across market participants.
If you buy shares for $100 and they increase to $200 without paying you a dividend, you've still made $100. If you prefer to have $100 in shares and $100 in cash rather than $200 in shares, you can sell half of your shares.
Dividends or not are irrelevant, what matters is that the marginal utility of market value measured in monetary terms (or in market equivalent in any other commodity, but money is the most common one for people to mistake for a direct measure of utility) differs between market participants, and for the same participant (relative to others, not just by, e.g., inflation that applies in the same way to all market participants) at different points in time.
Incorrect. Capitalism allows economies to accelerate the birth of new companies that benefit people.
When it's policed and regulated poorly, yes, scammers can proliferate. So don't vote for politicians who lie without apology, and don't let people you don't trust manage your money or provide you with goods or services.
Predatory people will exist with or without capitalism, only Capitalism is fine-grained democracy where you vote literally every day with your dollar.
I should also add, don't do any scamming or predatory behavior yourself. Because the most important vote you make for how society is run is with your own actions.
> only Capitalism is fine-grained democracy where you vote literally every day with your dollar.
I'm not sure where you get that from. Every economic model has trading, wherein the participants make trades (goods for goods). Capitalism is not democratic. Communism isn't democratic for a similar reason. The pareto principle (and natural hierarchies) appears and equality goes out the window for the traders.
It certainly is more democratic than any alternatives I'm aware of. If you don't want someone to accumulate more economic influence, do not pay them. The government will not jail you for doing so.
If business is controlled by a democratically elected government, and 49% of the country voted against those officials, there is no way for them to start their own alternative business to articulate those preferences in the market.
> It certainly is more democratic than any alternatives I'm aware of
It's no different at all, to any other economic system.
> If business is controlled by a democratically elected government, and 49% of the country voted against those officials, there is no way for them to start their own alternative business to articulate those preferences in the market.
If you have 1 dollar and I have one hundred thousand, the same problem exists. This has nothing to do with capitalism or democracy, per se.
It is not the same. You can build your own business and the guy with one hundred thousand dollars does not have any ability to prevent you from doing that under the law. The hierarchy under capitalism is very different.
> The entire trading industry is a zero-sum game bro.
It's not, and even a cursory understanding of what zero-sum games are and how the stock market works would tell you that.
How does the market grow if all trades are zero-sum? How do recessions happen if all trades are zero-sum?
Some portion of trades are zero-sum, maybe even most of them. Stock markets don't function if every trade was zero-sum.
Pump and dump schemes are bad because they distort information in the marketplace. The tradeoff is supposed to be that these major firms perform price discovery, and in exchange for providing accurate prices to the market, they are allowed to arbitrage off the difference between the current price and the "true" price.
Pump and dump schemes don't do any price discovery, they do the opposite. They create a fake new price, arbitrage off that difference, and then leave the followers holding the bag.
The stock market grows because companies create value for real consumers. Companies serving the people.
But the stock market and its derivative markets are just people speculating on the price of the stock. So the vast majority of the value is a zero sum game.
Think of it like the "use value" of a house, vs a housing speculative bubble on top. They can pump, they can dump.
The trading industry is separate from the investing industry.
The investing industry is positive sum - but you must hold for the long-run, or only make decisions if new information is discovered to be an investor. Vanguard and other passive firms are a part of the investing industry.
Not a fan of over-financialization, but... if trading is propagating market signals to people who otherwise wouldn't have them, it should have some positive externalities?
> How does the market grow if all trades are zero-sum?
The same way a cancer does: by repurposing adjacent systems in service of propagating itself, often to the determent of the function of those systems.
In the case of a financial market this means people spending their time watching lines squiggle around on a screen instead of finding real problems to solve.
Referring to the increase of stock prices as an indicator that markets are positive sum is a little like referring to an increase in hit points as an indicator that D&D is positive sum
It's not useful to use a system's own abstractions to measure its effectiveness.
Outside money flows into the market, this allows it to be positive sum.
For the DnD analogy, it is as if you had a cleric.
