Investing in the stock market

[Zan15]

Rollercoasters are fun ok.

So is gloating. Unfortunately the answer was the same as it was last time.
Its a mistake buying GME at 300.

239.50 -63.06 -20.84%

And people said buying GME at 300 was a mistake.

Even more scary now that GME reported that over 80% of all its stock is owned by individual investors. That their whole executive lineup has sold a ton of stock. How their two top holders have basically bailed.

Does no bode well for the future and will help promote even bigger "rollercoaster" days.

i wonder if deepfuckingvalue sold his shares since he went dark....hmmm

[Sorensen]

So is gloating. Unfortunately the answer was the same as it was last time.
Its a mistake buying GME at 300.

239.50 -63.06 -20.84%





Even more scary now that GME reported that over 80% of all its stock is owned by individual investors. That their whole executive lineup has sold a ton of stock. How their two top holders have basically bailed.

Does no bode well for the future and will help promote even bigger "rollercoaster" days.

i wonder if deepfuckingvalue sold his shares since he went dark....hmmm

Wheeeee. You gotta realize that all stocks are fake, but they only go up. It's basically just free money.

[Zan15]

Wheeeee. You gotta realize that all stocks are fake, but they only go up. It's basically just free money.

well people on WSB right now would disagree with you based on the performance of the top 5 meme stocks the last two days.

that and the amount of companies that go bankrupt every year and see their stocks go to Zilcho

[Sorensen]

well people on WSB right now would disagree with you based on the performance of the top 5 meme stocks the last two days.

that and the amount of companies that go bankrupt every year and see their stocks go to Zilcho

Yeah but you don't invest in those stocks.

[Zan15]

And people said buying GME at 300 was a mistake.

Maybe it wasn't

I mean apparently this company can continue to issue billion dollar chunks of new stocks that memer just keep buying up.
Maybe that is their new business model?
Who needs increased revenue and profits when you can just get a billion every few months by issuing new stock.

Apparently no one on wsb knows what dilution is.

[SavoirFaire]

i wonder if deepfuckingvalue sold his shares since he went dark....hmmm

Didn’t he do some YouTube stuff? Did that go dark as well? I’d imagine his lawyers told him to ignore all his internet identities until the end of time and vanish.

I look at GME, AMC, and the crypto stuff and think this is all bonkers. I can’t imagine what real, dyed in the wool financial people think of this roller coaster.

[Rasulis]

I am not the only one that see the power of ROTH.

The Power of ROTH - $2,000 into $5 billion in 20 years tax free

Over the last 20 years, Thiel has quietly turned his Roth IRA — a humdrum retirement vehicle intended to spur Americans to save for their golden years — into a gargantuan tax-exempt piggy bank, confidential Internal Revenue Service data shows. Using stock deals unavailable to most people, Thiel has taken a retirement account worth less than $2,000 in 1999 and spun it into a $5 billion windfall.

The late Sen. William Roth Jr., a Delaware Republican, pushed through a law establishing the Roth IRA in 1997 to allow “hard-working, middle-class Americans” to stow money away, tax-free, for retirement. The Clinton administration didn’t want to give a fat tax break to wealthy people who were likely to save anyway, so it blocked Americans making more than $110,000 ($160,000 for a couple) per year from using them and capped annual contributions back then at $2,000.

Yet, from the start, a small number of entrepreneurs, like Thiel, made an end run around the rules: Open a Roth with $2,000 or less. Get a sweetheart deal to buy a stake in a startup that has a good chance of one day exploding in value. Pay just fractions of a penny per share, a price low enough to buy huge numbers of shares. Watch as all the gains on that stock — no matter how giant — are shielded from taxes forever, as long as the IRA remains untouched until age 59 and a half. Then use the proceeds, still inside the Roth, to make other investments.

About a decade after the creation of the Roth, Congress made it even easier to turn the accounts into mammoth tax shelters. It allowed everyone — including the very richest Americans — to take money they’d stowed in less favorable traditional retirement accounts and, after paying a one-time tax, shift them to a Roth where their money could grow unchecked by Uncle Sam — a Bermuda-style tax haven right here in the U.S.

