I have to think a lot of the followers are fully aware of the game. I made a twitter account just to follow “Zack Morris” because I knew that if I caught one of his pumps early, potentially half a million other people would be buying the same stock after me. I managed to be at my computer at the right time for a couple of his plays and I bought without even knowing what company the ticker was. Dare I say those were easy trades because unlike some of his followers, I knew how to click the Sell button and take gains. By then I already had practice from WSB memes.
But most of the market manipulation by laypeople in discords/reddit/etc, while illegal, is hard for the SEC to go after, according to a securities attorney discussing the recent BBBY pump. The Atlas guys got taped bragging about “robbing idiots”; I guess that’s what it takes to get got. Also they probably forgot to include in their tweets, “Not financial advice” ;)
Financing new vehicles has obviously been going up forever now due to rate drops and personal saving lowering but financing a 30k vehicle with a great credit score (7.5%) means you’re paying 6k just in interest. Buying a new vehicle was almost always a terrible decision but this seems like it should make people a bit more privy to the idea now.
They got caught because they did it in the open and in a huge way. They went on podcasts bragging about it etc.
I’m also pretty sure that Ripster flipped on them. He was a co-founder of Atlas and then suddenly it was off his Twitter profile and he was no where to be found in the lawsuit.
I don’t own any bonds except for some zero coupon bearer bonds I have stashed around the house, but what’s the alternative exactly? The attraction of a stock/bond mix is that generally government bonds and stocks are anti-correlated, but there have been many examples where they fall in unison. Late seventies were a bloodbath for 60/40 holdings. But holding bonds as a hedge was a lot more comfortable during the 40 year government bond bull market from 1980-2020 than in the rising yield regime we’re currently in.
After years to decades of policy and other factors driving down interest rates, bonds because massively unappealing. When interest rates are very low, you either get almost no interest on your bonds OR interest rates go up and you take a big hit on the market value of your bonds.
60/40 probably makes more sense now than it did a year ago because interest rates are higher. But generally I think it’s kind of a silly default. If long term high quality bond yields are going like 6% or something, ok you can make a good long term portfolio return holding some of those bonds. But in lower interest rate environments holding bonds for the long term just feels like too much of a sacrifice.
In Cliffhanger, they weren’t bonds, though. They were uncirculated $1,000 bills that are allegedly only used in coutry-to-country transfers (which certainly raises the question of what the thieves expected to do with them).