Eg: IPO sells at $2, next seller buys at $4, next at $6, etc. Everyond makes money in that scenario. Eventually there can be losses, do all the losses counter balance these profits? No, because on net everything went up. If there were always trades that had losses to balance the gains, only then it would be zero sum.
What's more, people convert types of holdings all the time, and it is the big players that move things. When a mutual fund allocates 1% more to stocks, or 1% less and putd that to bonds, those are very big net new or net negative money flows. So, it's not just paychecks being added in, there are lots of sources of dynamism to make the stock market system anything but closed. There is net new money flowing into it all the time.
Money gets created when people take out loans which creates debt which is then traded in the markets. That's not money flowing into the markets, that's just the markets doing their own internal bookkeeping (much like D&D uses HP for internal bookkeeping about character health).
If you want to convincingly argue that markets are positive sum you have to demonstrate that markets produce more than they consume in terms of something besides money. E.g. when some of the factory workers quit to go be day traders, the factory ends up producing more while consuming the same or less due to the positive effects of the investments enabled by the increased trading activity.
This might be the case in some cases, and it won't be the case in others, and I don't know how to sum it in aggregate. Presumably somebody does.
Whether it comes out positive or negative, asset prices are an implementation detail, not the thing we're measuring.
In general there are two ways for companies to make money. 1) They make something that otherwise wouldn't have been made, or make it more efficiently than the competition and then capture volume with lower prices. 2) Rent seeking; they extract higher profits from the same activity, e.g. by buying their competitors and raising prices.
Traders do the work of finding the companies that can do one of these things and allocating resources to them so they can do them. When it's the first one, the societal gains are quite significant. When it's the second one, well, there are supposed to be laws against that and if it's happening then we need better laws or better enforcement.
I'd argue for a third category where the new thing addresses a problem that the company themselves is making more problematic (e.g. TurboTax) or where "more efficiently" involves cases where costs to the company are exchanged for costs to society (e.g. petroleum companies, cambridge analytica).
I think this category represents the majority of economic activity today, which is why I'm skeptical of markets being zero sum.
The result is the same though: find was to get more of (1) and less of (2) and (3).
The third thing is just the second thing. TurboTax lobbying to avoid free tax filing is obviously rent-seeking. It might even be more accurate to call this category rent seeking through regulatory capture. Fossil fuels would have been trounced by nuclear except that they lobbied to require nuclear to internalize all of its costs (and then some) but not their own, extracting undue rents by handicapping the competition.
The closest you get to a third category is Cambridge Analytica, in which case the third category would be criminal enterprises. But these rarely remain listed on the stock market; you won't find shares of the Guadalajara Cartel at your brokerage. It's the companies in the second category that do, because they're doing things that should be illegal but aren't.
I was going for extreme examples to make the point, but look at any modern advertiser: their products are used to target segments of society such that we can be encouraged to either turn against one another or to make some kind of decision which is bad for us and good for whoever is doing the advertising.
The perspective you're describing doesn't seem to have a way to classify this activity as unhelpful without going so far as making it illegal. Without that ability, I don't see how we can ever expect the market's notion of value to find itself in line with society's values. The best we can hope for is a random walk within the bounds of "illegal".
There are only a finite number of possibilities here.
If you're stuck with a machine you don't like that shows you harmful advertising because it has no viable competitors, the problem is with the law, because it's propping up that institution or otherwise failing to enforce anti-trust laws.
If that machine exists, even though there are plenty of viable competitors that don't do that, and then you freely choose that one on purpose, it's not obvious that the company is doing anything wrong. You apparently like that kind of advertising.
The exception would be for some kind of information asymmetry, like the advertiser is lying to you and you don't find out until it's too late. In which case we're back to needing a law, in that case against false advertising.
Now I can tell why you're choosing this one, because it's a sticky one: What happens when they're lying about politics? We can't have the government enforcing a law against "lying" about political issues, because the very thing that makes them political is that people disagree and don't find the other side's evidence to be credible. We can't have whoever is in power at any given time censoring the opposition.