To identify those who have amassed fortunes in retirement accounts, ProPublica scoured the tax return data of the ultrawealthy for IRA accounts valued at more than $20 million. Reporters also examined Securities and Exchange Commission filings, court documents and other records, including a memo detailing Thiel’s wealth that was included in his 2005 application for residency in New Zealand.

Among this rarefied group, ProPublica found, the term “individual retirement account” has become a misnomer. Rather than a way to build a nest egg for old age, the accounts have morphed into supercharged investment vehicles subsidized by American taxpayers. Ted Weschler, a deputy of Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway, had $264.4 million in his Roth account at the end of 2018. Hedge fund manager Randall Smith, whose Alden Global Capital has gutted newspapers around the country, had $252.6 million in his.

Buffett, one of the richest men in the world and a vocal supporter of higher taxes on the rich, also is making use of a Roth. At the end of 2018, Buffett had $20.2 million in it. Former Renaissance Technologies hedge fund manager Robert Mercer had $31.5 million in his Roth, the records show.

Contributions to a Roth IRA are capped at $6,000 per year for most people. But some of the wealthiest Americans found ways to grow their Roth IRAs to millions — or even billions — of dollars, tax-free. Here’s how.

One day in early 1999, a deputy of Thiel’s at the company that would become PayPal walked into the San Francisco office of Pensco Pension Services. It could have been an uneventful appointment. Instead, it changed Thiel’s life.

Thiel, a Stanford law graduate, ran a small hedge fund and hadn’t yet joined the ranks of the ultrawealthy. But he had outsized ambitions for his months-old tech venture, where he served as both chairman and CEO. He envisioned his company creating “a new world currency, free from all government control.”

Influenced by libertarian Ayn Rand and Tolkien’s fantasy trilogy, Thiel, then in his early 30s, carried himself like a contrarian philosopher king. A few years earlier, he had co-authored a jeremiad against multiculturalism that accused the administration of then-President Bill Clinton of waging class warfare. “Taxing the rich seems to have become an end in itself,” he and his co-author wrote.

Pensco was a small firm that allowed its customers to put nearly any investment they wanted into a tax-advantaged retirement account. Thiel was about to become Pensco’s whale.

In an interview with ProPublica, Pensco founder Tom Anderson recalled how Thiel and other PayPal executives had wanted to put startup shares of the company into traditional IRAs.

Anderson dangled something sweeter.

“I said, ‘If you really think this is going to be big, you know, you might want to consider this new Roth,’” recalled Anderson, who is now retired. If the investment ballooned, he remembered saying, “‘you’re not going to pay tax on it when you take it out.’ It’s a no-brainer."

The math was compelling. Thiel wouldn’t get a tax break up front, but he’d avoid an immense tax bill later on if the investment surged in value.

“They immediately grasped that,” Anderson said. “And they did it.”

What happened next deprived the U.S. government of untold millions in tax revenue. Perhaps billions. Thiel used his new Roth IRA to purchase shares of his startup.

In 1999, single taxpayers were only allowed to contribute to a Roth if they made less than $110,000. Like many startups, PayPal offered its top executives low initial salaries and large stock grants. Thiel’s income that year was $73,263, the IRS records show.

Thiel also had an advantage over most Americans with IRAs, who typically use them to purchase publicly traded stocks, bonds, mutual funds and certificates of deposit. Since Thiel used his Roth to buy shares of a private company, the value wasn’t set on a public stock exchange.

Although the details of such purchases are not usually public, Thiel’s financial assistant later disclosed them in a letter included in the entrepreneur’s application for residency in New Zealand: “Mr. Thiel purchased his founders’ shares in PayPal through his Roth IRA during PayPal’s formation.”

While SEC filings describing that time don’t mention Thiel’s Roth, they show that he bought his first slice of the company in January 1999. Thiel paid $0.001 per share — yes, just a tenth of a penny — for 1.7 million shares. At that price, he was able to buy a large stake for just $1,700.

In 1999, $2,000 was the maximum amount you could put into a Roth in a year.

