Savings and Investments thread

golfaddick said:

SELR_addicks said:

kentaddick said:

NASDAQ ceo now saying they might halt trading for a couple of weeks so bigger investors can adjust their positions. 

Must be time for people to start using decentralised exchanges and tokenised stocks after this, surely?

Hopefully people now see how rigged the game is. 

It's all fake but only the people in power are allowed to make money. Redistribution of wealth to the masses needs to be stopped. 

Doesn't bother me. That's life & its how some people make their money. We all benefit from it by an increase in our pensions, ISA's and other savings. If you don't like the system then don't play the game.
 

And how do you not play the game, move into Siberia with a tent, a goat and some seeds? Might not bother you cos you've got a good job, a house and enough food to live but not everyone has that. "the game" isn't working for them

Rothko said:

Supposedly Robinhood are going to allow buys on those stocks again tomorrow. But I suspect they’ve blown there business to pieces in the last 8 hours 

If you have everyone on the left and the right coming after you, you know you've fucked up

I know some find Zero Hedge a bit marmite but this is a good summary 

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/you-can-not-purchase-additional-shares-robinhood-reportedly-removed-shuts-down-buying

The issue that the Reddit thing has thrown up is not a straight forward David and Goliath story.

It's been a concern ever since markets went electronic.  In the 'good old days', markets were closed shops and the people who had direct access had huge advantages to cream off money, so long as they followed sensible trading disciplines (i.e. I'm not saying it's easy being a trader).  That's still largely true in equity markets.  Although the market talks about 'compressing margins' a cursory look at the profits of stockbrokers and asset managers tells you there's plenty of out size profits being made .

The quid pro quo was that they had to follow market rules and their reputation for fair and honest dealing was important if they were going to be allowed to get into (and, most importantly) get out again.  Traders had to prove competency, put up minimum capital requirements, etc.  This was to enable an 'orderly market', without which trust would break down and the market would die.

When we started building electronic markets (mid to late 90s) it threw up a number of dilemmas.  On one side were people like me, arguing that it would ultimately bring huge liquidity, better prices, democratise markets and dis-intermediate the middle men and it was a GOOD THING.

On the one hand you had vested interests who didn't want to be dis-intermediated (easy to ignore) but you also had regulators that saw that they would lose a vital control over who was doing what in the market and that they 'would know who was ultimately at the end of the wire' (more troubling but we just thought they were dinosaurs and just didn't 'get it').  Fortunately (!), people like me didn't know anything about markets, their history or the risks we were introducing at the time - we were just the IT guys - and we pushed on.

The regulatory solution we came up with was the 'responsible trader' (we all had a good laugh about that oxymoron and the term is back, with Brexit) and automated price controls (what the US, when they finally cottoned on to their necessity many years later, call 'circuit breakers').  The idea was that the central market had lost some of its ability to monitor and control the market and that the regulator would have to hold the market participants more to account.  

If Mrs Mop propped her cleaning device on the table, hit the enter button and accidentally bought 1,000,000 BP shares, it was going to be down to whoever had logged that computer on and left it vulnerable.  Ditto, if he was funnelling toxic and laundered money through his 'login'.  Now the market couldn't record them physically trading on the floor, the regulator needed access to any and all communication devices.

The central market (if there was one) would still have the responsibility to run an orderly market and the price controls allowed market officials time to check that the market was running in an orderly fashion and decide whether to re-open the market, back out erroneous trades or shut it down, e.g. a company had gone insolvent.

So, over the last few days the 'brokers' were arguing they were following their responsibility to not put through 'erroneous' trades and the exchanges are arguing the same.  That's a moot point - are the shares being ramped, which is ultimately not good for the integrity of the market and will undermine it and therefore should be prevented- or are 'investors' taking a view on future prospects?  Also, are these guys foremost brokers - merely earning commissions on trades - are are they disguised market makers, like the spread betters?

As Benjamin Graham famously said, "in the short term the market is a voting machine, in the long term, it's a weighting machine."  The market supervisors have to take a view on the long term integrity of the market and protect EVERYONE from market manipulation.

What hasn't helped was the demutualisation of the exchanges, particularly in the US, which has driven profit motive (volumes) over regulatory concerns.

Now, you can argue that the 'big boys' have been manipulating markets at the expense of the little guys for years and I would totally agree.  But the answer is to hold the big boys to account, not allow the wild west.

As they say on Seeking Alpha, in the mean time, I am long HL, JUP, CMCX, IGG ....

kentaddick said:

PragueAddick said:

Posting some tweets from a smart young Czech guy I follow. He's usually on the money. My own take: as I suspected, a lot of people are buying stuff without really knowing or even thinking about what they are buying - which is also my problem with crypto - and many of the same people buying both. When that happens, people get stiffed. The little people, that is..

https://twitter.com/jilm/status/1355040615361372161?s=20

https://twitter.com/jilm/status/1355041504650256386?s=20

https://twitter.com/jilm/status/1355082752035532801?s=20

if you buy dogecoin you deserve to lose your money.

bitcoin dips 20% = see i was right! It's a bubble!

bitcoin pumps 20% = see i'm right! It's a bubble! 

Rubbish, DOGE is the future. Made me 3.5k in 24hrs 

For those of you who want to understand what's going on in the blockchain world or to demystify it a little, I recommend the following, written by a good friend of mine, Keith Bear. 

https://etf.invesco.com/sites/default/files/Hyper-real-global-blockchain-industry-trends-Whitepaper.pdf

balham red said:

FTSE is falling like a stone. Anyone want to give me some hope it might recover soonish?

It'll recover soonish*

*sometime in the next 5 years

  

I wouldn't worry, markets go up and down, maybe invest more!

balham red said:

FTSE is falling like a stone. Anyone want to give me some hope it might recover soonish?

only back to where it started the month

balham red said:

Rob7Lee said:

balham red said:

FTSE is falling like a stone. Anyone want to give me some hope it might recover soonish?

It'll recover soonish*

*sometime in the next 5 years

  

I wouldn't worry, markets go up and down, maybe invest more!

Can't invest more as I've put it all in FTSE ETF!

It could still go down some more before it goes up but depends on your time horizon.  I'm pretty confident that, even in a year, it will be higher.  Realistically, if you invest in equities you have to look 5 years.  

At some point the vaccines will kick in, the economy will start and the market will pick up again. If you try to time it, you may well miss the best days.  If you'd drip fed in, you'd be in s slightly better position.

balham red said:

FTSE is falling like a stone. Anyone want to give me some hope it might recover soonish?

It will right itself quite soon. In a few months time you'll wonder what the worry was all about. Earlier this afternoon it was back down to pre-xmas levels.......and so by Easter it will back up to 6850 again. Swings & roundabouts but I'm expecting it to be going upwards more than downwards.