Topic: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion - page 12668. (Read 26713256 times)

3k. The last bear trap before the jump to 20k.

Short sellers make VW the world's priciest firm

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Volkswagen (VOWG.DE) briefly became the world’s biggest company by market value on Tuesday, as short sellers caught betting on a price drop with borrowed stock scrambled to find shares after a buying spree by Porsche (PSHG_p.DE).

A share trader points on the curve showing the course development of the shares of German car manufacturer Volkswagen AG on a trading terminal at the German stock exchange in Frankfurt, October 28, 2008. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach

Short sellers desperate to close their positions paid as much as 1,005 euros a share during the session following Sunday’s news that there was less than 6 percent of VW voting stock still floating in the market.

At that price Volkswagen’s voting stock was worth 296 billion euros ($370 billion), or more than the $343 billion market capitalization of Exxon Mobil (XOM.N).

VW shares later closed trading on Tuesday up 82 percent at 945 euros.

The share price has rocketed since Porsche revealed in a surprise announcement on Sunday that it had effectively gained control of 74 percent of Volkswagen’s voting shares.

In March, when Porsche was still sitting on a long-held 31 percent direct stake, it said it was not seeking to increase its holding to 75 percent, bearing in mind that the state of Lower Saxony holds a 20 percent stake in VW.

“The speculation of going to 75 percent overlooks the realities of the shareholder structure of VW, Porsche said at the time.

“In view of the fact that Lower Saxony as second largest shareholder owns 20 percent of VW, the probability of acquiring the necessary shares in freefloat is extremely low.”

Meanwhile on Tuesday a spokesman for German market regulator BaFin said it was looking into the VW share price movement for any sign of insider trading or market manipulation.

Porsche denied it was manipulating the market and said that the market had mixed up cause with effect.

“We vehemently reject the accusation of share price manipulation,” a spokesman for Porsche said. “The ones responsible are those that speculated with huge sums of money on a falling Volkswagen share price.”

Porsche’s statement on Sunday revealed that it had raised its direct stake to 42.6 percent, held a further 31.5 percent in cash-settled stock options and that it intended to increase its holding in the world’s third largest carmaker to 75 percent next year.

It said it was announcing its plans because the number of short positions in VW were considerably higher than it expected and it consequently wanted to give investors the chance to unwind their bets “without haste and without greater risk.”

Around 12.8 percent of Volkswagen’s entire market capitalization was on loan as of October 25, the most recent day for which data was available, according to financial market data consultant dataexplorers.com. This compared with an average 5 percent for all DAX stocks.

The “mother of all short squeezes,” as one analyst phrased it, led to an investor outcry alleging that they were duped by Porsche.

Dealers said those traders who had sold borrowed VW shares in the hope of buying them back at lower prices had been panicked by the announcement of Porsche’s holding.

“Someone must have been very desperate to get a hold of the stock, so there will be a big surprise at some point who will have all these losses — because someone must have lost a lot of money,” said Christian Schick, head of portfolio management in Germany for Fortis Investments.

Shares in Morgan Stanley (MS.N), Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) and France’s Societe Generale (SOGN.PA) all tumbled on Tuesday with traders saying there was speculation that the banks might be caught on the wrong side of trades involving Volkswagen.

U.S.-China rift divides Asian summit
Goldman declined to comment, but people inside the company said it had no Volkswagen losses, while a Morgan Stanley spokesman said that the company has no exposure to the automaker. SocGen could not immediately be reached for comment, but earlier on Tuesday said it was sticking with its third-quarter earnings forecast.

VOLKSWAGEN DAX WEIGHTING?
Shares in VW were up 45 percent at 689.9 euros by 1604 GMT, after tripling at one point in the previous session.

This meant they were trading at around 63 times expected earnings for 2009, at a massive premium to rivals such as Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) and Daimler (DAIGn.DE).

Analysts and traders said the stampede was historic for German large caps, but they could foresee VW shares continuing to rise or stay at current levels.


“The problem is, from a fundamental point of view, shares are really overvalued. But when the short squeeze comes to an end, there are not enough shares available to bring the share price back down,” said one Frankfurt-based analyst.

Despite the massive rise in VW shares and talk of little free float remaining, the Frankfurt Stock Exchange said it did not plan any changes in the German blue-chip DAX index.

