Oddly Enough – Wall Street Observer

Factbox: Stonks in Washington – Deciphering Reddit’s WallStreetBets lingo

Posted on Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 1:22amThu, Feb 18, 2021, 1:26am by Reuters

(Reuters) – Reddit trading lingo may filter in to Washington on Thursday when top hedge fund managers, the head of Robinhood and Roaring Kitty himself are set to give testimony before U.S. House of Representatives lawmakers.

The lingo of the online traders of Reddit’s WallStreetBets group, or WSB, which fueled a surge in GameStop Corp’s stock, prompted even singer Dionne Warwick to ask on Twitter https://twitter.com/dionnewarwick/status/1354511727023386624, “What are stonks and why is it a trending subject?”

For the uninitiated, here is a guide to understanding some common WSB words.

STONKS

An intentional misspelling of “stocks” that originated with an internet meme.

ROARING KITTY

The social media pseudonym of Keith Gill, a financial adviser in Massachusetts whose Reddit posts and YouTube video streams helped drive interest in GameStop’s stock.

YOLO

An acronym for “you only live once.” If someone on WSB has “yoloed” a stock, that person has poured a significant portion of their investments into it.

BAGHOLDER

Someone who has taken heavy losses on a stock, in WSB parlance: While others may have profited from a similar position in the past, that person has been left holding the bag.

TENDIES

Shorthand for chicken tenders, which WSB uses as slang for profits on a trade.

DIAMOND HANDS

Often referenced using emoji, “diamond hands” are how members express their belief that their position is valuable and worth holding on to for maximum profit. Conversely, a trader with “paper hands” sells out early.

TO THE MOON

A rallying cry on WSB, which members use to express their belief that a stock will rise significantly. The phrase is often accompanied by a rocket emoji.

(Reporting by April Joyner in New York; Editing by Aurora Ellis and Matthew Lewis)

Printed in days, a house: New York firm takes 3D printing to the next level

Posted on Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 10:44amWed, Feb 17, 2021, 10:56am by Reuters

(Reuters) – Most homes are built block by block, or brick by brick. But a demo house in Calverton, New York, was constructed scan by scan – its walls made using a giant three-dimensional printer.

The demo house was built by construction firm SQ4D, to show the public and industry what was possible. Now the company is putting one up for sale – a still to-be-built house in the nearby town of Riverhead, which has been listed on property site Zillow at $299,000.

With a detached garage, the house will cover some 1,400 square feet (130 square meters). The footings, foundation and slab, along with the walls, will be entirely made with the 3D printer.

“We instruct the machine to go around and follow your floor plan each pass as we go by. We’re constantly building up,” said Kirk Andersen, the director of operations for SQ4D.

Andersen and his colleagues had to design and build their own printer to fulfill their house-sized dream.

“We took the idea of a plastic 3D desktop printer and wanted to make it much larger and spit out concrete,” said Andersen.

“We set tracks on each side of the structure where we plan to print. We set up our giant gantry, our large scale printer goes back and forth, extruding these layers one by one, stacking, building all your walls.”

Andersen said the actual printing time for the walls took about 48 hours, part of an overall eight-day process to build the entire home.

That is significantly faster and around 30% cheaper overall than a home built using standard construction methods, he said, where laborers need to tow in and stack blocks manually.

“We show up with a printer. We can replace the labor-intensiveness of those guys and extrude concrete much faster than they can lay the bricks,” he said.

Not everyone in the construction industry is thrilled at that prospect, and the process has received mixed feedback, he said, with some skepticism in particular from older tradesmen.

“I think people are just unprepared for how this is going to change construction,” said Andersen. “This is the beginning. This is just scratching the surface right here.”

(Reporting by Reuters TV, Writing by Rosalba O’Brien; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

Police seize $60 million of bitcoin! Now, where’s the password?

Posted on Fri, Feb 5, 2021, 7:43amFri, Feb 5, 2021, 7:54am by Reuters

By John O’Donnell

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – German prosecutors have confiscated more than 50 million euros ($60 million) worth of bitcoin from a fraudster. There’s only one problem: they can’t unlock the money because he won’t give them the password.

The man was sentenced to jail and has since served his term, maintaining his silence throughout while police made repeated failed efforts to crack the code to access more than 1,700 bitcoin, said a prosecutor in the Bavarian town of Kempten.

“We asked him but he didn’t say,” prosecutor Sebastian Murer told Reuters on Friday. “Perhaps he doesn’t know.”

Bitcoin is stored on software known as a digital wallet that is secured through encryption. A password is used as a decryption key to open the wallet and access the bitcoin. When a password is lost the user cannot open the wallet.

The fraudster had been sentenced to more than two years in jail for covertly installing software on other computers to harness their power to “mine” or produce bitcoin.

When he went behind bars, his bitcoin stash would have been worth a fraction of the current value. The price of bitcoin has surged over the past year, hitting a record high of $42,000 in January. It was trading at $37,577 on Friday, according to cryptocurrency and blockchain website Coindesk.

Prosecutors have ensured the man cannot access the largesse, however.

($1 = 0.8349 euros)

(Reporting by John O’Donnell; Additional reporting by Anna Irrera in London; Editing by Pravin Char)

‘Crazy and evil’: Bill Gates surprised by pandemic conspiracies

Posted on Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 3:20pmWed, Jan 27, 2021, 3:26pm by Reuters

By Kate Kelland

LONDON (Reuters) – Microsoft co-founder turned philanthropist Bill Gates says he has been taken aback by the volume of “crazy” and “evil” conspiracy theories about him spreading on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic, but said on Wednesday he would like to explore what is behind them.

In an interview with Reuters, Gates said the millions of online posts and “crazy conspiracy theories” about him and about top U.S. infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci had likely taken hold in part because of the combination of a frightening viral pandemic and the rise of social media.

“Nobody would have predicted that I and Dr. Fauci would be so prominent in these really evil theories,” Gates said.

“I’m very surprised by that. I hope it goes away.”

Gates, a billionaire who stepped down as chairman of Microsoft Corp in 2014, has through his philanthropic Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation committed at least $1.75 billion to the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. That includes support for some makers of vaccines, diagnostics and potential treatments.

Since the pandemic began a year ago, millions of conspiracies have spread over the Internet, fuelling misinformation about the coronavirus, its origins and the motives of those working to fight it.

They include claims that Fauci and Gates created the pandemic to try and control people, that they want to profit from the virus’ spread, and that they want to use vaccines to insert trackable microchips into people.

“But do people really believe that stuff?,” Gates asked.

“We’re really going to have to get educated about this over the next year and understand .. how does it change peoples’ behaviour and how should we have minimized this?”

EXCITED ABOUT BIDEN

Gates praised Fauci and Francis Collins, head of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, as “smart” and “wonderful people”, and said he looked forward to seeing them able to work effectively and speak the truth under the new administration of President Joe Biden.

During former President Donald Trump’s handling of the pandemic, Gates said, it had “sometimes felt like they were the only sane people in the U.S. government.”

“I’m excited about the team that Biden has picked” to tackle the health crisis, Gates said.

Gates said he was also pleased that under Biden, the United States has rejoined the World Health Organization, and “that he’s appointed smart people, and the fact that Dr. Fauci won’t be suppressed.”

(Reporting by Kate Kelland; Editing by Bill Berkrot)