you don't have to read WSB, somebody else already do the legwork https://www.coindesk.com/wall-street-bets-futures-dogecoin-ftx
FTX Cryptocurrency Derivatives Exchange announced in a blog post that they have launched trading for a basket of WallStreetBets favorites. Companies included in the index are some of Reddit crowd’s most-beloved stocks, including GameStop Corp., AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., Nokia Oyj and BlackBerry Ltd. The exchange will also offer exposure to iShares Silver Trust.
FTT was already mentioned by a few politicians last week and they did so publicly. AOC's twitter feed has talk of this. Defazio already took the liberty of resubmitting a FTT bill early this year with more cosigners than he's ever had in his decade + long pursuit of one. We know most of the Democrat candidates advocated for it on the campaign trail. All they need is the "proper" excuse to say, "the time has come to end this rampant speculation and unproductive activities..."
Here's the twist though: with the EU unable to pass a FTT for years and not likely to be able to any time soon, US politicians may want to "lead the way." The thinking being that if the US does it, everyone else will fall in line leaving no where for traders to go to avoid it. It's a calculated risk on the US politicians part because the EU would likely not implement it or implement it at lower rates with more exemption carve outs and take it as a chance to regain the financial leadership it once enjoyed nearly a century ago.
As for US implementation of an FTT, stock volume will of course dry up. But the latest proposals by several politicians with regards to futures does not base the tax on the notational value, but rather on cash flows. A far better way to go about it and far less disruptive than stock's equivalent. They also do not tax currency spot trades. Take that as the tarnished silver lining that it is.
This is all speculation as to what comes next as a result of any fallout from this clever pump&dump ("buy-buy-buy! Diamond hands! Hold-hold-hold! To the moon! Apes together Strong!"). New regulation may simply ban short selling. There are enough synthetics (derivatives) available to take up the slack. So it wouldn't be the end of the world. But such a ban would likely introduce new problems - dark pools of synthetic short derivatives. And we'd be right back to 2008. And it signals a fundamental change in mindset with regards to free markets.
BTW reading through the wsb reddit this weekend, it is cray cray . I've heard the word "cult" tossed around the past many years with respect to many stocks but that's literally what gme is to these peeps. They are seriously talking about a 4 and 5 figure price. I don't do predictions but I felt safe good ng out on a limb here and saying I don't see it. I've been VERY wrong before and may be here. This is not investment advice!
Silver is a big product and futures are not available on Robinhood and some of other platforms traders use on WSB. We will see what happens in the morning when NY opens.
Robert
nosce te ipsum
You make your own opportunities in life.
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Good Break Down Of the Institutional BagHolder Strategy that has been one of their Bread and Butter profit centers since the beginning of trading.
also... WSB (Wall Street Bets Reddit Group) has a number of posts NOT agreeing with or supporting the SLV squeeze... This is because a large number of the WSB group do NOT want to dilute their buying firepower which helps them to stay long GME and other over shorted stocks they have targeted.
I think many WSBs are aiming for a target of 1000 on GME?
GME already hit 500+ over night a few days ago... but i am not sure now if the short interest has declined since then after the broker BS which makes the $1000 dollar target a bit out of range now ?
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This morning I sold Apr16 310.0 straddles on GME for $343, so I make profit anywhere in between -33 and +653 by April expiration. Implied vol was about 400% at the time. It seemed like free money just sitting there for the taking. I wanted to do this trade last week, which would have been an even better trade, but IB wouldn't allow it until today.
And thanks for the run-up in silver, I've been long PAAS since last spring as an inflation trade. I don't see SLV or any other silver ETFs being able to run up like GME. The CME can raise margin reqs on silver futures, which would curtail buying of the underlying commodity. Plus, the ETFs can issue new shares willy nilly if they need to so there's practically an unlimited supply of shares that can be made available.
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I would think there's no way the price goes above 653. Of course, at beginning at January I would have said "no way GME goes above 100" and yet here we are.
Crazy times.
I hope it works out for you!
Kevin
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Broker: Primary Advantage Futures. Also ED&F and Tradestation
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Only other time I have ever seen the premium on straddle be greater than the strike of the straddle is in the power markets. Be interesting to know how IB Margin you on this position. They have a reputation for being very harsh on things like this.
Of course if GME does go to $653, the price of $650 calls will probably be more than you got for the straddle!
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Currently, the margin for the straddle at IB amounts to 12,300 USD (expiry April 16th as in the example, Strike 250 as current price). Price of the straddle is 280 USD.
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I don't see any empirical evidence of that when I look at my footprint chart. The only thing I do see is the weekend gap. There were people on social media showing that they were going around town and buying all the silver they could, and that everyone was out. Physical suppliers would obviously be scrambling to get more at that point. So market makers saw what was going on and appropriately opened the market at a higher price. There was plenty of volume at that new higher price so I'd say the market makers acted appropriately.
Doesn't mean it will continue. I liked the metals trade before all of that though. They've stumbled at key points along the way, but the day to day action over there suggests there's definitely a good number of bulls in that market trying to break out to the upside.
Now contrast this with GME that traded 35m shares today. Pretty pathetic compared to the 175m they were trading last week. The RobinHood hault has definitely stalled this market. Today there was some selling off the S3 report that the number of shorts dropped. However, I'm not sure how accurate their model really is. We don't get official data until Feb 9th. Until then I can't really know what's going on under the surface. I just find it awfully hard to believe that last Wed there was a record number of shorts, and then in the days since when the volume has been barely anything they somehow covered it all. Clearly the data we get in retail on this sort of thing is neither current nor reliable.
