OT: Dogecoin

[PlayerUp]

Anyone buying should be aware that one account is holding 16 billion USD worth of DOGE currently which is on or around 30% of the total market cap right now and he can pull out anytime he wants to.

https://bitinfocharts.com/dogecoin/address/DH5yaieqoZN36fDVciNyRueRGvGLR3mr7L

Pretty sure it's been determined that account is actually Robinhood.

Sent from my SM-S115DL using RealGM mobile app

They say otherwise

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/a-25-billion-dogecoin-whale-lurks-but-robinhood-ceo-says-we-dont-have-significant-positions-in-any-of-the-coins-we-keep-11620326508

[aguifs]

Mark Cuban and Elon Musk trolling the world.

They probably made a lot of money the past weeks...

They should spend some time in jail

[aguifs]

fugly...
Musk spent weeks with the DOGE hype. Then, suddenly, he becomes eco concerned? He knows from day one Bitcoin mining is not eco friendly.

[R3AL1TY]

Guys like Musk are trying to use their celebrity status to dictate what coin they can make quick money off of while buyers are falling for the hype too late. Musk also said this about not accepting Bitcoin anymore, "We are also looking at other cryptocurrencies that use less than one percent of bitcoin’s energy." I won't be surprise if he mentions some Proof of Stake coin in the near future for people to jump on, but if he isn't selling Tesla cars with it, it will just be another "flavor of the month" coin him and other billionaires will sell short on.

[HomoSapien]

Doge is down a ton right now, but it always ends up rebounding in a week or two and usually hits a new high in the process.

I'm making no assertion of what will or will not happen with Doge coin, but the concept that thinking you can spot a trend by eyeballing it and thinking that you can make future predictions based on that trend is really, really bad.

My opinion isn't coming from eyeballing, it's coming from investing in it for the past 6 months. Do I think this will keep rising infinitely to Bitcoin levels? No. But I do think that until we hit a dollar, you will continue to see the trend of big surges (we're in the middle of one today) followed by huge drop-offs and panic selling that'll allow people to buy back in. Tesla's on the verge of accepting it and Coinbase announced yesterday that they'll be incorporating Doge into their platform in 6-8 weeks. The Robinhood Wallet is also on its way. Doge will be hitting a dollar within a few months.

[CaPiTanAK]

I bought Matic at .35-37 a month ago. Now, up quite a ton while everyone is chasing the next hot meme crypto.

Rule 1 of crypto is to prep for the pump to come to you, and not chase the pump.

Oh, I do expect a meme crypto blow up very soon like we did with the whole EV car making and battery making companies.

[R3AL1TY]

[aguifs]

Fu it!!!! I'm buying some SHIBA!!!


Friggin Elon Musk and Mark Cuban! I'll go with the other dog!!!

[stepic]

Doge is down a ton right now, but it always ends up rebounding in a week or two and usually hits a new high in the process.

I'm making no assertion of what will or will not happen with Doge coin, but the concept that thinking you can spot a trend by eyeballing it and thinking that you can make future predictions based on that trend is really, really bad.

My opinion isn't coming from eyeballing, it's coming from investing in it for the past 6 months. Do I think this will keep rising infinitely to Bitcoin levels? No. But I do think that until we hit a dollar, you will continue to see the trend of big surges (we're in the middle of one today) followed by huge drop-offs and panic selling that'll allow people to buy back in. Tesla's on the verge of accepting it and Coinbase announced yesterday that they'll be incorporating Doge into their platform in 6-8 weeks. The Robinhood Wallet is also on its way. Doge will be hitting a dollar within a few months.

it can't sustain itself. it has unlimited supply. it will collapse on itself once the social media hype around it ends.

far better to invest in coins with actual utility, and/or scarcity. btc, ada, polygon, dot.

[InsideInfo]

In feb i owned 208,426 doge coins. I paid $5,600 for them and sold them for just over 10k.

