Once it became clear - just a few seconds after AOC first rage-tweeted about RobinHood refusing to let "the people" trade more shares of $GME and $AMC before adding that she'd support a public hearing on what had just happened - that all the key players in the "WallStreetBets"/"Gamestop" trading saga would soon be dragged in front of Congress like a gaggle of tech CEOs, the newly elected Democrats and their hand-picked economic team were faced with a critical question: who exactly was going to preside over these proceedings on the regulatory side, since they are virtually all compromised by key connections to the financial services industry, and not just the big banks.
Over the past decade, a new category of financial beast has arisen. At Zero Hedge, we have been writing about them for years. They're alternatively called "high frequency traders" "high freaks", and "orderflow frontrunners" for those enjoy speaking the truth, or "market makers" for the political correct, but after the events of last week, millions of people were either asking Google, or their one IBD analyst friend, to explain what 'Citadel' is, and how it works.... the same Citadel which threatened to sue Zero Hedge last June for accusing it of frontrunning orders, just weeks before regulators punished Citadel for frontrunning orders (oops).
Which is a problem because as a reminder, Yellen received almost a million dollars in "speaking fees" in the past two years from the firm that is the quasi-monopoly "market maker" in the US, responsible for half of retail orderflow thanks to its domination of Robinhood trades...
“Separate from the GameStop issue, the secretary of the Treasury is one of the world-renowned experts on markets, on the economy. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone she was paid to give her perspective and advice before she came into office,” Psaki told reporters, ignoring the obvious conflict of interest.
It then got downright surreal, when Psaki implied that it was sexist to mention Yellen’s conflict of interest because she’s a woman.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/our-oligarc...
That’s one of the key takeaways here: these people are far too desperate to be as nefarious as we might think. The more outrageous aspects of the last few months—from Twitter censorship to post-election whiplash—may be best understood not as the first flashes of an ascendant tyranny, but as a flurry of idiotic moves by an elite who clearly have much less faith in their hold on power than we do.
The wild saga of GameStop’s stock adventures over the past week or so is a perfect illustration of the point. When users of the subreddit r/wallstreetbets decided to invest in the video game chain, the price of the stock skyrocketed to peaks well over $400 (six months ago it was closer to $4). The move resulted in jaw-dropping profits for some of the amateur traders—and a whole lot of anger from the Wall Street establishment. Hedge funds and other big-dollar investors who had shorted the stock have lost over $5 billion altogether from the episode. So what did our robust market system do? Simple: citing market volatility, Robinhood and other day-trading services just restricted transactions on GameStop and other WallStreetBets picks. The big funds, meanwhile, were free to continue trading as normal. Besides giving the big guys a chance to get their ducks in a row, the freeze caused the stock to crash on Thursday morning, costing many amateur investors a pretty penny.
It’s corrupt and immoral, and I’d be mad as hell if I’d been smart enough to get in on the GameStop craze. But it’s not the kind of thing that confident oligarchs do. It suggests the same fear that’s motivated so many decisions by people in power these past few months. Not to mention it may spark a backlash that will be well worth watching—and that may yet change our course in surprising ways.
I’m as wary of the Wall Street-Silicon Valley-Washington axis as anyone. But it’s hard to be too afraid of any regime that can be thrown into such a devastating panic by a horde of Redditors buying GameStop stock from laptops in their mothers’ basements—or, for that matter, by a virus, or an election, or the host of The Apprentice.
Robinhood Made Nearly $700 Million By Selling User Data To Hedge Funds
RobinHood is the Facebook of investing. There’s a reason it doesn’t charge you for trades. It sells information about your trades instead. It’s far more lucrative and explains why it’s willing to stop you from trading since you’re not really a customer-just a user/data point
Robinhood has long branded itself as an accessible platform that provides free financial services for its users. Its mission statement includes a pledge to “democratize finance for all.” But the company makes money by selling its order flow — information about user transactions — to third party clients who actually enact trades with access to user data.
Trades may be commission free for Robinhood users but they are actually sold to “market makers” that often used their position as the middle man to generate profit, according to the Financial Times. Most of these “market makers” are hedge funds or other institutional investors that financially benefit from more trade and market volatility.
It’s big customer, by the way—the one it cares about more than you—that’s Citadel, which pays for Robinhood’s order flow. It also happens to be the biggest investor in the hedge fund that just got bankrupted by the Game Stop short squeeze on RobinHood.
Robinhood was fined $65 million by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in December for “misleading statements and omissions” regarding its payment for order flow process. The SEC concluded that Robinhood “deprived” users of $34.1 million after providing their order flow to clients that prioritized higher revenue over providing the best price for customers.
Robinhood’s largest clients for order flow are all hedge funds and other institutional investors according to an SEC filing from 2020. More than half of the company’s market orders were purchased by Citadel Securities — an affiliate of the hedge fund Citadel LLC.