The solution we use for this is to put the determination in the hands of the public. The marketplace of ideas. If someone is full of crap, you prove them wrong in front of everybody, and then they lose credibility. This isn't perfect but it works pretty well in the absence of the aforementioned anti-trust problem. Because then instead of a handful of megasites that people get siloed into and fed content like livestock, you'd have a million blogs that intersect like the web. There would be no walls between sites, no way to prevent someone you're trying to mislead from hearing from the other side just because you're in with the site's operators, because none of the sites would be big enough to exercise that kind of power when the average person is getting their information from hundreds of separate sources instead of only one or two.
Sometimes companies have bad incentives. Those either get curbed by laws, or by free market competition, or... what's your alternative?
I agree that a marketplace of ideas is indeed the solution to the information asymmetry problem. I think we need to change the web so that nobody but the user has authority over which data is displayed in context with which other data such that platforms cannot prevent critical annotations from appearing next to content (or annotations that simply remove that content)... supposing the user has opted into those annotations. I'm working on such a protocol.
As for the incentive problem... Imagine that I'm a grocer and I live in a place whose ground water is being poisoned by a nearby mining operation. The mining company employees are showing up in my grocery store and expecting that they can exchange their salaries for food. But it's not in my interests to give them that food because it's going to enable them to stick around and continue poisoning my tap water. Maybe their behavior is illegal, but I can't really wait the years that it would take for the legal system to get around to doing something about it. Or maybe I live in a place where I don't trust the legal system to actually do that, I dunno.
Pardon the contrived scenario, it's just easier to talk about hazards like this if you've got characters to reference.
So I'm this grocer and my tap water is now poisonous, and there's only so much bottled water in town and I need immediate recourse which ideally doesn't involve violence. So I get together with the other people in town and we track down the entity/loan which issued the money which these miners are trying to use to buy groceries with, and... here's the answer to...
> what's your alternative?
...we disable that money for all uses except getting the hell out of town. We just collectively refuse to accept it. It would be like how nations wield sanctions against each other, except anybody can do it. It would be like, a wallet setting or something.
It's sort of like how we currently ship operating systems with a pre-populated list of certificate authorities, but maybe we could instead leave it to the user to populate that list based on who they actually trust. Except instead of the validity of SSL certificates we're talking about the validity of money. Instead of certificate authorities it would be governments or banks or publicly traded companies, or cryptocurrencies or issuers of collectible playing cards, I don't know... assets.
Being sanctioned by the masses would be a disaster for such entities, so this would create incentives against issuing money-like abstractions to people who are going to use it for evil. It's a way to get the banks to take some responsibility for their actions which does not create incentives to find things that should be illegal but aren't yet and exploit them asap.
> I think we need to change the web so that nobody but the user has authority over which data is displayed in context with which other data such that platforms cannot prevent critical annotations from appearing next to content (or annotations that simply remove that content)... supposing the user has opted into those annotations. I'm working on such a protocol.
To some extent browsers (i.e. users agents) already do this -- it's how ad blockers work. Naturally large corporations are always looking for ways around this, like using native apps for specifically the things (like social media) that have no reason at all not to be a web page -- or better yet, a feed protocol like RSS with a client app which is independent of the service.
A modern protocol which is basically RSS for social media content would be welcome. Probably even among content creators. But not so much social media conglomerates.
> We just collectively refuse to accept it.
If there are 10 grocery stores in town and 8 of them go along with this, the miners just shop at the other two, or the mine starts selling groceries in the company store. In order to be effective it would have to be close to universal, at which point you're basically reinventing government. Notice how if 51% of people are in on it, you already have the votes to pass a law.
Trying to tag money with the evil bit is also a fool's errand because it's fungible. Suppose that AT&T isn't in on your boycott, so they accept the hundred bucks from the mine to pay their phone bill, and put it in their account with billions of other dollars. Now AT&T is tainted. They're going to pay that money to their employees who will use it to buy everything from everywhere and in two weeks there won't be an account in the country that hasn't been Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon'd into having tainted money in it, or the boycott becomes a self-DoS because there are fewer places you can patronize while respecting the boycott than the miners can.