At the time of this post that amount of DC is worth $133k

It hurts me to think about it..

Roughly doubling your money is still awesome. Hurts that it wasn't better, but never feel too bad about doubling your money.

Yeah i am over it.. it was just such a shock to see it hit 6 figures.

Hope you have been well Doug.

[aguifs]

The doggies frenzy isn't over yet.

We had Doge, Shiba... and now Kishu! Kishu got 150k holders in 40 days I think...

I read about a guy making 6 millions from investing $ 17 in Shiba...

Kishu is way too cheap. Probably there's a lot of people trying to hit jackpot

Thanks Elon and Mark Cuban

[dice]

robinhood owners now billionaires in large part due to disingenuous marketing and skimming customers:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/04/robinhood-gamestop-free-trades-alex-kearns/

“The fact that we’re a brokerage leads people to think that a service like Robinhood should exist to make money,” Tenev said at the conference. “But that’s really not the case. The purpose of Robinhood is to make buying and selling stocks as frictionless as possible. If we make money as a side effect of that, that’s great.”

[Chi town]

robinhood owners now billionaires in large part due to disingenuous marketing and skimming customers:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/04/robinhood-gamestop-free-trades-alex-kearns/

“The fact that we’re a brokerage leads people to think that a service like Robinhood should exist to make money,” Tenev said at the conference. “But that’s really not the case. The purpose of Robinhood is to make buying and selling stocks as frictionless as possible. If we make money as a side effect of that, that’s great.”

Good read. Thanks for posting. Sad for Alex and his family.

The greed, lying, and cheating of Wall Street is disgusting.

[PlayerUp]

robinhood owners now billionaires in large part due to disingenuous marketing and skimming customers:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/04/robinhood-gamestop-free-trades-alex-kearns/

“The fact that we’re a brokerage leads people to think that a service like Robinhood should exist to make money,” Tenev said at the conference. “But that’s really not the case. The purpose of Robinhood is to make buying and selling stocks as frictionless as possible. If we make money as a side effect of that, that’s great.”

Good read. Thanks for posting. Sad for Alex and his family.

The greed, lying, and cheating of Wall Street is disgusting.

It's much worse than people realize. We only hear about a fraction of what happens as well.

[CaPiTanAK]

Wait until you hear about high frequency trading computers near the trading floor to skim off cents on established orders and make billions

[Michael Jackson]

Wait until you hear about high frequency trading computers near the trading floor to skim off cents on established orders and make billions

Richard Pryor was doing this back in Superman.

[dougthonus]

Wait until you hear about high frequency trading computers near the trading floor to skim off cents on established orders and make billions

I worked in the HFT area for a long time, this doesn't really happen, at least not in the way you are describing it.

HFTs generally aren't dealing with retail orders and don't have an ability to front run them and have pretty tight regulations about how they manage them. HFTs are often market makers providing a bid/ask at all times, and they do make the spread between the bid/ask if they are making transactions equivalently on both sides of the market, but they also take considerable risk. Since HFTs became market makers, the spread between the bid/ask has gotten much smaller which benefits retail consumers.

Even looking at this article, Robinhood is selling its orders to Citadel whom can offer better prices than what is commonly available and keeps the difference, but so what? How much do you think Citadel is price improving a typical order by? 1 cent? 2 cents? Trade commissions used to literally be 100s of dollars, and up until recently they were still like $8, acting like citadel/robinhood making cents per share on transactions through price improvement as some hugely illicit activity is kind of nuts on the surface and shows somewhat of a misunderstanding of the market.

Yes of course Robinhood/Citadel/whomever is going to make some money here for providing the service for you, it isn't all free, the question is just whether they're making a reasonable amount of money or overcharging or lying, but the article says they are improving prices that are quoted, so it sure feels like they are well within reason.

Front running orders was actually a much worse problem prior to HFTs being in business because the main traders were also the people collecting hte orders and they did so over phone and had plenty of time to do so.

