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Short sellers are in Nirvana with these creatures that had surged by hundreds or even thousands of percent in days after they announced a switch to "blockchain" in their business model or added "Blockchain" to their name. Their shares are now crashing.
I have written about a number of these outfits and their crazy share-price moves and their silly stock manipulation schemes on the way up. Now, not much later, here's an update on how they're doing on the way down.
This is a true gem. On January 9, the SEC halted trading in UBIA shares, citing two reasons: "accuracy" in UBI's disclosures and very funny trading activity. This froze the share price at $22. The trading halt came 11 days after I'd lambasted the shenanigans by the company and its executives. On Tuesday (January 23), shares trading resumed – and have since plunged to $8.25.
What caused the surge was the December 15 announcement – a mix of gobbledygook, hype, and silliness, as I called it – that it had acquired a "Blockchain-empowered solutions provider," etc. etc. What was not in the announcement was that the acquired "assets" belonged to a Singapore corporation that is 95% owned by Longfin's CEO and chairman. This was disclosed in the SEC filings, but no one betting on this crazy stuff reads SEC filings.
[...] For speculators that were able to get into and out of these scams in time, it worked. A 1,000% gain obtained in a few days by hook or crook is nothing to sneeze at. But it's ending in tears for those who got into these scams too late and whose despised fiat currency just ended up providing the exit grease for early speculators. And short sellers, the lucky ones that got the timing right, are laughing all the way to the hated legacy banks.
But not all will get the timing right. Short sellers, when they want to take profits, have to buy their shares back in order to cover their short position, and many of the stocks are thinly traded, and covering a big short position can cause shares to bounce violently. So there will be some serious snap-backs, which might take the fun out of shorting these stocks.
(Score: 2) by pdfernhout on Tuesday January 30 2018, @01:49AM (1 child)
I spent (or lost?) a bunch of time circa 2009 or so struggling against the tidal wave of Peak Oil hysteria and other gloomsterism. Sorry I could not help you.
One example:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/postscarcity/kT-s_5w8_qs [google.com]
"Basically, it is a rough calculation that in about fifteen years, just four of the top British newspapers print enough surface area that they could power the entire world if they were printing Nanosolar PV panels instead of articles about how we are all doomed from Peak Oil. :-)"
And another:
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-August/004123.html [p2pfoundation.net]
"I'm forwarding something I wrote privately in response to someone who cites William Catton about human dieoffs (from a different conversation than p2p); this is partially in response to Michel's point on many people panicking
about resource issues. I'll concede we may be doomed from panic or speculators. But, that has nothing to do with any underlying physical problems."
tl;dr -- we have lots of ongoing political and ideological problems that may well doom us like from nuclear war, bioengineered plagues, killer robots, or mean AI -- but no serious resource problems if we cooperated.
Ironically, the usual justification for using our abundance of advanced technologies to create the nukes, plagues, drones, and artificial meanness which could create artificial scarcity out of our abundance at the touch of a button is essentially always, at the root cause, the erroneous meme that there is not enough to (reasonably fairly) go around.
See also: "Wealth Inequality in America" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM [youtube.com]
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Tuesday January 30 2018, @03:36AM
Yeh.... I had read Jared Diamond's "Collapse" book, and my understanding of history seems like civilizations rise and fall like an oscillator...
I felt the first derivative was already into the negative region.
I was quite pessimistic. Its not the underlying physical plant that has me so concerned, rather, like all the civilizations that I have studied before me, its the control layer. Civilizations start out with many poor people toiling - and they start building infrastructure - but its not long before an "elite" emerge, and soon very few people are actually doing work, while the "elite" perform the same service a tick does to a dog. Basically, they tax it and suck it dry.
Their redeeming quality is they have the social skills to team with other ticks ( members of Government ), to have their wishlists codified into law to keep the "little people" out of their ballpark. Like interpretations of patent and copyright.
The dog eventually dies - then the ticks have nothing to tax, no-one to do the work, no more dogblood, and they die - then the cycle restarts.
Already, in the USA, I am seeing firsthand how little a craftsperson is worth, compared to someone who works in the permission-granting layers.
I live not far from a riverbed full of people, some of whom I have had some interesting conversations. Some of these people seem to be quite intelligent, but completely stripped of resources to do anything. ( Admittedly, I use the word "some", because "most" seem wrapped up in drugs and intoxicants, completely mentally burned out, and are about as useful as a tick on a dog. )
I honestly thought the dog was gonna die during the last "recession".
Thanks for the links... interesting reading!
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]