I'm not talking about hindsight or who was right or wrong. Honestly I have no idea how this will continue play out. Anyone who claims they do is misinformed or selling you something. The price went up and down by a huge amount so the lucky will already have big wins. Maybe there will still be more big winners to come or maybe not. Many people seem to have not been aware of what game they were playing and were caught up in hype and frenzy, even here on dear old HN.
This seems similar to "Blackjack was their way out of USA's lowest rungs", and some people made a bunch of money and most people lost a bunch of money.
Exactly my thoughts. This is pure gambling. Lots of people will end up losing money while a small amount of people will make millions from these scams.
This is interesting, but I'm struck by the sheer amount of serious analysis on this topic. It always struck me as very simple requiring no deep understanding.
There's an old saying on wall street, the harder it is to understand the deal the bigger the profit. The truth of this should be self evident. Add to that the fact that the people gambling weren't gambling with their own money. That way if they won then got big bonuses, and if they lost they simply didn't get bonuses. Clearly the only rational action in this situation is to go all in with other people's money.
Is it really that complicated? You wouldn't give your money to someone else and send them to Vegas, tell them to gamble if they win you split the profits, if they lose you lose your money.
You shouldn't invest in things you don't understand, and mind that old wall street saying.
But people do invest in things they don't understand, and pyramid schemes, and tulips, none of this is new. Sure some fancy math was involved this time, but that's only tangential.
I think everyone is concentrating on the fancy math because it's like magic, and then it's not their fault, it's not the same old story of everyone just being stupid again like in .COM 1.0, oh no - It's magic!
An article full of children's words: 'Lost', 'Won', 'Players', 'Game', ..
Nobody will ever convince me that everything is alright with this type of trading, where lottery-style winnings are praised. It's not even about being a shareholder in a company you identify with, it's just about gambling at high stakes. It just shouldn't be this easy to make or lose money. It's the same disregard of reality that caused the investment banks to tumble.
How will we ever get back to sane investments with good intent for the businesses in question?
Most of their losses was in the last 1.5 years. They actually could have been profitable. They are not sustainable because of mismanagement and massively failed bets. “We got greedy but don’t worry, you’ll pay for it” doesn’t have the best ring to it.
As with any Ponzi scheme, real people lost real money -- a proverbial "tax on the math-impaired".
I had friends who went to one, though as I had advised them, they merely observed rather than participated. It was frighteningly cultish. Those who started the groups tended to end up with the money, with the late arrivals losing their shirts.
Good riddance. The majority of it is snakeoil, relabeling and "smoke and mirrors". A lot of smart or lucky people made a lot of money, a lot of dumb people with power over money lost... probably insignificant amounts of it.
neither you nor parent post are absolutely right, of course. In the USA in the 2000 era, a lot of people with the ability to place large betting stakes on the table, using access to market-makers and leveraged buys of all kinds, were able to push around a LOT of money, mostly profitable, for quite a while. The party ended, except it didn't. The same over-leveraged tactics by players with access, except this time against one of the most protected asset classes, homes, almost collapsed the entire system with their excess. There are tomes written about this now, fifteen years later. Its not clean, fair or balanced.
Oh well. We'll see, it might bounce back as these things do.
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