> Does it matter that your're underwater by 50%? The goal was to beat Wallstreet, They did.

1. If you end up losing money in the end, I'd hardly call that "beating".

2. "wall st" isn't a single entity. The hedge funds shorting GME might have lost money, but there's plenty of companies that made money on the side, eg. the asset management firm that unloaded their GME shares.

They didn't beat wall street, they just dinged a handful of speculators. Who do you think is on the other side of that 50% loss? I am going to assume that a whole bunch of speculators swooped in yesterday to take advantage of the situation and they just walked away with some easy money, courtesy of the WSB crowd.

> The hedgefunds should definitely take note not to play a dangerous game because losing is always on the table.

Taken at face value, this advice boils down to never doing anything that involves a large risk. No civil rights movement, no D-Day invasions, etc.

There's certainly a reminder here about tail risk, and the ability of the market to stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. However, the takeaway isn't "only take on big risks if failure is impossible." Taking calculated risks is an important life skill, and so is realizing that humans have pretty bad intuitions about risk.

In hindsight, we may find some funds that had 30 different short positions similar to this one. This one position blew up badly, but if the others come out moderately ahead, and they came out ahead net-net, then maybe this just validates their strategy.

That's quite the hyperbole you've got going. I was just suggesting that ONE bad round of investments going bad shouldn't make a hedgefund apply for bankruptcy. and my take isn't to "only take big risks if failure is impossible" (Which is a paradox, you risk failure or failure is impossible)

"then maybe this just validates their strategy."

Well, no, the GME stock rally made them insolvent for such a long time that only the SEC intervening might save them. (Again, not suggesting that's the SEC's motivation)

30 day non-volatile shortstocks should require significantly higher margins than they already do because debt increases nonlinear when the market goes up. but no, higher margins would mean you can invest less so the SEC better protect everyone on wall street from market gambling. The SEC operates on a complete grey area and many people who have 'beaten' wall street ended up being caught and nerfed by the SEC.

'our mission is to protect investors and maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets'

The SEC is not your friend. It does not help YOU when the market is unfair, volatile, inefficient. only when big waves form they feel the need to help big players. The SEC is just going to blame amateurs, help the hedgefunds and make no attempt to help the day-traders who many people argue ITT got caught up in the GME stocks.

The problem is that people were starting to get in for pure speculation. Two friends of mine who don't care at all about Wall Street told me yesterday that they bought in, because they read an explanation of why they're sure to see big gains on Friday. If the goal was just to beat Wall Street, hurt some hedge funds and get egg on a lot of people's faces... like you said, they've already succeeded, so putting a stop to it before speculative investors get hurt seems appropriate.

Well exactly, if you're holding a single share and you lose $200 dollars in the end, obviously it's not the end of the world.

I think the later investors were coming in because they saw the craze on the news, Facebook, Twitter, etc and wanted to get rich quick. I have a few friends who invested yesterday.