Stats for nerds
2recommend
7mentions
3people
2021–2025years
71% recommend29% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Look up the meaning of "failures to deliver" in the stock market. In short: it means stocks sold by market makers and never delivered. AKA: they take your money when you buy a stock, it appears in your account, but they didn't actually deliver anything.
Then look up how many of those happen daily in any US stock.
Or read up here: Naked, Short and Greedy: Wall Street's Failure to Deliver by Susanne Trimbath
- Random recent example: Page 8, Paragraph 37: describing how Robin Hood was engaged in Naked shorting. I could give you a long list of such SEC documents/fines for RH as well as other major market participants. But that's a lottt of work, I hope this triggers people's curiosity. https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/admin/2025/34-102170.pd...
A more general one about how the markets (don't) work: Naked, Short and Greedy Wall Street's Failure to Deliver - Susanne Trimbath (book)
- I understand. I found it mind blowing and unbelievable too at first. I can recommend this book:
Naked, Short and Greedy: Wall Street's Failure to Deliver (2020)
Susanne Trimbath
It's full of examples and evidence from someone who has worked at the SEC.
- Yes counterfeit stock trading by RH is a conspiracy. But the fact that it happens in the US is not really a conspiracy as it has been documented quite thoroughly. A source/book about it is "Naked short and greedy".
Internalizing trades however is less of a conspiracy. Almost all US brokers do this or offer this trade routing option.
Here's the head of the SEC stating that almost all retail market orders on any broker never hit a lit exchange and are internalized: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wg8onYvJW3Q
- We already have a fallout in Archegos and Credit Suisse doing risky stuff (fraud TBD in court). With an exemption from the Fed on reserve levels over the last year, I'm betting those weren't isolated events and more banks have been very naughty.
Here's a documentary about naked short selling and failures to deliver if you're interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kpyhnmd-ZbU
Here's an economist, PhD and former DTC who authored "Naked, Short & Greedy" and has been trying to sound the alarm on naked shorts and phantom shares for decades: https://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2020/03/how-phantom-shares-o...
From that article - "The world‘s biggest stock fraudster, Bernie Madoff, wrote from prison February 3, 2012, “It was perfectly proper to short [my clients’] securities or purchase those positions back from those clients or others with any profit or loss recorded on my books. … The point is that this was my practice prior to the time that I fell into my crime of staying Naked Short. The fact that the prosecutor and Trustee seemed clueless of this is why my frustration is so great.”
GameStop may have gone the way of Toys R Us and countless others.
The shares shorted don't align with what should have been available. You can tally up institutional ownership, make some guesses on retail and use the short numbers available from various sources. It doesn't add up. You can also look at SEC failures to deliver.
None of this sounds like an elaborate fantasy to me. The information is out there.
Now, will anything be fixed? Definitely not unless it's exposed. Kind of what this is all about.
- I removed the reference to synthetics, because it is indeed a conspiracy/speculation (there can't really be evidence for it even if it's true). Though it has happened in the past and has been documented. Source: "Naked short and greedy" book.
There are some more hints though for the whole synthetics conspiracy ongoing. The most recent one, going on right now, being the GameStop stock split through stock dividend failing in Germany, because of DTC/DTCC issues.
These types of splits are not uncommon (Google did one a couple of weeks ago without any issues: https://capital.com/google-stock-split) and I've never heard of a stock split failing due to clearing issues before.
So there's that.
