THREAD: COUNTERFEIT STOCKS

There are four major players in the industry: Hedge funds, prime brokers, the DTCC, and the SEC.

Hedge funds and the SEC you know of, but the DTCC and prime brokers are important.

Prime brokers are relatively simple - they’re brokers that can clear their own transactions by way of moving actual shares between their clients.
The big prime brokers are ones you’ve heard of - Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bear Stearns, Citigroup, etc. - big, big companies.

These prime brokers in turn collectively own the Depository Trust Clearing Corp - DTCC.
The DTCC is an almost impenetrable, behemoth corporation that clears near a billion shares a day and accounts for a vast majority of the clearing house activity in the US market. This is the corporation that ACTUALLY holds physical shares - all your “shares” are on their books
The DTCC is (this will be important later) nearly impossible to get information out of, and it takes an act of Congress or a subpoena to get them to talk on anything.
So onto the big ticket - naked shorting. Hedge funds REALLY like shorting stocks. So much so that they, by way of bad market structure, can create “new” shares through the “float” - the gap between when they sell you a share and they actually deliver on it.
Anyone in the market legally has three days to deliver on a sale of a stock, else it gets marked as a “Fail to Deliver”. In the case of a short, this means that a hedge fund has to borrow a share to then sell and deliver to the buyer.
Problem is, for big players, you don’t have to actually borrow the share before you sell it. This is called a “naked” short - you sell the stock, then find someone to borrow a share from within the three day settlement period.
So within those three days, you’re basically playing with the house’s money.

And the hedge funds *really* like playing with the house’s money.

So how do you get more?

You extend the period.
The thing is, nobody ever checks up on Failures to Deliver. A hedge fund can have an FTD, but the sale goes through as normal and the buyer is treated as having an actual share - without the fund having sold one.
Now the SEC doesn’t like stocks having too many FTDs, so funds go a step further.

Stocks owned in margin accounts are not only immediately loaned out, but are also treated like complete, whole shares as soon as the sale goes through. So watch this:
Hedge fund naked shorts a stock.
Buyer in margin account buys said sale.
Stock lands in margin account, is put into loan pool.

Hedge fund borrows back the “share” they just sold to the account, and the books are balanced.
Congrats. You’ve made a share appear out of thin air. However, you can only do this so many times - there are so many margin accounts.

Well, hedge funds pay massive fees to brokers, and as part of that deal, brokers change normal accounts into margin accounts all the time.
What else can you do?

Well, funds also like to have a massive position in naked shorts that they, before the timer is up, sell to an offshore account - resetting the timer.

And they can chain this through dozens of accounts, taking advantage of massive amounts of float.
Basically, by way of naked shorting and creative misuse of the T+3 SEC rule, big hedge funds can make short positions in stocks appear out of nowhere, with no starting capital and no physical shares in hand.
This puts massive downward pressure on targeted stock prices, and if a large amount of funds get in on it together, they can drive a company into bankruptcy for a pittance and pocket MASSIVE amounts of money.
This is why Robinhood’s been having liquidity issues - there literally aren’t any more “real” shares of $GME out on the market
IF YOU DO NOT OWN THE CERTIFICATE IT IS NOT YOUR STOCK
Even better comparison: This is like check kiting, with the entire economy.

More from Trading

Many of you have seen the famous Westrum Organizational Typology model, so prominently featured in State of DevOps Research, Accelerate, DevOps Handbook, etc.

This model was created Dr. Ron Westrum, a widely-cited sociologist who studied the impact of culture on safety


Thanks to Dr. @nicolefv, I was able to interview him for an upcoming episode of the Idealcast! 🤯

It was a very heady experience, and while preparing to interview him, I was startled to discover how much work he's done in healthcare, aviation, spaceflight, but also innovation.

I've read 4+ of his papers, so I thought I was familiar with his work. (Here's one paper:
https://t.co/7X00O67VgS)

I was startled to learn he has also studied in depth what enables innovation. He wrote a wonderful book "Sidewinder: Creative Missile Development at China Lake"


Dr. Westrum writes about China Lake Research Labs: "its design and structure had one purpose: to foster technical creativity. It did; China Lake operated far outside the normal envelope... Sidewinder & others were "impossible" accomplishments,

I love this book because it describes traits of organizations that routinely create and maintain greatness: US space program (Mercury, Gemini, Apollo), US Naval Reactors, Toyota, Team of Teams, Tesla, the tech giants (Amazon, Google, Netflix, Google)
We have shared a lot of threads exclusively on Subasish Pani in the past year.