Conversely, suppose you're not willing to taint money that some huge corporation accepts. Well, now the miners just go to Walmart, who isn't in on your boycott, and use it to buy a prepaid debit card which isn't tainted because Walmart doesn't publish that information, and then use the card to buy whatever they want.
Well, yes. The ability to spin up a government when there's the kind of problem that needs one and dissolve it when that problem goes away is indeed what I'm after.
How else are you going to resist people with enough market power to corrupt your existing government? You've got to spin up a new one. (Consider all the US-installed dictators in South America in the 80's as an example. If only the citizens of those countries had something like this and were prepared to coordinate a resistance.)
> Money... Is fungible
Is it? I've worked at enough payment provides and been through enough trainings about KYC the OFAC lists and heard enough proposals regarding CBDC's to doubt that that's true anymore. It's just that only privileged parties are allowed to use the non-fungibility of money to their advantage.
As for the Kevin Bacon thing, that's kind of the point. When I accept some fiction in exchange for parting with something real, I want it to carry enough metadata to know who I'm helping and who I'm harming by doing so. That way I can make better decisions
It's not "the" evil bit, it's annotations by people who I may or may not share interests with. It's a restoration of information symmetry.
> How else are you going to resist people with enough market power to corrupt your existing government?
How are you going to resist people with enough market power to corrupt your new government?
What are you going to do when the incumbent corrupt government declares your alternate government to be unlawful?
> Is it?
Being fungible is the purpose of money. It's why a doctor doesn't have to find a farmer who needs medical care in order to have lunch.
> I've worked at enough payment provides and been through enough trainings about KYC the OFAC lists and heard enough proposals regarding CBDC's to doubt that that's true anymore.
Are you aware of the effectiveness of KYC? It's basically zero. Because money is fungible.
Suppose Bob is naughty and nobody is allowed to give him any money, but Bob wants to sell iron and buy wheat. Alice wants to buy Bob's iron. So Alice tells Bob she can't give him money and asks what he wants instead. Bob says wheat, Alice buys wheat from someone she's allowed to buy things from, then trades the wheat for Bob's iron, which is a process that involves Alice and Bob but not banks so nobody else knows it's happening. Trying to prevent this is futile but causes a lot of collateral damage and overhead and the people who continue to insist it be attempted should become unemployed.
> When I accept some fiction in exchange for parting with something real, I want it to carry enough metadata to know who I'm helping and who I'm harming by doing so.
And what I'm saying is that the metadata would just be a meshed graph containing everyone in the world.
Let's come back to AT&T. If someone you don't like pays them $100 and then they put the $100 in an account with a billion other dollars from ten million other people, what do you want metadata on money that comes out of that account to say? That the money is from everyone? Because it is. But how does that help you decide anything? All money would say that within a trivial number of transactions because it would quickly end up going through some large institution which mixes it with money from millions of other sources and then sends it back out into the general economy.
re: corruption, the impromptu government in my scenario only exists because a group of people decided to form it by collectively deciding the same way re: which money they'll accept and which they won't. It is legitimate so long as they continue to agree. If it stops being legitimate, then it stops being effective at the problem it was created to solve, people stop agreeing, and poof, it disappears.
The goal is only to make this kind of resistance possible. If it's the wrong tool for the job, stop using it and use something else.
re: incumbents, the assumption is that they're so sclerotic that they can't respond to novel scenarios. If this weren't the case, you could've just used them to deal with the driniking water problem in the first place.
re: fungibility and barter, the idea that "before we had money, we had barter" is often repeated in economics classes, but the anthropological evidence doesn't support it. Before the Roman empire violently asserted that caesar-face coin was more valuable than the metal it was made of, we did more or less what I'm describing. People with shared interests kept track of debts between each other, and people without shared interests refused to do so. It didn't scale super well, but now that we have computers, it can.
re: fungibility and kyc, there are plenty of people who are in jail for at one point having had the wrong kind of money, because it's not fungible.
re: a meshed graph containing everyone in the world
Well yes, that's how we treat money today, but I don't think it's sustainable. It concentrates too fast into the hands of too few. Why play a game in which you were born into a losing position? My generation decided to play, but I don't think that'll keep happening, because every generation has worse and worse reasons to. The French got fed up with their royalty, the children of the future will get fed up with their Quadrillionaires. The French chose violence, I'm proposing something else. A way to make old money into not money without taking anybody's head.