Thiel’s unusual stock purchase risked running afoul of rules designed to prevent IRAs from becoming illegal tax shelters. Investors aren’t allowed to buy assets for less than their true value through an IRA. The practice is sometimes known as “stuffing” because it gets around the strict limits imposed by Congress on how much money can be put in a Roth.

PayPal later disclosed details about the early history of the company in an SEC filing before its initial public offering. The filing reveals that Thiel’s founders’ shares were among those the company sold to employees at “below fair value.”

Victor Fleischer, a tax law professor at the University of California, Irvine who has written about the valuation of founders’ shares, read the PayPal filings at ProPublica’s request. Buying startup shares at a discounted $0.001 price with a Roth, he asserts, would be indefensible.

“That’s a huge scandal,” Fleischer said, adding, “How greedy can you get?”

Warren Baker, a Seattle tax attorney who specializes in IRAs, said he would advise clients who are top executives working at a startup not to purchase founders’ shares with a Roth to avoid accusations by the IRS that they got a special deal and undervalued the shares. Baker was speaking generally, not about Thiel.

“I would be concerned about the fact that you can’t support the valuation number as being reasonable,” he said.

At the time Thiel bought his founders’ shares, his own hedge fund had already loaned the new startup $100,000, California and SEC records show.

And soon after the company sold him the shares, millions of dollars poured in from investors, securities filings show. In just a month’s time, the company sold a slice of itself to investors for $500,000. That June and August, another $4.5 million poured in from the venture fund arm of telecom giant Nokia and other investors, those records show.

The dot-com boom was in full swing. “We’re definitely on to something big,” Thiel told employees in late 1999, predicting that PayPal would become “the Microsoft of payments,” according to “The PayPal Wars,” a book by a former employee recounting those heady early years.

But when it came time for Pensco, the custodian of Thiel’s Roth, to report the value of the account to the IRS at the close of 1999, none of the investor enthusiasm was apparent. Pensco told the IRS that Thiel’s Roth was worth just $1,664 at the end of 1999, tax records show.

In an interview, Anderson said Pensco relied on the companies whose shares were in a Roth to say what they were worth. He didn’t know how PayPal came up with its market value, but he said Thiel’s purchase of those shares was “very legitimate.”

From there, nothing would stop Thiel’s Roth. In a Silicon Valley equivalent of Tolkien alchemy, his Roth would transform those PayPal shares into a tax-free fortune — one that would be safer than all the gems, gold and silver in the dragon Smaug’s mountain.

Thiel’s Roth IRA Balloons Into Billions of Tax-Free Dollars
Congress created the Roth IRA as a tax-free account for ordinary Americans to save for retirement. Peter Thiel has turned his Roth into a behemoth investment vehicle that grew to $5 billion in 20 years.

[Themius]

People are coordinating buys as soon as the market opens, the dump the daily. It's not hard, just follow the trend.

Don't follow that trend.

[Zan15]

I am not the only one that see the power of ROTH.

The Power of ROTH - $2,000 into $5 billion in 20 years tax free

the crazy loophole is they can pay a billionare 1 dollar.
They can then issue new shares of a new class of stock to him to for .01 a share.
He can then use the power of roth to invest 6000 in this private issue.
He can then proceed to sell the rest of the shares on the open market which we know will be valued more than .01 a share.

Poof instant millions, tax free.

[Joneliader9611]

I'm just thinking about investing

[Zan15]

And people said buying GME at 300 was a mistake.

hi how's the last 30 days been.

oh right

GameStop Corp
GME

166.82


Damn those "people"

[Edge-]

hi how's the last 30 days been.

oh right

GameStop Corp
GME

166.82


Damn those "people"

Man, watching reddit freak out because Netflix announced their gaming shit officially and their stock rose off a big hire, while GameStop's stock didn't rise with new leadership...It's almost like a ton of the STONK dudes don't understand how fickle markets are or how fundamentals factor into pricing or literally anything beyond DIAMOND HANDS HODL STONK!

They just like the stock, Senator.