As this year comes to an end, here are the 11 most powerful threads on Subasish Pani exclusively compiled for you all.

Collborated with @AdityaTodmal

1/ Important concepts from Power of Stocks - Subasish


2/ Important concepts with video links of Subasish


3/ The 5 EMA


4/ The Bollinger Band set-

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महाभारत की कहानी कौन नहीं जानता।लेकिन क्या आपको पता है कि महाभारत के ज्यादातर पात्र किसी न किसी श्राप में फंसे थे।अगर ये श्राप न होते तो कदाचित महाभारत की कहानी कुछ और होती।हिन्दु पौराणिक ग्रंथों में विभिन्न श्रापों का वर्णन मिलता है व हर श्राप के पीछे कोई कहानी अवश्य होती है।


आइए आज जानते हैं महाभारत कथा में वर्णित कुछ श्रापों के बारे में।

1) राजा पाण्डु को ऋषि किन्दम का श्राप

एकबार महाराज पाण्डु शिकार खेलने वन गए।झाडियों के पीछे कुछ हिल रहा था। मृग है सोचकर राजा ने बाण चलाया जो जाकर ऋषि किन्दम और उनकी पत्नी को लगा।वे दोनो रति-क्रीड़ा में लिप्त थे।

जब राजा ने उन्हें देखा तो बहुत दुखी हुए कि ये मुझसे क्या पाप हो गया।बहुत क्षमा याचना के बाद भी किन्दम ऋषि ने पाण्डु को श्राप दे दिया कि जब भी वो किसी स्त्री को काम भावना से स्पर्श करेंगे उसी क्षण उनकी मृत्यु हो जाएगी।पश्चाताप करने, वे सिंहासन पे अन्धे राजा धृतराष्ट्र को बैठाकर...


..स्वयं अपनी रानियों कुंती व माद्री के साथ वन चले गए।पांडवों का जन्म भी कुंती को ऋषि दुर्वासा द्वारा दिए गए मंत्र से हुआ था जिसमे किसी भी देव का स्मरण कर उस देव से कुंती,पुत्र प्राप्त कर सकती थी।एक बार माद्री पे मोहित हो जब पांडु ने उसे स्पर्श किया,उसी क्षण पांडु की मृत्यु होगयी।


2) उर्वशी का अर्जुन को श्राप

महाभारत युद्ध से पहले जब अर्जुन दिव्यास्त्र प्राप्त करने स्वर्ग गए तो वहां उर्वशी नाम की अप्सरा उन पर मोहित हो गयी। अर्जुन ने जब उन्हें अपनी माता के समान बताया तो यह सुनकर उर्वशी क्रोधित हो गयी और अर्जुन को श्राप दे डाला कि तुम नपुंसक की भांति...
A brief analysis and comparison of the CSS for Twitter's PWA vs Twitter's legacy desktop website. The difference is dramatic and I'll touch on some reasons why.

Legacy site *downloads* ~630 KB CSS per theme and writing direction.

6,769 rules
9,252 selectors
16.7k declarations
3,370 unique declarations
44 media queries
36 unique colors
50 unique background colors
46 unique font sizes
39 unique z-indices

https://t.co/qyl4Bt1i5x


PWA *incrementally generates* ~30 KB CSS that handles all themes and writing directions.

735 rules
740 selectors
757 declarations
730 unique declarations
0 media queries
11 unique colors
32 unique background colors
15 unique font sizes
7 unique z-indices

https://t.co/w7oNG5KUkJ


The legacy site's CSS is what happens when hundreds of people directly write CSS over many years. Specificity wars, redundancy, a house of cards that can't be fixed. The result is extremely inefficient and error-prone styling that punishes users and developers.

The PWA's CSS is generated on-demand by a JS framework that manages styles and outputs "atomic CSS". The framework can enforce strict constraints and perform optimisations, which is why the CSS is so much smaller and safer. Style conflicts and unbounded CSS growth are avoided.