A lot of Redditors hate the Reddit IPO | Reddit warned us that its users were a risk factor, and boy do they sound excited about shorting its stock.::Reddit seems like a likely candidate for a meme stock. But the actual reaction suggests that r/WallStreetBets isn’t going to send the stock to the moon.

283 points

Reminder that shorting is a high risk play and you should never make investment decisions out of spite.

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231 points

The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

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34 points

Holy shit put that on a t-shirt

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91 points

A reminder that the stock market and any kind of high level money market of any kind including digital money … is a rich man’s game where poor are by design destined to lose.

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21 points

This is a gross over simplification. Yes, rich people can have higher risk tolerance, but that doesn’t mean people shouldn’t be going long on index funds and otherwise safe, low risk investments for retirement with what they can afford to.

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14 points

Yes, rich people can have higher risk tolerance

It’s not just risk tolerance. The very rich can manipulate the market in ways that the poor can’t.

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11 points

And then listen to every asshole yell ‘but think of their retirements!!1!’ when the stock market shits itself.

Fuck this system. It’s original intent is way long gone, and we should stop pretending it’s helping anyone but the rich.

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7 points

Yeah, well even some rich people are bored redditors.

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62 points
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Instructions unclear, purchased Lemmy stock using Amazon gift cards

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46 points
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¡Alert! Your Lemmy account may be suspended in 2 days unless you send Google Play gift card codes to me right now!

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44 points

Ohh dear

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17 points

Sorry, I only have Steam Gift cards… 😕

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11 points

Kitboga, this you?

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53 points

100%, this is a trap being set for retail investors… not touching this even if I had a 1000ft pole.

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24 points

What if you had a 1001ft pole?

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13 points

That’s the whacking pole

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9 points

If I had a 1001 foot pole I wouldn’t be browsing Lemmy on a Saturday night.

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8 points

Then it would be called buying puts instead of shorting

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37 points

Playing the stock market at all is a form of gambling. You should never gamble money you aren’t completely willing to lose.

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19 points

And with shorting there’s no upper limit to what you can lose.

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-7 points

Not true

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10 points

I think this company is deeply and uniquely incompetent and will never deliver on its objectives.

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10 points

To quote XKCD’s “Engineer Syllogism”:

  1. I am good with numbers and math.

  2. The stock market is mostly numbers and math.

  3. Therefore, I would be – wait, where did all my money go?

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2 points

Second premise is false

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2 points

No shit Sherlock

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5 points

It will be about a week until options come out. A put option simulates renting 100 shares of a stock over a time period, and collecting the difference between the strike price you pay for and the lower price if there is one. If the price ends higher, you lose the rent you paid.

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4 points

It would be hard to get that many separate entities to all start shorting a stock all at the same time. Especially on a well known entity that may have quite a bit of action.

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1 point

Yeah but I would short just a little, considering it will have hard time going 100x. Tbh 10x would be as difficult, but gotta play safe.

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1 point

No you should make investment decisioms purely for the fun of it.

Also, WSB has been wanting to short reddit for literally years, so this is barely news.

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0 points
Deleted by creator
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166 points

And while Huffman now thinks that Reddit as a corpus of training data for AI is valuable, he let his board member Sam Altman siphon off Reddit data for free; Altman was, and still is, the CEO of OpenAI. Altman’s also Reddit’s third-largest shareholder and owns more than twice as many shares as Huffman. Altman was the CEO of Reddit for eight days.

Say what now

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50 points

Huffman also made $193 million bucks, according to the article.

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22 points

How much is a dollar buck in USD?

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17 points

It’s equivalent to four quarter dollar bucks.

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14 points

About 1/10 of a banana

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13 points

1 Buckaroo

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7 points

It’s just shy of a bison dollar

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5 points
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Deleted by creator
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0 points

Same as a bill.

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27 points

Holy crap I did not know that! This is huge

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13 points

Altman was the head of Y-Combinator, Reddit is a Y-Combinator project.

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95 points

Nobody’s doing shit with this stock.

It’s all a manufactured cover story for hedge fund/institutional manipulation to blame retail for volatility and attempted fleecing.