If you opt in to something like this, all that remains is new money--money issued with a purpose (we have this already, money enters the system when loans are granted, those loans were granted because somebody at a bank thought something was worth doing, a mining project perhaps). You don't have to track every single transaction, just the ones where money is created. I think people should have the ability to look at money and decide if its original purpose was a worthwhile one (nowadays the loan reasons are hidden from us). This would create better behavior among those so audacious as to create things and propose that they be treated like money.
For inflation reasons, money will also need to exit the system, so it's not going to hang around forever. As for whether you need metadata on every hand that is passes though from creation to destruction, or whether it's good enough to accept/reject anonymously handled money based solely on the conditions of issuance... that's up to the people. If they deem an abstraction legitimate by being willing to accept it as money, so be it. If not, well I guess we'll need bigger databases or more aggressive demurrage schemes such that the histories don't become unwieldy.
I realize that this all seems a bit outlandish, I must seem like a crazy person to you. But it's clear to me that our system has some very damaging design flaws, and I can't tolerate watching the subsequent harm without at least spinning my wheels now and again in search of an alternative.
> If you want to convincingly argue that markets are positive sum you have to demonstrate that markets produce more than they consume in terms of something besides money. E.g. when some of the factory workers quit to go be day traders, the factory ends up producing more while consuming the same or less due to the positive effects of the investments enabled by the increased trading activity.
Price discovery would be the function of the markets that allows this. If the markets find out that iron ore production is going to crash because of a flood or something, they create demand for futures of that iron production, raising the price of iron and encouraging stability in the supply of iron via more companies mining it.
These futures then provide stability of supply and price (somewhat) to the factory. Conversely, they provide stability of demand and price to the mine, who can sell their production ahead of time.
I would not be surprised if most factories do employ investors, even if indirectly via a third-party supplier. Knowing that the price of iron was going to go up would be tremendously useful, and they would be able to produce their goods cheaper than everyone else if they stocked up on materials at lower prices.
They're traded in dollars, but the same would be true in a barter system. Liquidity would be incredibly important in any non-monetary system; people would pay a pretty penny to be able to exchange payment in goods they don't want to something they did want.
> Money gets created when people take out loans which creates debt which is then traded in the markets. That's not money flowing into the markets, that's just the markets doing their own internal bookkeeping (much like D&D uses HP for internal bookkeeping about character health).
That is meant to reflect the new value being created by all of the entities in the market. If you don't add currency to account for growth, the currency increases in value equal to demand for it, making the currency itself a very attractive investment.
Those loans have interest rates, so the borrowers need to be doing something with the cash to generate value in excess of the interest rate, which in turn creates value on the market. Loans backed by actual currency are dramatically more expensive to service because of opportunity costs. The borrower's interest rate would be higher than what the loan offerer thought they could get in return for safer investments. Current loan rates for practically everything are far below that.
The factory benefits by having access to extra cash for cheap. They don't have to stockpile cash for a decade to open a new factory, they can borrow money and do it now at an interest rate that still allows them to keep most of the value.
I'm responding to only: "> How does the market grow if all trades are zero-sum?"
I'm not trying to say that markets are necessarily a net positive. But we should also not be myopic about it either. There is more to it.
Firstly, money being made solely by trading is rent seeking. It's maybe even the definition of rent seeking (?) Personally I'd be in favor of tax rates in the 40% to 50% region for rent seeking (long term and short term capital gains tax IMO should both be doubled). Perhaps we agree a bit there.
> Money gets created when people take out loans which creates debt which is then traded in the markets
This is still net new money into the market, ergo, the market is not at all zero sum. There is new money flowing into it. That _negates_ the statement that there must be one person losing for every person winning in the stock market, it is not zero sum. Everyone can actually be making money because there is new money being injected (and the opposite can be true when money is net leaving because interest rates are high and everyone is putting their money to cash or bonds instead).