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I dunno if it's just ignorance, some form of dis-info, or just trying to turn something into a story.... but the narrative in the media is interesting.
The hottest posts on reddit are telling people to NOT buy silver. See below:
2021-02-01_194521
However if you were to get all your info from the MSM, the message is all about a short squeeze put on by wsb: 2021-02-01_194815
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All weekend we’ve been reading how Reddit readers are now going to “squeeze” the shorts out of silver to spike prices. But that rationalization makes no sense because there aren’t many speculative shorts in the silver market. In fact, Large Speculators are net-long 33% of total open interest, as shown on the chart. The weighty discussions in the media about the meaning of this group or that group relative to a market move is silly.
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I exited the trade this morning. I had achieved about a 20% return on the initial premium collected in three days, on a contract expiring > 70 days. The IV had dropped from 400% to 270%, and the puts were so far ITM that delta was starting to kick in against me, and there wasn't much premium left on the calls, and I don't think it's going to go back up anywhere near 310, which is where my max profit levels are achieved, so I just took the money and ran. At 270% IV there might be another trade I can do here to take advantage of more down-side. Stay tuned...
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For what it is worth I analyzed Gamestock using my new indicators to identify changes in buyer and seller behaviors over time rather than in the 10 days of very high volatility when GME became top of mind for some traders. the different time frames were chosen so volatility did not distort the scaling so much.
Some initial interpretations suggest the buying activity occurred over the previous 10 days before prices peaked.
The first chart below shows selling pressure as indicated by my Six Paths accumulating marginal change in net buying and selling volume per bar recounted with 30-day periodicities over two years that reflects the main selling or shorting activities, Shorting probably started about February 2019 and finished about early August 2019. Thereafter there was a period of absorption where prices did not rise or fall too much. Dow Theory might have suggested it was a Line Pattern. The absorption finished about mid-August 2020 when the supposed small trader (or hidden counter-trend Smart Money traders) created buying activity which took off with a four or five-fold increase in price. Your indicators if you were following GME, which I wasn't) should have been fluttering the flags (something was amiss). Much earlier than 10-days before the eventual astronomical peak was achieved.
The second chart shows the next few days and the problem of scaling the indicators over the last 6 months. That is where I believe some pundits (who may not have a clue) suggest the buying activity started.
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I was lucky to some extent playing this GME. I played it based on price action only. I had no idea of what was happening underneath. I did zero research.
I have a couple of indicators I built which I use for my trading entries and exits (see TOS chart below). Someone, in one of TOS trading groups pointed out that GME was about to do a double bottom, around the end of March 2020. I kept an eye on GME for nearly 2 weeks using my indicators, (a cyan colored bar above or crossing the solid line is a fairly good signal). Hence, I bought 100 shares at $4.55, to test the waters, on April 10, 2020. My stop is usually below the solid colored line.
On August 18, 2020 the solid line had become yellow and the bar was cyan. So I added 200 shares to the account at $5.12.
I took profits (sold 200 shares at $16.06) on November 23, 2020 because I noticed it was hitting some resistance area.
My indicators insisted that I should continue LONG, so I purchased the 200 share again on December 14 at $14.08. I then trailed 200 shares below the solid colored line.
On January 27, 2021, on the huge gap up, I sold 200 shares at $343.09. The next day I sold 75 shares at 250. On February 1st I sold 20 shares at $223.00.
I still have 5 shares for fun of it. Lesson: short squeezes do not last long.
Again, the luck part was someone pointing out the price action and then the huge eventual move up.
Last night the short interest numbers from last week were made public, and it was quite the mess. Not only did the numbers come out late, but they weren't provided in the same format that everyone had been watching. So people started reporting 78% short, and I saw a ton of activity on Twitter of people saying it's not over.
However, when you really get into it they are reporting about 20m shares short which is in line with the decline reported in the S3 and Ortex numbers that started the decline in GME. The only reason the percentage number is high because they are using a new much lower number for the float.
This morning I see GME mostly treading water as the rest of the market takes a nasty hit following TSLA lower. It seems to me that there's a number of retail traders buying it because they misread the short interest numbers. As far as I'm concerned the squeeze is over, and I don't think this will go well for the people still hanging on.
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I searched the thread for the domain and didn't see it in the results, so some people may still be interested in this website, isthesqueezesquoze dot com. It seems to have updates on the last short interest numbers, however, the last update was Feb 8.
Also, perhaps for those interested in a similar type of short squeeze play, I came across this "What Might Be the Next GME?" page s3partners dot com/thenextgme.html (no relation to either website)
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Big Mike... Do You Think What the CEO of Interactive Brokers said is even close to the truth or more like he is trying to distract the many critics of his company, and those of RobinHood, from the 'FACT' Interactive Brokers changed the rules, in the middle of the game, for many small retail traders trading GME during the critical days of the successful short squeeze of GME in Late Jan 2021 ?
Like... The US Multi Trillion Dollar Equity System can survive 2008/2009 crash and the Feb/March 2020 crash... But somehow a Small Cap stock war between Hedges and Retailers can 'Take The System Down' ?
Not Buying It
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It's kind of sad to me. Along with this GME incident, and past covid year, there's been that surge of new retailer interest in the markets and new aspiring traders. Unfortunately I think many of them may get caught up in some of the modern vendor scammery , where too many will miss tradingschools.org and this forum and being informed. And only few of them seemingly will ever consider futures other than trying to scalp the stock market or hit it big with the wsb farce. I'm glad at least OTA and RagingBull were taken down by the FTC (and tradingschools) since last year, but there are still many many other snakeoil pits.
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