[AnasteishaBuckovsky]

I've been thinking recently that it's about time I learned how to invest properly in securities and stuff like that. Back in 2014, I was going to buy 2 bitcoins, but because I didn't fully understand how it worked, I didn't buy. I ended up with ~$100,000 worth of losses.

[Feltima]

I'll pass on stonks until they're tokenized after the other shoe drops with this impending economic collapse.

I've been thinking recently that it's about time I learned how to invest properly in securities and stuff like that. Back in 2014, I was going to buy 2 bitcoins, but because I didn't fully understand how it worked, I didn't buy. I ended up with ~$100,000 worth of losses.

BTC won't make you rich anymore, however, buying alts like XRP, XDC, XLM, ALGO, QNT that are ISO 20022 compliant will make you disgustingly rich in a few years. Get em now while this bloody Monday plays out. The market is liable to do a complete 180 and pump to the moon after the 28th, while we'll likely get a crash between 27-19K(BTC) before the week ends. This will be a week when future millionaires and billionaires are made.

[Ashnazg]

I'll pass on stonks until they're tokenized after the other shoe drops with this impending economic collapse.





BTC won't make you rich anymore, however, buying alts like XRP, XDC, XLM, ALGO, QNT that are ISO 20022 compliant will make you disgustingly rich in a few years. Get em now while this bloody Monday plays out. The market is liable to do a complete 180 and pump to the moon after the 28th, while we'll likely get a crash between 27-19K(BTC) before the week ends. This will be a week when future millionaires and billionaires are made.

Why 28th? Market dumped immediately following bigtech earnings the last few times.

[hellhamster]

I'm also seeing a similar flash crash happening this week that won't be as tremendous as March 2020, but it will be a juicy buying opportunity nonetheless.

The technical analysis supports a decent move to the downside followed by an inevitable pump. Technically, there is absolutely zero incentive to go long right now. The only argument against this move down is RSI, an asset being oversold does not say anything though, especially if it's speculative.

Stocks are already seeing red and crypto follows. It won't be long now, I'm giving it a few more day(s)/week(s) before a massive decisive move, most probably to the downside before an immediate swing high.

[Belize]

I'll pass on stonks until they're tokenized after the other shoe drops with this impending economic collapse.

With all due respect, if the economy collapses to a point where it upends the entire system, your coins won't mean shit either. Such a collapse would destabilize society to a point where "investments" and "retirement" will be a moot idea of a bygone age for a long time.

[hellhamster]

With all due respect, if the economy collapses to a point where it upends the entire system, your coins won't mean shit either. Such a collapse would destabilize society to a point where "investments" and "retirement" will be a moot idea of a bygone age for a long time.

The collapse he is talking about will be linked to an inflation surge in the coming decade, which has already started happening since last year. It's always gradual at first, but becomes increasingly more violent year after year. The central banks are relatively still in control, but barely. If that changes and inflation skyrockets, guess what will happen with fiat currencies in comparison to scarce assets?

That's all what cryptocurrencies have been, a hedge against inflation. Which is why it's always a good idea to diversify into different assets at all times.

[Belize]

The collapse he is talking about will be linked to an inflation surge in the coming decade, which has already started happening since last year. It's always gradual at first, but becomes increasingly more violent year after year. The central banks are relatively still in control, but barely. If that changes and inflation skyrockets, guess what will happen with fiat currencies in comparison to scarce assets?

That's all what cryptocurrencies have been, a hedge against inflation. Which is why it's always a good idea to diversify into different assets at all times.

So your bet is that once massive inflation takes hold of the world, everyone and their dog with start accepting DogeCoin as legal tender and everything will simply fall back into place, but with whoever hoarded a bunch of coins as the new rich elite.

Right.

Will my Pogs collection be a scarce asset too? I have some real minty Pogs.

[hellhamster]

So your bet is that once massive inflation takes hold of the world, everyone and their dog with start accepting DogeCoin as legal tender and everything will simply fall back into place, but with whoever hoarded a bunch of coins as the new rich elite.

Right.

Will my Pogs collection be a scarce asset too? I have some real minty Pogs.

The big cryptos are an asset with a value, just like gold and silver. Dogecoin is an inflationary scam.