Wall Street Is Keeping Very Close Tabs On WallStreetBets (cnn.com) 53
Registered Coward v2 writes: Wall Street has decided if you can't beat them, at least watch them. They're paying for data that shows which stocks are most talked about on Reddit stock forums, ostensibly to allow them to adjust their positions or take advantage of opportunities to trade based on Reddit. Nothing could go wrong there, since Reddit would decide to seed the data with misinformation, or simply pipe the data into a filter and produce their own free list... Thinknum Alternative Data has a tool that "provides its hedge fund and investment bank clients a ranking of the most-mentioned stocks on WallStreetBets as well as the Stocks subreddit," reports CNN. The platform's pricing "starts at $16,800 per seat per year and goes up from there based on how much data is consumed. Some clients pay six-figures per year for access to the platform."
Nomura and Wolfe Research also recently launched the Wolfe Retail Red Alert basket -- a tool that "analyzes Fidelity, Reddit and other sources of retail trading flows to monitor mentions and trading activity and measure that information against statistics on how heavily shorted stocks are."
Nomura and Wolfe Research also recently launched the Wolfe Retail Red Alert basket -- a tool that "analyzes Fidelity, Reddit and other sources of retail trading flows to monitor mentions and trading activity and measure that information against statistics on how heavily shorted stocks are."
*blinks* I guess someone will buy it. (Score:3, Funny)
Imagine paying $16,800 for some software to watch a bunch of smooth brain apes.
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But it is really, really good software:
I think the phrase you are looking for is "they like the software"
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"You don't have to know who they are and whether they like the stock or not. The main thing is knowing that people are talking about the stock," the Thinknum president said.
That doesn't sound exploitable in any way at all.
Zhen added that demand was so strong for this tool that Thinknum created it in just days last week."
It looks like there's more than one way to sucker people on Wall Street.
Re: *blinks* I guess someone will buy it. (Score:2)
I need to order more popcorn!
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Imagine paying $16,800 for some software to watch a bunch of smooth brain apes.
But it is really, really good software:
"Rather than ascribing intention, Zhen said the tool is used to merely track how many mentions a stock gets on Reddit.
Every time Common F. Sense says "It couldn't possibly get any worse", Society responds with "Hold my beer."
Nothing like turning the already questionable game of speculation into rumor clickbait bullshit. Cue the Troll stocks in 3...2...
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Smooth brain apes who have money. Money that, if you watch what fad they're chasing this week, can become your money.
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I know right.
That's TWICE what I pay for the wife's boyfriendÂs rent so he can live near us.
I shouldn't suggest the moderators are autist retards but they clearly aren't following the language of WSB much. Your comment may not have much information but I still feel a weak informative or funny rating is more appropriate than "troll." Then again moderators don't tend to agree with me! :D
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Imagine paying $16,800 for some software to watch a bunch of smooth brain apes.
It's cheaper than paying a semi-intelligent employee to simply read Reddit all day ...
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I can get paid to read Reddit for rich companies? (Score:3)
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My neighbor is out shoveling horse shit right now. It was 28f here 2 hours ago, it ain't much warmer now. And bright, sunny day (at least we don't get snow here in N Florida).
In 6 months, it will be 80f at sunrise with near 80% humidity and both will go up by a good bit over the day.
"at least it is outside" isn't always the appealing thing it may seem to be....
Re:I can get paid to read Reddit for rich companie (Score:4, Insightful)
"at least it is outside" isn't always the appealing thing it may seem to be....
Sure, but on Reddit there are no good seasons.
Dude it's a RegEx (Score:2)
a losing game (Score:5, Interesting)
since Reddit would decide to seed the data with misinformation, or simply pipe the data into a filter and produce their own free list
This. Absolutely this. Wall Street is opening itself to get fed poison pills. It might get away with ameliorating swings, but it is wide open to a massive and coordinated attack.
I am not a necessarily a fan of WSB (a lot it is just feeding the risk habits of gambling addicts, and the end of this trend won't be pretty.)
But they really changed my mind the way I looked at hedge funds, and to recognize how much they poison the well for their benefit. I'm looking forward to seeing WSB shoving some serious false flags up Wall Street's ass.
Re:a losing game (Score:5, Informative)
Do you honestly think that Wall Street hasn't been doing this for years?
This sort of trading sentiment is exactly what gives them an edge, that they are able to predict what is going to happen before it does, or, more realistically, in a short enough timeframe that they can take advantage of the knowledge. They are scraping all social media, twitter, facebook, you name it. They also (of course) take the more traditional sources like Reuters. They don't just blindly apply this, they have (shock horror) algorithms that determine what to apply, how seriously to take it, and this is the real value, not the source itself.
Re:a losing game (Score:5, Insightful)
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"This sort of trading sentiment is exactly what gives them an edge, that they are able to predict what is going to happen before it does, or, more realistically, in a short enough timeframe that they can take advantage of the knowledge. They are scraping all social media, twitter, facebook, you name it."
