welp they tracked down DFV
doxxed by his own brother, lol.
I’ve been browsing the subreddit for at least 3 years. They don’t take themselves that seriously, most just want to gambool. It’s the same demographic you chatted with on PokerStars 20ish years ago. They are awful, but mostly just young and dumb male awful.
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I saw an article earlier today that suggested a lot of what’s going on with this is just nihilism and I think that’s really the one thread that ties together all these various internet movements over the past decade or whatever. From Guy Fawkes masks to tiki torches, nobody really has a coherent strategy or ideology other than wanting to burn it all to the ground. It probably shouldn’t be much of a surprise that this stuff all originates in the same internet cesspit of disaffected young white guys.
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Yeah I mean it seems very right wing or at the very least extremely entitled, ignorant and whiny (standard white male discourse) in my brief visits there over the years. Ultimately they are all completely money obsessed.
The anglicized name of the Venetian leader is dough-dzh: Doge Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster. There’s a little d sound before the zh, like in a full j sound, more like lodge than luge. That apparently lines up with the pronunciation guide on know your meme: Doge | Know Your Meme. When I was in Venice, they said the name of the leader as dough-jeh or dough-juh.
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Just to flesh this out a little, I think it’s important to remember exactly what happens when someone shorts a stock. Let’s say you have $10k in cash in your account (because you can’t just short stocks without putting any equity in). You decide to short 100 shares of Apple because you (correctly) believe that it is overvalued at $135 a share.
What happens immediately is that your account will now have
$23,500 in cash (your original $10k plus the proceeds from selling 100 shares of Apple at $135/share)
-$13,500 in an Apple position (the short 100 share position)
for a net $10,000 equity position.
From the broker’s perspective, that $10,000 in equity is a cushion to make sure they don’t get hosed. Even if your Apple short were to increase by $10,000, you’d be left owing $23,500 in Apple stock, but that’s ok because the broker can force close your short position (i.e., force you to buy to cover your short shares) for $23,500 and take all the cash in your account. You just lost all your money, but the broker is fine.
In order to make sure they’re protected, brokers require you to maintain a minimum amount of equity in your margin account. (All short sales take place in margin accounts.) If your equity drops below the required maintenance balance, the broker can say “Hey spidercrab, you need to put some more money in your account”, or they can just say “Hey spidercrab, we just covered your short because you didn’t have sufficient funds in your account.” But as long as the broker is monitoring the maintenance balance, there will always be a sufficient cushion there to make sure they don’t lose money.
The problem comes in when a stock like GME bounces around enormously in a very short amount of time. Apple stock isn’t going to go from $135 to $500 in a matter of minutes, but GME plausibly could. And if I had shorted GME at $135 only to see it moon to $500, my $10k equity cushion isn’t nearly enough to protect the broker - they’re going to force cover my short, paying $500/share to cover the 100 shares I borrowed. That’s going to cost the broker $50,000 total, but I only have the original $23,500 cash in my account. Of course, they’ll try to collect the rest from me (and I’ll legally owe that money), but they’d prefer not to deal with that hassle and risk that I just declare bankruptcy.
So for volatile stocks like GME, they’ll significantly increase the required equity cushion maintained. They might make it something like 300% of the short position. So if I short 100 shares at GME at $135, I’ll actually need equity in my account equal to $40,500. If GME stock goes up, it means I’ll need to add equity to my account to stay about the maintenance requirement. And when they see GME mooning very quickly, they’re watching that equity cushion get smaller and smaller until they press the button and cover the short while I still have sufficient funds in my account to make them whole.
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I just really don’t think many of them give a shit, it’s a game. I could be wrong, I often am.
It’s worth it to own Dogecoin just to profit off the random spikes that seem to occur a few times every year. It’s the ultimate meme coin.
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This all seems based on an assumption that these things are planned out and the effects wholly intentional much more than they actually are.
To be clear, I look at this from a certain postmodern skepticism towards Marxist (and capitalist) grand narratives. Some of history is just randomness that historians have assigned a pattern to in hindsight.
The WSB Reddit page literally has Trump as their mascot, it’s pretty clear what kind of people these guys are.
It’ll be fun to watch the NYT spin this as some kind of revolt of economically anxious online bros trying to score a win for the Forgotten Man. Is the WSB subReddit the Ohio diner of the internet?
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Apparently you can do it with a mob called Binance.
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How did you manage to buy Doge? I’ve been trying to and haven’t figured out an easy way to do it. ELI5?
I’m in WA state and the one exchange I found that you can buy DOGE directly won’t service WA state.
I think this is correct. You see this in what movies/TV shows resonate with this crowd.
Robinhood. It’s not really buying in the traditional way though. You can’t transfer from Robinhood to a crypto wallet. It’s treated like a stock, but on the plus side you can day trade it to your heart’s content without the 25k PDT balance req.
Also, this thread is not complete without this, which I can’t find a good embeddable source for:
much carma stolen.
wow
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You should like teach finance for a living or something
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Great writeup. One thing thought - RH waited the next day when GME was tanking to close out a bunch of positions.