Want to see two absolutely crazy, shady, frustrating charts? (warning: they're confusing, I'll explain)

These charts, which show stock price, volume, short interest, and short volume, tell the story of what happened over the past few days.

Left: $AMC, Right: $GME

On Wednesday night, Robinhood and several other apps limited trading of a number of tickers to just a few shares & options. You could sell as many as you owned, but you couldn't buy any more than a couple of each ticker. It included $AMC, $GME, and a few others…
They did this because their clearing houses increased liquidity requirements more than a hundred percent. A clearing house, if you’re wondering, is what settles all of the trades made during each trading day.
So, when you buy or sell a stock, you might see the cash or the stock in your account immediately. In the background, however, it’s a lot more complex: these clearing houses settle up the books between each other to make sure everyone is squared up properly.
These clearing houses have "liquidity reqs" which are set by regulations and other partners; they literally need to have a certain amount of cash on hand for different securities.

On Wednesday night, the requirements for certain extremely volatile stocks like GME skyrocketed.
Big firms like E*TRADE and Vanguard could handle this without issue, probably in part because they manage billions/trillions of dollars but also because most of their customers weren't in these volatile stocks.

Something like 50% of RH traders were/are holding GME.
So Robinhood, Webull, and others suddenly found themselves with a liquidity crunch and hustled to get short-term loans or funding that would let them stay on the 'right side' of the regulatory requirements/not go belly up.

Even so, they limited trading of these tickers (stocks).
What happens when you can only sell but not really buy? The price plummets. So that’s what happened to basically all the "meme" stonks—GME, AMC, BB, BBBY, etc.

And short sellers took advantage of this. When the prices fell, a ton of them closed out their high-cost GME position.
Probably for a decent loss, too. But then, it seems, a ton of short sellers (possibly the same ones!) shorted the hell out of AMC. So the short interest in AMC skyrocketed. Why? Fees are lower and they're betting on the bear case (AMC failing/stock falling back to like $2).
So now it’s a war of attrition. There’s still a ton of short interest in GME, but with buying still restricted and short interest down, it seems less likely to squeeze.

On the other hand, AMC's short interest is way up. But shorts can hold (at ~5% fees, according to Ortex).
We won’t see shorts closing their AMC positions even if they're underwater on the trade for a while. They moved their trade to a cheaper bear bet while retail had the rug pulled out from under them.

We'll see how this plays out this week but it doesn’t bode super well for retail

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I hate when I learn something new (to me) & stunning about the Jeff Epstein network (h/t MoodyKnowsNada.)

Where to begin?

So our new Secretary of State Anthony Blinken's stepfather, Samuel Pisar, was "longtime lawyer and confidant of...Robert Maxwell," Ghislaine Maxwell's Dad.


"Pisar was one of the last people to speak to Maxwell, by phone, probably an hour before the chairman of Mirror Group Newspapers fell off his luxury yacht the Lady Ghislaine on 5 November, 1991."
https://t.co/DAEgchNyTP


OK, so that's just a coincidence. Moving on, Anthony Blinken "attended the prestigious Dalton School in New York City"...wait, what? https://t.co/DnE6AvHmJg

Dalton School...Dalton School...rings a

Oh that's right.

The dad of the U.S. Attorney General under both George W. Bush & Donald Trump, William Barr, was headmaster of the Dalton School.

Donald Barr was also quite a


I'm not going to even mention that Blinken's stepdad Sam Pisar's name was in Epstein's "black book."

Lots of names in that book. I mean, for example, Cuomo, Trump, Clinton, Prince Andrew, Bill Cosby, Woody Allen - all in that book, and their reputations are spotless.
I’m torn on how to approach the idea of luck. I’m the first to admit that I am one of the luckiest people on the planet. To be born into a prosperous American family in 1960 with smart parents is to start life on third base. The odds against my very existence are astronomical.


I’ve always felt that the luckiest people I know had a talent for recognizing circumstances, not of their own making, that were conducive to a favorable outcome and their ability to quickly take advantage of them.

In other words, dumb luck was just that, it required no awareness on the person’s part, whereas “smart” luck involved awareness followed by action before the circumstances changed.

So, was I “lucky” to be born when I was—nothing I had any control over—and that I came of age just as huge databases and computers were advancing to the point where I could use those tools to write “What Works on Wall Street?” Absolutely.

Was I lucky to start my stock market investments near the peak of interest rates which allowed me to spend the majority of my adult life in a falling rate environment? Yup.
"I really want to break into Product Management"

make products.

"If only someone would tell me how I can get a startup to notice me."

Make Products.

"I guess it's impossible and I'll never break into the industry."

MAKE PRODUCTS.

Courtesy of @edbrisson's wonderful thread on breaking into comics –
https://t.co/TgNblNSCBj – here is why the same applies to Product Management, too.


There is no better way of learning the craft of product, or proving your potential to employers, than just doing it.

You do not need anybody's permission. We don't have diplomas, nor doctorates. We can barely agree on a single standard of what a Product Manager is supposed to do.

But – there is at least one blindingly obvious industry consensus – a Product Manager makes Products.

And they don't need to be kept at the exact right temperature, given endless resource, or carefully protected in order to do this.

They find their own way.