It is such a pleasant surprise to read an internet article and, instead of thinking "well that made me angrier, which in effect made me stupider", I instead think to myself "that article made me a tiny bit better informed". It's like it's the mid 1990's again.

Or you could look at it the other way: WallStreetBets used the Citadel hedge fund to destroy the Melvin hedge fund. Whose really driving the show here?

> It's not clear whether the average joes know they're triggering Citadel's bots, or whether this is just Citadel's bet on frontrunning average joes paying off for Citadel. It's possible Citadel is the joes' patsy, and the joes are also Citadel's patsies.

I wish I knew! There's so much misinformation going on here. I still can't find a clear answer about whether Robinhood was selling people's shares legally or not.

> Remember, the "legitimacy" of a financial strategy isn't determined by its objective decency, but rather by the power of the people who deploy it.

I don't know how Cory Doctorow became so broken.

Why would he change to hanging with the cool bullying kids picking on the (rich) nerd who wants to go to Mars and have us all driving electric vehicles. It's a good example of how the internet breaks good people.

> That's why habitual bullshitters like Elon Musk hate shorts. Musk leads a cult of credulous worshippers who buy whatever he's selling. Shorts make bets that Musk's cultists will get deprogrammed. Musk uses this to sharpen his cultists' resolve: "they want us to fail!"

An alternate explanation of Elon Musks position might be the ongoing day in, day out attacks from Short Sellers on Twitter ($TSLAQ), Reddit, HN of his products to devalue them.

It's not just pointing out flaws. It's information warfare. They will and do lie.

Are you saying Doctorow is "broken" because he calls Musk a cult leader? Whatever you think of his companies or the technology they've produced, it would be hard to say that many of Musk's followers aren't cultish, or that he doesn't exploit that.

Yeah, I rolled my eyes at that sentence too.

I believe a critical part of this is false: Citadel does not front run on order flow (front running is illegal).

They buy order flow from robinhood because retail traders don't know what they're doing, and that goes doubly for Robinhood, making their order flow generally random noise.

Institutional order flow is not random, and is often right; processing winning trades is less profitable than random ones, and so Citadel pays more for RH order flow.

Well that's the best explanation I've read yet.

It's what I've come to expect from Cory Doctorow - I have no idea how he manages to write novels while doing all of this blogging as well.