But Wolfgang Gerke, a member of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange’s Exchange Council, told manager magazin’s online portal that VW stock should be reweighted on the German DAX bluechip index as soon as possible.

When asked about the current, nearly 17 percent weighting that Volkswagen’s stock has on the gauge, Gerke said: “Deutsche Boerse needs to act now and reduce VW’s weighting on the basis of its considerably lowered freefloat.”

The Finance Ministry declined to comment on the rise in the Volkswagen share price and the Economy Ministry did not respond to multiple calls seeking comment.

Ver, Jihan & Wright are dumping their BTC to fund their little hash war. They'll run out eventually...

Can't make out the numbers, but... does this projection place the local low in the 1.5k area?

People above 6000 they bought all the time
Now there is no pump!!!!!

@roach:
Thanks - the only non-NPC comment so far.

So basically Bitcoin in your opinion has been irremediably corrupted after the introduction of LN, right? what's in your opinion the closest things we have to a sound decentralized cryptocurrency at present time?

Yeah Sherlock, it's me CSW talking rubbish about myself in every other post.

 Contains a lot of misplaced commas and a familiar ring to it.
Is that you faketoshi?

What's your opinion on this?

https://i.4cdn.org/biz/1542620075636.png

What's your opinion on this?

LN is an unworkable train wreck without putting all channel closings in the same common permissioned queue (meaning completely centralized).  The fact these systems are built around a finite block size means humans can easily attack that bottleneck by flooding it with channel closings.  Since it can be flooded, you're required to buffer them and either discard low payers or put them at the back of the line just like regular bitcoin mempool.

From that point, you either have to design as a hub and spoke model just like what Mike Hearn claimed, where the Lightning node is a bitcoin bank and everyone who uses it is their peon slaves to extract usury upon, or every lightning node broadcasts a shared queue with each other.  But due to the fact that people can try to flood the queue as mentioned earlier, each lightning node will have their own criteria for what is or isn't spam, or who is and isn't a terrorist that they will broadcast to other nodes (meaningly INSANELY PERMISSIONED, cartel coordinated, and usury based).  The nodes might also be incentivized NOT to broadcast and force a hub and spoke model for their own gain.

If a Lightning node constantly broadcasts flood bullshit to everyone, they will likely be blacklisted by other Lightning nodes (lightning banks, whatever you want to call them), so the entire system is based around things like trusted and untrusted members, subjective anti-spam filters, etc.  In other words, for Lightning to work at all, it would probably be the most permissioned centralized piece of garbage ever to exist.  No real difference from having an account at Bank of America, and ironcially, the govt will likely legislate who is and isn't allowed to run these Lightning nodes, meaning Bank of America or Goldman Sachs will run them.

At least this is my understanding of the problems one has to overcome to create such system.  The fact bitcoin is not decentralized and it's impossible to create a decentralized digital currency in the first place, also means anyone claiming Lightning is going to be "decentralized" is a complete idiot when it's built on top of bitcoin.

Do you actually know what LN is?  I'll tell you what it is.  LN is nothing more than establishing bitcoin banks on top of the blockchain.  All of the exact same regulation traditional banks have will be applied to them and bitcoin will be virtually identical to your current banking system.  The only reason it hasn't happened yet is because it's too difficult for them to play whack-a-mole with regulating miners, but the LN "nodes" aka banks are less ambiguous in nature and will be regulated to infinity just like any normal financial services provider or bank.  

The costs, compliance, and amount of lawyers needed will be so high only entities like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs will run them.  This is how crony capitalism works.  You introduce regulation with compliance requirements and fees so high that only your existing monopoly can participate while all small competitors are eliminated.

Nevermind the fact LN doesn't function in a decentralized manner in the first place.  There is also ZERO incentive for LN nodes aka banks to broadcast transactions to external peers.  There is actually incentive for these bitcoin banks to FORCE a hub and spoke model or cartel collective in order to hold their users hostage for usury fees (just like regular banks do). There's also nothing that stops them from changing usage of bitcoin as settlement to ripple, US dollars, or anything else.

Also depends on how many you bought. If you bought 5 coins from $600, you can wait till it hits $50k. That's a sensible move.

As a rule I ignore anything written in all caps. It's usually something written in a fit of rage by a person not burdened by an overabundance of schooling...