Same thing happens in a Ponzi scheme, everyone can actually be making money while there is new money flowing into the system.
In the example you stated, if a person borrows money against their house, they are moving money away from real estate to the market. Their wealth is net-zero in that scenario, but relative to the market - the market saw a net increase. Thus, the market is not a closed system, it is therefore not by necessity zero-sum - it's possible to have more winners than losers when trading (and/or more losers than winners too)
> If you want to convincingly argue that markets are positive sum you have to demonstrate that markets produce more than they consume in terms of something besides money. E.g. when half of the factory quits to go be day traders, the factory ends up producing more while consuming the same or less.
Yeah, this is what happens with IPO. Oatly is an example, they had a supply crunch, they could not produce enough milk for store shelves. With their IPO money they funded the construction of additional factories to increase their production capacity. I think people forget this, the IPO of a stock is a huge injection of money to a company, as-is whenever the company issues more stock. Amazon is another example, instead of using cash to pay employees, they used stock; which freed up cash to go to other places. Though, post-IPO, shares being traded around is arguably all just rent seeking. A company can still issue more shares too though. This very thing saved both AMC and GME; both of those companies would have gone under if they were not able to raise money by issuing stock.
On the other side, this situation is not always fully pure. Plenty of companies are run by MBAs that give themselves too many shares & their sole goal is to go public so they can offload their holdings rather than grow their company. Still though, the primary reason for stocks to exist is that companies can acquire additional funding without taking out loans, they get that funding by trading ownership. That's still a thing even if there is a lot of other corruption & rent seeking relating to it. Thus, we should not be myopic it, there is more to it.
Cancer is an exploitation of the politics present in human cellular biology. The DNA of what makes us human mammals is molecular capitalism in this analogy. You can dismantle that, but then we would be floating amoebas in the primordial ooze.
What you can do is identify when cells aren't behaving in good faith and punish them appropriately (through chemo etc) and find ways to prevent that behavior from surfacing again (diet / avoiding carcinogens / unknown future solutions).
Agreed, I'm not for dismantling it wholesale, just for being a bit more targeted with our punishments.
That is, I don't think that "the markets are up" is not an adequate indicator of "behaving in good faith". You have to look more closely at the actual outcomes. Whatever is being invested in, does it make life better or worse for the rest of us, etc.
I agree we need more keen punishments, and am annoyed by market value being some coarse indicator for economic health. It's been more morally pleasing to me to see criminal companies and "currencies" collapse in the past few years than it has for me to have seen the general market go up, as long term health depends on excising fraud.
I concur - we as a society have agreed implicitly (since I think around the 1980s) that it’s everyone for themselves so take whatever the hell you can for yourself, consequences be damned. If you’re lucky, you’ll be dead before the world burns and society devolves into chaos.
There are places in the world that is an apt description. The US is closer to that than previously (as judged by effective tax rates on millionaires comparing the 1950s to today), but nonetheless, the US us not "there" yet and still has a ways to go
TL;DR: he argues that he did the same as everyone else on Wall street, so the SEC fines him $285,000, letting him keep more than half a mil of net profits. The system works as intended</sarcasm>
The SEC only found wrongdoing in eleven trades, whose profit netted approx $272K. They did not penalize him for trades not found in violation of the law.
The issue of which particular trades were in violation of the law doesn't appear to be that clear cut:
> Michael Lewis, writing for New York Times Magazine, acknowledges that there were victims who suffered from Lebed’s actions, yet asserts that the SEC only settled because they believed they would not be able to win in court, and that its evidence was not as strong as it had alleged
Our friends pronounced it "carrying around our computer towers and setting up folding tables to play Planetside and Stepmania all night". I think it’s a regional thing.
2002 was actually quite late in the Palm era. The iconic Palm V, for instance, dates back to 1999. And BlackBerry had a mature smartphone by 2002. Nothing compared to an iPhone of course, but quite capable.
[PDF] https://assets.bwbx.io/documents/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/rmMOgPQg...
or coverage from Matt Levine: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-03-21/pump-a...