It's not gambling or the irrationality of markets that bothers me. It's the inequality and hypocrisy. Those with more money play by a blatantly better set of rules in life and financial markets are a microcosm of this.
Not really
Completely stopping trading, or refusing to extend credit, would have made sense. However, they seemed to have stopped all buys, while allowing people to cash out of their positions, thus only allowing prices to fall. That looks like it was engineered to benefit institutional short sellers at the expense of retail traders. The announcement also didn't seem to have any exceptions for people buying shares with liquid capital, without any options contracts or loans involved. Even now, one can freely close their positions by selling off their stake, but cannot buy many of these stocks, even with upfront cash.
I have no great love for the markets, but throwing money at them to 'punish' them doesn't seem sensible.
A longshot chance to make a huge profit on a small investment is sensible to the gambler. A chance to hurt those one perceives, even in a nonspecific way, as being responsible for, or representative of, one's troubles, is sensible to those seeking vengeance. Exposing a sham system and those that operate and regulate it for what they are...well, that's even sensible to me.
I bet, there are many noobs that do options and go in debt not only by loosing all their ins, but the amount of money multiplied within the options leverage. That is no fun at all. Remembe
r the guy that killed himself last summer...
Back in 2008 I had a crap ton of Chinese small caps bought on margin (even pre-crisis I wasn't quite reckless enough for the downside multiplying effect of options) when the bubble burst. That was a bit scary, but I never considered offing myself. I mean, my net worth was negative more money than I'd ever seen for a bit, but even if I hadn't been able to cash out semigracefully, what were they gonna do? Garnish my non-existent wages? Ruin my non-existent credit? Frankly, they were idiots to let me buy on margin anyway.
That's the real problem with markets and brokers...even now, they have all this privacy eviscerating KYC nonsense on the off chance someone dares try to cheat on their taxes (with all sorts of 'save the children'/'kill the terrorists' excuses for why it's needed), but they don't even check to see if someone has the means to cover losses before being willing to extend them insane lines of credit. In 2008 I had no employment history, and no credit history what so ever. I was still able to trade options, and I could buy on margin equal to what I had put in my accounts (and double that after being a customer for a while). This was like a no-questions asked six-figure loan to someone in their mid-twenties who barely existed on paper, and they're still doing it.
Anyway, with so much pressure surrounding money--frankly, for good reason, as survival often depends on it in the broken systems we've got--it's no wonder some react poorly to the threat of it's absence.
www.theguardian.com
edition.cnn.com
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Things probably depend on how the pandemic goes?