It's not to say that the industry is entirely clean in all ways, but the existence and competitiveness of HFTs with each other generally provides retail consumers with better prices not worse ones. They also massively increase liquidity in the market which should generally equate (though not always) to better price stability too.

[dice]

Wait until you hear about high frequency trading computers near the trading floor to skim off cents on established orders and make billions

I worked in the HFT area for a long time, this doesn't really happen, at least not in the way you are describing it.

HFTs generally aren't dealing with retail orders and don't have an ability to front run them and have pretty tight regulations about how they manage them. HFTs are often market makers providing a bid/ask at all times, and they do make the spread between the bid/ask if they are making transactions equivalently on both sides of the market, but they also take considerable risk. Since HFTs became market makers, the spread between the bid/ask has gotten much smaller which benefits retail consumers.

Even looking at this article, Robinhood is selling its orders to Citadel whom can offer better prices than what is commonly available and keeps the difference, but so what? How much do you think Citadel is price improving a typical order by? 1 cent? 2 cents? Trade commissions used to literally be 100s of dollars, and up until recently they were still like $8, acting like citadel/robinhood making cents per share on transactions through price improvement as some hugely illicit activity is kind of nuts on the surface and shows somewhat of a misunderstanding of the market.

Yes of course Robinhood/Citadel/whomever is going to make some money here for providing the service for you, it isn't all free, the question is just whether they're making a reasonable amount of money or overcharging or lying, but the article says they are improving prices that are quoted, so it sure feels like they are well within reason.

Front running orders was actually a much worse problem prior to HFTs being in business because the main traders were also the people collecting hte orders and they did so over phone and had plenty of time to do so.

It's not to say that the industry is entirely clean in all ways, but the existence and competitiveness of HFTs with each other generally provides retail consumers with better prices not worse ones. They also massively increase liquidity in the market which should generally equate (though not always) to better price stability too.

the article also says they were fined tens of millions of dollars for illicit practices. and as most people familiar with the regulatory system know, politicians are lobbied to keep such fines low. they are pretty much considered a cost of doing business

[dougthonus]

the article also says they were fined tens of millions of dollars for illicit practices. and as most people familiar with the regulatory system know, politicians are lobbied to keep such fines low. they are pretty much considered a cost of doing business

It would be good to know what the illicit practices were. 10s of millions of dollars is a really small fine in the HFT industry for a company the size of citadel. Tt could be politicians keeping them small if Biden hasn't unwound Trump's large push towards deregulation of the industry.

We had to deal with a lot of regulatory fines, and all of our fines were over reporting issues that were honest/technical mistakes but weren't actual malfeasance. The fines in the Obama era had real teeth and were going off the charts if you had any repeat issues. Trump came in and killed all of teeth of the regulators though. I was only there for about half the Trump era, but I don't know if we got fined again while he was in office.

The article quoted that over four years, Robinhood should have given users a grand total of 34.1M more in price improvements than they did if they had instead charged them $5 per trade instead of free trades. Of course the number 34.1M is hard to quantify, because while 8.5M per year sounds low but I'm not sure how many users they had.

I'm not saying Robinhood was a great company to work with or cared about its users. They very well may have been predatory, and at the very least weren't honest about the fact that while they weren't charging you commission on trades they were hitting you another way and that they were more expensive than other brokers potentially. At the same time, I don't think it represents malfeasance or poor acting by the HFT industry as a whole. Again, prior to HFTs, commissions on trades averaged over $100 a trade. Even Robinhood is probably getting dinged for effectively charging something like $10, but the real problem is the lack of transparency.

My larger problem with Robinhood was their willingness to approve people for highly leveraged positions which require considerable trading experience to manage properly, and they clearly approved people that had no business being approved.

To the extent there are issues in HFT industry, I don't think they're really around front running customers and costing them tons of money. If there are issues, they're probably more around price manipulation through block trades / options etc...