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2 points

I’m thinking of shorting it. My friend is definitely shorting it.

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0 points

I’ll be shorting it the minute outs come out. Won’t buy naked shorts though

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92 points

fuck spez

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21 points

fuck spez

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4 points

suck fpez

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89 points
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Also this scrambling to make Reddit “profitable” and fucking Spez pays himself nearly $200 million a year. Fucking ridiculous. Burn it down. Build something better that hasn’t been captured by complete twats.

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75 points

Nintendo CEO cutting his salary in half to avoid laying off workers after the Wii U fails versus whatever the fuck Reddit is doing

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25 points

Satoru Iwata was a treasure.

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21 points

I hate Huffman as much as the next guy, but the $193 million factoid is misleading clickbait nonsense. His actual salary is apparently $400k, the rest is “stock value” or whatever. Reddit is not giving 25% of its yearly revenue to the CEO.

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25 points

This argument is oft repeated but It’s Bullshit. If it wasn’t valuable why is Spez okay with it?

Stock grants not being direct Income isn’t clickbait nonsense. It’s actually DELIBERATE: Spez doesn’t pay income taxes on a majority of his income. Capital gains tax has a lot of loopholes that can be exploited.

This just gives spez more money and he can cash out in the IPO.

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13 points
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For anyone that’s fallen for the “{wealthy person} doesn’t actually have ${huge number} because it’s stock” thing, here’s how it works.

  1. Wealthy people with lots of stock get access to very, very cheap credit. Not credit cards like the plebs get with a 23% APR, multi million dollar lines of credit from places like Goldman Sachs with hyper low interest rates.
  2. Wealthy people use that credit to live indistinguishably from a person that actually has the vast wealth that they have access to. Spez might “only” make $400k but if he has access to $50M in cheap credit it spends all the same.
  3. Wealthy people enjoying their access to cheap credit which spends the same as income then get to dodge income taxes and instead use the more favorable capital gains tax rates.
  4. As a fun bonus, they also get to go “you morons I don’t have $200M that’s all just on paper, I only pay myself $10 a year because I’m a man of the people. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to get on this private jet”

You might be wondering, why do they get this cheap credit? Because it’s a very safe bet for the financial institute, they are acting as a sort of time arbitrage mechanism for the person they are extending credit to. Since they perform this function they can be relatively assured that this will allow their client to sell their stocks, not because they have to cover expenses, but because capital gains protections and the market is favorable. It also aids in fostering a positive relationship with someone with a lot of wealth which is something financial institutes have an interest in doing.

All the actors are doing what’s in their rational self-interest. The end result is that Spez can access a large part of that $200M as liquid cash right now through credit with one hand and with the other wave you off and say “those are stocks I actually only got paid $400k”

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6 points
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Almost always executive compensation is partly stock. That doesn’t change the fact that he was compensated that much. You can’t say Elon Musk isn’t worth 200b$ because it’s not liquid.

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2 points

I mean, you could say that because it’s just an estimate of what his assets are worth using the current valuations of his holdings. It’s more of a statistical average of what he could be worth then a concrete value. You can’t know the actual value unless someone makes an offer and it’s accepted. If he’s feeling pressure to sell, it will be lower than that. If he isn’t, it will be higher than that.

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20 points

Huffman’s wages of $193 million per year is absurd. That’s double what Tim Apple makes. It’s almost 4x what Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, makes, and 4x what Netflix’s CEO, Reed Hastings, makes. During the writer’s strike a big deal was made over David Zaslav’s compensation, but even that’s not as much as Huffman makes.

Imagine they reduced Steve Huffman’s wages by $100 million per year. For that much, they could give the top 10,000 moderators $10,000 each per year. For some, that might not match the work they put in, but it would sure be a nice gesture, and would make them feel like the work they were doing was appreciated. Meanwhile, Huffman would still be one of the highest paid CEOs in the world.

P.S. stop saying “spez”, the guy has a real life name, and that real life name should be the one that’s tarnished.

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6 points

Steve Huffman fucks underage goats.

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