They are idiots then. Scraping actual news is one thing but scraping social media is just asking for it to be used as a data injection exploit. The news stream actually is as well but since the stories reach
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The shocking thing is the hedge funds were not taken to cleaners by China, Russia or another hedge fund via Facebook mechanisms, but by the rowdy little brother reddit.
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I'm looking forward to seeing WSB shoving some serious false flags up Wall Street's ass
Yea, yea, whatever. But have you heard how hot Blockbuster [reddit.com] is right now?
Re:a losing game (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing is, this isn't new at all - I worked in the field, ooh, getting to 10 years ago, and they were doing it back then. They weren't stupid enough to use Twitter to give them direct buy/sell signals, but instead they'd use it as a soft signal, and/or a sentiment signal which would perhaps help them understand why something else was moving the way it was.
The only thing here is that WSB was (recently) doing things specifically to inconvenience the traders. Maybe they were watching or maybe they weren't - but you can bet they'll be watching it far more critically than they were before. Even so, I seriously doubt they'll generate any strong signals from any of it.
These sorts of traders may be many things, but they actually don't take risks they don't think they're going to get paid for. They also don't lose money for long before they stop doing whatever it is that lost them money and modify their behaviour. I doubt many of them will get fooled twice, certainly not to the extent they got caught this time around. Those that do... well, you know where you should avoid in your investment decisions ;-)
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Regarding the risk that's another problem I have with WSB.
A bunch of people have been saying and maybe still are that the short squeeze haven't happened yet.
I don't know and I don't know to what extent but I would imagine that if you are a professional at a big place doing these things that you actually have decided before what risk you are fine with and when you head out to limit that and say that both volume peaks actually may have included people short buying back. But I don't know and I'm not them and t
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Ok, so nothing new is going on here. Various entities have been doing this since atleast the 1950s. Back then of course it was more manual and personal. There is a reason why people bought actual seats at the Stock Exchange(s). Once computing got advanced enough, it outpaced the processing and execution that humans can do and humans just offloaded a whole ton of "obvious" decisions via algorithms.
Here, even if the info is invalid, as long as it impacts the actual underlying securities (and more importan
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I don't think WSB is a good place to learn about hedge funds and short selling.
Naked short selling seem to be illegal in the USA and hence the other kind of short selling is borrowing someone's stock and then sell to someone else which doesn't increase the amount of stock.
But sure it resulted in one more stock being sold at a time when someone likely thought the odds was worse than for some other investments at-least and that someone is supposed to buy it back at some other time. If you think the market go
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^^^^
This is essentially an injection attack.
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they have been doing this all along (Score:3)
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These companies haven't suddenly decided to do this, they have been doing it all along. Scraping Twitter, reddit, etc. is just part of the job.
Uh, if that statement were true, care to explain why someone hobbled together this "tool" days ago to sell for $17K a seat?
Re: they have been doing this all along (Score:2)
Clueless people?
Aka the whole reason the rip-off economy, aka Wall Street, exists at all?
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There's a whole raft of possibilities. Perhaps their customers are recent entrants to this type of trading and don't want the expense of building out their own tools. Or perhaps their customers are not happy with their in house tools and want to outsource development to this company. Perhaps the article is just marketing spin and they don't have any customers.
Or perhaps the Russians are behind it. Seems to be a fashionable fabrication these days.
Not sure why we're worried about speculation in the stock market. Speculation has seemingly infected everything, thanks to Greed infecting journalism and turning it into a steaming hot pile of clickbait bullshit that we must wade through every time and hope we find facts or truth.
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I heard (Score:4, Funny)
So now, (Score:2)
not only is the economy a Ponzi scheme, increasingly it's a house of cards as well. Or maybe its inherent stability and flakiness are just becoming more visible with each passing year.
Re: So now, (Score:2)
You wanted a free market economy for dinner.
Now eat your freakin' soup.
I see (Score:3)
" Nothing could go wrong there, since Reddit would decide to seed the data with misinformation, "
Or the traders just could _talk_ about investing in stuff an thereby ruining the bankers without risking a single dime.
who wins, who loses? (Score:2)
Judging by the carnage in GME, it looks like Wall Street absolutely can beat them.
Keeping up with the news and having information (Score:2)
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The image of the traders shouting at a frantic trading floor isn't a complete lie, it's just dated. They started disappearing in the 80s, as computers took over.
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So what. (Score:1)
Just shows how pathetic the whole thing is. (Score:2)
A financial market ... Influencing the actual lives and livelyhoods of literally billions of people ... Staring at a freakin' *meme generator* for guidance . . .
What a joke...
A little late to the party (Score:2)
I'm hoping it looks like a stock ticker (Score:2)
But memes scroll by
Pretty high price- (Score:2)
But it's ok, my wifes boyfriend is loaded.