Today, a group of Wall Street hedge funds are acting like Graham on steroids in the face of a growing group of small investors who have awakened to the power of peer-to-peer communications made possible by social media. (More on peer-to-peer communications below.) In this particular case these small investors seem to be winning hand after hand by pledging much of their savings—in some cases their total life savings—to another risky but decidedly much more political proposition: Beating Wall Street hedge funds at their own game by forcing losses on them for bets the hedge funds have made against a down-on-its-luck retail chain called GameStop and other companies. The focus, however, has been on GameStop which specializes in video games and equipment which increasingly can be purchased online. Another blow to GameStop has been the ongoing pandemic which has kept people out of its retail stores.
The small investors, emboldened by an online Reddit group called WallStreetBets, have so far inflicted nearly $20 billion in losses on their arch short-selling foes as the stock price of GameStop has rocketed from about $17 a share on January 4 to $325 a share on Friday. The stock sold for under $4 a share as recently as July 31. On January 25 the stock closed at $76.79 a share. Two days later it closed at $347.51.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Marketwatch: Commentary Censorship
February 2, 2021
Marketwatch: Commentary Censorship
Yesterday (February 1, 2021), MarketWatch published an article on why the short squeeze on silver being discussed by some on WallStreetBets/Reddit would be short-lived. Having read a number of articles on the issue it was not difficult to identify some misleading/faulty statements in the article. I sent a comment through to point out these inconsistencies in the article only to receive a message back that my comment “has been rejected as it contains content that is in breach of our community guidelines.”
Here is the comment:
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Some misleading and missing ‘facts’ in this story.
First, the gold-to-silver price ratio is not ‘historically’ 60-1. That is only a relatively recent ratio. Historically, the ratio is about 15:1. (https://www.mining.com/web/alert-gold-silver-ratio-spikes-highest-level-27-years/)
Second, the argument that the WallStreetBets/Reddit crowd is justifying its position based on the industrial use of silver in electronics/technology is only partially accurate. Several others justifications have been forwarded: the ratio of silver mined to gold mined is even lower than the price ratio, about 8 ounces of silver to every 1 ounce of gold (https://www.jmbullion.com/investing-guide/james/silver-supply/); and, most importantly, there are 100s of paper ounces of silver to every actual physical ounce in existence, so taking physical deliver, as many are suggesting, will expose the fraud that is the precious metals market (https://www.goldbroker.com/news/paper-silver-market-250-times-size-physical-silver-market-526#:~:text=This%20would%20mean%20that%2C%20for,circulating%20in%20several%20financial%20products.)
And finally, many simply want to expose the fraud and manipulation by the Big Banks that has been going on for ages. (https://www.reuters.com/article/jp-morgan-spoofing-penalty/jpmorgan-to-pay-920-million-for-manipulating-precious-metals-treasury-market-idINKBN26K325)
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The community guidelines are fairly extensive, but I can find no where in my comment where I was in breach of them, except maybe “excessive links to external websites”; but is 4 excessive?
Blatant censorship? It seems so to me.