According to SEC filings from 2020, other institutional investors that purchased Robinhood’s order flow included hedge funds G1X Execution Services LLC and Two Sigma Securities LLC along with brokerage firms Wolverine Securities LLC and Virtu Americas LLC.
Robinhood’s terms of service notes that certain content “is furnished by third parties” and specifies that neither the company nor third party provides are liable for damages. The company’s user agreement also requires investors using the app to “authorize or allow third parties” to gain access to services including market data and account information.
Got it , just an observer working for the establishment.
Why you didn’t invest your own $’s if your algo is so good? Other peoples’ money I know.
Is that a real job? HFT is a scam. What about naked short selling (hft by other name )? Making money out of thin air? Selling something you don’t own? You did the hft for that too? What about GME now? 1.8 million missing shares . What your algos will do to the market? Crashing it?
Now the hedge funds are a joke, no? They aren't buying 50 million shares at 30c, nor $100, nor $300, and that's their problem. You can do hft all in nanoseconds - nothing is helping them. PRICE DOESN'T MATTER
How hft algo is helping the hedge funds now? The market will be never be the same , no hft , no newsletters , no apps will save it .
Just try with your own $ and you will learn from practice. Good luck following recommendations. Practice is the best teacher. Now - do you have thousands $’s to learn from your mistakes?
I don’t give any advice. I was probing to see the reaction .
It is amusing to look at postings glorifying the pundits advice. They are not your friend.
Have you actually placed a limit orders? Do you practice this advice with your own $’s?
Do you know how much taxes you pay for a trade considered day trading? If the limit order is executed same day it is considered day trading. What is the point then?
Why retail investors are penalted for that but hedge funds are not? Are you retail trader or on the other side of the table? If so why you are giving advice to retail investors? The motivations?
When I used to follow the pundits “advice” they were always wrong - limited orders were immediately executed. These “fluctuations “ causing execution of limit orders are never reported in the historical data . I used to purchase historical data for thousand $’s and never found these fluctuations in the official dat I saw on the screen. Meaning you can never rely on historical data for analysis. If you had the same experience you would know. Learning from practice I’ve different way of making $’s.
Citadel, 1.8 mill shares missing because of naked short selling, because they are counterfeit, because all hedge funds are doing this , because connect the dots, because the game is rigged, because it is illegal. At the end RH is in the game selling the stock owned by investors without their consent.
https://www.sec.gov/comments/s7-08-09/s70809-407a.pdf
Related:
The Counterfeiting of Shares of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac A. Counterfeiting Stocks Through Electronic Delivery
Naked short selling is cute terminology developed by Wall Street to confuse the fact that this is simply a method of counterfeiting shares of U.S. publicly traded companies. At a speech at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington D.C. on November 16, 2007, former SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt stated, ―Phantom shares created by naked shorting are analogous to counterfeit money.
When I go outside green is the color my eyes are looking for to relax. Also pixels in the white background emit the maximum energy. One reason Apple introduced the dark mode is the pixels to emit mostly the valuable information and save energy , thus saving the battery life.
With Otter it is complicated. It iMac needs the sound to be split but Safari is not allowing it. So they recommend Chrome and changing it’s settings. Then setting up aggregate device. But it is not working. The only way it is working is if the sound is also coming out from the speakers and the microphone is picking it up. Too complicated, there is a feedback and no streaming to the hearing aids. So Zoom + Otter is out of the picture. Teams has the captioning and the best quality. What happens is a lot of companies are demanding in using only Zoom. This is a misters why they just don’t use the link of the Teams invite. If they don’t have it installed it is working from the browser too.
For anybody interested the following equipment works the best:
1) Oticon hearing aids + TV streaming device connected to iMac via audio interface.
It streams the audio from the computer to the hearing aids .
2) Teams + captioning. In order the person needing to see the captioning to see it he has to initiate the meeting and sharing the link. The link never expires and could be saved in Notes from all members of the group. The members of the group needs to share the meeting time via other means for example email , text message.
Compared to Zoom, Google meetups Team has superior video, audio and captioning capabilities.
There are desktop and iOS versions of Teams. No way to use Otter reliably with hearing aid device because it requires Chrome browser and needs physical sound from the speakers to work. Internal networking the sound is not working.
3) Phone calls - CaptionCall. It is free service paid by the FEDeral government. You sign up and receive dedicated phone number which you enter in settings for call forwarding. When you are calling or somebody is calling you CaptionCall is intercepting the call and forwards it for machine learning+ person transcriber. This is the best combination.
4) Messaging across devices -WhastApp. No video or audio captioning in iOS so - using only messaging. Used for announcing Teams meeting.
All other solutions do not do anything to accommodate-WebEx, BlueJeans, etc.
Microsoft is having the best accommodation service - there is dedicated web site with free 24/7 support for people needing accommodation. One Teams account is just $5/month and the support is responding within several hours.